ABSTRACT
Bentham's ‘cruel and clever cage', otherwise called ‘diabolic' by Michel Foucault,1 illustrates a broader phenomenon: the growing influence of psychologically-based mechanisms of constraint. In Discipline and Punish,2 Foucault claims that discipline was enforced less and less by physical punishment, and exerted more and more through the power of mind over mind. The Panopticon is the symbol of this political evolution. But, contrary to frequent interpretations, Foucault not only understands this new form of power as exclusively authoritarian, but also in The Birth of Biopolitics3 argues that liberalism paradoxically produces control on the one hand, and liberty on the other. Thus, to him, the Panopticon is characteristic of a liberal government, where freedom should be protected and fabricated by the means of political and judicial checks as well as procedures of control.4
