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Penal Theories and Institutions

Lectures at the Collège de France

Michel Foucault; General Editors: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana; English Series Editor: Arnold I. Davidson; Translated by Graham Burchell

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ISBN10: 1250195128
ISBN13: 9781250195128

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352 Pages

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The great French philosopher Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Collège de France from November 1971 to March 1972, entitled Penal Theories and Institutions. Within them, he presented for the first time his approach to the question of power, one that would become the focus of his research up to the writing of Discipline and Punish and beyond. His analysis begins with a detailed account of Richelieu’s repression of the Nu-pieds Revolt (1639–1640) and moves on to show how the apparatus of power developed by the monarchy on this occasion broke with the system of juridical and judicial institutions of the Middle Ages, widening into a “judicial State apparatus”—a “repressive system,” whose function was focused on the confinement of those who challenged its order.

Here, Foucault systematizes his approach to a history of truth which is at the heart of his notion of “knowledge-power,” based on the study of “juridico-political matrices” that he had begun in the previous year’s Lectures on the Will to Know. Available for the first time in English, these lectures are an essential milestone in the development of Foucault’s influential theory of justice and penal law.

Reviews

Praise for Penal Theories and Institutions

“[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual codes and ask new questions . . . [He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture.”—The New York Review of Books

“Ideas spark off nearly every page . . . The words may have been spoken in [the 1970s] but they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday.”—Bookforum

About the author

Michel Foucault; General Editors: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana; English Series Editor: Arnold I. Davidson; Translated by Graham Burchell

Michel Foucault, acknowledged as the preeminent philosopher of France in the 1970s and 1980s, continues to have enormous impact throughout the world in many disciplines.

Arnold I. Davidson, Series Editor, is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and Distinguished Visiting Professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is coeditor of the volume Michel Foucault: Philosophie.

Graham Burchell is a translator. As well as translating Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France he has written essays on Foucault’s work and was an editor of and contributor to the influential volume The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality.