An Analysis of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish

Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century¿s most innovative thinkers ¿ and his work on Discipline and Punish was so original and offered models so useful to other scholars that the book now ranks among the most influential academic works ever published.

Foucault¿s aim is to trace the way in which incarceration was transformed between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. What started as a spectacle, in which ritual punishments were focused on the prisoner¿s body, eventually became a matter of the private disciplining of a delinquent soul.

Foucault¿s work is renowned for its original insights, and Discipline and Punish contains several of his most compelling observations. Much of the focus of the book is on making new connections between knowledge and power, leading Foucault to sketch out a new interpretation of the relationship between voir, savoir and pouvoir ¿ or, ¿to see is to know is to have power.¿ Foucault also dwells in fascinating