The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973

by Foucault, Michel (2015)

Key Passage

In the first half of the nineteenth century there was a whole enterprise of confinement, of lodging the working class in barracks and, apart from the apparatus of production, in a whole series of non-productive institutions such as, for example, pedagogical institutions: crèches, schools, orphanages; correctional institutions: agricultural colonies, reformatories, prisons; therapeutic institutions: homes, asylums. All these institutions could provisionally be grouped together in terms of confinement.A whole activity of research runs through this production of utopias. Architectural research: for resolving the problem of how to construct an establishment such that optimum supervision is assured; architecture of the inverted theater, where the aim is to ensure that the maximum number of people come under the gaze and supervision of the smallest number of people (see the research of Baltard). “Micro-sociological” research:* before the term existed, research on schemas of dependence, authority, and supervision in a limited group. (p.203-204)

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The Punitive Society

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