ABSTRACT
Foucault thereby complements Max Weber’s formal-rational concept of bureaucracy and legal domination with a physiology of bureaucracy and power which is the definitive feature of the disciplinary society. The autonomy of modern economics was achieved at the expense of abstracting its concerns from the original disciplinary science of government and morals that occupied classical political economy. Thus it is necessary, in the light of Michel Foucault’s studies, to review how industrial discipline arose in relation to prison discipline in the production of a docile labour force suited to the needs of early industrial capitalism. Foucault argues that the disciplinary institutions were conceived to open up a field for the practices of evaluating, recording and observing large populations in order to administer them through the therapeutic institutions of health, education and penalty. Inasmuch as capitalism must be concerned with its own social reproduction, it will be driven to motivate moral consent as well as sheer physical compliance.
