Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

This is the second work of Foucault’s that I’ve read. Both of these works contain what I often call a “big idea” -- a way of looking at the world and our place in it (i.e., a philosophy) that provides new and intriguing explanatory powers. In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, the big idea was that sexuality is not a science, subject to an empirical understanding of its tenets and mechanisms, but an ideology, constructed out of a particular sociological context with no other binding effects. Here, in Madness and Civilization, the big idea is similarly that madness is also essentially an ideology -- something that existed in another form prior to the Age of Enlightenment, but which was re-contextualized into its current abhorrent configuration during the initial rise of that civilization. As is well summarized on the back cover of my paperback edition:

What does it mean to be mad? In Madness and Civilization, perhaps his masterpiece, Michel Foucault examines the archaeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 -- from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the “insane” and the rest of humanity.

The quotation marks around “insane” in that last sentence are really doing a lot of work, because it’s not that Foucault is claiming that the insane did not exist prior to the Renaissance, just that they weren’t treated as something antipodal to the new civilization, people to be excised from that enterprise, almost like the lepers of the previous age. Indeed, as Foucault sets up the premise for his case, he will describe in the historical disappearance of the leper colony both the context and the structure for the new “insane.” As the leper was removed from the body of the Church in order to save both his soul and the souls of the unaffected…

If the leper was removed from the world, and from the community of the Church visible, his existence was yet a constant manifestation of God, since it was a sign both of His anger and of His grace: “My friend,” says the ritual of the Church of Vienne, “it pleaseth Our Lord that thou shouldst be infected with this malady, and thou hast great grace at the hands of Our Lord that he desireth to punish thee for thy iniquities in this world.” And at the very moment when the priest and his assistants drag him out of the church with backward step, the leper is assured that he still bears witness for God: “And howsoever thou mayest be apart from the Church and the company of the Sound, yet art thou not apart from the grace of God.” Brueghel’s lepers attend at a distance, but forever, that climb to Calvary on which the entire people accompanies Christ. Hieratic witnesses of evil, they accomplish their salvation in and by their very exclusion: in a strange reversibility that is the opposite of good works and prayer, they are saved by the hand that is not stretched out.

...the lunatic will come to be removed from Civilization using the same mechanisms and for the same reasons.

Leprosy disappeared, the leper vanished, or almost, from memory; these structures remained. Often, in these same places, the formulas of exclusion would be repeated, strangely similar two or three centuries later. Poor vagabonds, criminals, and “deranged minds” would take the part played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded them as well. With an altogether new meaning and in a very different culture, the forms would remain -- essentially that major form of a rigorous division which is social exclusion but spiritual reintegration.

But there is more to the argument than “the insane are the new lepers.” Much more. Because, with a glance back at those quotation marks, we can come to understand that the “lunatics” of the Renaissance are not the same “lunatics” that freely moved about the landscape of the Middle Ages. No, because the very definition of insane will also change to better encompass those who are increasingly at odds with the tenants of the new civilization.

To inhabit the reaches long since abandoned by the lepers, they chose a group that to our eyes is strangely mixed and confused. But what is for us merely an undifferentiated sensibility must have been, for those living in the classical age, a clearly articulated perception. It is this mode of perception which we must investigate in order to discover the form of sensibility to madness in an epoch we are accustomed to define by the privileges of Reason. The act which, by tracing the locus of confinement, conferred upon it its power of segregation and provided a new homeland for madness, though it may be coherent and concerted, is not simple. It organizes into a complex unity a new sensibility to poverty and to the duties of assistance, new forms of reaction to the economic problems of unemployment and idleness, a new ethic of work, and also the dream of a city where moral obligation was joined to civil law, within the authoritarian forms of constraint. Obscurely, these themes are present during the construction of the cities of confinement and their organization. They give a meaning to this ritual, and explain in part the mode in which madness was perceived, and experienced, by the classical age.

That, like a lot of Michel’s writing, is a dense paragraph, but it well summarizes the ideological forces at work as the “new insane” were defined and then confined in practical “cities” of incarceration. No longer just the motley fools and village idiots of their pastoral precedents, these new lunatics would include the poor, the unemployed, the shiftless -- any and all who would be perceived as failing to properly embrace the spirit of the new age and, because of the moral force given to civilization and its gatekeepers, they, like the lepers before them, could be seen as being very properly punished for their sins of accident, ineptitude, and opposition.

If there is, in classical madness, something which refers elsewhere, and to other things, it is no longer because the madman comes from the world of the irrational and bears its stigmata; rather, it is because he crosses the frontiers of bourgeois order of his own accord, and alienates himself outside the sacred limits of its ethic.

In fact, the relation between the practice of confinement and the insistence on work is not defined by economic conditions; far from it. A moral perception sustains and animates it. When the Board of Trade published its report on the poor in which it proposed the means “to render them useful to the public,” it was made quite clear that the origin of poverty was neither scarcity of commodities nor unemployment, but “the weakening of discipline and the relaxation of morals.”

In this, it seems, we see the beginnings of one of the great moral canards of not just this civilization but ours as well: that the poor are not just morally deficient, but that they are poor because of their moral deficiency, and that we, their moral superiors, are morally justified in making them pay for their “sins.”

The edict of 1657, too, was full of moral denunciations and strange threats. “The libertinage of beggars has risen to excess because of an unfortunate tolerance of crimes of all sorts, which attract the curse of God upon the State when they remain unpunished.” This “libertinage” is not the kind that can be defined in relation to the great law of work, but a moral libertinage: “Experience having taught those persons who are employed in charitable occupations that many among them of either sex live together without marriage, that many of their children are unbaptized, and that almost all of them live in ignorance of religion, disdaining the sacraments, and continually practicing all sorts of vice.”

In 1657 in France the power to regulate these moral infractions was given to the “Hôpital Général” -- a new kind of institution that saw to the infirmities of both the body and the soul.

Hence the Hôpital does not have the appearance of a mere refuge for those whom age, infirmity, or sickness keep from working; it will have not only the aspect of a forced labor camp, but also that of a moral institution responsible for punishing, for correcting a certain moral “abeyance” which does not merit the tribunal of men, but cannot be corrected by the severity of penance alone. The Hôpital Général has an ethical status. It is this moral charge which invests its directors, and they are granted every judicial apparatus and means of repression: “They have power of authority, of direction, of administration and punishment”; and to accomplish this task “stakes, irons, prisons, and dungeons” are put at their disposal.

This is all leading somewhere. In Foucault’s estimation, this power to both define the cage and to place people within it is about more than just an expansion of our collective understanding of who is and is not insane. His chapter on this subject is called “The Great Confinement,” referring to the thousands who suddenly found themselves behind bars, but it could just as easily have been called “The Great Conflation,” since in this time two separate forces appeared to have been conflated together in a way not previously seen.

Thus we see inscribed in the institutions of absolute monarchy -- in the very ones that long remained the symbol of its arbitrary power -- the great bourgeois, and soon republican, idea that virtue, too, is an affair of state, that decrees can be published to make it flourish, that an authority can be established to make sure it is respected. The walls of confinement actually enclose the negative of that moral city of which the bourgeois conscience began to dream in the seventeenth century; a moral city for those who sought, from the start, to avoid it, a city where right reigns only by virtue of a force without appeal -- a sort of sovereignty of good, in which intimidation alone prevails and the only recompense of virtue (to this degree its own reward) is to escape punishment. In the shadows of the bourgeois city is born this strange republic of the good which is imposed by force on all those suspected of belonging to evil. This is the underside of the bourgeoisie’s great dream and great preoccupation in the classical age: the laws of the State and the laws of the heart at last identical.

This, indeed, may be Foucault’s second big idea in this short work. What we call madness and who we identify as madmen is ideology, yes, but the effect of that ideology in our age is to conflate the State with the “moral city,” and those who transgress one are, by definition, transgressing the other.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.