Madness and Civilization

Blurb

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason is a 1964 abridged edition of French philosopher Michel Foucault's 1961 work Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique. An English translation of the complete 1961 edition, entitled History of Madness, was published in June 2006.
Foucault's first major book, it is an examination of the evolving meaning of madness in European culture, law, politics, philosophy and medicine from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, and a critique of historical method and the idea of history. It marks a turning in Foucault's thought away from phenomenology toward structuralism: though he uses the language of phenomenology to describe an evolving experience of "the other" as mad, he attributes this evolution to the influence of specific powerful social structures.