La solitudine come tecnica di dominio. Il caso dei penitenziari statunitensi di inizio XIX secolo

This work aims to understand solitude and isolation as a domina-tion tool, as it was conceptualized and experimented in early XIX century prison reforms. Focus will be placed on French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville’s critical reception of the French and Anglophone prison debates as well as on its field study of U.S. penitentiaries. As both a theorist and a political reformer, Toc-queville can be regarded as a key source concerning the philosophical path underly-ing the invention and early development of penitentiary systems. Tocqueville par-ticularly stressed the importance of adopting convicts isolation as an essential step in order to accomplish a radical renewal of French prisons. His writings can there-fore contribute to frame XIX century theorists’ understanding of «solitary confine-ment» and deprivation of mutual communication, as well as to analyze the differ-ent perspectives which distinguished the promoters of the various (and competing ) forms of penitentiary solitude. Tocqueville’s writings on prisons, in turn, will be read through the interpretation of political thinker Roger Boesche, who interest-ingly evoked Tocqueville’s studies on solitude in prisons in order to draw a critique of late XX century consumerism.