Madness and Civilization
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First published in French in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l’âge Classique, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason examines how European society came to define, confine and treat madness. Moving from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, Foucault traces the changing boundaries between reason and unreason, paying particular attention to the mass confinement of the poor, the unemployed and the mentally ill in seventeenth-century France. He challenges the assumption that the rise of modern psychiatry represents a straightforward triumph of compassion, suggesting instead that new forms of medical knowledge brought their own systems of authority and exclusion. Throughout, the book asks who has the power to define sanity, and what a society reveals about itself through the people it casts out.
A formative work in Foucault’s intellectual development, Madness and Civilization helped establish his distinctive approach to history, examining how institutions and systems of knowledge shape what a culture accepts as truth. Its account of the changing relationship between madness and reason has influenced philosophy, the history of psychiatry, cultural criticism and debates about the treatment of those considered outsiders. Although its historical interpretations have been vigorously contested, the book remains compelling for the questions it raises about confinement, normality and the authority of experts. Both a history of exclusion and a searching critique of Enlightenment confidence, it invites readers to reconsider the fragile line between the rational and the unreasonable.
From the book
“The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.”
— Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
On Madness and Civilization
“M. Foucault told this story brilliantly, and with a sort of austere compassion.”
— Richard Sennett, The New Yorker