Like most of Foucault's classic work, Discipline and Punish is about how power impinges on bodies. His great achievement in this book is to induce readers to reconsider what both bodies and power could mean-- what the words themselves refer to, how those categories have acted in the readers' own lives and in history, how their own bodies have come under various powers' sway. As an intervention in certain French intellectual and political debates, it made much more of an impact than Foucault himself expected. As a work of contemporary philosophy, it made his academic career. Most remarkable of all, as a marriage of rhetoric and critical thought, it is a flat-out masterpiece. I can think of no achievement comparable since Kierkegaard.

The story here, about how French modernity came into being on the bodies of criminals, is fascinating and indelibly told. It seems Foucault got many of his facts wrong; indeed, I'm not sure his points are even falsifiable, much less verifiable. That is hardly the point. The details do matter, however, because they lend this book most of its considerable moral force. Even at its most ironic (and Foucault, a classic interpreter of Nietzsche, is a grand ironist) the human cost of torture, incarceration, and surveillance is always before the reader's conscience. Tellingly, when critics fault Foucault's handling of the past, they sometimes do it to fault his theoretical conclusions, but not the ethical force that drives them.

Let me return to this book's writing. It is much more accessible, I think, than even Foucault's other work, and much more so than most of the classics of Theory. If you are curious about Foucault, this is definitely the place to begin. It is not a point-by-point argument with all terms safely defined: What, you thought this was C. S. Lewis? But its writing will tend to pull you into Foucault's own thought processes, which you may find cropping up inside your own as you keep reading. The French, let me add, is even better, limpid and direct. I highly recommend it if you have the means.

We do have some of Foucault's lecture notes now, which is a gift. As an example of his written pedagogy, I find this even better. This book will teach you new and unsettling ways to think. I can't sell you on that, but I can urge you to give it a try and see how it fits. Few who try are wholly disappointed.