"Unfortunately, when we teach morality, when we do the history of morality, we always explain the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and we don't read [Colquhoun], this fundamental figure for our morality. The inventor of the English police, this Glasgow merchant [...] settled in London, where in 1792 shipping companies asked him to solve the problem of dock surveillance and the protection of bourgeois wealth. [To understand a society's system of morality, we must ask the question: Where is the fortune? The history of morality must be ordered entirely by this question of the location and displacement of fortune." Michel Foucault
Delivered at the Collège de France in the first quarter of 1973, these thirteen lessons on the "punitive society" examine the way in which the relationships between justice and truth that preside over modern criminal law have been forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society. This lecture, intended as a preliminary to the 1975 work Surveiller et Punir, unfolds in a completely different way, going beyond the prison system to encompass the whole of capitalist-economy society, within which a particular management of the multiplicity of illegalisms and their interweaving is being innovated. This fully-fledged essay draws on hitherto unpublished historical material concerning classical political economy, theEnglish Quakers and "Dissenters", their philanthropy - whose discourse introduces the penitentiary into the penal - and the moralization of working-class time. Through his critique of Hobbes, Michel Foucault provides an analysis of civil war, which is not a war of all against all, but a "matrice générale" that enables us to understand the workings of penal strategy, whose target is less the criminal than the enemy within .La Société punitive is one of the great texts recounting the history of capitalism. In the Nietzschean sense, our human sciences are still "sciences morales".
This summary is published with the kind permission of Editions du Seuil. It is taken from the back cover of La Société punitive. Cours au Collège de France (1972-1973) by Michel Foucault, published on December 5, 2013.
This lecture has not been enegistered.