HISTORY OF MADNESS | 
 enlarge | Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Routledge
Category: Book
List Price: $40.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 193248
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 725
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.9
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.4 x 2.5
ISBN: 0415277019
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.89009
EAN: 9780415277013
ASIN: 0415277019
Publication Date: August 18, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: GREAT BOOK,VERY CLEAN,
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Product Description
When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie a l'age 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. Challenging entrenched views of madness and reason, History of Madness is one of the classics of twentieth century thought. It is Foucault's first major work, written in a dazzling, and sometimes enigmatic, literary style. It also introduces many of the inspiring and radical themes that he was to write about throughout his life, above all the nature of power and social exclusion. 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? Foucault's bold and controversial answer is that throughout modern history, madness has meant isolation, repression and exclusion. Even the Enlightenment, which attempted to educate and include the mad, ended up imprisoning them in a moral world. As Foucault famously declared to a reporter from Le Monde in 1961, 'Madness exists only in society. It does not exist outside the forms of sensibility that isolate it, and the forms of repulsion that expel it or capture it.' Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hopital General 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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 The Space of the Unreasoned April 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Wonderful March 31, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
March Madness March 22, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Originally called the History of Madness in the Classical Age, this new book was first published in France 47 years ago. The 3006 edition is the first complete English translation. It is in sections like a textbook, and called by some a masterpiece. The difference between madness and unreason is obessions and delusions. Those Vols are too aggressive.
Some parts could be called a romantic fantasy: the purity of the possessed and those who speak the truth in paradox like the fools in Shakespeare. Does that mean Shakespeare was demented himself as well as his characters? "Despite suffering from sporadic bouts of depression and a suicide attempt at the age of 22, the author Michel Foucault recived degrees in philosophy and pyschology in Paris. He was a Communist.
Observing the insane in Sweden, Poland and Germany, he presented his research in this book. Later he wrote "The Order of Things" and "The Archaeology of Knowledge." In France, he taught History of Systems of Thought and daubled with politics where he campaigned on behalf of homosexuals. In USA he was at U of CAL Berkeley where he wrote the History of Sexuality. Like Rock Hudson and Bob Meier, he died of AIDS at the age of 57. He was praised thusly as a tribute. "Foucault's intelligence literally knew no limits." Neither did his unnatural passions even in 1984.
Not everyone who experience "madness" as it was called back then, became insane. Don Quixote, attacking the windmills, was deemed merely eccentric. The explanation in this volume erases all of the romantic illusion. Almost anyone give the right circumstances could resort to violence; some people do weird things. Battles are son by the clever, not merely the powerful. If you read closely, You will se little nuances of this book's complexity. Sometimes things don't work out the way we want them to ...old dreams die hard.
 Crazy History!!! October 20, 2007
4 out of 4 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.
Mirror of Madness September 17, 2007
15 out of 16 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.
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