Abstract
Many punishments, including the law of talion, which prescribes “an eye for an eye,” are structured by the same analogical principles of similarity and contiguity that Tylor and Frazer identified in sympathetic magic. As with magic, analogical punishments have frequently been consigned to a “primitive” past, even by such important theorists as Durkheim and Foucault. However, the appearance of analogical thinking in modern times, which Jonathan Z. Smith has shown in the case of Frazer, calls into question such evolutionist accounts. Bentham's “modern” philosophy of punishment also reveals a dependence on analogy and the convergence of punishment and magic as forms of ritual and rhetoric. Unlike evolutionist accounts, semiotics and ritual theory suggest an explanation for the wide and enduring use of analogy in rituals. Such analogies serve the rhetorical function of reinforcing and naturalizing arbitrary social laws, whether these are prescriptions of magic or laws of punishment.
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