Spierenburg - Punishment, Power and History

Punishment, Power, and History: Foucault and Elias
Spierenburg, Petrus Cornelis.
Social Science History, Volume 28, Number 4, Winter 2004, pp. 607-636 (Article) Published by Duke University Press
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Pieter Spierenburg
Punishment, Power, and History

Foucault and Elias
This article reevaluates the work of Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias, in so far as it relates to criminal justice history. After an examination of the content of Foucaults Surveiller et punir (1975), it discusses Foucaults receptions among criminal justice historians. Some of the latter appear to have attributed views to the French philosopher that are not backed up by his 1975 study. Notably the revisionist historians of prisons have done so. As a preliminary conclusion, it is posited that Foucault and Elias have more in common than some scholars, including the author in earlier publications, have argued. They resemble each other to the extent that they both thought it imperative to analyze historical change in order to better understand our own world. Nevertheless, Elias is to be preferred over Foucault when it concerns (1) the pace of historical change and (2) these theorists conception of power. It is demonstrated that Foucaults notion of an abrupt and total change of the penal system between 1760 and 1840 is incongruent with reality and leads to ad hoc explanations. Rather, a long-term change occurred from about 1600 onward, while several elements of the modern penal system (as claimed by Foucault) did not become visible until after 1840. With respect to the concept of power, Elias and Foucault converge again on one crucial point: the notion of the omnipresence of power. However, whereas Elias denes power as a structural property of every social relationship and acknowledges its two-sidedness, Foucaults concept of power has a more top-down character, and he often depicts power as an external force that people have to accommodate. Although Foucaults notion of the interconnectedness of power and knowledge is valuable, Elias has a more encompassing view of sources of power.
Imagine this scene, reported by an eyewitness. The authorities have ordered that a scaold be set up for a public execution. One man, scion of a respectable
Social Science History 28:4 (winter 2004), 60736 Copyright 2004 by the Social Science History Association
608 Social Science History
Frankfurt family, is about to mount it. He has been condemned for robbing and murdering four men and two women. The acquittal of the murderers mistress increases public interest in the case. Already in the early morning, an immense multitude assembles at the square where the fateful event is to take place. Some of the spectators endeavor to create a picture of the convict, which they intend to sell to others for a prot. The scene reaches its climax: the executioner presents the criminal to the assembled audience and severs his head from his body. Now listen to a quite dierent text, the house rules for a prison. Each Sunday morning the warden collects the inmates and recites from the Bible or another religious book. A preacher is there to instruct them; one or the other nishes with a few histories admonishing to piety. In the afternoon, those inmates who are able to read and write receive advanced training, while the warden or a work master teaches this art to the others. During the rest of the week, the inmates have to work. Whenever they are together, the master of discipline constantly watches them. He even has to overhear them at their sleeping places to nd out what they are talking about. If the inmates go astray nevertheless, the following punishments apply: for frivolously cursing or swearing, three days on bread and water; for the inability to recite ones prayers, the same; for disrespect of the sta, such as showing an ugly face or using bad words, one month on bread and water. The list of infractions and corresponding punishments is longer still, but these suce for now. A sequence like this is surely familiar to any reader of Michel Foucaults Surveiller et punir (1975; all quotes are my own translations from the original French edition).That book opens with the contrasting cases of the public execution of Robert-Franois Damiens in 1757, followed by the house rules of the Parisian Maison des Jeunes Dtenus, drawn up by Lon Faucher in 1838. Foucault cites articles 1728, on the order of the day, and concludes with a remark in the sense of look how much has changed in only eighty years. By contrast, the examples with which this article opened are no less than 344 years apart. That fact may hardly be remarkable in itself. However, I began with the more recent example! The reporter, the French writer Albert Camus, witnessed the last public execution in France. The German leader of a Paris-based gang, Eugen Weidmann, was decapitated before a large crowd in Versailles on the eve of the Second World War, on 16 June 1939. I purposely omitted that the pictures made of the event were photographs and that the makers sold them to the newspaper Paris-Soir. The publication of
Punishment, Power, and History: Foucault and Elias 609
these photos caused an outrage, presumably with the delicate public who had refrained from watching the event in person. This was the nal trigger that led to the abolition of public punishment in France (Camus and Koestler 1957: 130, 222; see also Revue des grands procs contemporains [1939], a dossier containing the pleas of the attorneys of Weidmann and his principal accomplice, Roger Million, with a brief introduction).1 My second text was a sample of the internal rules for the Amsterdam rasphouse, drawn up by Sebastiaan Egberts on 21 November 1595 (cited in Spierenburg 1991: 4950). The rst inmates arrived a few months later. Soon the rasphouse had acquired an international reputation as a model prison, to which visitors ocked from Germany, England, France, and elsewhere. This chronology, I suppose, gives pause for thought. Of course, my intention is in no way to suggest that the transformation of punishment took place in quite the reverse order than the one claimed by Foucault.That would be absurd. After all, we should also take into account the long and agonizing treatment Damiens had to endure (and that for scratching Louis XV in his side with a knife 2), whereas the murderer Weidmann was quickly decapitated with the guillotine without additional atrocities. Moreover, the shift to indoor executions took place in most European countries between 1850 and 1870; the French delay constitutes an anomaly that historians have not yet satisfactorily explained. Conversely, the Amsterdam ordinance of 1595 had a less-meticulous character than the Paris one of 1838. The former, with its long list of penalties for infractions, focused on submission and obedience and less so on the order of the day. The rasphouses order of the day consisted of the rhythm of forced labor rather than a precise timetable. Despite these caveats, my two opening examples suggest that the grand narrative of the evolution of punishment in early modern and modern Europe may be somewhat more complex than the story presented in Surveiller et punir. Several historians, of course, have already criticized Foucault on empirical grounds. His followers usually responded by emphasizing the importance of the philosophers overall scheme. They were right in the case of critics who failed to provide an alternative scheme themselves. Statements in the sense of the data are just too complex for any theory are no more than a testimony of poverty. In Peter Burkes (1992: 8) words (understandably without concrete references): Many sound second-rate historians can correct Foucaults errors, but are unable to produce a single new idea. (Any reader needing a brief introduction to Foucault can be referred to this excel-
lent one by Burke). It is my conviction that in social science history both the ideas and the evidence count. To avoid an empty empiricism, I am considering Norbert Eliass theoretical framework next to Foucaults. Especially for American readers, a few words introducing Elias (1897 1990) may be in order. One can best describe him as a historical sociologist. Born in Germany, he ed that country in 1933 and worked in England for several decades. His rst book on the civilizing process, which appeared in 1939, remained practically unnoticed until the end of the 1960s. From then on, Elias was increasingly recognized in Europe as a major theorist. He published a substantial number of works late in his life, alternately working in Germany and the Netherlands. Essentially, he argued that the society in which we live can be understood as the outcome (temporary, not as a kind of nal stage) of several interconnected, long-term processes. The development of civilized standards, including among other things a higher level of self-control and a greater degree of empathy with others, is one of these processes. Far from being the result of individual eorts, these standards developed in close conjunction with other social processes, such as the formation of states. Although Elias himself hardly wrote at all about criminal justice issues, his work can be and has been used as a theoretical base to discuss developments in crime and justice. In particular, the disappearance of various forms of physical punishment can be understood as forming part of civilizing processes, and because of this, that disappearance is also related to processes of state formation (Eliass books of major relevance here are listed in the references. For a more elaborate discussion of his work in relation to violence, see Spierenburg 2001).
Foucault on Penal Change

On earlier occasions, I have proclaimed the absolute incompatibility of Foucaults and Eliass sociological-historical approaches (in Spierenburg 1984, in particular, as well as in several other publications and numerous conference contributions). On second thought, perhaps this was an exaggeration. In any case, the two theorists themselves were eager to learn from each other, though it never came to a personal meeting. For his private use, Foucault translated Eliass The Loneliness of the Dying, the original German edition of which appeared in 1982.3 The French philosophers interest in this book was possibly enhanced by a sense of his own imminent death. For his part, Elias
wished to exchange ideas, so he invited Foucault to a conference in Bielefeld in 1984. The organizers were surprised when their invitee failed to show up and then learned he had died (information from Paul Nixon, who is studying the Elias archives in Marbach). Eliass open-minded stance, his readiness to consider the ideas of rival theorists, is an example worth following. Consequently, any discussion of Foucaults views of punishment should begin with an unprejudiced (re)reading of his Surveiller et punir. Twenty-ve years of debate and interpretation have placed layer upon layer on top of this book. It has been commented and re-commented upon in relation to Foucaults other works as well as the commentators personal ideas. This has made it dicult to separate the authors original intention from the views of his interpreters. In fact, when one reads Surveiller et punir with a fresh eye, it appears basically as a perceptive, well-written analysis of scaold punishments, penitentiaries, and the techniques of discipline (see David Garland [1990: 135], who remarks that it is not a dicult text; Garland [ibid.: 155] also stresses that Foucault never claimed that Surveiller et punir comprised a general theory of punishment). Consider, for example, the chapter entitled Lclat des supplices (The Heyday of Physical Punishment) (Foucault 1975: 3672). Foucault provides us with an inside look into the ancien rgimes criminal procedure and execution ritual: Secrecy is the paramount principle during the preliminary investigation and the subsequent trial; the entire procedure in court is aimed at obtaining the suspects confession; judicial torture plays a crucial role; the convict is obliged to act as the herald of his own condemnation (a clever formula, which summarizes a complex staging enterprise); punishment is saturated with symbolism referring to the crime; religious beliefs impregnate the proceedings at every level; an important function of the execution is to underline authority (although too much emphasis is placed on the person of the king); in particular, the execution serves to restore the sovereignty, shaken for a moment by the crime; nally, Foucault rightly stresses the constitutive role of the spectators watching an execution (providing little evidence on this aspect from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though). Having discussed the ancien rgimes system of physical punishment, Foucault proceeds to analyze the forces of change and subsequent developments. He discusses the Enlightenment project for penal reform, the introduction of new criminal codes in France, and early experiments with new penal methods outside France, such as Philadelphias Walnut Street prison.
The third part, entitled Discipline, appears as the books cornerstone. In it Foucault temporarily leaves the eld of punishment, looking for disciplinary enterprises in other sectors of society, notably in schools, factories, and the army. The last institution, in particular, enables him to trace the origins of the disciplinary principle back to the seventeenth century. In all cases, the arrangement of bodies in space, the ordering of activities in time, and the classication of people into distinct categories constituted the pillars of the regulatory program. This part of the book culminates in an analysis of the panoptic principle, the most ecient system of surveillance, as advocated by Jeremy Bentham and others. The inmates of panoptic institutions knew (or thought) they were constantly watched, so they had no option but to internalize the docility and bodily control expected from them. The new prisons of the rst half of the nineteenth century, the subject of the books last part, essentially constituted the realization of the panoptic project. Next to surveillance, solitary connement was the most distinct characteristic of these institutions. Foucault rightly stresses that punishment had not simply changed from being directed at the body to being directed at the mind; rather, both mind and body were now the objects of surveillance and disciplinary intervention. This brief summary of the themes dealt with in Surveiller et punir almost makes one wonder why it has obtained such a contested status. And how is it possible that, upon rereading, one can describe this work as a set of solidly historical analyses? The clue, I think, lies in its very nal sentence, a footnote to the last word in the body of the text: Here I interrupt this book which is meant as a historical background for several studies on the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern society. The formulation is slightly ambiguous. Has he purposely published an unnished book, or does its end mark the interruption of a larger series? Yet the meaning of the quoted sentence is clear enough. Foucault wrote Surveiller et punir as a historical work that would form the basis of a study of modern society. He purposely intended it to be largely empirical; most of the theorizing was reserved for later. Since Foucault subsequently shifted the focus of his attention to sexuality, he never completed that other task. Nevertheless, the metaanalysis of his work on punishment took shape in scholarly and political debate, some of it with him, a larger part without him.
Foucault and Historians of Crime and Justice

It seems inevitable that widely admired theorists get their interpretersa facet Foucault and Elias have in common. As with other important works, some of those who reected on the implications and signicance of Surveiller et punir made statements or discovered theses not fully backed up by the book. In fact, some of my own earlier criticism was aimed or should have been aimed at the Foucaultians rather than the French philosopher himself. The Foucaultians are numerous. For a considerable part, the meta-analysis of Surveiller et punir has been construed by scholars from various disciplines who reected about Foucaults entire work. It would by far extend the bounds of this essay to consider all those publications, so I will restrict myself to those pertaining directly to the history of punishment. As it happens, most historians of crime and criminal justice reveal themselves neither as ardent supporters nor as uncompromising opponents. Often, they are content with just citing Foucault. They mention Surveiller et punir as the only or one of the few theoretical works in their eld of study and proceed with their own evidence, hardly discussing to what extent this conrms or disproves Foucaults views. Alternatively, they summarize Surveiller et punir in a few paragraphs, with little indication of what they think of it. V. A. C. Gatrell (1994: 1416), for example, in a book on English executions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rst calls Foucaults analysis of penal change a materialist one and then discusses some elements of this analysis in a seemingly approving fashion. A slightly dierent way of introducing Foucault while avoiding too much debate is to consider his work as a parallel to other traditions of historical discourse. In German historiography, for example, the notion of social discipline (Sozialdisziplinierung) has been paramount for several decades. The theoretical positions associated with this concept vary somewhat, but in most cases it is assumed that the rise of absolutism was part of an all-encompassing drive toward a disciplined society in which the churches, too, played an important role. In a recent overview, Ulrich Behrens (1999: 4648) refers to Surveiller et punir as a reinforcement of that thesis. (Behrenss article gives a useful overview of the literature devoted to social discipline. Before Behrens, Martin Dinges [1996: 169] was already critical of associating Foucault with this German tradition.) Among German historians, Martin Dinges stands out as one who has occupied himself intensively with Foucaults work. In his elaborate study of
violence and conicts of honor in eighteenth-century Paris, Dinges (1994: 3035) uses the French philosophers views on discourse as the basis for an assessment of the meanings to be attributed to the narratives contained in the Parisian archives. An article on Foucaults reception in Germany is more directly relevant to the present discussion. Dinges concludes that most of his compatriots have failed to grasp the full signicance of Foucaults views on punishment and discipline or have misinterpreted his work. For example, several German historians ignored or rejected Foucaults notion of the ubiquity of power, preferring instead to assume a clearly dened center of power within society. This subject will be discussed below. Problematic, in my view, is Dingess consistent labeling of Foucaults critics as people led by a belief in progress. Because the French philosopher criticized the Enlightenment with his emphasis on the rise of a disciplinarian society, his opponents must necessarily be prophets of rationalization and modernity (Dinges 1996: 159 on power; 16162, 17071, on progress). This argument inappropriately reduces a scholarly debate to a political and ideological clash of views. It confuses the analysis of social change with its moral appreciation, which may be legitimate in philosophy but denitely not, I believe, in social science history. Despite Foucaults insistence that the disciplinary principle continues to aect modern society, few historians have applied his work to twentiethcentury developmentsthat is, as far as prisons, courts, and policing are concerned. Robert Gellately, in several publications dealing with the gestapo, is one of the exceptions. Even he relies implicitly rather than explicitly on the French philosophers thoughts. In a modern industrial society, Gellately reminds us in the introduction to his 1990 book, no agency can rely solely on compulsion or force. He goes on to cite Foucault, arguing that every regime, including that of the Nazis, requires a measure of cooperation from acting subjects. Only then can a disciplined or carceral society emerge. Not all members of such a society will lend a hand in policing, nor is it necessary that all of them do so (Gellately 1990: 12). The remainder of the book comprises an analysis of the functioning of the gestapo without further references to Foucault. In an overview of the existing institutions and legal measures for imprisoning the regimes opponents, Gellately (1996: 203) remarks that if ever there was a great carceral network of the sort alluded to in several well-known passages by Michel Foucault, then it existed in Hitlers dictatorship. (Surprisingly, Gellatelys book Backing Hitler [2001] has no references to Foucault.)
Intriguingly, Foucaults most ardent supporters among historians of crime and justice, such as Dinges and Gellately, are found outside his native country. French historians of crime and justice have made a habit of criticizing their famous compatriot. This criticism began directly after the publication of Surveiller et punir, and it was largely concerned with questions of detail. (The rst publication, resulting from a conference in 1977, is Perrot 1980. See also Petit 1984 and Petit et al. 2002, a practically unchanged reprint of a collection rst published in 1981.) The historians involved in it point at weaknesses, real or alleged, in the books historical narrative or the neglect of other evidence. Thus, the standard work on French prisons of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jacques-Guy Petits Ces peines obscures (1990), has scattered references to Foucault, most of them concerned with minor criticisms. Arlette Farge, on the other hand, appears more positive toward Foucault, together with whom she published a collection of archival documents concerning private connement (Farge and Foucault 1982). (For a few critical notes on this collections introduction, see Spierenburg 1991: 242, 24748.) Even among French sociologists of crime, as Philippe Robert explains, Foucaults inuence has been less than among their colleagues in the Anglo-Saxon world (Robert in Mucchielli 1994: 435). The criminal justice historians who have sided most conspicuously with the French philosopher are those proclaiming a revisionist historiography of carceral institutions. Among their foremost representatives are David Rothman and Michael Ignatie. Essentially, they both argue that penal change, such as the introduction and spread of incarceration, was not due primarily to the conscious eorts of individual reformers; instead, penal change was a response to or part of political or economic transformations. In The Discovery of the Asylum (1971), Rothman emphasizes that the proliferation of prisons in the United States, which took place in the 1820s and 1830s, was part of a larger movement of establishing institutions, which included poorhouses and insane asylums. He explains the rise of this institutional network with reference to Jacksonian democracy, although the exact nature of the link between the two remains unclear. In a follow-up study of American prisons in a later period, Rothman (1980) focuses on the tensions within Progressive politics. In Michael Ignatie s 1978 study of English prisons, economic change rather than politics is the main explanatory factor. He focuses on the model penitentiaries, with a regime of solitary connement, established in the rst half of the nineteenth century. Essentially, he sees these prisons as
the product of the Industrial Revolution, emphasizing the contribution of such utopian industrialists as Robert Owen over that of philanthropists such as Elizabeth Fry. Although The Discovery of the Asylum was published earlier than Surveiller et punir, Rothman later noted the resemblances between his work and that of Foucault and Ignatie (notably in his contribution to the conference Crime and Criminal Justice in Preindustrial and Industrial Societies held at the University of Maryland in September 1980). In a similar vein, Ignatie (1983) proclaimed that Rothman, Foucault, and he himself had pioneered in a new historiography of imprisonment.4 One common element, according to Rothman and Ignatie, had to do with timing: Prisons emerged following the great political and economic revolutions around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although true to a certain extent for the United States, this thesis has to be rejected for most of Europe, where prisons and related penal institutions were conspicuously present throughout a large part of the early modern period (Spierenburg 1991).5 More important for our discussion is that Foucaults work only partially supports the others views. In Surveiller et punir, he does pay attention to the early modern precursors of penitentiaries, although most of this attention is reserved for institutions established since the 1770s. Moreover, his discussion of schools, factories, and the army clearly demonstrates that the disciplinary principle far predated the great political and economic revolutions that took place around 1800. Finally, in Foucaults book on madness, the great connement of the early modern period is a central theme (Foucault 1961; I have no argument with this book except about the term great connement itself; see Spierenburg 1991: 10). Another new element in Rothmans and Ignatie s historiography the main reason why it was termed revisionistconcerned their argument that penal change reected, rst of all, a desire for greater control over lawbreakers and other deviant persons. They aimed this argument at the authors whose history writing Rothman and Ignatie, still claiming that Foucault was with them, attempted to revise. In fact, most of their predecessors were either amateur historians, students of local institutions, or lawyers with an interest in the past. These authors often produced an appreciative story with an emphasis on the benevolent motives of the principal actors: penal reformers and philanthropists. Since prisons appeared on the scene as an alternative to corporal and capital punishments, according to these authors story, they were useful institutions that deserved to be applauded by every-
one. One may wonder if such a view, mixing scholarship with moral judgment, needs serious attention at all. In confronting it, the revisionists created an opposite image, which in turn was not entirely free from moral judgment. From good guys, the reformers turned into bad guys. Their true intention was not to treat criminals more humanely but to subject them to tighter control. Thus, the revisionists opposed their control-oriented approach to an approach centering on benevolent intentions: One either explains changes in criminal law with reference to the sensibilities of contemporaries (they became more humanitarian) or one considers the rhetoric of contemporaries as masking their aim to supervise deviants more intensely. In a similar vein, authors such as Andrew Scull applied the revisionist argument to the history of mental institutions, also with reference to the French philosopher: Far from being treated more considerately, the insane became subject to tighter control (Scull 1979 and 1993: esp. 110, with reference to Foucault 1961). In my view, by contrast, sentiments and the desire for control are not mutually exclusive. Although I reject humanitarianism as a descriptive category, I do think that sensibilities were involved in penal change. The question, again, is whether Foucault sides with the revisionists on this point. Although he makes condescending remarks once in a while about authors who applaud penal reformers, he does not bother to enter into a debate with these authors. Yet Surveiller et punir contains passages that might be interpreted in the revisionist sense. Consider the following: During the eighteenth century . . . the formation of a new strategy for the exercise of the power to punish can be observed. And the actual reform, as it is formulated in theories of the law or schematized in projects, is the political or philosophical adoption of that strategy: . . . not of punishing less, but punishing better; to punish with diminished severity perhaps, but also to punish with greater universality and necessity. . . . The conjuncture which witnessed the birth of reform, therefore, is not that of a new sensibility, but that of another politics with regard to illegal activities (Foucault 1975: 84). This is precisely the sort of statement that would lead proponents of the control thesis to believe that Foucault is in their camp. That supposition is questionable, however. Admittedly, Foucault appears to deny that changed sensibilities played a part, but he acknowledges that punishment turned less severe, in the sense of involving less physical suering.With this acknowledgment, he still seems to concede that attitudes to suering played a part and thereby to reject a mono-
causal explanation. Intriguingly, his words constitute a parallel to Cesare Beccarias well-known dictum that the prevention of crime depends not on the severity of punishment but on the certainty of being caught.Thus, the quoted statement can equally be read in accordance with an Elias-based theory of the development of punishment: There have been gradual sociopsychological changes aecting peoples attitudes to physical punishment, but in turn, these changes were related to processes of state formation. The real Foucault, then, probably had more in common with Elias than some scholars, including myself, have previously thought. Although these two theorists dier in many respects, they are no irreconcilable opposites. Admittedly, it is not the rst time this conclusion has been drawn. Other authors have noted resemblances between our two protagonists as well. Karen Halttunen (1995), for example, who argues that the increased sensitivity toward suering that emerged at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought with it a new pornography of pain, refers both to Foucault and my Elias-based analysis of punishment as background works. Both a Dutch and a German historian who studied the development of hygiene and bathing argue that it reected the disciplining process and the rise of a medical regime in Foucaults sense as well as the civilizing process as posited by Elias (Roding 1986: 7; Frey 1997: 1718). In a review article on Foucaults impact on German historiography, Ulrich Brieler (1998: 277 78) sees parallels between Eliass portrayal of the process of civilization and the French philosophers notion of the genealogy of the modern subject. An argument about the relative similarity of Foucaults and Eliass approaches can also be deduced from a collection edited by Alan Petersen and Robin Bunton (1997). The editors stress that, in the latter part of his career, Foucault increasingly acknowledged a self that is autonomous and able to extricate itself from normalising judgements and disciplinary practices (ibid.: 8). (This is an implicit linking of Foucault and Elias, since none of the contributors to this collection refer to any of the latters works. Compare John ONeill, in Burke 1992: 15773, who draws a parallel between Foucault and Max Weber.) In other words, he stressed the importance of structural constraints as well as the possibilities of individual people to opt for dierent courses of action within these constraints, which makes him come closer to Eliass views. These are only a few examples of scholars linking the work of the two theorists discussed here. In the end, however, I believe that their basic agree-
ment is to be found at a more profound level. Elias and Foucault resemble each other to the extent that they both thought it imperative to analyze historical change in order to better understand our own world. Or, to put it dierently, they agreed that the otherness of past societies formed an indispensable key for the study of modern society. That said, I maintain that the real Foucault can be criticized on two principal points. One, referring directly to Surveiller et punir, concerns the pace of historical change. The other, concerning his conception of power, equally refers to this book and much of his other work. In both cases, I will argue, a consideration of Eliass contribution to social theory takes us further.
The Penal System: An Abrupt and Total Change?

Clearly, Foucault has a tendency to see abrupt change and, consequently, to neglect gradual development taking place over the very long term. In some cases, this lack of a long-term perspective leads to inadequate conclusions. This, too, can be demonstrated by considering a few concrete examples from his book. As said earlier, he posits a total transformation of the penal system within a time span of only 80 years. With a view on Europes long historical experience, this would be short indeed. Foucault neatly species the beginning and end terms: 17601840. He then proceeds to the explanatory level, looking for a historical background to this rapid transformation. He nds it at the opposite end of the spectrum: the behavior of lawbreakers. The reforms of criminal justice in the second half of the eighteenth century, he says, although promoted by philosophers and politicians from Beccaria to the members of the constituante, also had to do with a change in the nature of criminality. Foucault identies three constitutive elements of this change. The rst is the supposed shift in the character of criminality, from a predominance of violent oenses to a predominance of property oenses. It is widely known now as the violence-to-theft thesis; writing in 1975, Foucault comments that historians have just discovered this. As a second element, he refers to the decline of violence in absolute terms, causing the remainder of violent criminality to be on the whole less serious. Finally, he points at the liquidation of great robber bands in the 1750s with similar consequences. Since then, still according to Foucault, the property oenses the courts had
to deal with were of a more individual and petty character. He concludes that a softening of crime preceded the softening of the law (Foucault 1975: 78). Here I am obliged, despite my earlier reservations, to present a little criticism of detail myself. I will indicate its relevance for my overall argument though. The story of a softening of crime must be modied in the light of research appearing simultaneously with or after Surveiller et punir and, in at least one case, earlier than, Richard Cobbs The Police and the People (1970). For one thing, banditry in France by no means was over after the 1750s. In fact, larger and more tightly structured bands were active in several regions toward the end of the ancien rgime (Hufton 1974: 26683; Castan 1980: 223 28). The Bande Hulin, for example, whose operations extended from 1767 to 1780, counted about 300 members (Hufton 1974: 277). The last revival of banditry occurred in the 1790s and 1800s, fostered by the unsettled conditions of the struggle between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces (Cobb 1970; see also Brown 1997). Second, the violence-to-theft thesis has been discredited by most historians since the early 1980s. They agree that the increase in the prosecution of property oenses represents a shift in the policy of the courts rather than a massive change in real criminality. Moreover, those scholars who posited a rise in property crime based their claim on the proportion of categories of oenses rather than presenting any absolute numbers (Spierenburg 1996: 6768). If we venture a little further into the question of important shifts in the estimated levels of property crime, it becomes apparent that a long-term perspective is called for (see my contribution to Stearns et al. 2001 and the literature referred to there). The numbers of prosecuted thefts, burglaries, and related oenses were relatively low in the early modern period, although there were temporary peaks at the end of the sixteenth century already. Historians generally assume that these low numbers are due in large part to the informal (infra-judicial) handling of cases. In addition, they agree that temporary peaks in estimated real property crime occurred during economic crises or in the aftermath of war. In most of Europe rates of prosecuted property crime went up toward the end of the eighteenth century as a result of widespread proletarianization. However, from the 1870s onward a great shift took place from poverty-related to prosperity-related property crime: The weakening and ultimate disappearance of a correlation with economic conjunctures indicates that people no longer stole out of sheer necessity. Because, in some countries, this shift occurred before industrialization, it is assumed
that factors such as the rise of social security were at work as well. In addition, several historians observe that the rst stages of industrialization and urbanization led to a decline rather than a rise in (property) crime. From the 1960s onward, on the other hand, rates of property crime massively increased in practically the entire Western world. Presently, the levels are so high that the dierence with preindustrial society obviously is also a matter of real crime. Most historians and criminologists agree that modern rates of property crime result from increased opportunities, in the form of the visibility of goods in department stores, for example. All this suggests that a long-term perspective as advocated by Elias is better equipped to deal with shifts in property crime than Foucaults notion of sudden change. What about the development of violent crime? The preoccupation, among French criminal justice historians, with percentages rather than with estimates of real crime continues to the present day. As a consequence, we simply have no homicide ratesthe only good indicator for the level of real violencefor ancien rgime France. When viewed on a European scale, the homicide rate indeed dropped during the eighteenth century. However, this formed part of a longer-term decline over many centuries, and the timing of accelerations in this decline diverges per country and city (for a recent overview, based on an extensive database, see Eisner 2001). Nowhere can it be pinned down on a short period in the middle of the eighteenth century. So, it would be highly surprising if future research showed this to have been the case in France. Again, we must conclude that a long-term perspective as advocated by Elias is called for. In particular, these considerations cause the third pillar under Foucaults softening of crime to tumble down. On the whole, the relationship between changes in the severity of punishment and shifts in the type of crime is more variegated. Foucaults claim that, from the late eighteenth century onward, punishment increasingly served to repress property crime is only partially true. It holds by no means for the death penalty. In the Netherlands, for example, it was common up to about 1750 to inict capital punishment on burglars and robbers, especially if they were recidivists. This practice then declined, and capital punishment became increasingly reserved for manslaughter and murder. A similar change occurred throughout Europe, again with divergent timing: In the end the death penalty everywhere was reserved for murder and a few other heinous oenses (see, among others, Evans 1996). Thus, a restriction of the
application of the death penalty occurred, which, in turn, formed part of the very longer-term process by which punishment became gradually dissociated from the infringement upon bodily integrity. Of course, the concomitant of this process was precisely that the image of punishment increasingly came to be determined by the prison, and prisons housed mostly property oenders. In that sense, Foucault is right. But this situation was the result of a complex interplay of developments at the level of crime and that of control. What really happened should be described not in terms of before or after but in terms of the interdependence of several long-term processes. Interdependence, of course, is a key word in Eliass work. At this point, we can draw a preliminary conclusion: Foucault favors an ad hoc explanation for the transformation of the penal system. This would remain so even if his claim of a softening of crime had withstood later research. It is understandable to look for an ad hoc explanation, if you believe that the explanandum is a shift within a brief span of time. But it was not. Moreover, Foucaults argument is largely restricted to events in France, whereas the explanandum, the transformation of the penal system, was a Europeanwide phenomenon. Another example of ad hoc reasoning concerns the relationship between disturbances during public executions and their eventual disappearance. Scaold punishments sometimes took place in an atmosphere of popular unrest, notably when riots had already occurred and rebel leaders were brought to justice. Foucault gives a series of examples of popular discontent with executions, but, signicantly, all incidents date from the second half of the eighteenth century. From this he concludes that, although one may speculate about the role of sentiments of humanity in the abandonment of the ceremony of the scaold, there also existed, for the authorities, a political fear of these ambiguous rituals (Foucault 1975: 6168). Foucault does cite one incident from the late seventeenth century, but this is of a quite dierent type: that of the bungling executioner (on this type of case, see Spierenburg 1984: 1316). Apparently, he considers this political fear as a major factor contributing to the eventual abolition of scaold punishments. The ambiguity and danger, however, have always been inherent to executions at moments of popular unrest. This has been demonstrated for Amsterdam from the middle of the seventeenth century onward. For a long time, the tense atmosphere in no way diminished the authorities sense of the appropriateness of their response. When they started to doubt this, in various parts of
Europe toward the end of the eighteenth century, something else had changed as well. When public punishment began to be questioned for other reasons, arguments based on avoiding danger could come to the fore (discussed more extensively in Spierenburg 1984: 100109). One only realizes this when one considers a longer chain of events instead of assuming sudden change. Examining that longer chain of events, we nd that the entire penal system had undergone major changes toward diminishing the centrality of the public iniction of bodily harm from about 1600 onward. Considering this to be well known, I feel no need to elaborate on it. (This is the central argument in Spierenburg 1984 and 1991; in a recent overview, J. A. Sharpe [2000] reaches a similar conclusion, for England in particular.) It casts serious doubt on the signicance of the year 1760 as a marker for the onset of a quick and total transformation. So what about Foucaults end term, the year 1840? By then, he claims, all elements of our modern penal system were more or less in place; although he admits that some were introduced later, he nds these of lesser importance. Panopticism and solitary connement, on the other hand, are unmistakably important in Foucaults analysis of penal change. Needless to say, lawyers and legislators have long abandoned the idea that complete solitude somehow benets the mind, while the round panoptic prison is now considered a nineteenth-century architectural classic. Apparently, the penal system has continued its transformation also after 1840 (for a similar critique of Foucault, see Garland 1990: 161). This applies with equal force to another constitutive element of modern penality emphasized by Foucault: Not just lawyers but a whole range of nonlegal specialists are involved in the modern penal system, all contributing to the production of power-knowledge. Among them, psychiatrists and other medical experts play a crucial role, but in 1840 this role was still extremely limited. The medicalization of the criminal was a typical development of the late nineteenth century, as studies for France, England, and Germany have made clear (Nye 1984, 1993: 7297; Wiener 1990; Becker 2002). Even the classication of prisoners and their dierentiated treatment, as David Garland (1985) demonstrates for England, date back no further than the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the professions of sociology and psychoanalysis were not yet in existence in 1840. A recent collection dealing with the history of criminology in France takes a broad view of its subject, including in it all nonlegal specialties just mentioned. Although the editor, Laurent Mucchielli (1994: 7), stresses that criminologys history, viewed from this
perspective, begins at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the volume demonstrates also that the process of intruding nonlegal specialties into the treatment of crime was going on, with constant shifts of focus, well into the twentieth century. By contrast, Martine Kaluszynski (2002, based on a 1988 thesis) considers the reception of Cesare Lombroso in France as the beginning of criminology in that country. For the end of that century, we may again turn to Garland (1990: 310), who speaks of a crisis in criminal justice: Few people really believe in its ecacy, but the system stays in place because no one knows the road to reform. Obviously, this is a far cry from the rened strategies operating in the modern penal system according to Foucault. Elias, of course, is the theorist who has emphasized time and again that societies change continuously and that scholars should attempt to trace the interdependent long-term developments making up that change. A study of developments in penality appears to sustain his views. Interdependence is the keyword here. In Eliassand myview of historical explanation, the main task for scholars is to arrive at a better understanding of how social processes are interwoven instead of thinking in terms of cause and eect. It is certainly unsatisfactory to argue in terms of straightforward causalities. For example, if some places witnessed riots at the scaold and this prompted the authorities to move executions indoors, it will not do to conclude that the riot was the cause of the change in penal procedure. Similarly, we should never say that changed sensibilities were the cause of the privatization of executions. Instead, I would say that the privatization of executions reected a change in sensibilities. Second, to broaden the explanatory perspective, it is important to note the more or less contemporaneous tendencies toward concealment in other spheres of social life. The concealment of the spectacle of death and suering, apparently, was part of a more encompassing process of privatization. In this way, nally, we have arrived at a composite picture of overall historical change. In fact, this procedure is very similar to the comparative method advocated by Marc Bloch more than 70 years ago. He noted that every medievalist writing about the estates of a particular region tended to explain the emergence of this institution in terms of a peculiarity of the region studied. Instead, Bloch (1963 [1928]: 2426) argued, historians should acknowledge that the rise of estates was a Europeanwide phenomenon, which calls for an explanation in general terms.
Ultimately, Eliass and my principal goal is not to explain why corporal punishments disappeared and capital punishment came to be executed indoors. Much less is it my aim to provide a kind of overall theory of punishment. The latter task has been accomplished in a creative way by David Garland (1990) in a work that remains relatively undisputed. Rather, my main interest goes in the opposite direction. The aim is to explore in what way changes in punishment reect broader, long-term developments in society; to learn, through the study of punishment, how these developments are interrelated; to nd out if all this may enhance our insight into the structure of our own society and ourselves. An examination of the concept of power serves to expound this scholarly project in greater detail.
Foucault, Elias, and the Problem of Power

The theme of power obviously relates to any object of study; here, however, it has to be discussed in particular with reference to the history of punishment. In this case, too, we note that the views of Foucault and Elias converge on one fundamental point, while in the end they diverge in crucial ways. Their basic agreement concerns the idea that power is everywhere or, in the words of one interpreter, the postulate of the omnipresence of phenomena of power (Allgegenwrtigkeit der Machtfenomene; Kim 1995: 88). Although this is denitely an idea that Elias and Foucault have in common, many authors appreciatively refer to it as deriving from the latter alone (even as mild a critic as Garland [1990: 138] does so). In a brief, programmatic essay, Foucault claried his position in terms of a microphysics of power. He put forward four theses, or rather he discussed four commonly held notions that he rejected: One, power is something which certain people possess while others are excluded from doing so. Although the phrase they are in power may serve as a convenient political slogan, it is unhelpful in a historical analysis. Apart from politics, power is embedded also in families, sexual relations, living conditions, and neighborhood life. Consequently, a second notion he rejected was the idea that power can be localized, specically, that it can be conned to state institutions. To the contrary, the apparatus of the state is merely an auxiliary structure, the instrument of a system of powers far greater than the state. The police of ancien rgime France, for example, could be eective only because of the preexisting power structures of paternal authority and religious com-
munity. Three, power is subordinate to or a derivative of a mode of production. Rather, power is a constitutive element of the prevailing mode of production. It is only through power mechanisms that people are prepared to devote a considerable part of their lives to labor instead of such alternatives as taking a rest, having sex, or engaging in robbery. (This thesis, obviously, serves to distance the author from orthodox Marxism.) Four, power is rooted solely in physical force. In fact, it is mistaken to draw a sharp distinction between force and ideology. Every situation in which power is exercised is also an instance of gathering knowledge. For example, especially from the nineteenth century onward, every agent of power routinely provided feedback to his superiors about the implementation of their commands. Thus, power is not merely repressive; it also has productive and integrative eects (Foucault 1976a: 11423 6). This approach to the concept of power has an obvious relevance for criminal justice history. All four points can easily be related to issues central to this eld. Thus, Foucaults rst claimthat power is rooted in families and neighborhood communities no less than in state institutionsmatches the observations of many historians about informal social control. In preindustrial Europe the role of families, guilds, and neighborhood associations was equally, if not more, important within the system of social control than was the role of the state courts. And informal control at the neighborhood level remained inuential in several places until the early twentieth century. Moreover, a considerable amount of negotiation concerning the acceptance of norms went on between state agents and the rest of the population. On the other hand, informal and formal social control often were intertwinedan observation congruent with Foucaults second claim. The third claim obviously separates Marxist from non-Marxist historians of crime. It supports the latter to the extent that they argue that crime is not merely a function of the prevailing system of labor relations. Finally, the claim that power, next to being repressive, is also productive and integrative is relevant for the discussion about the extent to which the criminal law served to protect the lower classes and was welcomed by them. According to Foucault, then, power is inextricably linked to every part of the social body. Although Elias adopts a dierent terminology, he would have no objections to the general idea. The notion that power is not something possessed by the mighty alone and the acknowledgment of its relational character are central themes in his work from the 1960s onward. Consequently,
Eliass views of power are equally relevant for criminal justice history. Elias and Foucault, it can be concluded, developed the idea of the omnipresence of power more or less simultaneously but independently from each other. Eliass writings on the theme, however, are more sociological in tone. His basic rule is simple: Power should always be linked to people (individuals or groups), but power itself should neither be personied nor reied. Elias (1971 [1970]: 101) denes it as a structural property of a social relationship. As he said in academic lectures, Power is not a magic substance which you carry in your pocket. Rather, it is an aspect of the interaction between two or more people, up to millions of them. On still another occasion, Elias (1984: 251) explained: In fact what we call power is an aspect of a relationship, of every human relationship. It has something to do with the fact that people as groups or as individuals can withhold or monopolize what others needfood, love, meaning, protection from attack (i.e. security), as well as knowledge and some other things. Consequently, power is always two-sided, operating from the top down as well as from the bottom up. Those who withhold things from others sometimes still need these other people, but usually the distribution of power is unequal. To put it dierently, group A may be more powerful than group B, but that does not leave group B entirely without power. For example, we may speak of the power of a baby over its parents. Whenever the child cries, a parent is likely to devote attention to it. In a similar vein, prisoners have some measure of power over their supervisors and policy makers, even though the latter two are by far the stronger parties within this social relationship. Moreover, these two-sided power relationships are not static. They are subject to change as new or enlarged sources of power become available to certain people in connection with broader social transformations. In the case of babies, new conceptions of childhood and the value of children, related in their turn to more encompassing changes in society, may increase their chances of being attended to. In the penal realm, one of the most telling examples is the process of emancipation of prisoners, analyzed for the Netherlands by Herman Franke, who also coined this term. From the end of the nineteenth century onward, Dutch convicts gradually became more powerful, as outside groups were aware that they suered. Because sensitivity to suering in society at large increased, the more distressing aspects of life in captivity became intolerable. Material conditions in prisons improved, even though the contrast between life in captivity and life outside remained con-
siderable (Franke 1990; Franke 1995 is a condensed English version). This process of emancipation of prisoners is likely to have occurred in other countries as well, and future investigations of it could demonstrate the usefulness of Eliass concept of power for the study of criminal justice history. In the example just given, the level of sensibility prevailing in society at large served as a source of power for a specic group. The source of power in question may be called cultural or sociopsychological, but in other situations, sources of a quite dierent type can be operative. The notion of sources of power is closely connected with the denition of power as an aspect of all human relationships. Sources of power are no wells springing up in favorable places and empowering a person if he or she drinks from the water. According to Eliass sociological analysis, every source of power is a function of specic social relationships, or, to put it dierently, it derives from the way peoples lives are organized. This applies equally to peaceful or violent social relationships. A medieval castle lord has power over his retinue obviously not because he is physically stronger than all his dependents together. His power is a function of the organization of the castle and the surrounding domain and the conviction of all those involved that this is legitimate. When we consider the social class of knights as a whole, on the other hand, and contrast it with the peasantry, we easily recognize that the formers power surplus rests in large part on their monopoly on bearing arms. Finally, the organization of knowledge brings forth power dierences. Certain people are more powerful than others because they have valuable means of orientation at their disposal. The inuential position of priests in early agrarian societies, for example, was due in large part to their expertise in timing: They knew exactly when the seeds ought to be sown, which served as a source of power for them. The last example easily brings to mind Foucaults notion of the interconnectedness of power and knowledge. In his writings, however, knowledge appears to be a product rather than a source of power. Alternatively, the two have become merged into one, as in his well-known expression of powerknowledge (pouvoir-savoir, used in singular). Linguistic peculiarities further complicate the matter. In Surveiller et punir and other works, Foucault distinguishes between savoir and connaissance, which Arpd Szakolczai (1998: 78) translates as knowledge and knowledge-content. Savoir, however, is actually a verb, and in Dutch and German translations of Foucault it often is rendered as a verb. With this in mind, we might translate savoir and connais-
sance as knowing and knowledge, respectively. Pouvoir, of course, is also originally a verb. Although it would be too awkward perhaps to translate the word as can or being able to, it is important to realize this. Then we can take pouvoir-savoir to mean simply if one is able to do something, one also knows something and vice versa. Specic types of knowledge are the end result. This interpretation is concordant with a key sentence from Surveiller et punir: [It is] power-knowing, [and] the processes and the struggles which traverse it and by which it is constituted, which determine the possible forms and domains of knowledge (Foucault 1975: 32).7 Applying this to criminal justice history, we may consider the rise of penitentiaries again: Preexisting structures of knowing and enabling were a condition for the emergence of these institutions, which subsequently produced knowledge about, among other things, the classication of criminals. However, the quoted sentence still rules out the possibility that knowledgeor control over the means of orientationcan be a source of power. Foucaults preoccupation with the theme of power was greatest during the mid-1970s, the very period in which he published Surveiller et punir. Later in life he tended to deny that power was the central concern in his work, replacing it with truth and the subject (cf. Szakolczai 1998: 77 82, 23839). Nevertheless, for many criminal justice historians, Foucault is rst of all a theoretician of power. Because of the uncertainty in which Foucault leaves us concerning the exact relationship between power and knowledge, it is dicult to determine with precision to what extent his views diverge from Eliass notion of control over the means of orientation as one possible source of power. We can say with certainty, on the other hand, that Eliass notions of the two-sidedness of power and its relational character are largely absent from Foucaults work. This explains why scholars disagree about the question of who the power holders were in the narrative of Surveiller et punir. Who stood to gain from the discipline exerted on convicts; who proted from the existence of panoptic prisons? Major candidates are the bourgeoisie, the state, and professional groups. It is so dicult to decide between these three because the book implicitly contains two dierent concepts of power. The rst emphasizes its omnipresence, but it still suers from one-sidedness. According to this concept, we might distinguish an innite number of groups with power: A, B, C, and so on. We can imagine them to confront, in a top-down process, an equally large number of objects of discipline: X, Y, Z, etc. Within the frame-
work of this concept, there is no need to answer the question of who the power holders were. Power is exercised by many people but always in a one-way direction. Ultimately, however, the second concept prevails. It makes power much more monolithic: Power still is everywhere but now it is a very busy and rapid thing or person. It is Mr. Power himself (we must imagine him as a man, because the noun le pouvoir has the male gender). Toward the end of Surveiller et punir, Foucault (1975: 308) formulates it thus: The most important eect, perhaps, of the carceral system and its extension beyond the realm of legal imprisonment is that it makes the power to punish appear natural and legitimate, at least to lower the threshold of tolerance for penality. 8 In other words, Mr. Power punishes constantly, and everyone thinks it a normal thing. To conclude, Foucault severs power from real people, but at the same time it becomes an entity or even an actor who does things. Apparently, it has a will and a life of its own. In a similar vein, Eun-Young Kim criticizes Foucaults concept of power and opposes it to that of Elias. Foucault, according to Kim, views power as a constitutive factor for the modern subject. In the case of the prison, power produces the disciplinary subject that supervises itself, and in the case of sexuality, power produces the modern, self-confessing subject. Although Foucault, like Elias, rejects the homo-clausus model of a self-contained individual independent of others, he has gone too far in his attempt to destroy the notion of the centrality of the subject. Consequently, still according to Kim (1995: 89), Foucault views individuals as merely the connecting elements between power relations. I agree with Kim, except that the word relations is inappropriate. Foucault rather depicts power as a person or force that individuals are obliged to accommodate. Foucaults personication of power is illustrated most tellingly in a passage from his History of Sexuality. In that passage, Mr. Power behaves almost like a rapist: [Power] seizes the sexual body by the waist. No doubt [this implies] . . . also a sensualization of power. . . . The unveiled pleasure ows back to power, who surrounds it. . . . [Power] attracts; he conquers the strange things he guards. Pleasure spreads over power, who pursues him (Foucault 1976b: 61).9 This is suggestive language, as other scholars have noted, too. Herman Franke criticizes Foucaults choice of words with respect to power even without having considered the latters History of Sexuality. According
to Franke (1995: 294), Foucaults work has the eect of reducing individuals and groups to instruments of a willful, omnipresent and all-pervading force: power. People have to comply with the wishes and desires of that power.They even do so unconsciously (see also Franke 1990: 763). This terminology, still according to Franke, makes Foucaults analysis akin to that of structuralfunctionalism: Actors have to accommodate the strategies of a social system that strives to perpetuate itself. Signicantly, Franke adds, Foucault never poses the question why some social processes proceeded more or less as inuential people had imagined them while other processes did not proceed that way at all. By contrast, Elias acknowledges that social developments have a relative autonomy from the aims, plans, and wishes of the people involved in them. At this point, nally, it is easy to see how Eliass rejection of both a personication and a reication of power reinforces the thesis that the evolution of criminal justice from a dominance of physical punishment to a reliance on incarceration took place over a longer period of time and in a less linear fashion than Foucault would suggest. Because power is a two-sided aspect of all social relationships, no person or group has such a huge surplus of power as to be able to completely determine the course of historical change. For example, by the early seventeenth century urban and territorial authorities in several parts of Europe were already eager to impose imprisonment, on beggars in particular, but the apparatus of law enforcement was still limited and weak, so that actual numbers of imprisoned beggars remained low. Partly as a consequence of this, banishment and physical punishment stayed on the scene for another 200 years or so. If Foucaults Mr. Power really existed, he might have brought about the presumed sudden transformation of the penal system. But there was no sudden transformation, and the penal system continued to change after 1840. A powerful (in Eliass sense) coalition of philanthropists and administrators, who met at successive international conferences during the nineteenth century, promoted the solitary connement of criminals. This coalition was successful for a while, but then the power of prisoners, whose suerings became known to the outside world, slightly increased, which was one factor in the demise of solitary connement. These are only a few examples. In a similar vein, the massive increase in incarceration rates in the United States in recent years can be analyzed in terms of shifting balances of power.
Conclusion
Summed up in one sentence, the conclusion of this essay is that Foucault and Elias converge on some points while they diverge on others. They converge to the extent that they both acknowledge the omnipresence of power and prefer large historical explorations. They look for explanations at a relatively high level of generalization. In this, they contrast markedly with some recent works in the history of punishment, notably that of Richard Evans. Indeed, Evans dismisses both Foucault and Elias without developing an alternative theory of his own. He believes he can discredit the formers scholarly work with gossip about his personal life, and he dismisses the latters theory of civilization by repeating the blunt and unfounded statements of a few others, 15 years earlier, who claimed that this theory served to uphold racism (Evans 1996: 88099; neither does Gatrell [1994] have a theory of his own). When we examine the work of Foucault and Elias in greater detail, however, we nd them diverging in their approach to the study of longterm change and their methods of sociological-historical explanation. Eliass approach, in my view, comes closer to balancing, on the one hand, the fact that, in the human sciences, we always have to do with people of esh and blood and, on the other hand, that these people generate processes that are beyond their control as individuals. Based on this acknowledgment, Eliass view of historical explanation centers around the interdependence of several broad processes over the long term. Applied to the history of punishment, this view of historical explanation focuses on the interwovenness of penal change and change in other social elds. Instead of having the civilizing process explain the transformation of punishment, Eliass and my approach, rather, takes the opposite route: A study of the development of executions and incarceration increases our understanding of the nature of civilizing processes.
Notes
This article elaborates on a paper presented at the Social Science History Association meeting in Pittsburgh in October 2000. I am grateful to the session participants, in particular to the discussant, Mary Gibson, for their comments. Earlier versions were presented as a lecture at the criminology department of the University of Oslo in October 1998 and at a Ph.D. seminar of the University of Warsaw in May 1999. I also thank the par-
Punishment, Power, and History: Foucault and Elias 633 ticipants in those meetings for their remarks. Finally, I am indebted to three anonymous readers for this journal. 1 Weidmanns attorney vainly tried an insanity defense; Million was also condemned to death but beneted from a presidential pardon. 2 The king suered only a light wound, but he feared that the knife had been poisoned. Damiens had probably no intention of killing him, but inuential circles at court believed in a conspiracy. Cf. Lavisse 1909: 24445. 3 Messages on the Elias-I e-mail list, from Robert van Krieken (9 November 2000) and Arpd Szakolczai (13 November 2000). A French edition, by another translator, was published in 1998. References herein to Foucault as the French philosopher are used simply to avoid repeating his name too often. 4 Additionally he claimed that his own, 1978 analysis was a little more nuanced than that of his two colleagues. 5 In fairness it should be added that Rothman later recognized this, since he included a chapter on these early modern institutions in The Oxford History of the Prison (1995), which Norval Morris and he edited. 6 This cheap German edition identies the essay as a lecture at the Collge de France in 1973. I was unable to trace the French original. 7 [Cest] le pouvoir-savoir, les processus et les luttes qui le traversent et dont il est constitu, qui dterminent les formes et les domaines possibles de la connaissance. 8 Leet le plus important peut-tre du systme carcral et de son extension bien audel de lemprisonnement lgal, cest quil parvient rendre naturel et lgitime le pouvoir de punir, abaisser du moins le seuil de tolrance la pnalit. 9 Il [le pouvoir] prend bras-le-corps le corps sexuel. . . . sans doute . . . aussi sensualisation du pouvoir. . . . Le plaisir dcouvert reue vers le pouvoir qui le cerne. . . . Il [le pouvoir] attire, il extrait ces trangets sur lesquelles il veille. Le plaisir diuse sur le pouvoir qui le traque.
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Punishment, Power, and History: Foucault and Elias 635 Garland, David (1985) Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies. Aldershot, U.K.: Gower. (1990) Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gatrell, V. A. C. (1994) The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 17701868. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gellately, Robert (1990) The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 19331945. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon. (1996) The prerogatives of connement in Germany, 19331945: Protective custody and other police strategies, in Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jtte (eds.) Institutions of Connement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 15001950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 191211. (2001) Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halttunen, Karen (1995) Humanitarianism and the pornography of pain in AngloAmerican culture. American Historical Review 100: 30334. Hufton, Olwen H. (1974) The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 17501789. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon. Ignatie, Michael (1978) A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 17501850. New York: Pantheon. (1983) State, civil society, and total institution: A critique of recent social histories of punishment, in David Sugarman (ed.) Legality, Ideology, and the State. London: Academic: 183211. Kaluszynski, Martine (2002) La rpublique lpreuve du crime: La construction du crime comme objet politique, 18801920. Paris: L.G.D.J. Kim, Eun-Young (1995) Norbert Elias im Diskurs von Moderne und Postmoderne: Ein Rekonstruktionsversuch der Eliasschen Theorie im Licht der Diskussion von Foucault und Habermas. Marburg: Tectum. Lavisse, Ernest (1909) Histoire de France depuis les origines jusqu la Rvolution.Vol. 8, pt. 2, Le rgne de Louis XV (17151774). Paris: Hachette. Morris, Norval, and David J. Rothman, eds. (1995) The Oxford History of the Prison. New York: Oxford University Press. Mucchielli, Laurent, ed. (1994) Histoire de la criminologie franaise. Paris: LHarmattan. Nye, Robert A. (1984) Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (1993) Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France. New York: Oxford University Press. Perrot, Michelle, ed. (1980) Limpossible prison: Recherches sur le systme pnitentiaire au 19e sicle (debate with Michel Foucault). Paris: Seuil. Peterson, Alan, and Robin Bunton, eds. (1997) Foucault, Health, and Medicine. London: Routledge. Petit, Jacques-Guy (1990) Ces peines obscures: La prison pnale en France, 17801875. Paris: Fayard.
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Punishment, Power, and History: Foucault and Elias

Spierenburg, Petrus Cornelis.

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Punishment, Power, and History

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Foucault on Penal Change

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Foucault and Historians of Crime and Justice

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The Penal System: An Abrupt and Total Change?

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Foucault, Elias, and the Problem of Power

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