Didier Fassin suggests that “the political and moral economies of punishment are somewhat disjointed” and may not really reflect the reality of how prisons worked. The three articles push hard on Foucault’s marriage of a political economy of punishment and a genealogy of morals in these 1973 lectures. the role and method for militant specific intellectuals to intervene in our present, drawing on The Punitive Society as a political text.the contemporary reflections of all this in our present condition of massive and racialized over-incarceration, or what has come to be known as the New Jim Crow and.the relation of that particular political-economic theory to a Weberian-inspired, genealogical analysis of the protestant roots of the wage- and prison-form.the concept of “illegalisms” as the basis for a political economy of punishment that criminalizes the poor and minorities.the idea of civil war as a model for relations of power in society, and the related notion of the “criminal as social enemy” as a specific instantiation of the matrix of war.In their fascinating and provocative articles on The Punitive Society, Didier Fassin, Axel Honneth, and Nadia Urbinati raise a set of critical questions about Foucault’s 1973 lectures, concerning: With special guests Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton) and EHESS, Axel Honneth, Columbia University, and Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University

Foucault punishment