When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et
Deraison: Histoire de la Folie a l'age 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 Hopital General 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.
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