History of Madness [Paperback]

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.

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.

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.