Book Review: Foucault, History of Madness

A review of the long awaited Foucault’s History of Madness

That Histoire de la Folie has at last been translated in full, in the year of what would have been Foucault’s 80th birthday, is, of course, much to be welcomed. So as to duly celebrate the occasion, we can perhaps leave aside the question of why it has taken so long, how far through the obstruction or negligence of publishers and heirs, how far through the indifference of English-language historians and commentators long content to dismiss or marginalise a work they had never found it necessary to read in full. The English historian Roy Porter, for one, pronounced, towards the end of his own life, that Foucault had been the greatest of historians of psychiatry — but only, it has to be said, after he had previously indulged at length in cursory caricature of Foucault’s work.

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