Foucault argued that modern power works not by punishing but by watching.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault introduced the concept of pouvoir disciplinaire, disciplinary power, in his 1975 book Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, published in English as Discipline and Punish.1 Foucault argued that between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Western societies shifted from a model of power based on spectacle, the public execution, the sovereign's visible force, to one based on surveillance, examination, and normalization.
The central image of the book was Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, an 1791 prison design in which a single watchman could observe all inmates without them knowing whether they were being watched at any given moment.2 Foucault used the Panopticon as a metaphor for how modern institutions, schools, hospitals, factories, and offices, organized bodies in space and imposed behavioral norms through the possibility of observation rather than the application of force.3
Disciplinary power operated through techniques Foucault called "hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination."4 The performance review, the standardized test, the employee monitoring system, all descend from this logic: power exercised not through commands but through the establishment of norms and the measurement of deviation from them.
Foucault died in 1984 at the age of fifty-seven. His lectures at the Collège de France, where he held the Chair in the History of Systems of Thought from 1970 to 1984, were published posthumously and continue to circulate in university syllabi worldwide.5