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Palgrave Macmillan
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The Punitive Society

Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972-1973

  • Book
  • © 2015

Overview

  • Indispensable for understanding the nature and unity of Foucault's overall project
  • Examines how the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged
  • Brings together previously unpublished historical material concerning classical political economy, the Quakers, English 'Dissenters,' and their philanthropy
  • Invaluable not only for students of Foucault's work, but also all students of political philosophy
  • One of the greatest texts recounting the history of capitalism

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Table of contents (15 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delivered at the Collège de France in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society.

Reviews

Selected by Choice magazine as an "Outstanding Academic Title" for 2016

“Delivered shortly after the dissolution of Group d’Information sur les Prisons, Foucault’s third lecture course at the Collège de France coincided with a significant change in his thinking about prisons, as he began to reflect on the disciplinary power at work in prisons and in society more generally. … Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.” (A. D. Schrift, Choice, Vol. 53 (9), May, 2016)

“Bernard Harcourt … has done a fantastic job establishing the text of the lectures … . He provides us with countless erudite references to Foucault’s unacknowledged as well as acknowledged sources and supplies a clear, fair-minded and modest commentary. The editors of the series and Harcourt’s research assistants also need our thanks as well. But in the end, it is Graham Burchell’s superb translation and Harcourt’s absolutely rigorous editing work … that ought toreceive our everlasting thanks.” (Mariana Valverdem, British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 57 (1), January, 2017)

“[Foucault] must be reckoned with.” (The New York Times Book Review)

“Ideas spark off nearly every page of this book, as Foucault manages to reinvigorate questions of power and violence that might have seemed well-worn. The words may have been spoken in 1976, but they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday.” (Bookforum)

“Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are.” (The Nation)

“[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual coded and ask new questions [He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture.” (The New York Review of Books)

“These lectures offer important insights into the evolution of the primary focus of Foucault's later work the relationship between power and knowledge.” (Library Journal)

About the authors

Author Michel Foucault: Michel Foucault, acknowledged as the pre-eminent philosopher of France in the 1970s and 1980s, continues to have enormous impact throughout the world in many disciplines.

Bibliographic Information

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