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

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.

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.

If you are looking to get into Foucault, this is a great place to start. It's a wonderful introduction to the concepts and themes that characterize this brilliant man's work, but the prose is far less dense than that of his later works.

Certain reviewers of this book seem to confuse the categories of operation Focualt addresses in this book and others. He is not making the simplistic argument that "madness" is socially constructed but rather that certain concepts, including the medicalized model of insanity, only become possible under cetain conditions and operate within a specific, historical and culutral formation of knowledge. Understanding what these conditions are, and how these change is important both to become critical concerning the limitations of current organizations of these concepts, but also so that one does not anachronistically project present concepts into the past, ie, seeing 18th century discourses as premature versions of today's ideas. The problem of madness as an object of knowledge is his task within the history of ideas, not discerning its reality. Those that fail to recognize this, both the cultural relativists and the reactionaries, reveal their own lack of critical thought and say little about the text's strengths or weaknesses.