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

Paul-Michel Foucault (1926-1984), often referred to simply as Michel Foucault, was a French intellectual historian and philosopher whose work focused on various institutions of social control and the ideas that enable them to operate. Madness and Civilization was his first book, and it would be followed by four others: The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. In Madness, Foucault begins to develop ideas and methodologies that he would go on to refine in these later works. For example, he would eventually articulate theories of power, which are at play in Madness, but are not made explicit. He would recall, “When I think back now, I ask myself what else it was that I was talking about, in Madness and Civilization or the Birth and the Clinic, but power? Yet I’m perfectly aware that I scarcely ever used the word and never had such a field of analyses at my disposal” (Gordon). Foucault scholars have thus come to value Madness as containing embryonic expressions of some of the philosopher’s most influential ideas, even though he does not formulate them as elegantly in this book as he would go on to do later.