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When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge 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.

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?

Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général 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.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Foreword: History and significance of Foucault's History of Madness
• Prefaces
• 1 1961 edition
• 2 1972 edition
• Part 1
• 1 Stultifera Navis
• 2 The great confinement
• 3 The correctional world
• 4 Experiences of madness
• 5 The insane
• Part 2
• 1 The madman in the garden of species
• 2 The transcendence of delirium
• 3 Figures of madness
• 4 Doctors and patients
• Part 3
• 1 The great fear
• 2 The new division
• 3 The proper use of liberty
• 4 Birth of the asylum
• 5 The anthropological circle
• Appendices
• 1 "Reponse a Derrida" ("Michel Foucault Derrida e no kaino" Paideia (Tokyo) February 1972)
• 2 "La Folie, l'absence d'oeuvre" Appendix 1 of 1972 edition
• 3 "Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu" Appendix 2 of 1972 edition
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Critical bibliography on Foucault's History of Madness

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CHOICE Review

Forty-five years after its 1961 publication, the book that first brought Foucault to the intellectual world's attention has finally appeared in complete translation. Prior to this, only the 1965 translation of the heavily abridged paperback Madness and Civilization was available. This new edition includes about 300 pages of text, plus some 800 notes, omitted in the earlier translation, plus the complete original preface and three appendixes (including two important replies to Derrida's critique). Its basic thesis is perhaps well known: the understanding of "madness," followed from the Renaissance, where it is seen as the "other" of reason, to the modern age, when it comes to be taken as an objective fact of disease to be treated scientifically. This thesis reveals people's understanding to be a historical construction that does not proceed seamlessly from the barbaric and ignorant to the humane and enlightened. Reading this mammoth volume in its entirety fills out the thesis and reveals glimpses of many themes associated with Foucault's later work that were difficult to locate in the abridged volume. Although the translation is far from flawless, this publication is a major event for many besides Foucault scholars. It should be in every academic and public library. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-level undergraduates and above; general readers. A. D. Schrift Grinnell College

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France, and was educated at the Sorbonne, in Paris. He taught at colleges all across Europe, including the Universities of Lill, Uppsala, Hamburg, and Warsaw, before returning to France. There he taught at the University of Paris and the College of France, where he served as the chairman of History of Systems of Thought until his death.

Regarded as one of the great French thinkers of the twentieth century, Foucault's interest was in the human sciences, areas such as psychiatry, language, literature, and intellectual history. He made significant contributions not just to the fields themselves, but to the way these areas are studied, and is particularly known for his work on the development of twentieth-century attitudes toward knowledge, sexuality, illness, and madness.

Foucault's initial study of these subjects used an archaeological method, which involved sifting through seemingly unrelated scholarly minutia of a certain time period in order to reconstruct, analyze, and classify the age according to the types of knowledge that were possible during that time. This approach was used in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, for which Foucault received a medal from France's Center of Scientific Research in 1961, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge.

Foucault also wrote Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, a study of the ways that society's views of crime and punishment have developed, and The History of Sexuality, which was intended to be a six-volume series. Before he could begin the final two volumes, however, Foucault died of a neurological disorder in 1984.

(Bowker Author Biography)