The post-disciplinary prison

To be free [during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries], in this modem sense, is to be attached to a polity where certain civilized modes of conducting one's existence are identified as normal, and simultaneously to be bound to those << engineers of the human soul >> who will define the norm and tutor individuals as to the ways of living that will accomplish normality [...] [Now], freedom is seen as autonomy, the capacity to realise one's desires in one's secular life, to fulfil one's potential through one's own endeavours, to determine the course of one's existence through acts of choice.