ABSTRACT
In view of some of the critical things I shall have to say about Madness and Civilization (Foucault 1965; 1972), I think it is appropriate to begin by acknowledging that almost all those who have worked on the history of psychiatry during the past two decades and more owe multiple debts to the late Michel Foucault. On a purely mundane level, it was surely the reception accorded to Foucault’s work and the stature he came to occupy in both the academy and cafe society, that played a major role in rescuing madness from the clutches of drearily dull administrative historians and/or psychiatrists in their dotage, giving the whole topic the status of a serious intellectual subject and thus attracting us to it in the first place. More broadly, whatever else he may have suffered from, Foucault did not lack for intellectual daring, and most of the best work in the field for the past fifteen or twenty years can be seen as responding, at least in part, to the intellectual challenges he threw down.
