Madness & Reckoning by Heather Poinsett Dunbar

In the Renaissance, art portrayed insane people as possessing wisdom (knowledge of the limits of the world), whilst literature portrayed the insane as people who reveal the distinction between what men are and what men pretend to be. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault traces the cultural evolution of the concept of insanity (madness) in three phases:

In the 17th-century Age of Reason, insane and socially undesirable people would end at The Madhouse. He wrote the book between 1955–1959, when he worked cultural-diplomatic and educational posts in Poland and Germany, as well as in Sweden as director of a French cultural centre at the University of Uppsala. Philosopher Michel Foucault developed Madness and Civilization from his earlier works in the field of psychology, his personal psychological difficulties, and his professional experiences working in a mental hospital.

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (French: Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique, 1961) is an examination by Michel Foucault of the evolution of the meaning of madness in the cultures and laws, politics, philosophy, and medicine of Europe-from the Middle Ages until the end of the 18th century-and a critique of the idea of history and of the historical method.Īlthough he uses the language of phenomenology to describe the influence of social structures in the history of the Othering of insane people from society, Madness and Civilization is Foucault's philosophic progress from phenomenology toward something like structuralism (a label Foucault himself always adamantly rejected).

Madness & Reckoning by Heather Poinsett Dunbar