History of Madness |  | Author: Michel Foucault
Creators: Jean Khalfa, Jonathan Murphy
Publisher: Routledge
Category: Book
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Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 67,557
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 776
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 2.2
ISBN: 0415477263
Dewey Decimal Number: 109
EAN: 9780415477260
ASIN: 0415477263
Publication Date: April 2, 2009
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Product Description
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.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
 Mirror of Madness September 17, 2007
Michael C. Stephens (charlotte, nc, usa)
26 out of 30 found this review helpful
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.
Crazy History!!! October 20, 2007
Jason D. Holton (Spanish Harlem, New York)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Foucault is right on the mark with this newly translated book. And so are the translators. It is insightful and informative, giving a history and an oh so subtle analysis. If you have been in a mental institution in the past 20 years then you can even gain more insight into what is going on in the book. Although it can be a bit unsettling, the rewards far outweight any frightening revelation you might come across. Why are the mad treated the way they are today? Where does that treatment come from? Are we really as advanced as we think we are, or are we actually still basing our medical treatments of the mad on the foundations of what confinement and frenzy since the middle ages have built? Redundant, yes, huge, yes, brilliant, no doubt. I am glad this book is finally in english, my french is ok, but not advanced enough for this book. Still has some editing errors, but that gives it charm.
Mad for Foucault December 4, 2009
Lynne R. Huffer
I think this new translation of History of Madness is one of the most important "book-events" (to use Foucault's term) of the last decade. Although the original French version of this book was published in French in 1961--it was Foucault's first major book, and the first to turn away from his phemonenological roots--it has taken over forty years for it to be fully translated into English. The 1965 English translation, Madness and Civilization, is only about half of the book's original length. Important passages are missing from the 1965 abridged translation, including the two pages on Descartes's exclusion of madness from the cogito which forms the basis of the famous Foucault-Derrida debate. History of Madness gives us, in my view, the seeds of all of Foucault's later ideas, including his ideas about power and ethics. For more on this argument that scrambles typical periodizations of Foucault's work, see my recent book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory, which gives a detailed reading of History of Madness in light of the new translation.
Great read July 8, 2010
Goldmember (Melbourne, Australia)
This book is very well reasoned and Foucault has a really good crack at the problem of 'madness' in society, by looking at how it evolved historically.
A Foucault Masterpiece in Full July 13, 2009
wendy forward (westlake village, california United States)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Finally, the first great work by the 20th century's most influential and prescient thinker is available in full in a beautiful translation. Routledge is one of my favorite publishers and both the paperback and hardback editions meet their usual high standards. As is usual with Foucault, there is so much to think about in every sentence the work is best taken in small doses. It's also very depressing, but amply repays the effort and stamina required to read.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
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