The Rationalisation of Punishment
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Description
In this paper I want to pursue some of the historical themes raised by Michel Foucault's work Discipline and Punish. However, I wish to do so by reference not to Foucault's work itself, but rather by exploring the broader Weberian themes and analyses upon which Foucault's research has drawn. For the most part, I will be concerned to discuss how the long-term processes of rationalization, professionalization, and bureaucratization have affected the development and functioning of modern penal systems, but I will also try to suggest the limits of these tendencies, and the counterforces with which they contend. My general contention will be that the field of punishment is marked by an endemic conflict between what Weber would term rational, non-rational, and irrational forces. The theoretical conclusion which I draw from this is that Foucault's rather rationalistic account of punishment needs somehow to be brought together with the kind of interpretation offered by Emile Durkheim in order to produce a theoretical framework more capable of understanding the complex dynamics of this social institution. The development of the disciplines is a key theme in Foucault's account of modern punishment and of Weber's account of modern society, but for both writers, disciplinary practices are only one element within a much broader developmental process in which social practices come to be “rationalized”, and “instrumentalized” in a utilitarian fashion. According to Weber rationalized social practices are those rule-governed forms of social action which are calculated and calculable, based on a self-reflexive knowledge of their aims and conditions, and oriented to achieving these ends by the most instrumentally appropriate means. Historically, and conceptually, these practices are counterposed to affective, customary or traditional forms of social action, since these non-rational or quasi-rational forms are dictated by emotion, habit or other irrational factors. The move from traditional or affective practices to rationalized forms of action is seen by Weber (and by Foucault) as a distinctively modernizing development, in which social practices become better informed, more efficient and more self consciously adapted towards specific objectives. In the course of this development, “science” (including social science) comes to replace belief, calculation replaces commitment, and technical knowledges replace traditions and sentiments as the leading determinants of action. In consequence, social practices and institutions become more instrumentally effective, but at the same time they become less emotionally compelling or meaningful for their human agents. For Weber—and in large part for Foucault too—human consequences of this ever-more rationalized social world involve not only “disenchantment” and the loss of spiritual faith and value commitment: they also entail a heavy measure of constraint and oppression which is psychologically burdensome for the individual. Weber's image of the iron cage of modern rationalism, and Foucault's vision of the disciplinary society, each attempt to capture and convey this ironic of modernity and its discontents. The great interest of Foucault's (partly-Weberian) analysis of punishment is that he shows how this broader rationalization process has transformed an institution from being a morally-charged and emotive set of ritual practices into an increasingly passionless and professionalized instrumental process. In the pages which follow, I will explore this “rationalization” of punishment in an attempt to spell out precisely what these changes have amounted to, and how they fit with this more general thesis. Having drawn up the evidence for the proposition that punishment has become, to some extent at least, a rationalized form of social practice, I will then try to place this development within= its wider context. Recalling the well-known theories of Emile Durkheim, it will be seen that this Weberian-Foucauldian theme of rationalization appears to run directly counter to the Durkheimian insistence that penality—even modern penality—is fundamentally a passionate reaction grounded in non-rational motivations and rituals. But instead of rejecting one or the other thesis out of hand, I will argue that both themes are in fact characteristic of modern punishment—although they are functionally separated to some extent within the specialised division of labour of the modern penal process. My argument will be that there are two contrasting visions at work in contemporary criminal justice—the passionate, morally-toned desire to punish and the administrative, rationalistic, normalizing concern to manage. These visions clash in many important respects, but both are deeply embedded within the social process of punishing. It is in the conflict and tension between them that we will find one of the key determinants of contemporary penal practice.
Source Publication
Theatres of Power: Social Control and Criminality in Historical Perspective
Source Editors/Authors
Heikki Pihlajamäki
Publication Date
1991
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "The Rationalisation of Punishment" (1991). Faculty Chapters. 707.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/707
