Bentham believed the inspectors themselves needed surveillance to prevent tyranny
Evidence
In this same apartment, the officers, male and female, may take their meals in common. Room is not wanting. Why not, as well as fellows in a college? This surely would not be the least active nor least useful of all colleges. Too much of their time cannot be spent in this central station, when not wanted on immediate duty. No expedient that can help to bring them hither, or keep them here, ought to be neglected. The legitimate authority of the governor and sub-governor will here receive assistance, their arbitrary power restraint, from the presence of their associates in office. A governor, a sub-governor, will blush, if not fear, to issue any tyrannical order in presence of so many disapproving witnesses; whose opinion, tacit or expressed, will be a bridle upon his management, though without power to oppose and disturb it. Monarchy, with publicity and responsibility for its only checks: such is the best, or rather the only tolerable form of government for such an empire. — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 328
Categorization
- XREF: This is the panopticon turned inward — the inspector watched by his peers. Direct antecedent of the recursive, self-policing gaze in Orwell’s Inner Party and Foucault’s ‘everyone watches everyone.’ — connects to: Complete surveillance requires those watched to begin monitoring themselves.
- DEEPTHINKING: The power that watches the prisoners is itself contained only by being watched by its peers — surveillance as the cure for the very power it empowers. Dense, recursive, and quietly subversive of the clean panoptic model.
Related
- The panopticon governs through prevention rather than detection (similarity 0.82)
- Bentham claimed the inspection principle fits every institutional setting, not just prisons. (similarity 0.78)