
I’ve written about The Punitive Society course by Foucault before, particularly in a review essay which appeared in Historical Materialism, and then in my book Foucault: The Birth of Power which appeared with Polity in 2017. That was a book based on both textual and archival research, an attempt to trace how Foucault moved from The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969 to Surveiller et punir, Discipline and Punish in 1975. I did this by privileging two main sources of information – his early courses at the Collège de France, and his political activism. With the courses, I was particularly interested in how each of the first three courses took a particular schema of power-knowledge as its principal focus: measure, inquiry, examination; in Lectures on the Will to Know, Penal Theories and Institutions, The…