Punishment, Power, and History

Abstract

This article reevaluates the work of Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias, in so far as it relates to criminal justice history. After an examination of the content of Foucault’s Surveiller et punir (1975), it discusses Foucault’s receptions among criminal justice historians. Some of the latter appear to have attributed views to the French philosopher that are not backed up by his 1975 study. Notably the “revisionist” historians of prisons have done so. As a preliminary conclusion, it is posited that Foucault and Elias have more in common than some scholars, including the author in earlier publications, have argued. They resemble each other to the extent that they both thought it imperative to analyze historical change in order to better understand our own world.Nevertheless, Elias is to be preferred over Foucault when it concerns (1) the pace of historical change and (2) these theorists’ conception of power. It is demonstrated that Foucault’s notion of an abrupt and total change of the penal system between 1760 and 1840 is incongruent with reality and leads to ad hoc explanations. Rather, a long-term change occurred from about 1600 onward, while several elements of the modern penal system (as claimed by Foucault) did not become visible until after 1840. With respect to the concept of power, Elias and Foucault converge again on one crucial point: the notion of the omnipresence of power. However, whereas Elias defines power as a structural property of every social relationship and acknowledges its two-sidedness, Foucault’s concept of power has a more top-down character, and he often depicts power as an external force that people have to accommodate. Although Foucault’s notion of the interconnectedness of power and knowledge is valuable, Elias has a more encompassing view of sources of power.

Judging Migrants

“…25 The essays in this collection deal mostly with non-state forms of control through subjects like poor relief, charities, and educational policy, viewing social order as being upheld through 'a wide range of social institutions from religion to family life' , and not just through legal systems and policing. 26 Other historians, like Herman Roodenburg, started looking into church discipline as a means of social control, but attention also shifted towards secular extrajudicial instances with private justice systems such as guilds and neighbourhoods. 27 Although historians distanced themselves from the notion of social control as merely government repression by moving from criminal history towards a focus on extrajudicial forms of social control, the historiographical emphasis remained on a top-down perspective of institutional control and regulation.…”

A figurational approach to understanding school climate and peer harassment: Possibilities from Norbert Elias’s work

“…Although, as mentioned earlier, they share many of the same concerns, this combination of structural and internalised constraints means we do not need to conceptualise schools as an intentional exercise in exerting a technology of power over docile bodies, but as an unforeseen consequence. Spierenburg (2004), for example, notes that Foucault tends to present power as an all-pervading force that reduces individuals to its victims. There is little room in his work on Discipline and Punish for the well-intentioned actions of prison reform to lessen suffering.…”

“…organise social relationships in a hierarchical way. Yet an Eliasian perspective allows us to evaluate how long-term (continual) structural developments and their constraining consequences for personality structures occurred relatively autonomously from the wishes and plans of those involved in formulating them (Spierenburg, 2004). Schools in this sense are not scheming, conspiring, disciplinary institutions, but rather they respond in the only way possible to sociogenetic changes to public behaviour.…”

The power to pardon in late medieval and early modern Europe: New perspectives in the history of crime and criminal justice

“…The Eliasian model of the civilizing process, which acquired a growing interest in the 1970s, offered a first explanation (Spierenburg, 1995(Spierenburg, , 2001. Scholars found in the works of Michel Foucault (1979) and Gerhard Oestreich (1982) an alternative narrative in which the absolute State and local authorities from the 16th to 18th centuries played an active role in the taming of violence through coercive means of social disciplining, forcing the population to adopt new comportments (Rousseaux, Dauven, & Musin, 2009;Spierenburg, 2004).…”