Madness And Civilization Foucault Summary

Michel Foucault traces the notion of progress through the period of the Enlightenment in his work What is Enlightenment, taking it to be the period that we most commonly and sincerely identify, to use Kant’s phrase, as the period of “man’s emergence from his self incurred immaturity”[1]. It is through Kant’s essay of the same title that Foucault analyses the processes that Kant recognized as necessary to this ‘emergence’- a process involving “modification of the pre-existing relation linking will, authority, and the use of reason”[2] that came upon through assuming the motto of “dare to know”[1]. But Foucault slices through the simple language of Kant’s essay to reveal the notorious ambiguities that lie hidden beneath simple exhortations, revealing through questioning the use of simple phrases in the text of Kant’s essay like ‘mankind’ or ‘public and private use of reason’ to reveal an inherent contradiction in

After discussing in length how the economic effects of confinement annulled themselves over time, he reveals what he believes to be the true goal of this incarceration, to “this proximity which seemed to assign the same homeland to the poor, to the unemployed, to prisoners, and to the insane”[3]. And that is because, according to classical interpretation- “as for that power….of abolishing poverty, labour……possessed it not so much by its productive capacity as by a certain force of moral enchantment”[3]. And so the prisoner “had the right to be fed, but he must accept the physical and moral constraint of confinement”[3]. Thus, the three Critiques by Kant provide the conditions for the ‘legitimate use of reason’, but for the period of the Enlightenment. Each historical epoch can and will have its own rules of