Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (), a 1961 book by Michel Foucault, is an examination of the evolution of the meaning of madness in the cultures and laws, politics, philosophy, and medicine of Europe—from the Middle Ages until the end of the 18th century—and a critique of the idea of history and of the historical method.

Although he uses the language of phenomenology to describe the influence of social structures in the history of the Othering of insane people from society, Madness and Civilization is Foucault's philosophical progress from phenomenology toward something like structuralism (a label Foucault himself always adamantly rejected).

Background

Philosopher Michel Foucault developed Madness and Civilization from his earlier works in the field of psychology, his personal psychological difficulties, and his professional experiences working in a mental hospital. He wrote the book between 1955 and 1959, when he worked cultural-diplomatic and educational posts in Poland and Germany, as well as in Sweden as director of a French cultural centre at the University of Uppsala.

Summary

thumb|right|In the 17th-century [[Age of Enlightenment|Age of Reason, insane and socially undesirable people would end at The Madhouse. (Francisco Goya, 1812–1819) ]]

In Madness and Civilization, Foucault traces the cultural evolution of the concept of insanity (madness) in three phases:

  1. the Renaissance;
  2. the Classical Age; and
  3. the Modern era

Middle Ages

In the Middle Ages, society distanced lepers from itself, while in the "Classical Age" the object of social segregation was moved from lepers to madmen, but in a different way. The lepers of the Middle Ages were certainly considered dangerous, but they were not the object of a radical rejection, as would be demonstrated by the fact that leper hospitals were almost always located near the city gates, far but not invisible from the community. The relative presence of the leper reminded everyone of the duty of Christian charity, and therefore played a positive role in society.

Renaissance

In the Renaissance, art portrayed insane people as possessing wisdom (knowledge of the limits of the world), whilst literature portrayed the insane as people who reveal the distinction between what men are and what men pretend to be. Renaissance art and literature further depicted insane people as intellectually engaged with reasonable people, because their madness represented the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy.

Yet Renaissance intellectualism began to develop an objective way of thinking about and describing reason and unreason, compared with the subjective descriptions of madness from the Middle Ages. Moreover, Christian European society perceived such anti-social people as being in moral error, for having freely chosen lives of prostitution, vagrancy, blasphemy, unreason, etc. To revert such moral errors, society's new institutions to confine outcast people featured way-of-life regimes composed of punishment-and-reward programs meant to compel the inmates to choose to reverse their choices of lifestyle. The conceptual distinction, between the mentally insane and the mentally sane, was a social construct produced by the practices of the extrajudicial separation of a human being from free society to institutional confinement. In turn, institutional confinement conveniently made insane people available to medical doctors then beginning to view madness as a natural object of study, and then as an illness to be cured.

Reception

thumb|[[A Rake's Progress no. viii: the inmates at Bedlam Asylum, by William Hogarth ]]

In the critical volume, Foucault (1985), the philosopher José Guilherme Merquior said that the value of Madness and Civilization as intellectual history was diminished by errors of fact and of interpretation that undermine Foucault's thesis—how social forces determine the meanings of madness and society's responses to the mental disorder of the person. Specifically problematic was his selective citation of data, which ignored contradictory historical evidence of preventive imprisonment and physical cruelty towards insane people during the historical periods when Foucault said society perceived the mad as wise people—institutional behaviors allowed by the culture of Christian Europeans who considered madness worse than sin. Nonetheless, Merquior said that, like the book Life Against Death (1959), by Norman O. Brown, Foucault's book about Madness and Civilization is "a call for the liberation of the Dionysian id"; and gave inspiration for Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari.

In his 1994 essay "Phänomenologie des Krankengeistes" ('Phenomenology of the Sick Spirit'), philosopher Gary Gutting said:

In Psychoanalysis and Male Homosexuality (1995), Kenneth Lewes said 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." That the history Foucault presents in Madness and Civilization is similar to, but more profound than The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) by Thomas Szasz.

See also

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

Notes

References

  • Some images and paintings that appear in the book