ABSTRACT
Source: Sarup, M. An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Post-Modernism. Hemel Hempsted: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education.
REASON AND UNREASON
[…] In his first well-known book, Madness and Civilization,1 Foucault describes how madness, along with poverty, unemployment and the inability to work, comes in the seventeenth century to be perceived as a ‘social problem’ which falls within the ambit of responsibility of the state.1 There is a new conception of the state as preserver and augmenter of the general welfare. In the book there is an important discussion of the emergence of ‘humanitarian’ attitudes towards the insane at the end of the eighteenth century. The opening of Tuke’s Retreat at York and Pinel’s liberation of the insane at Bicêtre are portrayed as leading to a ‘gigantic moral imprisonment’, more oppressive than the former practices of brutal incarceration since they operate on the mind rather than merely on the body.
