Michel Foucault · Philosophy

Madness and the Birth of Reason

In his first major book, Foucault wrote a history not of madness but of how ‘Reason’ came to define itself by silencing and confining its other. Through the ‘Great Confinement’ of the classical age, the mad were locked away with the poor and idle - and madness, once a familiar presence, became a thing to be excluded, studied, and cured.

What you'll be able to recall

You learned that for Foucault, the history of madness is really a history of Reason defining itself against its other. The classical age’s ‘Great Confinement’ locked away the mad with the poor and idle, and the modern asylum, far from a simple liberation, replaced chains with a subtler moral and medi…

Leads to René Descartes.

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