ABSTRACT
There is a holy trinity integral to Discipline and Punish, in which Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon, and discipline, are wrought together in such a way that each in some degree invokes the whole. In this trinity, Bentham receives, understandably, least attention. After all, he is merely the specific ‘inventor’ of an institutional formation that is itself only the epitome of a broader technology of power. Arguably, a focus on Bentham can be counterproductive, as when scholarship has sought to centre his allegedly baser motives in proposing a penal regime that would profit him directly as the contractor appointed to operate the penal Panopticon (Himmelfarb 1968). But there are sound reasons why some more attention to Bentham may be productive for a Foucaultian analysis of penality. As a key organic intellectual of the liberal bourgeoisie, Bentham assembled a rationale and apparatus for the classical liberal way of punishment, in which the liberal and bourgeois ideologies of industry and diligence were promulgated and enforced, and in which the panoptic prisons and workhouses would create ‘docile bodies’ out of the mass of the dangerous classes.
