Discipline and surveillance

The standard story calls the asylum humane progress, treating the mad as patients rather than criminals; Foucault reads it instead as a means of control, a great confinement.

In the text In Madness and Civilization (1961; Howard translation), ch. 2, Foucault dates the Great Confinement from the Paris decree of 1656 founding the Hôpital Général, which he says "is not a medical establishment".

Other readings Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain (Madness and Democracy, 1999) read the asylum as a democratic project.

The prison was sold as a rational, humane successor to torture; its real function, Foucault argues, is surveillance and isolation, like the school, hospital, factory and asylum.

Bentham's panopticon fascinates Foucault: because the prisoner can never tell whether the guard in the central booth is watching, the uncertainty itself becomes an instrument of discipline.

Where Adorno and Horkheimer draw a dialectical spiral from Enlightenment to totalitarianism, Foucault draws a straight line: the drive to know and classify everything leads directly to control and surveillance.

Put simply Foucault draws a straight line from the Enlightenment to control and surveillance: the urge to know and sort everything leads there directly. Adorno and Horkheimer instead trace a winding, back-and-forth path toward totalitarianism.