Though it is often used in reference to the Panopticon, the vocabulary of utopia appears to be eventually misleading. It does not, in fact, take the complexity of Foucault's insight into account. By pointing at the same time to the present ('what really exists') and to the future ('programme'), Foucault's statements highlight the difficulty of rooting Bentham's plans into a definite time frame and invite us to question the 'truth' of the principles at work within them. This chapter argues that Foucault's insistance on the various dimensions of the Panopticon can be of use to historians trying to grasp the status of Bentham's projects by inscribing them into dynamic historical processes and agencies - instead of dismissing them as utopian or dystopian. This argument is then illustrated by a case-study. Etienne Dumont, Bentham's first and primary European disciple, indeed used the Panopticon writings he had himself translated into French as a blueprint during the debates on the building of a new prison in Geneva in the 1820, an episode that has received little attention since Robert Roth's seminal work
From 'Utopia' to 'Programme': Building a Panopticon in Geneva