*** Welcome to piglix ***

Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique

Madness and Civilization
Madness and Civilization (Plon edition).jpg
The Libraire Plon edition
Author Michel Foucault
Original title Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique
Translator Richard Howard (abridged edition)
Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (unabridged edition)
Country France
Language French
Subject Insanity
Published
  • 1961 (Libraire Plon, in French)
  • 1964 (in English)
Media type Print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages 299 (Vintage edition)
725 (unabridged edition)
ISBN (Vintage edition)
0-415-27701-9 (unabridged edition)

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (French: Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique) is a 1964 abridged edition of a 1961 book by French philosopher Michel Foucault. An English translation of the complete 1961 edition, entitled History of Madness, was published in June 2006.

Foucault's first major book, Madness and Civilization is an examination of the evolving meaning of madness in European culture, law, politics, philosophy and medicine from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, and a critique of historical method and the idea of history. It marks a turning in Foucault's thought away from phenomenology toward structuralism: though he uses the language of phenomenology to describe an evolving experience of the mad as "the other", he attributes this evolution to the influence of specific powerful social structures.

The book developed out of Foucault's earlier writing on psychology, his own psychological difficulties, and his experiences working in a mental hospital, and was written mainly between 1955 and 1959 while working in cultural-diplomatic and educational posts in Sweden (as director of a French cultural centre attached to the University of Uppsala), Germany, and Poland.

Foucault traces the evolution of the concept of madness through three phases: the Renaissance, the "Classical Age" (the later seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries) and the modern experience. He argues that in the Renaissance the mad were portrayed in art as possessing a kind of wisdom – a knowledge of the limits of our world – and portrayed in literature as revealing the distinction between what men are and what they pretend to be. Renaissance art and literature depicted the mad as engaged with the reasonable while representing the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy, but the Renaissance also marked the beginning of an objective description of reason and unreason (as though seen from above) compared with the more intimate medieval descriptions from within society.


...
Wikipedia

...