Madness and Civilization

Madness And Civilization

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (French: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique) is a 1964 abridged edition of French philosopher Michel Foucault's 1961 work Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique. An English translation of the complete 1961 edition, entitled History of Madness, was published in June 2006. Foucault's first major book, written while he was the director of the Maison de France in Sweden, it is an examination of the cultural, legal, political philosophical and medical construction of madness in Europe, from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, and a critique of the idea of history and historical method. It marks a turning in Foucault's thought from phenomenology toward structuralism. Though he uses the language of phenomenology to describe an evolving experience of the other as mad, he attributes the change in this experience over time to specific powerful social structures.