Abstract

Foucault's aim in Surveiller et punir is a correlative history of the modern “soul” and the new power to punish: “a genealogy of modern morals. First, he refuses to limit his discussion of punishment to its “repressive,” negative effects—excluding, repressing, penalizing. Instead he takes punishment as a complex social function having many positive effects — maintaining order, restoring calm, “improving” mankind. Next, he does not view penal methods as answering to legal statutes, but he deals with techniques of power in complicity with other agencies of authority: punishment as a political tactic. Third, he explores whether there is a common matrix for the history of penal law, the development of the human sciences (and humanism), thereby continuing his earlier investigations (especially in The Order of Things).