In the first quarter of 1973, Michel Foucault delivered these thirteen lectures on the "punitive society" at the Collège de France, examining how the relationships between justice and truth that govern modern criminal law are formed, and investigating what connects them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still governs modern society.

This series of lectures, which was supposed to be preparatory for Discipline and Punish, a work that would be published in 1975, is analyzed quite differently from it, going beyond the correctional system and encompassing the whole of society with a capitalist economy, within which a special management of the multiplicity of offenses and their overlapping relationship first appears.

The entire study focuses on previously unpublished historical material related to classical political economy, to the Quakers and to the English “Dissenters,” with their philanthropy – they are the ones whose discourse introduces reform to the criminal system and is also related to the moralization of working time.

Through his critique of Hobbes, Foucault provides us with an analysis of the civil war, which is not the war of all against all but a “general matrix” that allows us to understand the functioning of criminal strategy, which targets not so much the criminal as the internal enemy.

The Punitive Society holds a place among the major texts on the history of capitalism. The “human sciences” prove to be always, in the Nietzschean sense, “moral sciences.”

“This was the center of my interest: the prison as a social form, that is, as a form through which power is exercised within a society – the way in which power derives the knowledge it needs in order to be exercised and on the basis of which it will distribute orders, mandates, instructions. We could thus seek the images that symbolize the form of power.

We have the medieval image of the throne, the point from which the monarch listens and judges: it is the from-the-throne form of power. Then we have the authoritarian form of the head commanding the body, which pre-exists: it is the primal form of power as it appears on the cover of Leviathan. Finally, we have the modern image of a center from which the gaze radiates that surveils and controls, where a flow of knowledge culminates and from which a flow of decisions emanates: it is the central form of power.

My opinion is that to understand the institution of the prison, we should study it in depth, that is, not so much based on criminal theories or concepts of law, nor again based on a historical sociology of crime, but by asking the question: in what system of power does the prison operate?”

Michel Foucault