Like an Egyptian

Like an Egyptian



Book Details

Molly Swetnam-Burland

EGYPT IN ITALY

Visions of Egypt in Roman imperial culture
261pp. Cambridge University Press. £70 (US $110).
978 1 107 04048 9

The cultural impact of Egypt on Imperial Rome

PETER THONEMANN

Deep in the rolling Cotswold hills west of Chipping Norton, at the end of an avenue of ancient oaks, stands the sole example of what we might call the Islamo-Palladian architectural style. "And there they burst upon us", wrote John Betjeman in Summoned by Bells (1960), "the onion domes, Chajjahs and chattris made of amber stone . . . exotic Sezincote". Exotic seems almost too mild a word. Built by an affluent officer of the East India Company between 1805 and 1812, Sezincote is like a Mughal emperor's bad dream brought on by a surfeit of claret and snuff. Georgian windows, golden Cotswold stone and a gracefully curving orangery squabble noisily with peacock-tail arches, fiddly minarets, and a squat copper Mughal-style dome. Even the estate farm buildings and dairy are modelled on an Indian fort.

The reason why Sezincote looks so outlandish to modern eyes is simply that there is nothing quite like this anywhere else in England. (The Royal Pavilion at Brighton, built a decade or so later, is an exception: the Prince Regent was blown away by Sezincote, and wanted one of his own.) Two centuries of British rule in India ended up leaving virtually no mark on the architecture and material culture of the imperial mother country. Victorian London built no mosques or Hindu temples to cater for ardent English Indophiles; no looted statues of Shiva or Buddha were set up on The Mall to commemorate the capture of Lucknow or the Younghusband expedition.

The Romans would have found this very peculiar. In 30 BC, Octavian annexed the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt to the Roman Empire. The conquest was followed by an explosion of Egyptian artefacts, cults, building styles and interior decoration throughout Italy. Visitors to Rome can still boggle at the colossal tomb of a Roman aristocrat called Gaius Cestius, a 36-metre-high pyramid faced in marble, completed around 12 BC. A couple of years later, two gigantic obelisks from Egyptian Heliopolis were shipped to Italy at fabulous expense. They were re-erected in prominent locations at the heart of Rome, one in the Circus Maximus, the other on the Campus Martius, where it served as the gnomon of a colossal sundial. A huge sanctuary of the Egyptian gods Isis and Sarapis was laid out on the Campus Martius, complete with antique sphinxes, basalt baboons, and pharaonic portrait-sculptures imported from Egypt. In Victorian London, the Raj was all but invisible; in Julio-Claudian Rome, provincia Aegyptus was a noisy, colourful, and sometimes bizarrely incongruous presence.

This Roman Egyptomania of the late first century BC and first century AD is the subject of Molly Swetnam-Burland's lively new book, Egypt in Italy. One of its major themes is the variety and sophistication of Rome's engagement with Egyptian art and culture. Although countless Egyptian statues, inscriptions and curios ended up in Italian fora, temples and private houses, the Romans were far from just mindless looters. Italian craftsmen also produced careful imitations of Egyptian artefacts, ranging from little alabaster jars to monumental pharaonic statues, and Egyptian genre-scenes are lovingly recreated in the domestic wall paintings of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Even if the Romans did not always understand Egyptian art "correctly" (by our standards), their reactions to it were neither superficial nor triumphalist.

A nice example of creative Roman adaptation of Egyptian material culture comes from the south Italian city of Beneventum. Here, in the late 80s AD, a local civic benefactor called Rutilius Lupus commissioned two brand new obelisks of Egyptian granite, probably to adorn the city's own lavish temple to Isis. In most respects, the dedicatory inscriptions on these obelisks are conventional enough: they record Lupus's status as a legatus Augusti ("envoy of the Emperor"), and include a prayer to Isis for the health and happiness of the reigning Emperor Domitian. More startling is the fact that these inscriptions are written not in Latin, but in perfect Egyptian hieroglyphic script, complete with ingenious Egyptian paraphrases of technical Latin terms (legatus Augusti becomes "he who runs back and forth for the emperor"). Lupus had clearly gone to some trouble to produce a monument of the highest possible authenticity.

How many people in Rome (let alone Beneventum) could actually read hieroglyphs is another matter. The Romans were fascinated by the hieroglyphic script, and at least some Roman antiquarians made serious efforts to master it. The late Roman historian Ammianus quotes a complete Greek translation of the hieroglyphic inscription on the Circus Maximus obelisk, attributing it to an otherwise unknown figure called "Hermapion". In a brilliant recent article, Amin Benaissa has shown that this mysterious Hermapion must in fact be the well-known scholar Apion of Alexandria, who lived in Rome during the early Julio-Claudian period and who wrote a monumental encyclopedia, the Aegyptiaca, on the history, geography, religion and customs of Egypt.

Apion's translation of the Circus Maximus obelisk-inscription is an odd mixture of creative intelligence and outrageous muddle. The Egyptian titulature of Ramesses II, "Horus, powerful bull, son of Seth, golden Horus, chosen by Re", is rendered by Apion as "powerful Apollo, son of Helios, bright-shining, chosen by Helios". The Greco-Roman gods Apollo and Helios ("Sun") are perfectly plausible equivalents for the Egyptian deities Horus and Re (the Egyptian sun god). Apion seems to have been baffled by the hieroglyphic sign for "Seth", and so simply adds another reference to Helios. As Swetnam-Burland nicely puts it, "The act of translation here is twofold, both linguistic and cultural, translating the words of the Egyptian language while transforming their meaning into terms readers standing outside Egyptian culture could understand".

The chief problem with Swetnam-Burland's otherwise admirable book is her assumption that "Egypt" can be treated as a single homogeneous culture. By the time of the Roman conquest, the Egyptians had been ruled for three centuries by the Macedonian dynasty of the Ptolemies. The Ptolemaic capital of Alexandria, founded in 331 BC by Alexander the Great, was the greatest city of the ancient Mediterranean, with a population (largely of Greco-Macedonian origin) probably larger than that of late Republican Rome. The Romans suffered from a deep inferiority complex towards the glittering high culture of Ptolemaic Alexandria. Roman imperial architects studiously imitated or adapted the Alexandrian architectural style; Roman poets, from Catullus onwards, were heavily influenced by Ptolemaic literature, notably the third-century Alexandrian poet and librarian Callimachus.

Swetnam-Burland nowhere really engages with the long history of Roman reception of Ptolemaic culture. Of course, her main interest is in Roman responses to native Egyptian art and architecture, not the aesthetics of Greco-Macedonian Alexandria. But the trouble is that the two cannot always be separated. So, for example, a large part of Egypt in Italy is dedicated to Italian cults of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Isis was, it is true, a very ancient Egyptian maternal goddess. But long before she arrived in Rome, she had received a thoroughgoing Alexandrian makeover. In the last three centuries BC, the Ptolemaic kings energetically promoted a new hybrid "Greco-Egyptian" Isis (modelled on the Greek goddess Demeter), whose cult frankly had little in common with the earlier Egyptian Isis rituals. It was this new-style Isis who was worshipped so enthusiastically in early imperial Rome. Swetnam-Burland simply assumes that the cult of Isis was popular in Roman Italy because it was "Egyptian". Instead, might Isis not have been popular precisely because she was seen as Alexandrian – that is to say, because she was closely associated with the luxurious lifestyles of the Greco-Macedonian elite in Egypt?

Or take the pyramid of Cestius in Rome. Most people have simply assumed without argument that this tomb alludes to the venerable Old Kingdom pyramids at Giza. But can this really be right? The tomb of Cestius does not actually look much like any "real" Egyptian pyramid: the apex is too high in proportion to the base, and its sides are smooth, not stepped like the Egyptian structures. There is no sign of any Egyptian iconography anywhere else in the tomb; the materials (concrete core, marble facing) are quintessentially Roman, and the various tomb inscriptions (all in Latin) make no reference to Egypt. Might Cestius in fact have been aligning himself not with Cheops or Ramesses, but with the cultivated Greeks of Alexandria? We are pretty sure that the near-contemporary Mausoleum of Augustus (not discussed by Swetnam-Burland) was modelled on two of the most famous monuments of Ptolemaic Alexandria, the Lighthouse and the tomb of Alexander the Great. Cestius' tomb may well have been something similar: a good imitation of fashionable Alexandrian tombs, rather than a bad imitation of ancient Egyptian pyramids. If so, then Roman "Egyptomania" starts to look like a very different kind of phenomenon: not so much an antiquarian fascination with the remote and exotic Egyptian past, as a zeal to emulate the Romans' own refined Greco-Macedonian contemporaries.

Nonetheless, Egypt in Italy is a milestone in our understanding of Rome's cosmopolitan imperial imaginary. One of the most magnificent objects discussed in the book is a two-foot-high Egyptian vase carved from a single gigantic piece of honey-coloured calcite alabaster. According to the hieroglyphic inscription on the front, this vase (now in the Louvre) was made in the ninth or eighth century BC for an Egyptian priest called Nebneteru, who dedicated it in a temple at Thebes in Upper Egypt. Some 700 years later, probably at the time of the Roman conquest of Egypt, the vase was carted off to Italy as war booty, ending up in the hands of one P. Claudius Pulcher, the son of the notorious Republican demagogue Clodius, who eventually recycled it as his own funerary urn. The back of the vase now carries a brash Latin inscription in big black letters listing Pulcher's various political offices.

For a member of the Roman upper class to have had himself buried in an antique Egyptian pot is truly extraordinary, as if Lord Salisbury had chosen to be interred in a mummy casket. What did this vase signify for Pulcher? Was it simply a generic objet d'art, prized purely by dint of being foreign, expensive, and rare? Or was its "Egyptianness" significant to Pulcher in some way – either as a symbol of a modern, luxurious Alexandrian lifestyle, or as a link back to remotest Egyptian antiquity? Either way, we can enjoy picturing the patrician mansion of the Claudii Pulchri as a kind of Sezincote on the Tiber, with sphinxes guarding the entrance, miniature obelisks in the garden, and colourful frescoes of women in kohl eyeliner – all of it, naturally, in the best possible taste.

Uniter of his enemies

Uniter of his enemies

"The Princes in the Tower", by Paul Delaroche, 1831

Book Details

David Horspool

RICHARD III

A ruler and his reputation
336pp. Bloomsbury. £20.
978 1 4729 0299 3

Richard III: a bad man or just a bad king?

DAVID ABULAFIA

The century before the Battle of Bosworth was a bad time for the dynasties of Europe. From Poland to Portugal and from Sweden to Sicily kings and queens faced armed challenges to their authority from the greater nobility, generally led by their own close relatives. Usurpers abounded and often triumphed, with the result that we write the political history of the period as a series of success stories for rulers who might easily have failed to gain power – Henry VII at Bosworth, in 1485, Ferdinand and Isabella at Toro in 1476, Ferrante of Naples at Troia in 1462. Worse still, many of the major dynasties failed to maintain the line of succession; this was a disease-ridden period in which one royal prince after another died prematurely, while in several kingdoms, such as Naples under the vacillating Joanna II, the ruler remained childless.

Even when children were born, rivals for the crown flung accusations of illegitimacy at those best placed to succeed to the throne, most famously in the case of Queen Isabella of Castile, who ruthlessly exploited the accusation that her half-brother King Henry IV could not have fathered a daughter because he was apparently homosexual and therefore, supposedly, impotent. In Italy, if one could win the approval of Vatican City, illegitimacy was no bar to succession, as the troubled career of King Ferrante of Naples shows, though the shadow of French challenges lay over him and his successors, culminating in the French invasion of Naples in 1494–5. One of the major actors in those events was the ambitious and cultured duke of Milan, Ludovico il Moro, whose hold on power was consolidated by the untimely – or should one say timely? – death of his nephew and predecessor Giangaleazzo Sforza; and the accusation that Ludovico poisoned his way to the ducal throne still hangs in the air.

Ludovico has often been compared to his near contemporary, Richard III of England, and has been portrayed as a wicked uncle who, like Richard, developed to a high level the art of losing political friends when he needed them most. Over all these figures, Ferrante of Naples, Ludovico il Moro and Richard III, there hangs the question of how they justified in their own mind the killings that they reputedly fostered. There is a temptation to label the late fifteenth-century European rulers, in particular, as Machiavellians before Machiavelli.

David Horspool's account of the life of Richard III, from his childhood (about which we know very little) to his death in battle (about which we now know a great deal, following the excavation of his skeleton by Dr Jo Appleby) raises these issues sensitively and thoughtfully. Even though the figure he describes is decidedly unattractive, Horspool shows appreciation for the attempts of the Richard III Society to steer away from the staunchly negative view of the king fostered by Thomas More and the Crowland chronicle. He stresses how, even more than Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier has fixed in the mind the image of a scheming devil, intent on clearing the way to the throne. This is true even when the blame lay elsewhere, as in the case of his endlessly rebellious brother the duke of Clarence. King Edward IV had suffered more than enough from Clarence's disloyalty; but Clarence was condemned to death in the High Court of Parliament. By contrast, Shakespeare's Richard is found muttering: "Simple plain Clarence, I do love thee so that I will shortly send thy soul to heaven".

As for the Princes in the Tower, it is hard to see how Richard can be excused from their murder; as Horspool points out, Richard had the chance to parade the princes, if alive, or to show their bodies, if dead, and did neither; he could not afford to display a living Edward V, whose presence would undermine his own claim to the throne, despite his accusation that Edward was a bastard; and he could not admit to the scandalous murder of two children, his own nephews. One only has to look at Richard's appalling record in executing rivals to see that he was addicted to purges: Earl Rivers, a member of the Woodville family into which Edward IV had married, was executed even before Richard seized the crown; Lord Hastings too was beheaded without trial; the long list of victims makes plain Richard's determination to purge the English nobility of those who contested his claim to power. The evidence is silent on how his conscience dealt with this carnage.

This attempt to clear away all opposition was in reality his undoing. His most bizarre achievement was that he managed to bring together supporters of the house of Lancaster, loyal to the memory of King Henry VI, and of the house of York, loyal to the memory of King Edward IV. The death in childhood of his heir, Prince Edward, shattered Richard's hope of establishing a line of succession, though he may well have planned to take as his second wife Elizabeth of York, his niece, a story brilliantly enhanced by Shakespeare. However, York and Lancaster were not the opposing sides at Bosworth Field; Henry Tudor had already brought together the white and the red rose before he became king and married Elizabeth of York. Dynastic exhaustion had set in, and precisely because he was a relatively minor figure Henry could be seen as a fresh beginning.

There is a tendency in the literature to concentrate so heavily on Richard's behaviour that the wider setting of English politics at this time is ignored. Horspool's book does not engage with scholarly arguments about the fifteenth-century "constitution" or the exercise of power in the English counties, led by such luminaries as Christine Carpenter and John Watts, who do not even appear in the bibliography. The focus is firmly on Richard; it helps to know something about who was who during the Wars of the Roses, especially in the earlier chapters. Horspool does, however, pay welcome attention to the European setting. Even before he became king, Richard interfered in Scotland, supporting the rebellious duke of Albany, another troublesome royal brother (this time to James III); and suspicion of Richard's intentions may have prompted a number of Scots to join the army of Henry Tudor. However, events in France largely determined his fate. So long as Henry Tudor was stuck at the semi-independent ducal court of Brittany, along with sundry refugees from England, Richard had little to fear; but when Henry gained the support of the French king, and pieced together an army half of which was not in fact English, the threat became real. The threat was exacerbated by uncertainty about the loyalty of leading figures in England, of whom the most famous is Lord Stanley; the family links of the Stanleys to the Tudors, and of other potential allies to the Woodvilles, made any judgement about which way they would turn highly approximate.

David Horspool's measured and fluent account of Richard's life sets a new standard among biographies of medieval rulers aimed at a wide readership. This is not an evil Richard or a benign Richard, but a prince who again and again found it hard to control events, and whose response to crises, including, no doubt, the killing of his nephews, was both opportunistic and bloodthirsty. In the final analysis, Horspool convincingly shows, "whether or not Richard was a bad man, he was a bad king". For he had challenged the legitimacy of his predecessors on the throne, even of his own brother Edward IV; but he never convinced his subjects that his own claim to rule was impeccably legitimate. He had cheated his way to an inheritance that was not his. In the end, the usurper was usurped.

Bars and stripes

Bars and stripes

Michel Foucault, West Berlin Technical University, 1978

Book Details

Michel Foucault

THE PUNITIVE SOCIETY

Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973
Edited by Bernard Harcourt and translated by Graham Burchell
340pp. Palgrave MacMillan. £27.
978 1 403 98660 3

The thinking and rethinking that led Michel Foucault to write his finest book

DAVID GARLAND

Le Collège de France, founded in 1530 and located in Paris's Latin Quarter, is one of France's elite institutions. It is a public institution of higher education but it enrols no students and grants no degrees. Instead, it requires its professors to give an annual course of lectures – free of charge and open to all – reporting on their on­going research. Michel Foucault, who was admitted to the Collège in 1970 as professor of "The History of Systems of Thought", took this obligation very seriously, preparing his lectures with exquisite care and presenting them to a packed amphitheatre at 5:45 pm each Wednesday from January to March. His lectures were intense, austere performances. Reading aloud from his prepared text, he made little concession to the oral form, refraining from informality and permitting himself a minimum of levity or improvisation. For ninety minutes at a time, he would set out historico-philosophical questions, summarize his archival findings, and outline explanatory hypotheses, speaking to his hundreds of auditors – many of whom were academic tourists come to hear the famous maître penseur – as if he were addressing a small group of fellow specialists. He evidently regarded these lectures as a specific kind of production: not working drafts, not thinking aloud but a completed scholarly performance of a certain kind. And indeed, mimeographed transcripts of lecture recordings soon circulated, samizdat-style, bringing the first results of Foucault's new thinking to eager audiences in France and abroad.

The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973, adroitly translated from the French by Graham Burchell and expertly edited by Bernard Harcourt, is composed of thirteen lectures that were delivered in the spring of 1973 by Foucault while he was working on what would become his most famous book, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, published in February 1975 and translated as Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison two years later. To read these lectures today is to be reminded of the remarkable impact that Foucault's genealogies of penal power had when they first appeared – among students of punishment his ideas quickly came to define a whole climate of opinion – and to reflect on their continuing relevance in light of the changes that have occurred in the forty years since.

The texts published here have been reconstructed using Foucault's original lecture notes and a transcript of cassette recordings made by one of his course auditors. These are presented together with Foucault's own course summary, a context-setting essay by Harcourt, and a foreword by François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, the general editors of the series in which the book appears. That series recently completed the French language publication of all thirteen of the lecture courses Foucault delivered between 1970 and 1984 (on topics ranging from The Birth of Biopolitics to The Government of the Self and Others) and all but two of these have now been published in English. We await the appearance of Penal Theories and Institutions from 1971–2 and Subjectivity and Truth from 1980–81.

If one begins by reading Foucault's "course summary" – with its references to "discipline", "panopticism" and "a history of relations between political power and bodies"– one gets the impression that the Punitive Society lectures are a working draft for the famous book that would soon follow. But the summary misleads. Written after the lectures had been delivered, it anticipates the new thinking of Discipline and Punish more than it reflects the lectures that were actually presented. Characteristically, the ever-creative Foucault develops his ideas in the process of summarizing them, presenting concepts and arguments that first took shape towards the end of his lectures rather than being present throughout. (Readers of L'Archéologie du savoir will recall he did much the same thing in that book: transforming the "archaeological" method of discourse analysis he had used in his previous studies in the very act of explaining it.) As it turns out, there are interesting differences between the analyses set out in the lectures and those that Discipline and Punish would sub­sequently make famous: differences that make The Punitive Society worthy of close attention.

The Punitive Society sets out to solve a historical puzzle. Why, between 1790 and 1830, did the penitentiary prison suddenly become the dominant form of punishment in France and throughout the Western world? (Discipline and Punish addressed this same basic problem, but framed and resolved it differently.) The rapid and widespread rise of imprisonment at the end of the eighteenth century is, Foucault says, a significant historical fact because the new penitentiaries had no exact precedents (earlier prisons were not designed to reform their inmates); because such institutions were not "deducible" from legal theory nor proposed by penal reformers; because the new prisons were, from the start, dysfunctional but persisted anyway; and because the penitential emphasis of the new prisons was not specific to them alone but was to become a "general dimension of all the social controls that characterize societies like ours".

To understand the birth of the prison, Foucault sets aside the broad concept of "exclusion" which had informed his earlier study of madness in order to think more precisely about the forms and functions of concrete penal practices. Noting that the same penalties and penal aims appear in different eras but that they operate differently depending on the historical matrix in which they function, he proposes that we focus our inquiries on a new object of analysis which he identifies as "the level of penal tactics". In order to understand the birth of the prison, we must stop trying to explain it by reference to the history of law or penal theory – in whose terms it appears altogether anomalous – and view it instead in relation to power structures and penal tactics. Penality, in this conception, is not the expression of an ideology: it is the relay of a certain kind of power.

Why then, did nineteenth-century penal systems adopt the prison and its techniques of penitential confinement? To answer this question, Foucault shifts the scope of inquiry, viewing this development as one event among others within a larger transformation of the structure of social controls. He tells us that in late eighteenth-century France, England and America, new practices of moralization began to take shape, focused on the supposed dissoluteness of the labouring classes. (In a passing remark, he proposes that someone write a "history of laziness", linking shifts in the perceived failings of the poor to changes in the mode of production.) Emerging first in civil society, in the activities of Societies for the Reform of Manners and Societies for the Suppression of Vice and in the work of Quaker and Methodist organizations, and then in a series of state enactments, these efforts generated a panoply of new controls – workers' records, workers' savings books, vagrancy laws, private police in the ports, and so on – that subjected the working population to intensified scrutiny and a daily moral accounting. The result, Foucault says, was the emergence of a "punitive society" characterized by mechanisms of supervision and punishment that aimed to moralize compliant subjects and shunt recalcitrant ones off to prison.

"To understand a society's system of morality", Foucault says, "we have to ask the question: where is the wealth?" And to explain moral change, he insists we should look not to philosophers like Kant but to practical men like the police reformer Patrick Colquhoun, who understood that the advent of commercial society required a new kind of moral training in the workplace and the penal system.

The spread of capitalist production and exchange meant that a great deal of wealth was no longer fixed in place but instead circulated in the form of commodities, rendering it vulnerable to depredation by the property-less workers who handled it in factories, docks and warehouses. This problem was compounded by the widespread existence of what Foucault calls "illegalisms" – customary practices that violated the letter of the law but had long been tolerated by officials because of the mutual benefits of collusive evasion. In the nineteenth century, these illegalisms increasingly took the more pointed form of popular resistance to wage contracts and exploitative working conditions – with the result, Foucault says, that this new "worker illegalism" prompted the development of "a whole repressive system".

In the new capitalist society, where wealth was exposed and depredations widespread, a more intense control of conduct was required. According to Foucault, these were the considerations that established a new "connection between morality and penality". Henceforth, the target of punishment would be "not just the infractions of individuals, but their nature, their character". (The new science of criminology would later medicalize these moral concerns, converting the sinning individual into the criminal type.) The result was a new and more thoroughgoing mode of regulation – one that sought not to deter criminal acts but to transform ­individuals. And as these mechanisms of supervision and punishment became pervasive, so the punitive society was born.

According to Foucault, the new prisons formed the end-point of coercive processes that were traced throughout the punitive society, and embodied the new penitential techniques in a concentrated form. But how did these institutions emerge? In Discipline and Punish, Foucault would argue that the new prisons encapsulated a series of disciplinary techniques – techniques targeting the body that had originated in schools, monasteries, factories and barracks and which had, by the late eighteenth century, become so widespread that they were, in effect, society's preferred means of exercising power. But in The Punitive Society lectures, the story is different. Here Foucault asserts that the modern prison emerged as a religiously charged moral enterprise – a penitentiary, first developed by the Quakers – and he devotes a good deal of attention to the associated ideas that crime is a sin and that punishment should aim at the inner transformation of the prisoner.

But how could an institution associated with a small religious sect, in a specific geographic region, so quickly become generalized? ­Foucault's answer – which owes something to Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – is that the penitentiary prison became aligned with capitalism's need to moralize workers and with the penitential practices that were becoming characteristic of capitalist society.

More specifically, what enabled the prison's take-off at this historical moment was its focus on the control of time, and the affinity of this concern with the control imperatives of capitalist production. Unlike the diverse penalties suggested by penal reformers, imprisonment was modulated along a single dimension: that of time. Prison sentences were measured in temporal units just as the wage contract was calibrated in units of labour-time. The prison was, Foucault tells us, uniquely suited to an emerging society in which "capitalist power clings to time, seizes hold of it, makes it purchaseable and usable".

So Foucault's explanation for the prison's rapid rise is to be found not in legal or penological theory but instead in the economic figure of the wage form and the new control problems faced by the bourgeoisie. According to Foucault, the "prison-form" and the "wage-form" are "historically twin forms". They emerge together and are linked by an elective affinity – a shared focus on the regulation of time and the moral control of the worker. And the term that Foucault repeatedly uses to describe carceral confinement – "sequestration" – works to reaffirm this connection, linking the commercial practice of confiscating assets with the practice of incarcerating an offender to punish a crime.

In these lectures, the explanatory framework that Foucault employs is a Marxist functionalism that views the emergence of penitential controls as "the mode of production provid[ing] itself with the instruments of a new political power"; the function of which is "to connect up time, the body, the life of individuals, to the process of production and the mechanisms of hyper-profit". But being Foucault, he takes care to distinguish himself from conventional Marxist positions and particularly from the then-fashionable theses on ideology developed by Louis Althusser, with whom Foucault had studied at the École Normale Supérieure. Foucault emphatically rejects the concept of ideology and any methodology that reads texts for their hidden meanings, insisting that meanings are neither hidden nor unsaid but are in fact available for inspection on the surface of actors' statements. He insists on treating discourse not as a mystification, or an emanation of something more real, but instead as a vector in a field of force, a power to be understood in its strategic functioning. "Every point at which power is exercised is, at the same time, a site of formation, not of ideology but of knowledge" and "where epistemologists [a lightly veiled reference to Althusser] see only poorly controlled ideological effects, I think it is possible to see perfectly calculated, controlled strategies of power".

These glancing encounters with unnamed theorists are characteristic of Foucault's mode of theorizing, both in the lectures and elsewhere. Though Foucault is often described as a "theorist" he is far from being a theory-builder in the conventional sense. He is, instead, a pragmatic thinker who conceptualizes and re-conceptualizes phenomena according to the problem at hand, adapting his theoretical toolbox in the process. In most of these lectures, there is little overt theorizing. Instead, Foucault narrates concrete historical events and episodes, proposes genealogical inquiries, and suggests low-level socio-historical explanations that stick close to the material. At one point early in the lectures, he proposes that society might be characterized as a kind of "civil war" – an ongoing struggle between groups that invests all social relations and social norms with elements of power and conflict. But this turns out to be a theoretical dead-end, and the notion is later dropped. More fruitfully, he uses the final lecture of March 28 to talk explicitly, for the first time, about the conception of power he has been using: a conception that opposes itself to the orthodoxies of Marxism by insisting that power is not possessed – but is, instead agonistic and relational; that it is not localized in the state but rather suffused throughout society; that it does not "guarantee" the mode of production but, in fact, constitutes the relationships that make production possible; that power does not work through ideology but instead is articulated with, and operates through, knowledge; and, more positively, that power is normalizing, shaping habits and creating consciousness. At the end of this lecture he notes that when sociologists study social norms and consciousness, they are in fact dealing with the covert relations of power that suffuse the social surface and constitute social relations: "What characterizes the social . . . is nothing other than the system of disciplines, of constraints. Power is exercised through the system of disciplines, but so that it is concealed and appears as that reality called society" – an observation that reveals just how all-encompassing Foucault's concept of power is at this point.

By the time of Discipline and Punish, Foucault had largely abandoned the Marxist approach, together with the concept of sequestration and the prison-form/wage-form argument. And though the control of time continued to feature, it was now characterized as a legacy of the monastery – and one strand of the web of disciplines – rather than a form of control imposed by the bourgeoisie. More generally, Foucault's account of causation ceases to be so class-based and conspiratorial and becomes more pluralistic, more anonymous, and more non-intentional. In The Punitive Society, social classes struggle to moralize other classes. In Discipline and Punish, actors have mostly dropped out of sight, the passive voice dominates, and power-knowledge relations proliferate. Instead of property-protecting projects launched by the bourgeoisie we learn of the silent, anonymous emergence of disciplinary techniques. Instead of a "punitive society" designed to control workers and align them with production and profit we witness the pervasive spread of discipline, embodied in the architecture and routines of modern institutions. In the lectures, Foucault describes pentitential projects directed at the workers; by the time of ­Discipline and Punish these have become ­disciplinary technologies, normalizing us all.

The Punitive Society is, for the most part, a work of historical sociology, analysing the emergence of new practices of supervision and punishment and the social uses to which they were put. Discipline and Punish is, in contrast, a more philosophical work. Its focus is not so much on economic change and the struggle to establish adaptive controls as on the new rationalities of power, new human sciences, and the constitution of the modern individual. Instead of a history of punishment, it presents a genealogy of "the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases". In the later work, it is the cognitive aspects of penal power that are foregrounded – the individualized knowledge produced by ­surveillance, inspection and examination; the science of criminology; the normalizing concerns of modern law – rather than the struggles of one class to control and exploit another. It is an account focused not on the sociological uses of penal power but on penal power's rationalities and technologies. Its central concern is to anatomize modern power together with the human sciences and forms of knowledge that render it possible. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault moves back onto his own terrain – that of the historian of the human sciences, their practical surfaces of emergence, and their philosophical implications – and leaves behind the analysis of social process and historical causation.

This shift of perspective proved productive. Foucault was tremendously insightful when it came to the description of technologies of power-knowledge, analysing diagrams of power reduced to their ideal forms. But he was less good on their actual uses and functioning: here he exaggerates, he ignores resistance, he neglects variation, and he has little to say about institutional supports and social foundations. It is Foucault the philosopher, the archaeologist of discourse, the historian of systems of thought who is penetratingly original in his insights, not Foucault the sociologist. Discipline and Punish is Michel Foucault at his best: the book in which our most important genealogist of the human sciences has truly found his subject. The Punitive Society is the story of the thought processes – the thinking and relentless rethinking – that eventually led him there.