Foucault is perhaps best known for his account of the panopticon, a model prison first devised by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century.

For the panopticon would be under democratic control, of a sort. “Any member of society,” Foucault notes, had “the right to come and see with his own eyes how the schools, hospitals, factories, ...

Foucault took the panopticon as emblematic of the ways that surveillance becomes an exercise of power, even going so far as to constitute the people being observed. When you don’t know when you’re ...

All was not lost, however. For in 1978 the French philosopher Michel Foucault revived interest in the panopticon idea with the latter’s publication of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

Foucault brought back Bentham’s panopticon and used the design as a metaphor for society at large – a system of insiders (good) and outsiders (bad). A society of order, discipline, and laws.

In the 1970s, the French philosopher Michel Foucault criticised the panopticon as inducing in prisoners "a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power".

In the panopticon, each prisoner is simultaneously a victim and enforcer of their own subjugation. While Dartmouth’s campus hardly functions as a prison, it induces a state of constant visibility ...

In the 1970s, the French philosopher Michel Foucault criticised the panopticon as inducing in prisoners "a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power".