ABSTRACT
Colin Gordon makes the excellent point that too few of Foucault’s English and American readers are familiar with the unabridged version of Histoire de la folie. For reasons best known to Foucault himself the short version in both French and English does not just leave out details but goes far to make transitions from one historical period to the next less intelligible than they were in the original, full-length study. I have long thought that Foucault permitted such fundamental changes because they corresponded better to his growing emphasis on cultural ruptures, an emphasis that came to fullest expression perhaps in Les mots et les choses and in Surveiller et punir. Certainly, it came as a surprise (perhaps even a disappointment) to some of Foucault’s admirers that in 1983 he described his history of madness as ‘entirely concerned with the slow evolution from one form of confinement, intended mainly for the poor, into a confinement involving medical treatment’ (Stone and Foucault 1983: 42). In any event, Gordon is right that we need to consider the longer and fuller history.
