He argued that modern institutions do not punish deviance but produce normality.
Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, in 1926. He studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris under Louis Althusser and earned agrégation in philosophy in 1951. His early academic career included positions in Sweden, Poland, and Germany before he returned to France.1
In 1975, Foucault published Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The book opens with a graphic account of a public execution in 1757, then traces the transition from physical punishment to institutional surveillance and behavioral regulation. Foucault argued that modern institutions, including schools, hospitals, factories, and prisons, share a common architecture of control: they observe, classify, examine, and normalize.2
His concept of the Panopticon, borrowed from Jeremy Bentham's 1791 prison design, described a structure in which inmates could be observed at any time without knowing whether they were being watched. Foucault used it as a metaphor for how modern institutions maintain order not primarily through force but through the internalization of surveillance.3 The subject of discipline eventually disciplines himself.
Foucault also developed the concept of "biopower," the way modern states govern not through sovereign commands but through the management of populations: tracking births, regulating health, measuring productivity, classifying deviance. The workplace, in this framework, is not merely a place where labor occurs. It is a site where individuals are shaped into particular kinds of subjects through routines, evaluations, and norms that feel natural precisely because they are never questioned.4
Foucault held the chair of History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France from 1970 until his death in Paris in 1984 at the age of fifty-seven.5