Rewriting the history of madness

Michel Foucault has had an extraordinary impact on writers in the human sciences since his first book Madness and Civilization appeared in English. When it appeared in Britain in 1967 it was read as part of the anti-psychiatry movement of the time. Only retrospectively has it been seen as the start of a profoundly original and influential theory on the nature of knowledge and power. Rewriting the History of Madness is a collection of essays centred around a provocative paper by Colin Gordon, which claims that major critics have failed to take note of the depth of Foucault's researches because of their excessive dependence on the English translation of the abridged 1965 edition. The chapters that follow take Gordon's essay as a starting-point, but range widely in drawing out the significance of Foucault's writings for modern thought in a variety of disciplines. With its annotated bibliography of anglophone reactions to Madness and Civilization, this book provides an excellent and lively approach to the literature on Foucault, and is an exciting assessment of the implications of his work in the history of madness and the historiography of the human sciences.