Just Finished Reading: The Spectacle of the Scaffold by Michel Foucault

This is basically the first two sections of Foucault’s larger work – Discipline & Punish – in a handy pocketbook size and is part of the Penguin Great Ideas series (the 4th so far I’ve read). In it Foucault discusses, in some graphic detail, the standard practice of gruesome public executions undertaken throughout Europe until comparatively recently and ponders why such things happened and why the practice died out (no pun intended).

Foucault’s main focus (from my reading about him rather than work by him – this being my first) is on power in society. Public executions for Foucault were an expression of naked power and existed primarily to educate the majority of the people to understand their place – at the bottom of things. In the ages Foucault concentrates on crime against property was crime against the State rather against other individuals and was punished accordingly.

The slow decline and eventual demise of public torture and bloody execution was, Foucault maintains, only in part the result of Enlightenment thought and the growth of the political franchise. It was, he maintains, primarily caused by a shift in the nature of punishment from the body of the criminal to the mind of the criminal. No longer was it necessary to horrify the population during a public event but to educate them after a suitably humbled criminal confesses his wrongdoings to the crowd – or even in one of the emerging newspapers or many pamphlets. The change from public to private justice was part of a shift away from crude public demonstrations of power which, more often than not, backfired in an orgy of demonstration and rioting – the public previously expected to vent its anger at the accused which then spilled over into general rampage. Whilst the power of the State did not fade away (far from it) it became more subtle in its application and achieved the same end – control.

This was an interesting read in a basically bite sized chunk. Foucault has some interesting ideas about power and reminded me more than once of Nietzsche. I have several books by him – and a few about him – that I’ll be reading in the next year or so. If I do a future degree in politics, which seems likely to be honest, no doubt a background in Foucault will be useful. Watch this space.