Abstract
The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital; on the other hand, the immediate producers into wage-labourers. The so-called ‘primitive accumulation’ therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive because it forms the pre-historic stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it. The economic structure of capitalistic society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former.
This well-known passage in which Marx outlines the essential meaning of the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ is the key to a reading of those historical events which are the subject of our enquiry. The same process, of divorcing the producer from his means of production, is at the root of a dual phenomenon: the transformation of means of production into capital; and the transformation of the immediate producer tied to the soil into a free labourer. The process manifests itself concretely in the economic, political, social, ideological and moral dissolution of the feudal world. The first aspect of the question, the creation of capital, does not concern us here. Rather it is the second aspect, the formation of the proletariat, that constitutes the more fruitful area of research.
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Notes
- 1.
K. Marx, Capital, vol. i (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977) p. 668; see the whole of Part viii.
- 2.
M. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London, 1963). Cf. particularly chs 4, 5 and 6: ‘The Rise of Industrial Capital’, ‘Capital Accumulation and Mercantilism’ and above all, ‘Growth of the Proletariat’.
- 3.
Dobb, ibid., p. 224 Cf. Marx, Capital, vol. i, ch. xxvii, pp. 671 ff.
- 4.
For a discussion on this thesis see R. Hilton (ed.), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. A Symposium (New York 1954).
- 5.
Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, p. 42.
- 6.
Marx, Capital, vol. i, ch. xviii, p. 678.
- 7.
Sir Thomas More, The ‘Utopia’ and The History of Edward V, with Roper’s Life. Edited, with Intro, by M. Adams, London, n.d., pp. 89–90.
- 8.
Marx, Capital, vol. i, ch. xviii, p. 686.
- 9.
More, ‘Utopia’, p. 98: W. J. Chambliss, ‘A Sociological Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy’, Social Problems, vol. 12, no. 1 (Summer 1964) p. 67.
- 10.
More, ‘Utopia’, pp. 92 ff.
- 11.
F. Piven and R. A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor (London, 1972) p. 15.
- 12.
A. van der Slice, ‘Elizabethan Houses of Correction’, Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. xxvii (1936–7) p. 44; A. J. Copeland, ‘Bridewell Royal Hospital’, Past and Present (1888); Max Grünhut, Penal Reform (Oxford, 1948) p. 15; S. and B. Webb, English Prisons Under Local Government (London, 1963) p. 12.
- 13.
Grünhut, Penal Reform, pp. 15, 16 and van der Slice, Elizabethan Houses of Correction, p. 51.
- 14.
F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor (London, 1928) p. 16; G. Rusche and O. Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York, 1968) p. 41; Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, pp. 15, 16; Grünhut, Penal Reform, p. 16; van der Slice, Elizabethan Houses of Correction, p. 55.
- 15.
Eden, The State of the Poor, p. 16.
- 16.
Van der Slice, Elizabethan Houses of Correction, p. 54.
- 17.
See Eden, The State of the Poor, p. 17; S. and B. Webb, English Prisons Under Local Government, p. 13; Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 51; van der Slice, Elizabethan Houses of Correction, p. 55; Grünhut, Penal Reform, p. 16.
- 18.
Eden, The State of the Poor, p. 17.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 19.
- 20.
See Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, p. 37; also Marx, Capital, vol. i, chs. Xxviii-xxix, pp. 686–96; and Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, pp. 231 ff.
- 21.
Details here and in subsequent passages on the demographic situation are drawn from A. Bellettini, ‘La popolazione italiana dall’inizio della era volgare ai giomi nostri. Valutazioni e tenderize’, in Storia d’ltalia, vol. v, i (Torino, 1973) p. 489. This essay relates the Italian demographic situation to that of Europe in general.
- 22.
Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, pp. 237 ff.
- 23.
See above, p. 13.
- 24.
Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, p. 6.
- 25.
Marx defines Holland as ‘the head capitalistic nation of the seventeenth century’, Capital, vol. i, ch. xxxi, p. 704.
- 26.
T. Sellin, Pioneering in Penology (Philadelphia, 1944) p. 20; Grünhut, Penal Reform, p. 17; R. von Hippel, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Freiheitsstrafe’, Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft, vol. xviii (1898) p. 648.
- 27.
See Sellin, Pioneering in Penology, pp. 1, 2.
- 28.
Cf. Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 42 and Bellettini, La popolazione.
- 29.
See Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 42.
- 30.
Marx, Capital, vol. i, Part viii, p. 686 ff. and Part iii, ch. x: The Working Day, pp. 222 ff.
- 31.
See above, p. 13.
- 32.
Piven and Cloward have especially emphasised this, for example in the first chapter of Regulating the Poor.
- 33.
I have already cited Sellin; cf. von Hippel, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte’, pp. 437 ff. A. Hallema has contributed widely to this theme: A. Hallema, In em om de Gevangenis, Van vroeger Dagen in Nederland en Nederlandsch-Indie (‘s Gravenhage, 1936) pp. 174–6. Most historical research on penology refers to Dutch workhouses. In Italian see: C. I. Petitti di Roreto, ‘Della condizione attuale delle carceri e dei mezzi di migliorarla (1840)’ in Opere scelte (Torino, 1969) p. 369. M. Beltrani– Scalia, Sul governo e sulla riforma delle carceri in Italia (Torino, 1867) p. 393.
- 34.
See Sellin, Pioneering in Penology, pp. 23, 24. All the following information on the Rasp-huis is drawn from Sellin.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 26.
- 36.
It was calculated that in the city of Amsterdam, with a population of 100,000, at the time of the opening of the institution there were about 3500 ‘juvenile delinquents’ (ibid., p. 41).
- 37.
Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, pp. 193 ff.
- 38.
See Sellin, Pioneering in Penology, pp. 29, 30.
- 39.
For a theoretical discussion on this theme see Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, pp. 281 ff.
- 40.
Marx, Capital, vol. i, p. 331.
- 41.
Ibid., pp. 346, 347.
- 42.
Sellin, Pioneering in Penology, p. 59.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 63.
- 44.
Cf. pp. 23 ff.
- 45.
Marx, Capital, vol. i, p. 340.
- 46.
See pp. 33 ff.
- 47.
See Sellin, Pioneering in Penology, p. 68.
- 48.
See Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, pp. 151 ff.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 158. On the ‘Ciompi’ see V. Rutenberg, Popolo e movimenti popolari nell’ Italia del ‘300 e ‘400 (Bologna, 1971) pp. 157–329.
- 51.
See Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, pp. 235 ff. and bibl.
- 52.
Referred to in Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 36; Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, p. 9; Grünhut, Penal Reform, p. 14.
- 53.
In Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, p. 9.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 11. Specifically on Lyon, also see: J. P. Gutton, La Société et les pauvres. L’exemple de la généralité de Lyon, 1534–1789 (Paris, 1971); N. Z. Davis, ‘Poor Relief, Humanism and Heresy: The Case of Lyon’, in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History (1968) p. 217; R. Gascon, ‘Immigration et croissance au XVIe siècle: l’exemple de Lyon (1529– 1563)’, Annales (1970) p. 988.
- 55.
On this specific theme cf. Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, pp. 33–52; more generally, see: J. B. Kraus, Scholastik, Puritanismus und Kapitalismus (München, 1930); P. C. Gordon Walker, ‘Capitalism and the Reformation’, Economic History Review, vol. viii (1937) p. 18 and, of course, M. Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London, 1976), int. A. Giddens.
- 56.
See pp. 33 ff. In the same way, the influence of methodism grew in Great Britain during the industrial revolution: see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968) pp. 385 ff. It is no accident that Marx refers to ‘the methodist cell system’ in The Holy Family (Moscow, 1956), though, as we will see, this system was originally more Quaker than Methodist. On this theme, cf. D. Melossi, The Penal Question in ‘Capital’, Crime and Social Justice, no. 5 (1976) pp. 26–33.
- 57.
K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, ed. O’Malley (Cambridge U.P., 1977) p. 138.
- 58.
Cited by H. Marcuse in his ‘Study on Authority’, Studies in Critical Philosophy (London, 1972) p. 65.
- 59.
Marcuse puts this forward in the above study (p. 49 ff.) It is enough simply to mention the fact that it is this family structure which lay at the basis of Freudian theory. A theory, that is to say, which rose to prominence in this century as the bourgeois consciousness of the crisis in this particular form of the family. But see below, note 133.
- 60.
See below, pp. 67 ff.
- 61.
Marcuse, Study on Authority, pp. 56 ff.
- 62.
M. Foucault, Storia della follia (Milan, 1963) pp. 91, 92. Eng. Trans: Madness and Civilisation. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London, 1965).
- 63.
M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 159 ff.
- 64.
That is to say, as Marx explains with magnificent clarity, this devaluation of the significance of works as such as against their value in the eyes of the deity, as a sign, exactly corresponds to a society in which works do not imply production for immediate consumption (as in peasant society) but for the market, for exchange (i.e. the difference between use-value and exchange-value): work has value not for what it is but for what it can obtain (accumulation or grace – it makes no great difference to the religion of capital).
- 65.
‘An ideal house of terror’, see below, n. 104.
- 66.
Selected Writings, vol. iii, p. 466, quoted in Marcuse Study on Authority, p. 65. My emphasis.
- 67.
Quoted in Marcuse, Study on Authority, p. 64n. It is symptomatic that the social strata to which Müntzer refers as the victims of the predatory princes are ‘the poor peasant, the artisan’, i.e. precisely those who bore the main brunt first of expropriation, then of proletarianisation. On the peasant revolts in Germany, see Engels’s classic, The Peasant War in Germany (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969).
- 68.
Marcuse, Study on Authority, p. 65. This conception is essentially at the basis of Hegelian penal theory.
- 69.
Cf. Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 44, von Hippel, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Freiheitsstrafe, pp. 429 ff.
- 70.
As in von Hippel, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte’, p. 648.
- 71.
See Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 44.
- 72.
Ibid., pp. 63 ff.
- 73.
Ibid., pp. 65.
- 74.
Ibid., p. 51, n. 139. Von Hippel’s ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte’ contains a full summary of this booklet in German.
- 75.
See Foucault, Storia della follia (Madness and Civilisation) p. 82.
- 76.
See Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 43; Foucault, Storia della follia, pp. 126 ff.
- 77.
See Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, pp. 45, 48.
- 78.
See the section in this chapter on the establishment of modern prison practice in continental Europe, and Chap. 3, which deals with Italy. Rusche and Kirchheimer conclude: ‘the fact that both the old and new religious doctrines collaborated in the mutual development of the new institution goes to prove that purely ideological viewpoints took second place to economic motives as driving forces in the whole movement.’ p. 52(Punishment and Social Structure).
- 79.
Ibid., p. 43; Foucault, Storia della follia, p. 85 and pp. 95 ff.
- 80.
Foucault, Storia della follia, pp. 98–9.
- 81.
See Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 69 ff; Jean Mabillon, ‘Reflexion sur les prisons des ordres religioux’ in Ouvrages Posthumes de D. Jean Mabillon et de D. Thierri Ruinart… (Paris, 1724) pp. 321–35, edited in English in T. Sellin, ‘Dom Jean Mabillon – A Prison Reformer of the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. xvii (1926–7) pp. 581–602.
- 82.
Marx, Capital, vol. i, p. 694.
- 83.
Ibid., p. 702 and pp. 716 ff.
- 84.
Ibid., p. 702.
- 85.
Ibid., p. 694.
- 86.
See Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, pp. 226 ff.
- 87.
Ibid.
- 88.
Ibid., p. 225.
- 89.
Cited in T. E. Gregory, ‘The Economics of Employment in England, 1660–1713’, Economica, vol. i (1921) p. 44. For a survey of various views on this see R. Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry (New York – London, 1956) pp. 60 ff; also interesting is D. Defoe’s ‘Giving Alms No Charity’, in A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Economic Tracts (London, 1859) p. 40; Bendix is very important in relation to the whole of English social policy from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century (Bendix, first part, Ch. II).
- 90.
See Eden, The State of the Poor, pp. 25, 34, 35.
- 91.
See J. D. Marshall, The Old Poor Law 1799–1834 (London, 1968) p. 14.
- 92.
Ibid., p. 15.
- 93.
See Eden, The State of the Poor, pp. 25 ff.
- 94.
Ibid., p. 27.
- 95.
See S. and B. Webb, English Prisons Under Local Government, pp. 15–17; L. W. Fox, The Modern English Prison (1934) p. 3; Grünhut, Penal Reform, p. 17.
- 96.
On the following see S. and -B. Webb, English Prisons Under Local Government, pp. 18 ff.
- 97.
See Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, pp. 256 ff.
- 98.
See above, n. 6.
- 99.
See ‘Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood’ in K. Marx and F. Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975) vol. i, pp. 224–63. See also P. Linebaugh, ‘Karl Marx. The Theft of Wood and Working Class Composition: A Contribution to the Current Debate’, Crime and Social Justice, vol. 6 (Fall–Winter 1976) p. 5.
- 100.
See Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, p. 29, cf. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 59 ff.
- 101.
In relation to these, see Marshall, The Old Poor Law. On the Poor Laws in a broader economic and ideological context, see K. Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (Boston, 1957).
- 102.
For an elaboration on the new poor laws, see Marshall, The Old Poor Law, p. 17; Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, pp. 33, 34; Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 94; F. Engels, Conditions of the English Working Class in 1844.
- 103.
Engels, ibid., p. 312.
- 104.
See Marx, Capital, vol. i, p. 263.
- 105.
Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, pp. 33, 34.
- 106.
Ibid.
- 107.
Ibid., p. 35. This came out of the so-called ‘less eligibility’ principle.
- 108.
In Marshall, The Old Poor Law, p. 30. For the relationship between what nowadays we would define as ‘political criminality’ and ‘common criminality’ and which then took on various forms, primitive and barely different form of class struggle in Britain of the industrial revolution, see Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 61 ff.
- 109.
See Engels, Conditions of the English Working Class in 1844, p. 287.
- 110.
Ibid., p. 288.
- 111.
Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, p. 35.
- 112.
See Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, pp. 95 ff.
- 113.
See ibid., pp. 96, 97 for an account of the rapid rise in the crime rate in England especially from 1810 onwards. It is no accident that the themes of pauperism, alcoholism, prostitution and crime continually crop up in the young Engels’s work cited above. The actual situation before Engels, was one in which mass criminal activity had barely been superseded by class struggle. This is summed up in Engels’ exclamation: ‘And he among the “surplus” who has courage and passion enough openly to resist society, to reply with declared war upon the bourgeoisie to the disguised war which the bourgeoisie wages upon him, goes forth to rob, plunder, murder, and burn!’ (p. 87) He then describes how the British working class passed through crime, revolt and Luddism to political struggle as a result of winning the right to organise (pp. 214, 215). It is not inappropriate to note, en passant, that Marx’s well-known judgements of the lumpenproletariat, which sparked off a famous politico- philological querelle (see Il Manifesto, 16 and 23 Jan and 6 Feb 1972) were all delivered, like those presented by Engels, within a particular socio-political context from which they derive their own special validity. It was the particular task of the socialist movement in the last century to transform, willy-nilly, criminal behaviour into mass political activity while such behaviour remained characteristic of a section of the working class: the lumpenproletariat, to be precise, which was often used in an anti-working-class way. It was quite obvious that with such a political perspective Marx and Engels would denounce the lumpen elements. It should also be stressed that the question of the lumpenproletariat as a question of class analysis has not the slightest connection with those of violence and illegality as forms of political struggle. On this point see M. Foucault, Surveiller et Punir (Paris, 1975) pp. 261 ff.
- 114.
See J. Howard, Prisons and Lazarettos, I: The State of The Prisons in England and Wales (Montclair, New Jersey, 1973) particularly: ‘Proposed Improvements in the Structure and Management of Prisons’, p. 19.
- 115.
See Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 110.
- 116.
Ibid., p. 111.
- 117.
In Marshall, The Old Poor Law, 1795–1834, p. 33. The basic text on this problematic in the industrial revolution period is (regarding English history) the work of S. and B. Webb, English Poor Law History, vols vii, viii and ix of their English Local Government (London, 1929).
- 118.
See Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, p. 35.
- 119.
See Howard, Prisons and Lazarettos, p. 492.
- 120.
From the official Prison Report by the Home Office for that year.
- 121.
We should also remember that in the transition from one social situation to another, the same results can be achieved with other means, for example other segregated institutions, transportations, etc.
- 122.
See J. Bentham, Panopticon, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. iv (New York, 1962) p. 37.
- 123.
See V. Comoli Mandracci, Il carcere per la società del Sette-Ottocento (Turin, 1974) pp. 36, 37. Also R. Evans, ‘Bentham’s Panopticon. An Incident in the Social History of Architecture’, Architectural Association Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 2 (April/July 1971).
- 124.
See Postscript in Bentham, Panopticon, pp. 71 ff.
- 125.
Cf. M. Pavarini’s essay in the second part of this book.
- 126.
See Bentham, Panopticon, p. 47 ff.
- 127.
Ibid., p. 47.
- 128.
Ibid., p. 50.
- 129.
Ibid., p. 54.
- 130.
Ibid., p. 40.
- 131.
Ibid.
- 132.
On the concept of co-operation see Marx, Capital, vol. i, pp. 305 ff.
- 133.
See ibid., pp. 181 ff. The thesis set out below is more widely developed in D. Melossi, The Penal Question in ‘Capital’; D. Melossi, ‘Institutions of Social Control and the Capitalist Organization of Work’, in NDC/CSE (eds) Capitalism and the Rule of Law (London: Hutchinson, 1979) pp. 90–9; D. Melossi, ‘Strategies of Social Control in Capitalism: a Comment on Recent Work’, Contemporary Crises, 4 (1980), pp. 381–402. Particularly the last two essays seek to understand this process from the standpoint of changes in social control as capitalism has developed. It should be stressed that here, on the contrary, the discussion specifically centres on the period of the prison system’s maturity, i.e. ‘classical’ capitalism of the nineteenth century. It is from this starting point (and that of the first volume of Capital) that I write here.
- 134.
Marx, Capital, vol. i, p. 172.
- 135.
Ibid.
- 136.
Ibid.
- 137.
Ibid.
- 138.
Ibid.
- 139.
Ibid.
- 140.
Marx clearly demonstrates how the principle of authority is incorporated into the capitalist process of production itself in the chapter on co-operation: ‘By the co-operation of numerous wage-labourers, the sway of capital develops into a requisite for carrying on the labour- process itself, into a real requisite of production. That a capitalist should command on the field of production, is now as indispensible as that a general should command on the field of battle’: in Capital, vol. i, p. 313. Also pp. 305 ff.
- 141.
See K. Marx and F. Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party.
- 142.
See the section above on the genesis and development of prisons in other European countries.
- 143.
Surveiller et punir, already cited. We were able to see Foucault’s book only after our own work here had been completed. M. Foucault’s book is a brilliant discourse on prison rather than a history of the same. It is thus of little use here if only for its extreme Franco-centrism (every twist and turn is modulated on French history – if this leaves the philosophical discussion relatively unharmed, it is, as I think I have shown, quite misleading from a historical perspective). But I repeat, it seems to me that Foucault’s aims (and that which is of most interest in his work) are other than ‘historical’. For a debate on this, cf. La Questione Criminale, vol. 11, no. 2/3 (1976).
- 144.
See V. Cotesta, ‘Michel Foucault: dall ‘archeologia del sapere alia genealogia del potere’, La Questione Criminale, vol. 2, no. 2/3 (1976).
- 145.
On man’s estrangement from his body, on the reduction of man to worker, on the whole thematic of the senses and needs (pp. 322 ff.) in K. Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 1844’, in Early Writings, Intro. L. Colletti (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
- 146.
See Foucault, Surveiller et punir, pp. 197 ff. And as we have seen in Bentham, Panopticon.
- 147.
Fox, The Modern English Prison, pp. 6, 7; G. C. Marino, La formazione dello spirito borghese in Italia (Firenze, 1974) pp. 353–5.
- 148.
See Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, pp. 95 ff.
- 149.
See pp. 47 ff.
- 150.
Cf. Pavarini’s essay, below.
- 151.
Cf. Fox, The Modern English Prison, pp. 14 ff; Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, pp. 132 ff.
- 152.
The complete title of Howard’s first volume cited here is: The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with Preliminary Observations, and an Account of some Foreign Prisons and Hospitals.
- 153.
Cf. Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, ch. vi, pp. 84 ff.
- 154.
See Howard, The State of the Prisons, pp. 44 ff.
- 155.
See Sellin, Pioneering in Penology, p. 59.
- 156.
See Grünhut, Penal Reform, pp. 19 ff.
- 157.
See Howard, The State of the Prisons, pp. 66 ff.
- 158.
See Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 91.
- 159.
See Howard, The State of the Prisons, pp. 145 ff. which includes a reproduction of the plan of the Maison de Force; Grünhut, Penal Reform, p. 22; L. Stroobant, ‘Le Rasphuis de Gand, Recherches sur la repression du vagabondage et sur le système pénitentiaire établi en Flandre au xviie et au xviiie siècle’, Annales de la Soc. d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de Gand, vol. iii (1900) pp. 191–307. It was due to the work of the Count Hippolyte Vilain that the new building was made possible. He espoused his programme in an essay which Howard also cites: Mémoire sur les moyens de corriger les malfaiteurs et les fainéants a leur propre avantage et de les rendre utiles à l’ Etat (Ghent, 1775). The prison at Ghent was generally considered to be the fundamental starting point for the development of the modern prison; it is cited in practically all historic studies on this subject.
- 160.
Howard, The State of the Prisons, p. 148.
- 161.
Ibid., p. 150.
- 162.
Ibid., p. 153. For Italy cf. pp. 63 ff.
- 163.
See Foucault, Storia della follia, pp. 109 ff.
- 164.
Ibid., p. 110; Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 91.
- 165.
See Howard, The State of the Prisons, pp. 165 ff. For an analysis of the various human types locked up in the Parisian hospitals, see Foucault, Storia della follia, pp. 126, 127.
- 166.
See Howard, The State of the Prisons, p. 174.
- 167.
See Marx, Capital, vol. i.
- 168.
See J. P. Marat, Disegno di legislazione criminale (Milano, 1971). Refer to the preface by M. A. Cattaneo and the scholarly introduction by M. A. Aimo for further material on this work.
- 169.
Ibid., pp. 71 ff.
- 170.
Ibid., p. 72.
- 171.
Ibid., pp. 72–3.
- 172.
Ibid., p. 73.
- 173.
Ibid., pp. 74–5.
- 174.
Ibid., p. 78.
- 175.
Cf. G. Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789, Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (London, 1973). There is extensive material in French on this subject. I will limit myself to citing the following: C. Paultre, De La répression de la mendicité et du vagabondage en France sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: 1906); L. Lallemand, Histoire de la Charité, t. IV, Les temps modernes, (Paris: 1910 and 1912); ‘Crimes et criminalité en France sous l’Ancien Régime, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles’, Cahier des Annales, vol. 33 (Paris, 1971); A. Vexliard, Introduction à la sociologie du vagabondage (Paris, 1956).
- 176.
See Lefebvre, The Great Fear, pp. 10, 11.
- 177.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 178.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 179.
Ibid., p. 17. Brigandage in Italy is more specifically dealt with later in Chap. 3.
- 180.
G. Lefebvre, The Great Fear, p. 21.
- 181.
Cf. Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, pp. 81−2, 91–2; Foucault, Storia della follia, p. 110.
- 182.
E. B. Pashukanis, Law and Marxism: A General Theory, ed. C. Arthur (London, 1978).
- 183.
In para. 101 of his Philosophy of Right, trans. S.W. Dyde (London 1896), Hegel states in relation to the lex taliones: ‘This identity, involved in the very nature of the case, is not literal equality, but equality in the inherent nature of the injury, namely, its value.’ And: ‘Value as the inner identity of things specifically different, has already been made use of in connection with contract, and occurs again in the civil prosecution of crime. By it the imagination is transferred from the direct attributes of the object to its universal nature’ (pp. 98, 99, 100).
The young Marx was to develop this concept in an article on the law against thefts of wood. ‘Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article. Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,’ in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (London, 1975) vol. i, pp. 224–63. The scope of our research does not permit any discussion of penal theory. It is, however, necessary to mention the profound contradiction which permeates the Hegelian doctrine of retribution. This doctrine is, on the one hand, a philosophical expression of the bourgeoisie’s increasing harshness on the question of crime once in power: the rejection of Enlightenment utilitarianism derives, above all, from the need to assert the general and universal validity of order and respect for law. Equally, it is, in Hegel’s own words, an identification of the criminal as a “rational being” (see para. 100 of the Philosophy of Right) and it is no coincidence that Marx shapes his particular view of the penal question through a discussion of the Hegelian Theory: see Bottomore and Rebel (eds.), Karl Marx. Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (London, 1956) pp. 228–70 (‘Capital Punishment,’ from an article in the New York Daily Tribune). On the function of the Hegelian theory in this respect see Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 101.
- 184.
Cf. Foucault’s brilliant discussion in Surveiller et punir, pp. 158 ff. on the new mode of controlling time ‘par découpe segmentaire, par sériation, par synthése et totalisation.’ On a more general discussion than is dealt with here in this relation, see pp. 222 ff.
- 185.
See above, note 183.
- 186.
These words are from Petitti di Roreto, Della condizione attuale delle carceri, p. 372.
- 187.
Probably the best-known reports came from G. de Beaumont and A. de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France (Southern Illinois University Press, 1964). In Petitti’s book cited above, these reports are fully documented (pp. 372–3). Also see M. Pavarini’s essay below.
- 188.
See Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, pp. 96–7.
- 189.
Ibid., pp. 98, 99. In the nineteenth century this came to be a common point from which eighteenth-century social policy was attacked.
- 190.
Ibid., pp. 99–100.
- 191.
See Petitti, Della condizione attuale delle carceri, pp. 374–5 and 469.
- 192.
See Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, pp. 106–7.
- 193.
See information recorded in Rusche and Kirchheimer, p. 109.
- 194.
See ibid., ch.viii, p. 127; ch. iii of Petitti’s study is entirely dedicated to the various systems and contains a full bibliography.
- 195.
See Rusche and Kirchheimer, p. 130.
- 196.
See note 33 above.
- 197.
See Petitti, Della condizione, p. 374 ff.
- 198.
Petitti lists the following as being amongst the supporters of this system: ‘Messrs Lucas, Mittermaier, Béranger, Madam Fry, Aubanel, Leone Faucher and Grellet Wammy and himself’, p. 450.
- 199.
The following supported solitary confinement: ‘Moreau-Cristophe, Aylies, Demetz, Blouet, Julius, Crawford, Russel and Ducpetiaux’ (p. 452). The people cited here and in note 198 above are amongst the main artificers, both in practical and theoretical terms, of European social policy during the first half of the nineteenth century.
The connection between isolation, the penal or spiritual conception of punishment, as it was called, and madness, is thus synthesised by Marx in The Holy Family: ‘… correctly describes the conditions to which isolation from the outer world reduces a man. For him who sees a mere idea in the perceptible world, mere idea, on the other hand, becomes a perceptible being. The figments of his brain assume corporeal form. A world of perceptible, sensible ghosts is begotten within his mind. That is the mystery of all pious visions and at the same time it is the general form of insanity’ (Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, pp. 244–5).
- 200.
See Rusche and Kirchheimer, pp. 94–5.
- 201.
Marx comments: ‘Kleinliche Forderung in einem allgemeinen Arbeiterprogramm. Jedenfalls musste man klar aussprechen, dass man aus Konkurrenzneid die gemeinen Verbrecher nicht wie Vieh behandelt wissen und ihnen namentlich ihr einziges Besserungsmittel, produktive Arbeit, nicht abschneiden will. Das war doch das Geringste, was man von Sozialisten erwarten durfte’ (K. Marx, Kritik des Gothaer Programms, in MEW, Band 19 (Berlin, 1962) p. 32). Translations are often a little ambiguous. The sense, however, is:
‘A petty demand in a general workers’ programme. Anyway, it should have been made quite clear that there is no desire to treat run-of-the-mill criminals like animals through fear of competition and especially not to cut them off from their only means of improvement, productive labour. This was surely the least one might have expected from socialists.’
On the positions of the French workers’ movement on this subject at the beginning of the last century, see also Foucault, Surveiller et punir, pp. 291 ff.
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Melossi, D. (2018). Creation of the Modern Prison in England and Europe (1550–1850). In: The Prison and the Factory (40th Anniversary Edition). Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56590-7_2
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