ABSTRACT
On first reading Madness and Civilization 1 twenty years ago, I was bewitched, bothered and begrudging. Since then, my admiration, for both its erudition and its vision, has grown with every rereading. Time has proved it by far the most penetrating work ever written on the history of madness (and, above all, the history of reason). Colin Gordon’s paper (1990) evokes the dazzling originality of Foucault’s analysis, and there is no need here once again to detail its qualities. As Gordon emphasizes, the standard criticisms have often been the products of prejudice, misunderstanding and ignorance (not least, ignorance of those parts of Folie et deraison omitted from the English translation). 2
