Foucault’s Bentham: Fact or Fiction?

Abstract

One would be hard-pressed to name an edifice that has dominated the academic imagination as thoroughly and exhaustively as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. This somewhat monomaniacal fixation on one of Bentham’s many penal contraptions is rooted, to no small degree, in Michel Foucault’s now voguish theory of power, as expounded upon in his seminal work Discipline and Punish . Foucault’s understanding of Bentham’s penal thought, particularly the Panopticon, forms one of the key linchpins which his broad historical claims hinge upon. But to what extent does Foucault’s representation of Bentham’s penal theories, in particular, his views on the prison and the Panopticon, converge with how Bentham himself gave expression to his own penal philosophy? This question is examined in this article by taking a closer look at The Rationale of Punishment , a compilation of a vast mass of Bentham’s manuscripts, which were first published in English in 1830.