In The Will to Punish, Didier Fassin interrogates the philosophical presuppositions of modern punishment. Through his own fieldwork, history and anthropology, Fassin breaks the conceptual links between crime and punishment, showing that states punish without crime, and that the extent of punishment's focus on marginalized communities means that it lies beyond any rational justification. ...the Lectures... could be said to provide something of a state of the art summation of the general lines of critical thought, raising questions about critical method, what has been achieved, and what else there is still to do.