ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault wrote his work on the generalization of disciplinary power in the eighteenth century not as an investigation into some distant past, long overdue, but as a ‘history of the present’. Foucault endeavoured to write about our present through the lenses of the past-rather than the other way around. Noting the concurrent emergence of freedom and the generalization of disciplinary power, Foucault embarked on a study of the governmental technologies that simultaneously condition and constrain that freedom. Indeed, one could say that Foucault’s work entailed an “endless critique of technologies of freedom in the name of freedom itself” (Osborne 2003: 12). Foucault did not suggest that disciplinary power was an invention of the eighteenth century.1 The point Foucault tried to make was rather that in the course of the eighteenth century a recasting and a generalisation of disciplinary power took place:
Many disciplinary methods had long been in existence-in monasteries, armies, workshops . . . Taken one by one, most of these [disciplinary] techniques have a long history behind them. But what was new, in the eighteenth century, was that, by being combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process (Foucault 1991b: 137, 224).
