Prison Discipline: How the 19th Century Penitentiary Reforms Shaped the Development of American Political Science?

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The emergence of political science was facilitated by several intellectual innovations that simultaneously emancipated the study of politics from an old-time collegiate moral philosophy and arranged a new order of such study suitable for a modern research university. These innovations were the distinction between state and government, the historicization of government, and the application of the historical-comparative method to study historicized government. Through the analysis of Lieber’s early works, the lector will demonstrate that the named intellectual innovations were devised to deliberate penitentiary reforms in mid-century America and examine how the concept of the state, which modern political science committed to studying, reflected the organization of American prisons.

Speaker: Tetiana Zemliakova (PhD candidate, European University Institute, Florence)

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