FOUCAULT, Michel

Sharp first edition of the French philosopher's first book to appear in English translation: an abridged version of his 1961 doctoral thesis, which tracks the shifting conceptions of madness and reason from the Renaissance to the Modern Age. Informed by Foucault's own struggles with mental health, as well as the time he spent working in a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s, the book is widely seen as an attack on the medicalization of madness as mental illness. Rather than an inevitable humanist victory, Foucault reads that position as a mode of bourgeois social control, one supported by a selective historical narrative. Madness and Civilization seeks to upend that narrative by highlighting crucial discontinuities in the history of madness. Though Foucault himself falls prey to over-selectivity at times in his presentation of facts, his landmark work remains one of the most important texts in the post-structuralist history of ideas. NY: Pantheon Books, 1965. Translated from the French b