Foucault's Panopticon: Rise of the Surveillance State

Foucault describes the Panopticon in his famous work Discipline and Punish (1975). While the Panopticon is a model for a prison designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Foucault sees it as much more than that. For Foucault the Panopticon is an architectural figure -- a kind of metaphor -- for modern power relations in general.

As Foucault describes it, in the modern world, power circulates around us through systems of surveillance and self-discipline. We are constantly being watched, measured, and evaluated, and even when we are not, we feel as if we are, and so we conduct ourselves and discipline ourselves into behaving in particular ways. This is how modern power dynamics work and they can be effectively illuminated by Bentham's Panopticon design.