Subtle discipline in Egypt’s army masked rather than softened sovereign power

Evidence

As said above this shift from a system of enforcing order by resorting to a brutal and excessive use of force to a more subtle, distant and impersonal one should not be read as a move to a more enlightened, reformed application of the law. Rather, it testifies to what Foucault calls in his Discipline and Punish a shift from spectacular to representational and finally to disciplinary punishment. What informed this shift was not the humane, rational and progressive ideals of the Enlightenment as much as the need to make the power of the sovereign (in this case Mehmed Ali) tolerable and acceptable to his subjects. For “power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself.” Hence this shift to what appears as a humane execution of the law was in fact a shift to a more cunning, cynical and hidden kind of power. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 669

Categorization

• DEFINE: The shift from spectacular to disciplinary punishment is Foucault’s framework invoked directly here.
• DEEPTHINKING: The central argument that apparent humanitarian reform in punishment is actually a more effective masking of power is a densely argued, reusable interpretive lens.
• XREF: connects to: Egyptian rule shifted from issuing orders to managing public information and hidden authorship; The Egyptian army pioneered indirect representational techniques of discipline — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 692; Egypt’s army regulated soldiers’ latrine breaks under threat of jail — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 719