Analysis Of Foucault's Book: Discipline And Punish

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Foucault and Nietzsche challenge the hidden purposes of historians in their search for origins, demonstrating that an accurate understanding of history rectifies one of any beliefs of moral origins. In this paper, I will elaborate what Foucault thinks an accurate understanding of history regarding punishment truly is. I am going to clarify this concept by focusing on the first chapter of Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish.
Foucault starts out the first chapter, The body of the condemned, by contrasting Damiens gruesome public torture with a detailed schedule of a prison that took place just eighty years later. Foucault is bringing the reader’s attention to the distinct change in punishment put in place in less than a century. It gets the reader to start thinking about the differences between how society used to punish people and the way that we do today. Foucault states that earlier in time the right to punish was directly connected to the authority of the King. Crimes committed during this time were not crimes against the public good, but a personal disrespect to the King himself. The public displays of torture and execution were public affirmations of the King’s authority to rule and to punish. It was after many years when the people subjected to torture suddenly became sympathized, especially if the punishment was too excessive for the crime committed.
As a result, at the end of the 18th Century, Foucault mockingly tells the story of how our society became “humane” and the public cried out for punishment without torture. When the invention of prisons came about, most people chose to forget the disappearance of public executions. Foucault states: “Today we are rather inclined to ignore it: perhaps in its time, it gave r...

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...d essential at the moment of birth. “The origin always precedes the Fall. It comes before the body, before the world and time; it is associated with the gods, and its story is always sung as a theogony.” (Foucault, Page 79) This quote explains why we like to pin point an ideal origin and dispute the likelihood the idea of evolution.
Ultimately, Foucault has shown that punishment does not have one origin that can be traced down in history but that it is a combination of a never-ending cycle. A few years from now, we will evolve and there will be another level of power in charge that will come along with different rules and punishment. We will look back and be astounded at the way that we punished people, and call that the new barbaric ways of our society. This shows how the change in power is what determines the type of punishment we enforce and not by our morals.

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