By Bernard Harcourt

Fifty years after its publication, Discipline and Punish (1975) remains as controversial as ever. Anyone writing about the prison today, in no matter what discipline, feels obliged to position themselves vis-à-vis Michel Foucault’s book. As a result, new studies and books regularly criticize Discipline and Punish, most often for misleading the reader about the history of the prison. As Adam Gopnik recently writes in the New Yorker, scholars are “turning decisively against Foucault,” contending “that incarceration may be a facet of every hierarchical, complex society. In other words, it’s always been with us.”However, Discipline and Punish was never intended to be a history of the prison. It was instead a genealogy of a particular mode of governing in modern times—what Foucault called “disciplinary power” or “panopticism.” And rather than trace the history of the prison, the book proposed a contemporary way to understand how power circulates in society and it paved the way for the study of contemporary modes of governing.  Drawing on a wealth of new Foucault archives, public lectures, manuscripts, and historical documents that have surfaced over the past 50 years, it is possible now to identify the true import of Foucault’s book. Just as the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes captured the turn in modern political philosophy to theories of sovereignty and representation, Discipline and Punish marked the end of modern political theory and launched a new approach to analyze relations of power in society. In this essay, I redefine the central contribution of Discipline and Punish and explore how to use Foucault’s book today—and also, how to go beyond it.

 Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 6044574,