History of Madness (Madness and Civilization)

Introduction

Foucault wrote most of the book while teaching in Uppsala in the late 1950s and defended it as his main doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne in 1961; it appeared that year under the title Folie et déraison. It begins with the ship of fools of the late Middle Ages and dates the “Great Confinement” to the founding of the Hôpital général in Paris in 1656, where the mad were locked up with the poor and the idle. The “liberation” of the insane by Pinel and Tuke around 1800 appears as a new, moral form of confinement. An abridged version was translated into English in 1965 as Madness and Civilization, the full text only in 2006. Historians have questioned parts of its evidence.

Connections

Criticizes

• Meditations on First Philosophy1641 · René Descartes

Criticized in

• Cogito and the History of Madness1963 · Jacques Derrida

More works by Michel Foucault

• 1966The Order of Things
• 1975Discipline and Punish
• 1976The Will to Knowledge (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1)
• 1984What Is Enlightenment?