Madness and Civilization

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Madness and Civilization

The Librairie Plon edition

Author Michel Foucault

Original title Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique

Translator Richard Howard (abridged edition)

Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (unabridged edition)

Country France

Language French
 Subject Insanity

 1961 (Librairie Plon, in French)

Published
 1964 (in English)

Media type Print (Hardcover and Paperback)

Pages 299 (Vintage edition)

725 (unabridged edition)

ISBN 0-679-72110-X (Vintage edition)

0-415-27701-9 (unabridged edition)

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of

Reason (French: Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique) is a 1961
book by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. The book was first translated into
English - in an abridged edition - in 1964. A new English translation of the complete
1961 edition, titled History of Madness, was published in June 2006.[1]
Foucault's first major book, Madness and Civilization is an examination of the
evolving meaning of madness in European culture, law, politics, philosophy and
medicine from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, and a critique
of historical method and the idea of history. It marks a turning in Foucault's thought
away from phenomenology toward structuralism: though he uses the language of
phenomenology to describe an evolving experience of the mad as "the other", he
attributes this evolution to the influence of specific powerful social structures.[2]

Contents

 1Background
 2Summary
 3Reception
 4See also
 5References
 6External links

Background[edit]
The book developed out of Foucault's earlier writing on psychology,[3] his own
psychological difficulties, and his experiences working in a mental hospital, and
was written mainly between 1955 and 1959 while working in cultural-diplomatic and
educational posts in Sweden (as director of a French cultural centre attached to
the University of Uppsala),[4] Germany, and Poland.[5]
Summary[edit]
Foucault traces the evolution of the concept of madness through three phases:
the Renaissance, the "Classical Age" (the later seventeenth and most of the
eighteenth centuries) and the modern experience. He argues that in the
Renaissance the mad were portrayed in art as possessing a kind of wisdom – a
knowledge of the limits of our world – and portrayed in literature as revealing the
distinction between what men are and what they pretend to be. Renaissance art
and literature depicted the mad as engaged with the reasonable while representing
the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy[5] but the Renaissance also marked the
beginning of an objective description of reason and unreason (as though seen from
above) compared with the more intimate medieval descriptions from within
society.[2]
Foucault contends that at the dawn of the age of reason, in the mid-seventeenth
century, the rational response to the mad, who until then had been consigned to
society's margins, was to separate them completely from society by confining
them, along with prostitutes, vagrants, blasphemers and the like, in newly created
institutions like the General Hospital of Paris all over Europe – a process he calls
"the Great Confinement".[2]
The condition of these outcasts was seen as one of moral error. They were viewed
as having freely chosen prostitution, vagrancy, blasphemy, unreason, etc. and the
regimes of these new rational institutions were meticulous programs of punishment
and reward aimed at causing them to reverse those choices.[2]
The social forces Foucault sees driving this confinement include the need for an
extra-judicial mechanism for getting rid of undesirables, and the wish to regulate
unemployment and wages (the cheap labour of the workhouses applied downward
pressure on the wages of free labour). He argues that the conceptual distinction
between the mad and the rational was in a sense a product of this physical
separation into confinement: confinement made the mad conveniently available to
medical doctors who began to view madness as a natural object worthy of study
and then as an illness to be cured.[2][5]
For Foucault the modern experience began at the end of the eighteenth century
with the creation of places devoted solely to the confinement of the mad under the
supervision of medical doctors, and these new institutions were the product of a
blending of two motives: the new goal of curing the mad away from their family who
could not afford the necessary care at home, and the old purpose
of confining undesirables for the protection of society. These distinct purposes
were lost sight of, and the institution soon came to be seen as the only place where
therapeutic treatment can be administered. He sees the nominally more
enlightened and compassionate treatment of the mad in these modern medical
institutions as just as cruel and controlling as their treatment in the earlier, rational
institutions had been.[2]
...modern man no longer communicates with the madman ... There is no common
language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental
illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a
dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all
those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the
exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of
psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come
into existence in such a silence.

— Foucault, Preface to the 1961 edition[6]

Reception[edit]
This article is missing information about despite indication of the
contrary, the last part of this section does not contain anything on
Foucault's critics . Please expand the article to include this
information. Further details may exist on the talk page. (June 2019)

The sociologist José Guilherme Merquior argues that while Foucault raises
important questions about the influence of social forces on the meaning of, and
responses to, deviant behavior, Madness and Civilization is nonetheless so riddled
with serious errors of fact and interpretation as to be of very limited value. Merquior
notes that there is abundant evidence of widespread cruelty to and imprisonment
of the insane during eras when Foucault contends that the mad were perceived as
possessing wisdom, and that Foucault has thus selectively cited data that supports
his assertions while ignoring contrary data. Madness was typically linked
with sin by Christian Europeans, noted Merquior, and was therefore regarded as
much less benign than Foucault tends to imply. Merquior sees Madness and
Civilization as "a call for the liberation of the Dionysian id" similar to Norman O.
Brown's Life Against Death (1959), and an inspiration for Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972).[7]
Kenneth Lewes writes that Madness and Civilization is an example of the "critique
of the institutions of psychiatry and psychoanalysis" that occurred as part of the
"general upheaval of values in the 1960s". Lewes sees Foucault's work as being
similar to, but more profound than, Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental
Illness (1961).[8]
The philosopher Gary Gutting writes:
The reactions of professional historians to Foucault's Histoire de la folie seem, at
first reading, ambivalent, not to say polarized. There are many acknowledgements
of its seminal role, beginning with Robert Mandrou's early review in Annales,
characterizing it as a "beautiful book" that will be "of central importance for our
understanding of the Classical period." Twenty years later, Michael MacDonald
confirmed Mandrou's prophecy: "Anyone who writes about the history of insanity in
early modern Europe must travel in the spreading wake of Michael Foucault's
famous book, Madness and Civilization." Later endorsements have been even
stronger. Jan Goldstein: "For both their empirical content and their powerful
theoretical perspectives, the works of Michel Foucault occupy a special and central
 place in the historiography of psychiatry." Roy Porter: "Time has proved Madness
and Civilization far the most penetrating work ever written on the history of
madness." More specifically, Foucault has recently been heralded as a prophet of
"the new cultural history." But criticism has also been widespread and often bitter.[9]

See also[edit]
 Psychiatry portal

 Anti-psychiatry
 Cogito and the History of Madness
 The Archaeology of Knowledge