Loïc Wacquant
Rethinking the Penal State
Polity
2026
Présentation de l'éditeur
In
this book based on his 2024 Adorno Lectures, Loïc Wacquant combines
social theory, comparative history and structural ethnography to probe
criminal punishment as a core function of the state. Extending Pierre
Bourdieu's concepts of bureaucratic field and symbolic power, he
captures the constitutive duality of punishment, at once material
and symbolic, an instrument of class control and a means of
communicating values, endlessly oscillating between rehabilitation and
retribution.
Ranging from the birth of the workhouse prison in
sixteenth-century Europe to the deployment of punishment in the colonies
to the workaday world of prosecutors in a California criminal court,
Wacquant reveals how the penal state curates crime, manages urban
marginality, signals sovereignty, and manufactures legitimacy in the
eyes of the population by restoring control over bodies out of order.
But the penal Leviathan is a bifurcated state which captures
nearly exclusively dispossessed and dishonored categories by targeting
their neighborhoods: it is everywhere a class-splitting and a
race-forging institution based on the stubborn differentiation of "paper
penality" and "street penality."
Getting inside the machinery of
criminal justice shows that punishment must be placed at the epicenter
of the political sociology of statecraft, group-making and place-making
in the metropolis as well as brought to the forefront of civic debate to
articulate a radical penal minimalism suited to reconciling punishment and democratic ideals.
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