Michel Foucault, born in 1926, was one of the most popular and influential French philosophers and one of the most radical critics of the modernity.

When did the discipline start?
In his book Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, based on a research of modern penitentiaries and his own experience of working in prisons and Parisian mental hospital, he produces a thesis that at the end of seventeenth century the nature of power in Western societies started to change, becoming the kind of power we still have now, one that can be called a disciplinary power.

Earlier in the times the king (with few others to whom he transmitted his forces) used to have a sovereign power over people living at the territory under his (or occasionally her) domination, which he or she exercised in a violent and unexpected, discontinuous way. When the sovereignty of the king was in danger or when he wanted to expand his territory, strengthen his forces or just manifest his power to assure it among the population, he used to undertake steps such as drafting men into the army, confiscating goods, introducing laws, etc. This, however, until the seventeenth century never was something that we could call state administration, because, except of this situations, the power of the king was not very much present in peasants or craftsmen lives. (more…)