History of Madness [Hardcover]

Michel Foucault (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 18, 2006

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world.

This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition.

History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined?

Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud.

The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Scarcely any philosopher working on the history of philosophy, or historian working on the history of institutions, social science or sexuality can avoid confronting the challenge of Foucault's books.' – Michael Ignatieff, Times Literary Supplement

'Without a shadow of a doubt, the most original, influential and controversial text in this field during the last forty years. It remains as challenging now as on first publication. Its insights have still not been fully appreciated and absorbed.' – Roy Porter

'Extraordinary … rich and insistent, and almost unreasonable in its necessary repetitions.' – Maurice Blanchot

About the Author

Michel Foucault (1926-84). Celebrated French thinker and activist who challenged people's assumptions about care of the mentally ill, gay rights, prisons, the police and welfare.

Jean Khalfa is a lecturer in French at Cambridge University, UK.

Jonathan Murphy is an experienced translator, editor and lecturer.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 776 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (August 18, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415277019
• ISBN-13: 978-0415277013
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #200,162 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

One of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century and the most prominent thinker in post-war France, Foucault's work influenced disciplines as diverse as history, sociology, philosophy, sociology and literary criticism.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mirror of Madness, September 17, 2007

By 

Michael C. Stephens "motherfer" (charlotte, nc, usa) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: History of Madness (Hardcover)

First time the full text of Michel Foucault's "History of Madness" has been available in English. The abridged version, "Madness and Civilization", produced some notable misinterpretations and came to be viewed as an apologia for the anti-psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and others. Although Foucault is no friend of the psychiatric establishment, and has denounced psychiatry as a pseudo science (with more depth and subtlety than Tom Cruise), The History of Madness is much more than a denunciation of psychiatry as a tool of normalization.

Foucault shows how the idea of madness from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the present, has undergone several transformations of meaning. For Foucault, the way in which each historical phase interprets insanity is always an essential key to understanding that phase's entire value system. The projection of the idea of madness on the other allows society to carve out its idea of itself as sane.

In the Renaissance, the mad were often viewed ambiguously as the potential possessors of higher truth (as in King Lear) while the sane could be victims of their own severely limited ideas, and slaves to custom and tradition. The upside-down night-world of A Midsummer Nights Dream and other renaissance fantasies reminds us that madness and sanity could engage in creative interchange. The bastions of world order in those days were hereditary inheritors holders of power, but not yet self-made lords of reason. Even the greatest earthly power was over-ruled by the higher reality of God and Satan and the supernatural realm was inherently a miraulous, magical world, a realm above and beyond earthly reason.

As the belief in pure reason emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, however, madness and sanity became polarized. Science abolished God and His angels, and made itself the ultimate source of truth and reason. No higher authority existed than the human mind in its "reasonable" aspect. The arbiters of reason could now judge and condemn all others to the inescapable hell of the asylum.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, psychiatry finally rehabilitated madness as an "illness" subject to cure or normalization through therapy and drugs. This final "kind" mutation of the history of madness, is in many ways the most insidious and hypocritical. Especially when we look at some of the more remarkable achievements -- Hiroshima, Nazi Germany, The Iraq War -- of our hideously "sane" and rational society.

Read Foucault and understand the history of knowledge as the skin-shedding, self-justifying forms of control.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, March 31, 2008

By 

Mr. Steiner (New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: History of Madness (Hardcover)

At last the complete version of Foucault's great 'History of Madness' has been released in English. This very fine translation offers a higher degree of clarity and accuracy than the Vintage edition, and it also provides more comprehensive endnotes and Foucault's rejoinder to Derrida's 'Cogito and the History of Madness.' However, Routledge is once again guilty of producing a great and beautiful book but leaving a number of typos in. I don't know if they rush these volumes through production too quickly but it seems to be a recurring volume. In any case, 'The History of Madness' is one of the great works of historical philosophy of the last century. Foucault traces the transmutations and interpretations of insanity from the Dark Ages through the Classical Age and all the way up to modernity with the advent of psychoanalysis. You will never be able to understand the nature of our understanding of insanity without until you have followed Foucault's multi layered analysis. Truly a marvelous book.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Space of the Unreasoned, April 29, 2008

By 

Jeffrey Rubard (Beaverton, OR US) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: History of Madness (Hardcover)

Michel Foucault's first book should be a real treat, for those interested in modern theory and (as previously mentioned in another review) for those with a psychiatric history of their own. I say "should be": although Foucault is usually reckoned as attempting to tackle social facticity without any support from either dominant or "liberatory" ideologies, Habermas' charge that he was "crypto-normative" rings oddly true in the case of this work. *History of Madness* is itself an effort in the early-modern genre it chronicles, that of providing a definition for mental illness that explains exactly what is objectionable about the conduct of the alienated from the standpoint of reason, rather than merely explaining their unreason in terms of an undifferentiated objectionability.

And "unreason" is a key word for Foucault's project, as is ably explained in Ian Hacking's introduction. Rather than import the diagnostic categories of contemporary psychiatry back into the Classical age, Foucault explains why the practical failure of persons to integrate themselves into modern social life -- which rather obviously has economic and political dimensions -- became "unreason", a failing which compelled modernizing authorities to regiment the "afflicted" in workhouses and *hopitals* rather unlike hospitals rather than treat them in a medical fashion. Rather than a strict critique of psychiatry, Foucault's analysis is a window onto the social struggles which constitute mental illness as something to be combated in the first place, rather than as poorly-calibrated religiosity or aesthetic sentiment.

Although it is true that Routledge seems not to have weathered the changeover to electronic publishing very well, they should be commended for making this great historico-philosophical work available to an English-speaking audience in its entirety.