Foucalt's Discipline And Punish And The History Of

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This essay will cover Michel Foucalt and his understanding of power and knowledge, and the relationship between them by looking at Foucalt’s works – Discipline and Punish and The History of Madness (or better known as Madness and Civilization), which is what the first part of this essay will describe. Further on, the second part covers Foucault’s pastoral diagram, the interests of the state and the inner workings of a police system, which will elaborate on the subject by going over a brief history of spiritual guidance that is present in both early Judaism and Christianity (as described by Foucault). Using Foucault’s study of power and his elaboration on it using the Pastoral diagram this essay will conclude how through the use of pastoral …show more content…

During the 18th century). The goal of this transformation is to support the change of people that will make them conformable with new social norms that are in the process of being established. For this purpose, new social tools had to be developed; such as: compulsory labor - working on the principle of a regular schedule, or the collection of any available information about the prisoners, which was supposed to lead to a socially useful transformation of the offender. The consequences of this historical moment are not limited just to the legal system, because together with the internal control of the offender are developing methods of the police and there is an apparatus that allows to control the offenders through an entire social field, and thus interned delinquency becomes politically and socially …show more content…

New power relations are associated with positive functioning standards (maintaing the socially accepted status quo), which is gradually submitting all the manifestations of human life (Foucault analyzes especially sexuality in great detail). Modern society can, according to Foucault be described as disciplinary; discipline, however, can not be identified with the power of general or specific institutions: discipline is the only type of power, technology, intersected together with the coordinates of other strategies of specific institutions or of any other given social