Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974

by Foucault, Michel (2008)

Key Passage

In the Middle Ages, and much more on the eve of the Reformation, we see the constitution of relatively egalitarian communal groups which are not governed by the apparatus of sovereignty but by the apparatus of discipline: a single rule imposed on everyone in the same way, there being no differences between those on whom it is applied other than those indicated by the internal hierarchy of the apparatus. Thus, very early on you see the appearance of phenomena like the mendicant monks, who already represent a kind of social opposition through a new disciplinary schema. You also see religious communities constituted by the laity, like the Brethren of the Common Life, who appear in Holland in the fourteenth century; and then, finally, all the working class or bourgeois communities that immediately preceded the Reformation and which, in new forms, continue up to the seventeenth century, in England for example, with their wellknown political and social role; and equally in the eighteenth century. (p.65)

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