Disciplinary institutions (French Institution disciplinaire) is a concept proposed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975).

Disciplinary institutions are specific to a group of technologies called by Foucault "disciplines". School, prison, barracks or the hospital are such examples of historical disciplinary institutions, all created in their modern form in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution. A process of objectification transforms the body into a subject of scientific knowledge.

Disciplines are technologies of power which aims at individualizing masses. It is through disciplinary institutions that the individual subject is created, instead of being, as in classic liberal philosophy, the foundation of freedom and the atom which would pass the social contract with sovereignty. Therefore, disciplines transform multitudes into ordered multiplicities.

This Foucauldian concept may be related to the concept of "total institution" proposed by Erving Goffman in 1961, as well as to Louis Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA).

See also

• Michel Foucault's ''Discipline and Punish (1975)
• biopower
• governmentality

Institution disciplinaire

Philosophical concepts | Political philosophy