Madness, medicine and the state

Not only is Madness and Civilization important for its being the first book of Michel Foucault’s to deal explicitly with matters of power and institutional function in ways easily seen as continuous with his work in the 1970s, but it also stands out as a peculiar instance of the materiality of ‘authorship’ which, of course, was one of Foucault’s central concerns. I am referring, of course, to the fact that Madness and Civilization has remained for more than twenty-five years the only available English version of Folie et deraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, despite Foucault’s presence among English-speaking academics. ¹