Construct · 1 fields · 2 citations
One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.
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Social theory
An inspection design that induces self-monitoring through the constant possibility of being watchedThe English philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham proposed the panopticon in 1791 in Panopticon; or, the Inspection-House as an architectural plan for a prison built as a ring of cells around a central inspection tower, arranged so that a single watchman could see into any cell while the inmates could never tell whether they were being watched at any given moment. Bentham argued that this uncertainty would lead prisoners to behave as if they were always observed, so the design would produce order and reform through the prospect of surveillance rather than through force, and he proposed the same plan for factories, hospitals, and schools. In 1975 the French philosopher Michel Foucault, in Surveiller et punir (translated as Discipline and Punish), recast the panopticon as a general model of modern power: he named the mechanism panopticism and treated it as a diagram for how disciplinary institutions lead people to monitor and regulate their own conduct, so that visibility itself becomes a means of control. What makes the construct a landmark is that it links a concrete architectural form to a claim about self-regulation under uncertain observation, and it is the common reference point for later work on surveillance, discipline, and the internalisation of the observer across sociology, criminology, and political theory.[1][2]