Foucault also provides us with a powerful critique of liberalism and utilitarianism. His study of Jeremy Bentham's early 19th century utilitarian based proposals for managed institutional imprisonment revealed the extremity and inhumanity of Bentham's proposals and the failure of utilitarianism.
Foucault critiqued the prevailing practice of institutionalized as a dominant form of social and political power. Foucault insisted that claims for modern incarceration by the state is more human than preceding forms of corporal punishment are misplaced and a distortion. In a scathing critique of Bentham's notorious but failed proposal for a Panopticon prison, he revealed the contradictions in modern forms of punishment in Western Society.
Figure 1. Jeremy Bentham's plan for the Panopticon Prison. (In Bentham's plan, prisoners were never to know when or if they were under observation, even though the scheme allowed for continual monitoring from a central perspective. For the text of Bentham's Panopticon proposal go to http://cartome.org/panopticon2.htm#II.
Figure 1. Jeremy Bentham's plan for the Panopticon Prison. (In Bentham's plan, prisoners were never to know when or if they were under observation, even though the scheme allowed for continual monitoring from a central perspective. For the text of Bentham's Panopticon proposal go to http://cartome.org/panopticon2.htm#II.
No comments:
Post a Comment