ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that Foucault not only saw in Bentham the inventor of the panoptic prison, but also that he identified him as principal technologist of modern governmentality. It also relates to the nature of society and democracy as Bentham considered them, and to a key point in the theories of both Foucault and Bentham the issue of the exercise of power. The panoptic idea seemed to be grafted onto complementing, contemporary political struggles, especially anti-prison protests. The Panopticon is a technique of disciplinary power based on an architectural principle. At the end of the eighteenth century, the innovation of closed institutions had given way to the innovation of the regulatory power of social and health management. Foucault suggests that rationalised institutions constitute neither models to be emulated nor areas of rational practice that would spread to other forms of social interaction.
