Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

by Michel Foucault

One is no doubt right to pose the Aristotelean problem: is a science of the individual possible and legitimate? A great problem needs great solutions perhaps. But there is the small historical problem of the emergence, towards the end of the eighteenth century, of what might generally be termed the ‘clinical’ sciences; the problem of the entry of the individual (and no longer the species) into the field of knowledge; the problem of the entry of the individual description, of the cross-examination, of anamnesis, of the ‘file’ into the general functioning of scientific discourse. To this simple question of fact, one must no doubt give an answer lacking in ‘nobility’: one should look into these procedures of writing and registration, one should look into the mechanisms of examination, into the formation of the mechanisms of discipline, and of a new type of power over bodies. Is this the birth of the sciences of man? It is probably to be found in these ‘ignoble’ archives, where the modern play of coercion over bodies, gestures and behaviour has its beginnings.