What was most important to Bentham is that even if a guard wasn’t actually watching a prisoner at a given time, the prisoner would have no way of knowing. A prisoner in a cell could be seen at any time by a guard stationed in the tower. To achieve this effect, Bentham imagined a prison with a tall central tower and cells arranged in a circle surrounding it. “Pan” means “all” and “optics” refers to sight the Panopticon is therefore an institution in which everything is seen, or everyone is constantly under surveillance. By reconstructing the philosopher’s arguments concerning the significance of disciplinary institutions, biopower, subjectivity, and forms of resistance in modern society, Ransom shows how Foucault has provided a different way of looking at and responding to contemporary models of government-in short, a new depiction of the political world.The third chapter of Foucault’s section on “Discipline” is called “Panopticism.” Here, Foucault draws inspiration from Jeremy Bentham’s proposed design of a prison he called a Panopticon. Foucault’s Discipline demonstrates how Foucault’s valorization of descriptive critique over prescriptive plans of action can be applied to the decisively altered political landscape of the end of this millennium.
By concentrating primarily on Discipline and Punish and the later Foucauldian texts, Ransom provides a fresh interpretation of this controversial philosopher’s perspectives on concepts such as freedom, right, truth, and power.
Uniquely, Ransom presents Foucault as a political theorist in the tradition of Weber and Nietzsche, and specifically examines Foucault’s work in relation to the political tradition of liberalism and the Frankfurt School. Ransom extracts a distinctive vision of the political world-and oppositional possibilities within it-from the welter of disparate topics and projects Michel Foucault pursued over his lifetime.
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