Madness and Civilization

Madness and Civilization is a book by Michel Foucault. Foucault wrote it in 1961 and it’s about how people understand Mental illness.

Summary

In the book, Foucault says that people during the Renaissance praised Madness and the wisdom of insane people but that during the Age of Enlightenment, they started to lock up insane people. Foucault said society was trying to punish them. He said the difference between normal and insane was just an idea that society created as an excuse to lock people up and let doctors study them. Foucault said that treating Madness as a disease was actually as bad as trying to punish people for being insane.

Reception

In 1985, José Guilherme Merquior said that Foucault ignored how badly everyone actually treated insane people in the Middle Ages and Renaissance when people actually thought that being insane was worse than being evil. And Merquior said that Foucault made a lot of mistakes in the book.

But in the 1990s, Jan Goldstein, Roy Porter , and Gary Gutting said a lot of good things about the book. A man named Kenneth Lewes compared it to The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz.