Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by armedaphrodite
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault
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.