The ‘juridico‑anthropological’ functioning of modern penality—where legal judgement is linked to an examination of the offender’s personality—did not arise from the later superimposition of the human sciences and humanitarian rationality onto criminal justice, but from earlier disciplinary techniques that installed new mechanisms of normalizing judgement.

By Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish

Key Arguments

  • Foucault explicitly denies that this mode of penality originates in the arrival of human sciences and humanism: it ‘did not originate in the superimposition of the human sciences on criminal justice and in the requirements proper to this new rationality or to the humanism that it appeared to bring with it’.
  • He locates its real origin in disciplinary techniques: ‘it originated in the disciplinary technique that operated these new mechanisms of normalizing judgement’, asserting that disciplinary normalizing judgement precedes and conditions the later juridico‑anthropological form.
  • He notes that disciplines, ‘drawing on a whole series of very ancient procedures’, ‘created … a new functioning of punishment’ which then ‘gradually invested the great external apparatus that it seemed to reproduce’, indicating that what looks like a humanizing transformation of justice is in fact the penetration of disciplinary punishment into the formal legal apparatus.

Source Quotes

existence; or at least that is not its essential role; the disciplines created – drawing on a whole series of very ancient procedures – a new functioning of punishment, and it was this that gradually invested the great external apparatus that it seemed to reproduce in either a modest or an ironic way. The juridico-anthropological functioning revealed in the whole history of modern penality did not originate in the superimposition of the human sciences on criminal justice and in the requirements proper to this new rationality or to the humanism that it appeared to bring with it; it originated in the disciplinary technique that operated these new mechanisms of normalizing judgement.
existence; or at least that is not its essential role; the disciplines created – drawing on a whole series of very ancient procedures – a new functioning of punishment, and it was this that gradually invested the great external apparatus that it seemed to reproduce in either a modest or an ironic way. The juridico-anthropological functioning revealed in the whole history of modern penality did not originate in the superimposition of the human sciences on criminal justice and in the requirements proper to this new rationality or to the humanism that it appeared to bring with it; it originated in the disciplinary technique that operated these new mechanisms of normalizing judgement. The power of the Norm appears through the disciplines.

Key Concepts

  • the disciplines created – drawing on a whole series of very ancient procedures – a new functioning of punishment, and it was this that gradually invested the great external apparatus that it seemed to reproduce in either a modest or an ironic way.
  • The juridico-anthropological functioning revealed in the whole history of modern penality did not originate in the superimposition of the human sciences on criminal justice and in the requirements proper to this new rationality or to the humanism that it appeared to bring with it;
  • it originated in the disciplinary technique that operated these new mechanisms of normalizing judgement.

Context

Concluding synthesis of the section ‘Normalizing judgement’, where Foucault traces the historical source of modern penal rationality back to disciplinary mechanisms rather than to the later rise of human sciences and humanitarian discourse.