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foucault


            Michel Foucault, despite courting controversy and enduring countless criticisms of his work up until his .
             death in 1986, contributed much to modern sociological thought. His work can seemingly lack coherence .
             but there are underlying themes to his writings, most notably that of power, the subject, and truth. However, .
             when debating his importance in the sociological sphere, it would be more productive to analyse the .
             importance of the topics that constituted most of his studies: discipline, sexuality, the genealogy of the .
             present, the dangerous individual, and ethics. Through this one can learn about the formation of the human .
             subject at the intersection of knowledge and power. It must be stressed, however, that Foucault's work has .
             come under much criticism from other sociologists, many of whom have found theoretical difficulties with .
             his work. .
             In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault examines our reasoned compulsions as human beings to .
             normalize individuals, to punish and reform deviance. Foucault juxtaposes an account of a mid 18th century .
             torture and execution and an early 19th century prisoners" timetable. In the eighty years that separate these .
             two accounts, he observes the evolution in penal methods from public execution to one that associates .
             punishment with incarceration. The human being becomes a representative model for modern society, a .
             society Marshall (1998, p.237) summarises as "a regime of observation, surveillance, classification, .
             hierarchy, rules, discipline, and social control." Foucault's study of the penal system stretches to a view that .
             almost echoes Marx in so far as social transformation is relative to an economic need for a rationalized .
             superstructure. He uses the term "disciplinary power" to describe this new form of power relations that .
             Foucault (1975, pp.25-26) argued existed in the human body: "The body is directly involved in a political .
             field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it.


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