VARIETY
IN PRAISE OF FOllY
Michel Foucault published as his doctoral thesis a remarkable
work on madness,
Histoire de
La
Folie
a
l'age classique.
1
Madness has been
the subject of countless studies-medical, psychological, sociological and
literary-but it has rarely been the subject of a history. The first virtue
of Michel Foucault's book is to treat insanity as a variable that each
society perceives in a different manner. His study belongs to the school
of history-writing that considers all forms of perception-mental and
sensory-as belonging to a particular time and place; Foucault, although
he never mentions them by name, continues the tradition of Lucien
Febvre, Marcel Bloch and the present contributors to
Annales. Histoire
de La Folie
gives back to history what has too often been left to the
sciences of classification (medical or social), and demonstrates that
madness, like any other form of human behavior, is a product of a
culture and not part of a fixed order. At the same time, without ever
departing from the most rigorous historical framework, Foucault treats
his subject as a philosopher who sees the relation between reason and
unreason as the determining factor in our knowledge of man. In this
perspective, madness functions as a complement to rational discourse,
without which knowledge is incomplete. The unusual quality of this
work lies in the combination of these two approaches, the historical and
the existential.
As a history this work deals with the treatment of madness in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France, although it spills over
into neighboring periods and countries (Foucault includes a chapter on
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and follows parallel developments
In
England and Germany). It takes as point of departure the edict of
1
Histoire de la Folie
a
I'age classique
was published by Pion in 1960; an
abridged version, entitled
Madness and Civilization
will be put out by Pantheon.
Mr. Foucault, professor of philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, is
also the author of
Maladie mentale et psychologie, Naissllnce de la clinique
and
a study of Raymond Roussel.
