Obedience and Reform

Abstract

Tocqueville’s writings on prison discipline have often been underestimated by specialists. Nevertheless, they have a significant theoretical value and are tightly linked to their author’s more renowned works. While comparing the two U.S. “penitentiary systems” of Auburn and Philadelphia—a comparison critics have long eluded due to a subtle interpretative oversight—Tocqueville poses a theoretical question: how can inmates’ attitudes be durably modified by prison organization? In struggling to answer it—as this paper argues—Tocqueville investigates the relationship between habit, mutual communication, abdicative tendencies and individuals’ “taste” for freedom, thus developing a set of anthropological insights that would later play a crucial role in his social and political thought.