Early on in Discipline and Punish, Foucault makes the argument that discipline and punishment shifted from the corporal to the mind and soul during the eighteenth century.

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The Body: Vehicle of the Soul

Early on in Discipline and Punish, Foucault makes the argument that discipline and punishment shifted from the corporal to the mind and soul during the eighteenth century. Before this happened, those who infringed upon the law were tortured and killed in public. This type of corporal punishment had no other purpose than to inflict pain before actually killing the perpetrator in question. Foucault even states that this form of judicial torture, of punishing the victim until the truth came out was, in "the hierarchy of punishments... placed immediately after death," thus implying the severity of the torture was more excruciating than simply being killed would have been (42). With time, it became clear to those in power that this was perhaps not the best means of punishment. It is here that Foucault argues that the shift to disciplining and the punishing the soul took place through the controlling of both time and space. By punishing the soul, Foucault argued that the punishment would penetrate the perpetrator deeper, by affecting their psyche. Furthermore, this type of punishment and discipline would prove to be more effective, because the people in question would be actively as