Rethinking Institutions in Late Georgian England*

This chapter recounts as a droll interlude in the history of psychopathology but as having little to do with the subject of its talk, rethinking institutions in late Georgian England. Institutions for the insane in late Enlightenment and early nineteenth-century England were sites of deep contestation regarding matters of design and discipline. Another facet of Foucault's rather abstract stance is that Foucault is silent about the economics of institutions, their place within determinate kinds of productive and exchange relations. Fluid and shifting boundaries between the public and private explain major divergences in institutional change between France and Britain. To understand the rethinking and reformation of institutions in late Georgian England to examine the discipline of the market and marginal utility no less than the discipline of the gaze, the diagnostic chart, the police record or mug shot.