ipl-logo

Neoliberalism In Les Miserables Essay

766 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The problem of punishment

I am amazed and proud of the level of eloquence and thought in this text by a Korean student at the Design Academy Eindhoven, with little background knowledge in European history or philosophy. Rereading this text I feel blessed and amazed of what one course in philosophy can do, when given to a receptive mind. Question 2) What is Wacquant's biggest objection to Foucault? (Please use the word neoliberalism in your answer) Wacquant’s arguments differ from Foucault’s view of the emergence and functioning of the punitive society in several ways. Among them, I will discuss two things in relation to neoliberalism. First, Wacquant insists that ‘devices for normalization’ in the carceral institution have not spread throughout society. Foucault …show more content…

The story of Jean Valjean in “Les Miserables” can be a great example. What we should consider above all when we deal with a law-breaker is the environment in which the offender is situated. Jean Valjean, who stole bread because of starvation, can be sentenced less when extenuation is considered. However, neoliberalism treats Jean Valjean’s crime in terms of his own incompetence rather than in terms of the social structure where he lives. Neoliberalistic logic towards Jean Valjean looks only at what he did, not at what makes him act that way. What is worse, its logic has tendency to treat people like Jean Valijean as potential criminals even though they do not steal bread. Neoliberalism has its own reason to punish people like Jean Valjean that way: if the government increases social welfare budget to assist low-income group, the policy will help them to stay idle without looking for a job to help themselves. Neoliberalists think that social welfare systems will end up creating moral hazard among people in general. Accordingly, they attribute social evil to the social welfare

Show More
Related
498 Words | 2 Pages

The Boy Who Dared by: Susan Campbell Bartoletti is a realistic/ historical fiction book about a boy named Helmuth’s life during World War II. The book takes place in Helmuth’s jail cell on the day that he is going to be executed. The story reflects on Helmuth’s life and tells you how he got into jail. He tried to start a rebellion against Hitler by writing and spreading out flyers to show how the German government was lying to its citizens. The government found him, arrested him, and sentenced him to death for releasing the flyers and for rebelling against Hitler.

Read More
503 Words | 3 Pages

Short Summary: Chapter 2 of The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison was about how the way society sees crime can be distorted by the media, the justice system, and the information we are presented with about what crime really is. It points out that medical neglect, known environmental hazards, dangerous workplace conditions, and poverty cause more injuries yearly than murders, assaults, and robberies. Most people see the latter as “crime,” but not the former. Long Summary: Chapter 2 of The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison discusses people’s skewed perspective when it comes to what they think crime really is. The reader is asked to do an exercise regarding their own reason.

Read More
694 Words | 3 Pages

The Jail and The New Jim Crow both describe how our justice system is generally based on people’s conceptions of things, and how our own justice system is creating a new way of discriminating people by labeling, incarcerating the same disreputables and lower class that have come to be labeled as the rabble class. In chapter two, of The New Jim Crow, supporting the claim that our justice system has created a new way of segregating people; Michelle Alexander describes how the process of mass incarceration actually works and how at the end the people that we usually find being arrested, sent to jail, and later on sent to prison, are the same low class persons’ with no knowledge and resources. These people commit petty crimes that cost them their

Read More
737 Words | 3 Pages

The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.” Here, Stevenson explains his views on what he defines as justice after his long history of experience working in the criminal justice system. He says that justice in a society is measured by how it treats its least valuable members. However, this view is evidently not shared by the criminal justice system. Stevenson proves in Just Mercy that the criminal justice system favors privileged groups while mass-incarcerating non-privileged groups.

Read More
509 Words | 3 Pages

For example in the story in source two it stated "while incarceration renders many unable to find gainful employment upon release, consigning them to underground economics where disputes are resolved by violence. This shows that when people get out of jail, they are unable to get a job so they go back to jail. The government should do a sentencing reform to help people get jobs who have been in jail. This will decrease the jail population. Another example that is stated in the text in source two is "we should heed the call of black lives matter and other voices for change that connect criminal law reform to broader social and fiscal policy reforms to reforms that would reduce violence by revitalizing our communities, providing employment to disaffected youth, funding drug treatment and quality health care, investing in education and shelter fit for human beings, and ending our shameful practices of mass incarceration".

Read More
1601 Words | 7 Pages

Through the course of this class I have been exposed to number of new ideas and concepts that I was unaware of. Many of these ideas play out in my everyday life which has given me a chance to experience them and observe them. Know that I have been exposed to the Ideas I can look back over my life and point out were some of these concepts played a major role. One concept that has been present in my life and played a major role in not only my life but many other people even shaping many people's future is racism. Hensil defines racism as discrimination on the basis of race (Henslin 245).

Read More
1092 Words | 5 Pages

In this day and age, There are five times as many people in jail as there were in the 1970s. Almost 5 percent of the population of the United States will go to prison at in point of their life. Conservatives believe that imprisonment reduces crime in two ways: it removes criminals from the public so they can not commit more crimes, and it also discourages people who would commit a crime as they consider the consequences. Unfortunately, neither of these outcomes have come to be true. In fact, mass incarceration and “tough on crime” laws have been extremely ineffective that instead of reducing crime, it increases it.

Read More
2169 Words | 9 Pages

The latter of the two creates a situation where incarceration “ceases to be incarceration of individual offenders and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population” (Bobo & Thompson,

Read More
1642 Words | 7 Pages

Chee Gossett adheres to queer prison abolition as, “critical theory [that] reinvigorates queer/and or trans abolitionists imaginaries and collective energies so often at risk of dissolution into exclusively nonprofit brand forms of organizing that are compatible with rather than dynamically and principally opposed to, prevailing neoliberal carceral multicultural culture” (Adalbert, Guenther and Zeeman 269). The statement Gosset makes addresses neoliberalism in America. Neoliberal policies symbolizes the presence of material equality but structural

Read More
1206 Words | 5 Pages

A Marxist Analysis of The Kite Runner In Afghanistan, the Hazara people were formerly a majority ethnicity at about 67 percent of the population, however once the Pashtuns began taking political actions, the Hazaras were massacred until they only formed about 9 percent of Afghanistan’s total population today (“Afghanistan-Hazaras”). Because of their minority status, the Hazara people face much prejudice in Afghan society as shown by the book. Similarly, Afghani people compose 3 percent of America’s population, wherein they also face prejudice. In Khaled Hosseini’s

Read More
2004 Words | 9 Pages

It was dominated by social antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. The paper aims at providing an insight into the factors that caused the French revolution and the themes that emerged during the revolution. It further explores the significance of the revolution and its significance to date towards our system of thinking and interaction. This literature also examines the French revolution and how human nature was viewed. It elaborates on how human beings can be self-interested, savage and yet socially conscious or kind.

Read More
785 Words | 4 Pages

MICHEL FOUCAULT ON SEXUALITY Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, philologist and social theorist. He made discourses on the relationship between power and knowledge and about how they are utilized as a form of social control through social establishments. This essay talks about Michel Foucault’s discourse on sexuality. He put forward his theory of the history of sexuality.

Read More
3327 Words | 14 Pages

This essay will examine the historical accuracy of the film Les Miserables in terms of the social, economic and political conditions in French society post French Revolution. The film Les Miserables depicts an extremely interesting time in French history (from about 1815-1832.) Even though the story line does not depict every detail and event that occurred during the time period as well as the fact that some aspects are dramatized for entertainment purposes, the film effectively spans thirty years of economic, political and social aspects of French Society. However it also manages to bring in references to the past, the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the impact it had on the society portrayed in the film.

Read More
2091 Words | 9 Pages

The disadvantage of this approach is the fact that it does not focus on the victim instead it justifies the offender’s actions by regarding them as patients and victims of dysfunctional societies Restitution

Read More
1514 Words | 7 Pages

Marxist Within the Mockingbird Today the world is open to people of all races, economic classes and much more, but in the 1930’s the world was not as accepting. To Kill A Mockingbird, is a book by Harper Lee which takes place in the 1930’s. Throughout the story there are issues with feminism, racism, and injustice. It starts with a young girl and her family, and as the book progresses the reader gets to find out some of the things that go on in their life and around them. Such as a stressful case which includes, a black innocent man who is accused for something he did not do.

Read More

More about Neoliberalism In Les Miserables Essay

Related Topics

Open Document