The opening chapter describing Damiens’s execution is some of the most effective prose I’ve read this year, full stop, not just in nonfiction, and I say that as someone who reads a lot of grim fiction on purpose. It’s genuinely hard to get through and it earns every bit of that difficulty, because the entire argument of the book, that punishment shifted from spectacle on the body to constant surveillance of the mind, needs you to feel the corporal version viscerally before it can convince you the panopticon is the scarier one.

I kept a tab open to a dictionary more than once getting through the middle stretch, which isn’t a complaint exactly, dense philosophy should probably cost you something to read, but I want to be honest that this isn’t a book you casually pick up on your lunch break. Where I get more skeptical is the history itself. Foucault’s critics have raised real questions about how selectively he uses his historical sources, and once you notice that the argument leans on a fairly clean, linear story (spectacle, then discipline, then surveillance) that doesn’t actually match how unevenly real punishment has evolved, even in this country, right now, it’s hard to unnotice it.

The panopticon concept has obviously outlived the specific prison history it’s drawn from, and reading it now, with how casually surveillance shows up in schools, hospitals, workplaces, feels less like a historical argument and more like a diagnosis of something ongoing. That’s the part that’s going to stick with me longest, more than the specific claims about 18th century French prisons.

Four stars, not five, because the idea is bigger and more durable than the historical scaffolding holding it up, and I think that scaffolding matters more than some of Foucault’s biggest fans want it to.