ABSTRACT

This chapter situates Bentham's legal theory in the context of his work on the Panopticon, it highlight the confrontation between his legal theory and his works on the Panopticon, and demonstrate their role in the entirety of Bentham's thought. The chapter investigates the extent to which the Panopticon implements Bentham's legal theory, and thus the extent to which Foucault's concept of panopticism could be useful in identifying control as a central tenet of Bentham's thought. In order to speak of a legal Panopticon or panoptic paradigm one must reconstruct Bentham's thought, and elaborate a conceptual analysis that links it to Foucault's panopticism on the one hand and Bentham's Panopticon on the other. The distinction established by Brunon-Ernst, considers the Panopticon as belonging to Bentham, and panopticism as Foucault's conceptual construction which extracts certain characteristics of the Panopticon in order to exemplify aspects of Foucaultian theory.