Take a photo of a barcode or cover
armedaphrodite's review against another edition
challenging
slow-paced
3.5
A difficult book that requires your full attention to read. There's a lot of reasons for that. It's got a lot of interesting and well-conceived ideas to consider, and connecting ideas across the book often takes a fair amount of thought. It's a work in translation with a lot of very technical language. And also, it gets its facts wrong sometimes. After the first few chapters I felt I had to follow up on some of the claims, especially regarding the Ship of Fools and the Catholic Church. They weren't always accurate, or entirely accurate, and the act of looking them up also revealed a number of reviews/critiques that pointed out more that I wouldn't have been aware of.
The book is certainly worth reading for its ideas - the discussion of how madness has been considered through a specific period of European history is interesting, and while the book doesn't try to apply itself much to the modern day it leaves you the space to apply it. That said, I wonder if part of the reason it's not applied to the modern day is that it's very specific to its period/region. Foucault wants our vision of madness to be psychological and systems driven - however, it's a very particular group of people he's focusing on, with a particular psychology and particular systems.
The book is certainly worth reading for its ideas - the discussion of how madness has been considered through a specific period of European history is interesting, and while the book doesn't try to apply itself much to the modern day it leaves you the space to apply it. That said, I wonder if part of the reason it's not applied to the modern day is that it's very specific to its period/region. Foucault wants our vision of madness to be psychological and systems driven - however, it's a very particular group of people he's focusing on, with a particular psychology and particular systems.
ayahefnawy5's review against another edition
3.0
I liked the book, i liked how foucault presented the idea of madness and tracked the history of how it was dealt with. An interesting read
jmannion's review against another edition
4.0
There is a certain degree of waywardness in Foucault's style, history slips into literary or art criticism and the section labelled 'conclusion' is anything but a conclusion to the preceding work, but this is a fascinating analysis of the interplay of madness and social constructions.
cobblestonesky's review against another edition
4.0
Reads like eating many French saws in succession. A painfully edifying bad trip that reveals the brief and brutal history of the nascent science of psychology. A reminder to stay suspect of minimally successful methods and open to progress, which given the disastrous infancy of the field so far, is surely still ahead of us.
micheleseverson's review against another edition
4.0
Foucault outlines the evolution of society's definition, views, and treatments of madness from the middle ages to the 18th century. This sounds super interesting, but I found it took me a long time to get through all the specific names and cases Foucault uses and often had to puzzle out the "bigger picture" for myself to keep myself engaged with the text.
As Deleuze points out, the major fault of Foucault's work is that it doesn't bridge to the 20th and 21st century very easily. I was hoping to find the journey of madness through the history of human kind to the present day, but nope. I guess that will be some other philosopher or psychologist's job.
Still, I found it worthwhile to learn how the idea of madness has shifted throughout time, even if I didn't get to read about madnesses's manifestation in the 20th century. The emergence of psychology in relation to madness was also an interesting historical development that Foucault includes.
As Deleuze points out, the major fault of Foucault's work is that it doesn't bridge to the 20th and 21st century very easily. I was hoping to find the journey of madness through the history of human kind to the present day, but nope. I guess that will be some other philosopher or psychologist's job.
Still, I found it worthwhile to learn how the idea of madness has shifted throughout time, even if I didn't get to read about madnesses's manifestation in the 20th century. The emergence of psychology in relation to madness was also an interesting historical development that Foucault includes.