Thomas L. Dumm: Democracy and Punishment: Disciplinary Origins of the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, May 18, 1988.
A reverse sandwich, bread encased by baloney: in the center of this book, Professor Dumm offers an informative, brief history of the rationale for prisons in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. At the beginning and end, he lays on thick slices of ‘Left’-Nietzscheism, perhaps the most dubious meat now available in academe’s busy cafeteria.
Friedrich Nietzsche utterly despised both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ partisans in the Europe of his time. This has not prevented certain German and French thinkers, and their American imitator, from attempting to use him for political purposes. The ‘Right’s’ efforts ended in the debacle of fascism. Leftists deserve credit for greater caution; they confine their vulgar Nietzscheism to cultural and political criticism, leaving action to the few rash souls who take professorial cant seriously.
Channeling wind from the late Michel Foucault, Professor Dumm commends the study of prisons as instruments and symbols of the subtle, frightening oppression we all suffer in American liberal democracy. If by chance you are not frightened, then I fear you lack subtlety. Professor Dumm will do his best to sensitize your benighted soul.
The United States, you see, “is a disciplinary society.” Few Americans know this, having “fail[ed] to face the strategies of power that constitute them as subjects.” The System needs no obvious methods, such as a centralized and despotic state, which would serve as a focus for popular resentment. Instead, it exercises a device of truly Machiavellian cruelty, “repressive individualism,” whereby each person abides by moral rules voluntarily, in order to work its tyrannical will. “Moral assertions” and “appeals to truth” ought to be ‘deconstructed.’ What, you ask, will replace these mind-forged manacles of the bourgeoisie? Imagination. I hope you’re satisfied.
So go the first sixty pages of a slim book. When the imaginative professor finally gets down to the subject, he turns out to have some intelligent things to say. He considers three prison systems: that of the Pennsylvania Quakers; the “republican” model of the founding period, and the “democratic” model of the nineteenth century.
The Quakers wanted to maintain freedom of conscience while enforcing Christian virtues. Their prisons “maximized the free play of the techniques of moral suasion” by eschewing corporal punishment and treating imprisonment as a time of solitary contemplation and repentance. “Imprisonment was to be a pedagogy.” Dumm shows limited knowledge of Quaker theology. He never mentions the importance of free will and “Inner Light” in Quaker moral psychology. He evidently believes Quakerism innovative in conceiving of the soul as “the battleground of power.” In fact, the Quakers only followed the teachings of Jesus opposing spiritual “principalities and powers.”
On the “republican” penitentiary, Dumm rightly challenges historians who contend that American Founders merely continued English tradition in this and other areas. He shows how the Founders revolutionized “the use of repressive power.”
Dumm concentrates on the reforms of Dr. Benjamin Rush, the physician/statesman who tried to reconcile the republicanism of modern political philosophy and the most recent discoveries of modern science with Christian morality. In a civil society dedicated to liberty, incarceration by itself punishes severely. This, coupled with solitary confinement—a re-enactment of Locke’s state of nature to which the criminal had returned himself, in violation of the social contract—and followed by hard labor—the basis of economic value—aims to re-channel anti-social passions and refit the individual for republican life. Dumm adds that Rush’s penitentiary also stressed Bible-reading—intellectual work to supplement the physical labor—but falsely concludes, “the proposition that all are fundamentally alone is the most extremely liberal aspect of what was designed as a liberal institution.” The Bible hardly teaches that anyone is fundamentally alone; presumably, Dr. Rush wanted prisoners to learn exactly the opposite lesson from their studies.
The “democratic” penitentiary had the more modest aim: to habituate the inmate to socially useful action. Dumm finds this despotic, an instrument of the Demon Industrialism, and puts Tocqueville’s warning against majority tyranny and the replacement of political and republican institutions with bureaucracy, to good if slightly tendentious use. Oddly, leftist critics of ‘the State,’ forgetting that it consists of people, indulge in at least as much mystification as those they claim to enlighten.
Dumm concludes with another Foucaultian chapter, now claiming that the cultivation of fear “might contribute to a rearrangement of the current regime of truth.” Robespierre and Stalin believed that, too (as a reviewer, I exercise my right to counter-tendentiousness) without much wholesome effect. But a ‘disciplinary regime’ that needs a professor to persuade us to believe it exists, may lack needed plausibility.
In the old days, not so good but better than these, Professor Dumm would have written a study longer on research, shorter on polemic. May Nietzsche’s derided but less pretentious “scholarly oxen” return to the fields of published research.
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