FOUCAULT (Michel).
Madness and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.
Michel Foucault’s first major work, the most famous exposition of his archeological method and one of the most important works of twentieth-century social and political thought. Written as Foucault’s primary doctoral thesis, Madness and Civilization charts the development of discourses surrounding ‘madness’ and ‘insanity’ in Western European culture from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance to the “Great Confinement” initiated during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the subsequent development of “mental illness” as a psychiatric concept. Foucault’s ‘madness’ or ‘déraison’ (‘unreasoning’) appears as contingent, a discursive formation of relations of power and knowledge, emerging from the Enlightenment onwards as the primordial, indescribable other against which scientific modernity defines the rational, ‘reasonable’ self.
The book exercised a significant influence on the anti-psychiatry movement, appearing contemporaneously with R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self (1960), Erving Goffman’s Asylums (1961), and Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness (1961). Foucault himself was cautious regarding this association, citing a tendency towards the misapplication of his work in anglophone contexts.
