A book of the very 'now' zeitgeist. You'll understand when someone drops the 'panopticon' at the pub, and know if they're for real or not.

A foundational text of late-20th-century critical thought, Discipline and Punish traces the shift from spectacular punishment to diffuse systems of surveillance, regulation, and self-policing. Foucault’s focus is not simply prisons, but the broader architecture of modern power: schools, hospitals, factories, armies—institutions that train bodies and normalise behaviour through repetition, visibility, and internalised control.

The language is cool, precise, and unsettlingly applicable to contemporary life, which is why the book continues to circulate far beyond philosophy departments. Hard to read, but vital.