Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Superb scholarship rendered with artistry" -- The Nation

Product Description

Perhaps the French philosopher's masterpiece, which is concerned with an extraordinary question: What does it mean to be mad?

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (November 28, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067972110X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679721109
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 4.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #12,828 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #31 in	Books > History > Historical Study > Social History
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The sociology of madness, August 4, 2001

By	TheIrrationalMan (Basildon, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

"Madness and Civilisation", which was first published in 1959, was the first major work of the cultural critic and maverick structuralist Foucault, and it eloquently and stylishly establishes the main themes, (namely, power, knowledge, confinement) of his later works. Foucault, in his brilliant and forceful exposition, traces the codes or "epistemes" responsible for the shaping of madness from the Reneissance and up to the late nineteenth century. He charts the history of insanity from it being considered as a virtually harmless "wisdom of folly", to it being considered as a disease in the age of confinement and the psychiatric clinic. Drawing on several imprtant representations of madness in culture, which include the Ship of Fools of Jerome Bosch, and "The Disparates" of Goya, as well as the fates of Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Nerval and Artuad in the modern era, he "deconstructs" the concept of "reason" itself, by placing it in an inverse relation to supposedly "mad" experience. He asks the fundamental, and highly philosophical, question of "what does it mean to be mad, and what is the qualitative distinction between 'sanity' and 'insanity'?" This leads him to make the extraordinary claim that the "pathologisation" of madness, its treatment as a disease, is something approximating a disease of the modern era itself. Madness represents a moment of rupture, whose suppression is an attempt to avoid something mysterious, unseizable and dangerous within our own selves. In his examination of the history of confinement, and the supposed devastation that it has caused, Foucault is not trying (as his critics have alleged) to promote insanity in a bid to transgress social modes and conventional wisdom. Rather, he is attempting nothing else than a sociology of madness, by seeing how it arose in the context of modernity, with its work ethic, industrialisation, and its expansion of business enterprise, imperatives which entailed the exclusion of marginal and supposedly "deviant" behaviour. Written with considerable flair and panache, the book is highly opaque, relying much on paradox, wordplay, discontinuity and the need to undermine the rigour and consistency of "reasoned" discourse, which Foucault charges of embedding dangerous authoritarian implications. The obscurity and complexity of his style also illustrates the very pressing difficulty of trying to express any certain or objective truth about reality. The translation of Richard Howard, however, is the superior version, as it retains much of the impact of Foucault's style.

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars category mistakes, May 26, 2004

By A Customer

Certain reviewers of this book seem to confuse the categories of operation Focualt addresses in this book and others. He is not making the simplistic argument that "madness" is socially constructed but rather that certain concepts, including the medicalized model of insanity, only become possible under cetain conditions and operate within a specific, historical and culutral formation of knowledge. Understanding what these conditions are, and how these change is important both to become critical concerning the limitations of current organizations of these concepts, but also so that one does not anachronistically project present concepts into the past, ie, seeing 18th century discourses as premature versions of today's ideas. The problem of madness as an object of knowledge is his task within the history of ideas, not discerning its reality.

Those that fail to recognize this, both the cultural relativists and the reactionaries, reveal their own lack of critical thought and say little about the text's strengths or weaknesses.

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A poetic historical tour de force redefining reason, March 29, 1998

By	Eduardo Navas([e-mail]) (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

Madness and civilization is a powerful survey on the historical development of what we call madness today. What the term means today is radically different from what it meant during the age of reason. This book takes a more or less chronological approach to the development of madness. What is most important is it shows how the term mad was manipulated throughout history in order for society to redefine itself against "the other." This book makes a good case as to why we still live under the shadow of Freud, as Foucault credits him with defining the relationship of the clinically insane, and the physician. A must read to understand the current definition seperating the sane and the insane.