Foucault News

Lecture of 21st February, 1973

Part One (of my summary and  comments, the lecture was delivered as a unified entity)

In the early nineteenth century, the penal system became a penitentiary system for the first time, was more unified, and was much more under  the control of the state than before. At the end of the eighteenth century there was a growth in the capitalist mode of product, which provoked political crises. The plebeians were proletarianised requiring a new repressive apparatus. There was a series of movements of popular sedition in response to the growth of capitalism. Bourgeois power replied to the seditions with a new judicial and penitential system. There is more behind the new system than control of plebeian sedition, it was a control of popular illegality. Until the end of the eighteenth century some popular illegality was compatible with the development of the economic bourgeoise and even…