Panopticon, Inc.: Jeremy Bentham, contract management, and (neo)liberal penality
| DOI | 10.1177/14624745211023457 |
| Author | Spencer J Weinreich |
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Panopticon, Inc.: Jeremy
Bentham, contract
management, and
(neo)liberal penality
Spencer J Weinreich
Princeton University, USA
Abstract
This essay revisits Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, perhaps the foundational figure of the
study of the prison, to recover a dimension of the project wholly omitted in Michel
Foucault’s canonical reading in Discipline and Punish. Nowhere does Foucault mention
Bentham’s insistence that the prison be run by a private contractor. With Bentham’s
penal theory characteristically derived from his account of human psychology, the
contract and private profit are essential to the functioning of the Panopticon, because
they align the jailer’s duty with their self-interest. Bentham built profit and market
imperatives into the fabric of the Panopticon, always envisioned as a place of economic
production. The contract-Panopticon and its political economy are vital antecedents to
the neoliberal penality theorized by Loı¨c Wacquant and Bernard E. Harcourt, even as
they problematize the statism inherited from Foucault and the chronological implica-
tions of the prefix “neo.” Bentham was only the theorist of a marketization of gover-
nance pervasive in his own time and ever since, raising the question of whether pun-
ishment has ever been a purely state function.
Keywords
contract, Discipline and Punish, Jeremy Bentham, market, Michel Foucault,
neoliberalism, Panopticon, privatization
Corresponding author:
Spencer J Weinreich, Department of History, Princeton University, USA.
Email: sjw2@princeton.edu
Punishment & Society
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DOI: 10.1177/14624745211023457
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2021, Vol. 23(4) 497–514
Resembling nothing so much as the shell of some phantasmagorical mollusk,
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (Figure 1) has become one of the icons of moder-
nity, the emblem of a social order defined by surveillance and discipline (Boyne,
2000; Brunon-Ernst, 2012a). For this we can thank Michel Foucault, whose
Discipline and Punish established the Panopticon as “the diagram of a mechanism
of power reduced to its ideal form” and “a figure of political technology” ramify-
ing far beyond crime and punishment (1995: 205). Now, a legion of critics tell us,
panopticons are everywhere: schools and barracks, but also online retail and real-
ity shows, personal fitness and self-help programs.
Bentham’s prose is distinguished neither for readability nor concision: thus
most readers only really encounter the Panopticon via Foucault. It is the
Panopticon of Discipline and Punish that has inspired such interest from so
many different quarters; one scholar tellingly speaks of “Bentham’s (and, by exten-
sion, Foucault’s) ‘Panopticon’” (Rodr
ıguez, 2006: 187; see Semple, 1992).
Yet Foucault’s Panopticon and Bentham’s Panopticon are not the same thing,
the former a somewhat selective reading of the latter.
1
That Foucault sometimes
Figure 1. Willey Reveley, A General Idea of a Penitentiary Panopticon in an Improved, but as yet (Jany.
23d. 1791), Unfinished State, 1791, 1791.
498 Punishment & Society 23(4)
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