Acaba de publicarse en la revista Política y Sociedad, 62 (2025), 1, . https://dx.doi.org/10.5209/poso.91329 un artículo de Francisco Vázquez, titulado “Entre la fascinación y la distancia. La recepción de Vigilar y castigar
en la historiografía española". El trabajo forma parte de un monográfico con motivo de los 50 años de la publicación de la conocida obra de Foucault. Coordinado por los sociólogos Mario Domínguez y David Domínguez, cuenta con la participación, entre otros, de Darío Melossi, Laurence Guignard, Pablo Lópiz, Iñaki Rivera, José Ángel Brandáriz, Ana Ballesteros, Miguel Ángel Martín e Ignacio Mendiola. El artículo puede descargarse en abierto pinchando aquí. Debajo incluimos el resumen en inglés.
This article aims to evaluate the reception of Discipline and Punish, the work of the philosopher
Michel Foucault, in the field of Spanish historiography. To do so, we use a methodology inspired by the
social history of reading and the sociology of the processes of intellectual importation. We begin by
pointing out the peripheral and dispersed character of its initial reception, quite distant from the university
departments of contemporary history. This absence is explained by alluding to the state of the Spanish
historiographical field and two stages are differentiated in the course of this reception. In the first (1978-
1994), the work was received with great interest, and its arguments were combined with those adduced
by Marxist critical criminology. In the second (1995-2020), a critical distancing prevailed, underlining the
inadequacy of the Foucauldian account with respect to the historical reality of the Spanish penal system.
Finally, it is pointed out that, beyond the misunderstandings of the reading that Spanish historians made
of Foucault’s work, it has decisively marked the development of penal historiography in our country,
reaching the rank of a classic text.
