On Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), by Michel Foucault

Abstract

The original text of this work was published in Paris, in 1961, as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique. Madness and Civilisation was the English translation (by Richard Howard) of an abridged French version from which 300 pages had been cut. A substantial number of the references from the first text were also omitted, and the deep scholarship of Foucault's original work was not fully available to English readers until 2006, when Routledge published a comprehensive translation of the full book by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. This delay in translation of the full text may explain the very different reactions to the work in France and in the English-speaking world. The former were positive in the main. French historians celebrated the depth of research and Foucault's methodological originality. English-speaking historians, working with the abbreviated version only, were generally dismissive. A chorus of reviews challenged the accuracy of Foucault's historical scholarship. In an important defence of Foucault, published in 1990, Colin Gordon argued that Histoire de la Folie was an ‘unknown book’ in the English-speaking world and went on to show how the answers to most of these historical challenges could be found in the original French version.