Description
Foucault’s first major book asks how Europe’s idea of madness changed between the late Middle Ages and the mid-nineteenth century, and why the answer to that question kept determining who got confined and who didn’t. He writes in a dense, associative style that pulls in painting and religious history alongside case histories, less interested in diagnosing insanity than in tracing how power decides what counts as reason in the first place. Published in 1961, it laid down the approach — power operating through institutions rather than through force alone — that Foucault would spend the rest of his career developing.
