The Missing Link.

Sacha Raoult (1, 2)

1 LAMES - Laboratoire méditerranéen de sociologie
2 LDPSC - Laboratoire de Droit Privé et de Sciences Criminelles

Michel Foucault presents his starting point in Discipline and Punish by positioning his work in relation to two major socio-historical milestones: a short article by Émile Durkheim, who was trying to explain “the gradual softening of punishment”, and the book Punishment and Social Structure published by Rusche and Kirchheimer during the interwar period, which laid the groundwork for an economic analysis of criminal justice systems. This positioning is made on two pages of Discipline and Punish. Thanks to the recent publication of Foucault’s The Punitive Society, we find more advanced arguments over these issues and see how, in the months prior to the completion of Discipline and Punish , Foucault moved and refined what seemed the most problematic with modern penality.

Keywords: Michel Foucault; The Punitive Society; Discipline and Punish; Penal Sociology; Marxism; Prison; Poverty

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Law; Humanities and Social Sciences; Sociology

Sacha Raoult. The Missing Link. : An Inquiry into Michel Foucault’s Distinction from “Penal Evolution” Literature between The Punitive Society and Discipline and Punish (1973-1975). Materiali Foucaultiani, 2015, III (5-6), pp.263-282. ⟨hal-01310268⟩