Don’t talk to me about Marx any more!
| Author | Johann Koehler |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520918819 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review Symposium: The Prison and the Factory (40th Anniversary Edition) |
Essay
Don’t talk to me about
Marx any more!
Johann Koehler
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Don’t talk to me about Marx any more! I never want to hear anything about that man
again. Ask someone whose job it is. Someone paid to do it. Ask the Marxist func-
tionaries. Me, I’ve had enough of Marx.
–Foucault, cited in Eribon (1991: 266)
The occasion of a book’s 40th Anniversary reissue spares me the need to offer shaky
predictions anticipating how audiences are likely to react. That history already hap-
pened. But, oddly enough, one of the remarkable features of Melossi and Pavarini’s
The Prison and the Factory is that it earned its place as a classic in penal history
despite a curiously unenthusiastic initial reception. Readers will be pleased to find
that Melossi’s retrospective essay introducing the new edition sketches some of his
reflections and misgivings about the book’s legacies. But texts have both an intel-
lectual life of the sort foundin that essay, and also a historical one of the sort readers
will find here—and, in that more narrowly historical sense, The Prison and the
Factory’s lukewarm initial reception is particularly noteworthy. Although a quiet
pallor gripped Marxist penal history when Rusche and Kirchheimer first published
Punishment and Social Structure in 1938, its reissue three decades thereafter invigo-
rated intellectual ferment in penal history generally and its Marxist interpretations
specifically. What followed was a vibrancy in (especially Marxist) penal history that
endured up until the English translation of The Prisonand the Factory was published
in 1981, at which point interest then spontaneously evaporated.
Until recently, the abrupt disappearance of Marxist penal history has been
intelligible only by placing The Prison and the Factory alongside the then-recent
publication of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (e.g. Garland, 1990: 132–133;
Corresponding author:
Johann Koehler, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton St,
London, WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: j.koehler@lse.ac.uk
Punishment & Society
2020, Vol. 22(5) 731–735
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520918819
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