There is more of the anthropologist about him, a greater attention to the fit of institutions in a society than to the dynamics of change. He is often interested in origins, the first appearance of the mental hospital or the medical clinic, but he is not really a historian. He has a fundamental concern for the principles of thought that underlie the creation and operation of social institutions, principles that he has traced out on the most abstract epistemological level (in such a difficult and not altogether rewarding book as “The Birth of the Clinic'), and with a penetrating sensitivity to broad cultural values (as in “Madness and Civilization').

In the evening, “the cell doors areĬlosed and the supervisors go the rounds, in the corridors, to ensure order and silence.”įoucault's analysis of these two modes of punishment, public execution and torture as against the timetable of a prison, is of a very special sort that does not belong to one or another academic discipline. At the first drum roll, the prisoners must rise and dress in silence, as the supervisor opens the cell doors.” After receiving a ration bread, “they form into work‐teams,” to spend the day in steady labor.

“The prisoners’ day will begin at six in the morning. and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced ashes.” (The penalty was carried out, but with such ineptitude as to increase the victim's agony.) The second, some 80 years later: the regimen for the inmates of a reformatory. burnt with sulphur, and on those places where the flesh will be torn away, pour molten lead, boiling oil. flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red hot pincers, his right hand. The court sentenced him to be conveyed to the scaffold where “the The first: the execution of the would‐be regicide Damiens in a public square in 1757. THE texts for Michel Foucault's imaginative, luminating and yet troubling discourse are two penalties meted out in Paris less than 100 years apart.

Michel foucault on prisons