ABSTRACT
The 1972–73 lectures at the College de France given under the overall title The Punitive Society were published in English only in 2015. This very belatedly published volume will have a significant impact on the understanding of Foucault's work on punishment and forms of power. Foucault delivered the lectures just after a period of two years during which he spent an inordinate amount of time and energy on prison-related activism. In the second part of the first lecture, Foucault argues that concrete forms of punitiveness should not be used as data used to 'reconstruct the set of juridical and moral representations that are supposed to support and justify these penal practices'. The importance given to the term 'illegalisms of dissipation' shows that Foucault used social historians' work on the early industrial working class to start opening a path towards post-Marxist and anti-moralistic critiques of capitalism. Criminology is the essential supplement to modern, rational-choice, humane criminal law.
