Michel Foucault, the death penalty and the crisis of historical understanding

Historical Reflections

Volumn 29, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 191-208

  Meranze, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 59849124538     PISSN: 03157997     EISSN: 19392419     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. There is a growing historical and sociological literature exploring these developments. They largely focus on the United States, the site of the most dramatic transformations. But these changes have spread to Britain albeit in less intense form. It is not impossible that they will also affect Europe. For only a sample of the critical literature see Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 267-305
2. David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago, 2001)
3. Marc Mauer, The Race to Incarcerate (New York, 1999)
4. Michael Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York, 1999)
5. Edgardo Rotman, "The Failure of Reform: United States, 1865-1965" in The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society ed. by Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (New York, 1998), pp. 151-177
6. Jonathan Simon, "Sanctioning Government: Explaining America's Severity Revolution," University of Miami Law Review 56 (2001): 217-254
7. Jonathan Simon, "Managing The Monstrous: Sex Offenders and the New Penology," Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 4 (1998): 452-467
8. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1977)
9. Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (New York, 1978)
10. David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston, 1971 ). I do not wish to overstate the importance of this scholarship. David Garland has usefully cautioned against assuming the influence of academic and critical writings on penal practice-especially since the ultimate policy outcomes were so different from what the critics intended. Still, it does seem fair to argue that the historical literature helped weaken the ideological and conceptual underpinnings of the rehabilitationist moment
11. On this see Simon, "Sanctioning Government: Explaining America's Severity Revolution."
12. Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (New York, 2003). These lectures, Foucault's meditation on the theme of war as a matrix for understanding historical development, formed a crucial mediation between Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality
13. For a discussion of their place and timing see, Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended," pp. 273-293
14. Benjamin Rush, An Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments Upon Criminals and Upon Society (Philadelphia, 1787), p. 4
15. Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750 (London, 1948), p. ix
16. For one effort to challenge this revisionism and reassert the progressive nature of the humanitarian revolution see Thomas L. Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility," American Historical Review 99 (1985): 339-361, 547-566
17. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, p. xv
18. See Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge and New York, 1984), pp. 183-207
19. The Marxist tradition would pose a different set of analytical issues. There the emphasis on class conflict and the emergence of bourgeois norms preclude any assumption that penal history embodied "humanity" or "civilization." But on the issues with which I am most concerned here, systematicity, irrevocability and the construction of meaningful context, I do not think the issues would be that different
20. Richard Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600-1987 (New York, 1996), pp. 11,12
21. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 135-194, esp. pp. 135-139, 151-153, 171-172
22. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New York, 1978), p. 136
23. Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended," p. 247
24. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 135
25. Ibid
26. Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume 3: Power, edited by James Faubion, series editor Paul Rabinow (New York, 2000), pp. 459-460
27. For a demonstration of this problem see Randall McGowan's "History, Culture and the Death Penalty: The British Debates, 1840-1870" in this volume
28. I have tried to make that case for the seizure of the body within reformative penitentiaries in my Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), especially at pp. 293-328
29. On this see my "Critique and Government: Michel Foucault and the Question 'What is Enlightenment?'" in What's Left of Enlightenment?: A Postmodern Question, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reil (Stanford, CA, 2001), pp. 109-112