Discipline and Punish

⚖The case for it

Foucault's subject is small stuff: the timetable, the exam, the seating chart, the ranked file of names. He picks his evidence like a lawyer picking witnesses, so trust his eye further than his proofs. What he sees is that we stopped hurting bodies and started scoring souls, and that the scoring never lets up. Sit through one performance review, or reread an old school report card, and the argument does its work on you without any help from the footnotes.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Foucault's history is shakier than his theory: archives quoted selectively, a grand epochal shift built from a thin set of French sources, and the Panopticon, a design that mostly stayed on paper, made to stand for all modern life. Power explains everything here, which comes close to explaining nothing; nobody ever successfully resists. After the famous opening execution, the prose thickens into abstraction and stays there.

— the honest librarian