Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Nadzirat i Nakazyvat)

More than 250 years ago, Robert-François Damiens, who had attempted to assassinate King Louis XV, was quartered on the Place de Grève in Paris. A description of his horrific execution begins Discipline and Punish, one of the most revolutionary books on modern social theory. The bloody spectacle of the execution allows Foucault to demonstrate the differences between individual violence and state violence and to show how, over time, the primary object of state control becomes not the body, but the soul of the criminal. The evolution of methods of surveillance and punishment gradually transforms crude state violence into a complex mechanism of total biopower, enveloping modern man in his daily life and shaping a society of total control.