In "Two Lessons", Michel Foucault criticizes historical materialism for inadequately explaining social phenomena. He derides academics who use bourgeois domination to explain a wide range of social trends, including the exclusion of madness and the repression of childhood sexuality. Foucault calls this type of social theory too easy and criticizes it for providing results that are both true and false. However, Foucault makes the same mistake when he derives the origin of disciplinary power from bourgeois rule in Discipline and Punish. According to Foucault, the eighteenth-century transition from the illegality of rights to the illegality of property pushed the bourgeoisie to protect its assets by making the penal system more efficient. They eliminated public executions and torture, symbols of the ruler's ineffectiveness, and targeted the soul of the criminal. Subsequently, the upper class created the concept of delinquency to control and normalize the poor (Discipline 277). By using bourgeois influence to explain penal reform, Foucault ignores other social trends and inadequately explains power outside of prison. Without providing substantial evidence to support his claims, Foucault rejects the idea that reformers could have changed punishment by appealing to human sympathy. Instead, it forces their efforts into a broader, bourgeoisie-dominated discourse. While upper-class influence offers a plausible explanation for penal reform, it fails to justify disciplinary power in its other forms. Foucault claims that disciplinary power extends to the whole of society, but he does not explain why it exists outside of prison. The errors in Foucault's ideas about penal reform reflect a broader problem with his idea of ​​power. Foucault finds power in discourse and social relations, but neglects to discuss the reasons why power exists in a given situation. His problems in deducing the origin of modern discipline arise because he conceives of power as strategy, but leaves employers and their goals unclear. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In Discipline and Punishment, Foucault attempts to create a genealogy of the modern soul by examining the evolution of punishment (Discipline 29). His main interest is how punishment stops affecting the criminal's body and instead controls his behavior through examination and discipline. During the eighteenth century, protests against public torture increased and punishment was required to respect the humanity of the criminal. From Foucault's perspective, the demand that punishment be humane lacked a rational explanation (Discipline 74). He rejects the idea that sympathy for others drove this change and instead emphasizes a transformation of crime. As society became wealthier, crime became more widespread and shifted the focus from physical violence to material goods. Foucault cites the fact that from the end of the 17th century, rates of murder and assault decreased, while those of economic crimes increased (Discipline 75). The increased prevalence of crime and its new nature required a change in punishment. Foucault argues that the concentration of power in the hands of the sovereign has incapacitated the penal system by making justice uneven. The old system demonstrated real power through excessive physical torture, but was not effective in preventing economic crimes. It left gaps open that allowed popular lawlessness to develop at the end of the 17th century (Discipline78-9). For example, the king could suspend the courts or annul their sentences. The king could also sell part of his judicial power to magistrates who made the application of punishment even less coherent. Therefore, Foucault believes that the change in punishment was a strategy to control a new and rapidly spreading type of crime. Although the reformers appealed to a concept of humanity, a broader discourse calling for penal regulation influenced their claims. In Foucault's terms, a discourse defines what is conceivable within a field of knowledge. Foucault believes that knowledge and power are inseparable, because every opinion must be located within a discourse (Discipline 27). Saying anything outside of a speech is almost impossible, and Foucault gives the example of the modern penal system to illustrate this point. Although many realize that prisons fail to rehabilitate criminals and prevent crime, abolishing them is unconscionable. According to Foucault, modern thinkers aim to improve the penal system, but the discourse concerning it presupposes the existence of prison (Discipline 232). Discussing the relationship between power and knowledge, Foucault writes that "we should rather admit that power produces knowledge... that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no relation of power without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time relations of power” (Discipline 27). Therefore, Foucault states that the reformers' efforts to make punishment more humane must be placed in the discourse of the time torture and public executions coincided with a shift in the focus of crime from injuring the bodies of others to the theft of goods. According to Foucault, this transformation required less severe modes of punishment and more subtle ways of ordering the lives of individuals (Discipline 89). Foucault believes that there was a strategic coincidence between what the reformers wanted and what the bourgeoisie needed. He argues that the reformers' criticism was not aimed at the cruelty of power, but rather at its ineffective management. The reformers wanted to eliminate public execution, because it was the place where the excess power of the sovereign and the lawlessness of the people were most visible. They thus constitute man and respect for his feelings as limits of power. In this explanation of penal reform, Foucault's positioning of each opinion within a discourse results in a very cynical and limited view of social change. Without providing any evidence other than the coincidence of reformers' efforts with other trends, he rejects the idea that human sympathy could have caused penal reform. Foucault suggests that eighteenth-century reformers acted within a discourse of bourgeois power, consciously or unconsciously. The bourgeoisie not only made punishment less severe, but also gave prison its current disciplinary qualities, according to Foucault. After economic crime caused the first change in the penal system, another change in lawlessness led the prison to focus on the supervision and normalization of the criminal. Foucault argues that a shift from material illegality to political illegality occurred in the 19th century. To illustrate this point he refers to the period of political uprisings from the French Revolution to the Revolutions of 1848 (Discipline 273). The ruling class began to recognize that the majority of "murderers, thieves, and loafers" came from the lower class and associated that class with criminality (Discipline 275). People no longer connected lawlessness topassions and momentary circumstances of men, but instead made it an intrinsic quality of the poor. Therefore, the upper class tried to control criminally inclined people by creating the concept of delinquency. The criminal is the product of the prison system and the human sciences. He is defined as abnormal and is therefore subject to the disciplinary power of society. Foucault writes that “it would be hypocritical or naive to believe that the law was made for all in the name of all; that it would be more prudent to recognize that it was made for a few and that it was applied to all "others" (Discipline 276). Prison separates criminals from the rest of society and makes them less dangerous than they would otherwise be. Foucault contradicts his same theory of power when using bourgeois influence to derive penal reform. Opposes the traditional idea that power is held by dominant groups and used against marginalized people within society and pushover is excessively simplistic 26). it exerts pressure on them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the hold it exerts on them" (Discipline 27). Although Foucault believes that the modern prison arises from class struggle, the lower classes have no contribution to the development of methods of punishment. The bourgeoisie uses punishment to supervise, normalize and debilitate the lower classes. Foucault emphasizes that power is something that circulates, although its distribution may be unequal (Critique 37). Yet, in Discipline and Punishment, the bourgeoisie has complete control of the penal system. The upper class decided to focus on regulating the soul instead of inflicting pain to protect their livelihood of delinquency to control the lower class. In Discipline and Punishment, Foucault fails to give the poor any choice but to obey the desires of the bourgeoisie. Although Foucault focuses on the development of the penal system, he believes that disciplinary power extends throughout society. “The ideal point of punishment today would be infinite discipline…” writes Foucault, “is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks and hospitals, all of which resemble prisons?” (Discipline 227-8). Schools, hospitals and military institutions control the individual's time and movement. The goal of these organizations is to force the individual to conform to a norm by defining what is acceptable within society. Despite the similarities between schools, hospitals and prisons, according to Foucault's conception of power, they serve different purposes. Prison is the result of the bourgeoisie's effort to control the lower classes, but schools and hospitals are not part of this effort. Everyone, rich and poor, must attend school and is therefore subject to disciplinary power. While the penal system is an instrument of bourgeois domination, schools influence all people by subjecting them to norms and managing their time. Foucault does not explain the purpose of disciplinary power within schools in the same way he explains it for prisons. His conception of power is vague in showing who is using power for a specific goal. Foucault derives pervasive disciplinary power from the bourgeoisie, but shows that it too is influenced by its own strategies of domination (Critique 42). Therefore, a central problem with Foucault's theory of power is that it emphasizes the existence of power relations in society, but ignores why these relations.