ABSTRACT
It is essential to avoid confusing the terms norm and discipline. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault suggests that the prison is in some sense the purest expression of the disciplinary order. Foucault's ideas have a dual consequence for the philosophy of law. Thus, two centuries ago the word norm led a quiet, unremarkable existence, whereas today, along with its panoply of derivations and associated terms, it has become one of the most used and abused terms of our contemporary vocabulary, whether we speak colloquially or as social scientists. Once human nature loses its metaphysical status, individuals can be judged only with reference to the social and, more precisely, with reference to the average man. In the social and moral world, presumably the sphere of free agency, there are observable regularities, constants of social life whose causes remain obscure. The theory of the average man, then, is simply a new—and altogether modern—means of individualizing the members of a population.
