Michel Foucault — "The function of punishment is not to deter crime, but to maintain social order."
The function of punishment is not to deter crime, but to maintain social order.
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More from Michel Foucault
"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to the bureaucrats and the police to see that our papers are in order."
"The most important thing for me is to try to understand how things work."
"Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere."
"I am not a prophet, I am a diagnostician."
"The discourse on sexuality has always been a discourse of power."
About Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
French philosopher and historian whose Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality reframed power, knowledge, and institutions in modern thought. Closely associated with Jacques Derrida (deconstruction peer) and Gilles Deleuze (philosophical ally on power and difference). For an intellectual contrast, see Jürgen Habermas, German social theorist of communicative rationality — Habermas insisted on universal norms of reason — exactly the position Foucault's 'power/knowledge' framework treats as itself a power effect. The Foucault-Habermas debate is the canonical postwar argument over whether reason is universal-emancipatory or always-already complicit with power.
The standard scholarly entry points to Michel Foucault's work: Didier Eribon (French intellectual biographer) — Michel Foucault (1989); Stuart Elden (Warwick, political geographer) — Foucault's Last Decade (2016); Gary Gutting (Notre Dame, philosophy) — Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (2005). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Michel Foucault.