Madness & Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault
5-Stars
Madness and Civilization is the second Foucault book I have read this year; and, just like Discipline and Punish, it did not disappoint. In fact, although Madness was published ten years prior to Discipline, Madness appeared to have picked up where Discipline left off, and Foucault spends the majority of the book chronicling the crimes against the unwanted, the vagabonds, and the insane beginning in Medieval Europe and continuing through the Enlightenment.
Foucault begins Madness by mentioning the shocking fact that leprosy, the scourge, the ugly blight, the parasite of civilizations for thousands of years, was eradicated in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. I use the word "begins" in its most literal sense, as the first sentence of the essay is "At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world." Wards, houses, and communities for lepers had been established in Europe over the previous centuries; suddenly free from the inconvenience of lepers, the bourgeoisie soon decided to fill these structures with others groups of persons they felt were unsightly and inconvenient: delinquents, vagabonds, beggars, and the mad.
While Foucault himself seems to praise madness crucial to achieve the highest form of wisdom:
"Wisdom, like other precious substances, must be torn from the bowels of the earth." This knowledge, so inaccessible, so formidable, the Fool, in his innocent idiocy, already possesses. While the man of reason and wisdom perceives only fragmentary and all the more unnerving images of it, the Fool bears it intact as an unbroken sphere: the crystal ball which for all others is empty is in his eyes filled with the density of an invisible knowledge.
Victory is neither God's nor the Devil's: it belongs to madness.
He also, derides madness as folly:
Madness is the punishment of a disorderly and useless science. If madness is the truth of knowledge, it is because knowledge is absurd, and instead of addressing itself to the great book of experience, loses its way in the dust of books and in idle debate; learning becomes madness through the very excess of false learning.
Self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice.
Yet, despite both the praise and derision he awards and casts upon the mad, as I reader I felt he truly saw the injustice of and had compassion for the plight they were subjected to during a period Foucault labels the "Great Confinement".
During this "Great Confinement", "more than one out of every hundred inhabitants of the city of Paris found themselves confined...within several months". These institutions, while ostensibly concerned with healing the mad, sought, in reality, to prevent " mendicancy and idleness as the source of all disorders". In so doing, a forced labor system was established in Western Europe.
In 1532, the Parlement of Paris decided to arrest beggars and force them to work in the sewers of the city, chained in pairs...on March 23, 1534, the order was given "to the poor scholars and indigents" to leave the city.
Of course, these practices were not simply confined to France, in Hamburg according to a regulation, published in 1622: "The internees must all work. Exact record was kept of the value of their work, and they were paid a fourth of it". Men, women, and children were all forced into low-skilled labor across Europe, simply for being beggars, vagabonds, or mentally unstable. As I read account after account, I could not help but think that these laws and the locally available free labor must have played into Europe's exit, more so than any feelings of righteousness or equal treatment for all humanity, from the trans-Atlantic African slave trade. As America's Founding Fathers were drafting the Constitution and making, what we now interpret as egregious, compromises with the Southern States; the practice of white slavery continued in across Europe:
An attempt was even made, in 1781, to substitute teams of prisoners (beggars and the mentally unfit at Bicetre) for the horses that brought up the water, in a relay from five in the morning to eight at night.
Just as the slaves were treated as chattel in America; just as they were whipped, prodded, and beaten; so were those forced into labor in Europe.
Of course, the most insane and most mentally unstable were not put to work; instead, they were put on display for paid public viewings:
As late as 1815, if a report presented in the House of Commons is to be believed, the hospital of Bethlehem exhibited lunatics for a penny, every Sunday. Now the annual revenue from these exhibitions amounted to almost four hundred pounds; which suggests the astonishingly high number of 96,000 visits a year.
Foucault's book is a tragic look into the human mind, both what it is to struggle through mental illness as well as the callousness the human mind is capable of. Fortunately, Foucault ends his essay on a less somber note as he critiques modern artists and modern art:
Delirium was robbed of its meager truth as madness if it was called a work of art.
The frequency in the modern world of works of art that explode out of madness no doubt proves nothing about the reason of that world, about the meaning of such works, or even about the relations formed and broken between the real world and the artists who produced such works. And yet this frequency must be taken seriously, as if it were the insistence of a question: from the time of Holderlin and Nerval, the number of writers, painters, and musicians who have "succumbed" to madness has increased; but let us make no mistake here; between madness and the work of art, there has been no accommodation, no more constant exchange, no communication of languages; their opposition is much more dangerous than formerly; and their competition now allows no quarter; theirs is a game of life and death.
Madness: a real treat for the reader.
