The government of the body Medical regimens and the rationalization of diet

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The rationalization of culture and social institutions has been a major theme of sociological thought, providing a connecting thread be-tween Weber on disenchantment, Marx's theory of alienation, Lukacs on reification and the analysis of forms of rationality by the Frankfurt School.l In more recent years, Michel Foucault's treatment of the growth of discipline through the systemization of knowledge in the form of examinations, time-tables, registers and taxonomies has once more brought the question of the codification of discourse to the centre of sociological theory.2 The formalization of thought and conduct has become a crucial topic in a wide variety of historical and sociological approaches to the constitutive features of Western society.3 The notms of calculation, prediction and organization are thus regarded as fundamental to social arrangements of public and private life in industrial capitalism. The extension of the principles of rational calculability has been examined by sociologists in a diversity of social contexts -law, industry, education, science and so forth. Although Foucault has drawn attention to the development of medical discourse in Madness and Civilization4 and in The Birth of the Clinic,5 the problem of the formalization of medical thought, the discipline of the body and the organization of diet as an illustration of rationaliz-ation has been generally neglected in sociology. The issue of formal medical knowledge can be appropriately raised in the context of a traditional sociological debate about the development of social classes in capitalist society through the theoretical perspectives of Weber and Foucault.