Michael Foucault's The History Of Madness

Michael Foucault’s work, a renowned French philosopher, has greatly influenced the study of politics. He began his career as a Marxist and went on to research about sociologically and politically valuable data. In 1961, for his doctoral thesis, Foucault wrote his first major work called the “The History of Madness.” In this book, he gives a historical account of a constitution (as he calls it) of experiences of madness ranging from the 15th to the 19th century in Europe. It involves studying effects of differences in treatments given to mad people so as understand the phenomenon of madness. This book illustrates his thoughts and research on the relations between reason and power, institutions and power and authority and power (Hacking, 2004).
Following his writings in “The History of Madness” Foucault began to almost exclusively focus all his attention on the political concern (Foucault, 1988). At first, this was evidently indicated in the introduction of his next book called the “The Birth of the Clinic”. This book mainly develops “The History of Madness” both theoretically and chronologically. It does so by investigating the origin of institutional medicine from the end of the 18th century. The introduction of this book is simply a proposal of a new method that will not only attend to the language that is spoken but to the institutional framework (Miller, 2000). However, it is the next book that he wrote, “The Order of Things” (1966) that fulfilled this intention. This book however only proves to be
He suggests an explanation of madness and reason and not on the basis of exclusion but purification. Exclusion aims to eliminate by separating whereas purification aims to preserve by separating (Foucault, 1994). Exclusion is for war whereas purification is for modernity which requires modern clinical medicine to separate the healthy from the ill and at the same time preserving the ill as the unusual and using them as a tool that when used in comparison, normal health is