LAW AND SOCIAL THEORY 2000 SESSION ONE TAKE-HOME EXAMINATION (NO. 2) QUESTION 4 “The process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century he politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, the dark side of these processes…The real corporeal mechanisms constituted the …showed first 75 words of 1460 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1460 total…courts’ ability to punish are justified by the existence of prison. Perhaps their actual capacity to put someone away is facilitated by the existence of prison, but surely the real power is not in the prison but, as Foucault himself argued earlier, in the interactions between persons, mediated by the courts? Nevertheless it does go to show that a liberal democratic society needs illiberal non-democratic elements (prison) in order to function at a normative level.