References for Theme: History of Madness
- Foucault, Michel
- History of Madness (2013)
(p.335) As we have seen, the madness of the classical age is linked to the threat of bestiality – a bestiality dominated by predatory and murderous instincts. Returning madness to nature meant abandoning it to the furies of all that was counter-natural, in a reversal that was impossible to control. The cure for madness supposed are turn to all that was immediate, not in relation to desire but to the imagination – a return that removed from the lives of men and their pleasures all that was artificial, unreal and imaginary. The therapeutics of the well-considered plunge into immediacy secretly supposed...
- History of Madness (2013)
(p.53) A general reorganisation took place at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and a fine of five pounds was to be levied on any Justice of the Peace who did not have a house of correction in his jurisdiction. There was an obligation to install looms and set up workshops and factories (for milling, spinning or weaving) to help the upkeep of the institution, and ensure that its inmates had work.
- History of Madness (2013)
(p.54) To our eyes, the population designated to fill the space long left empty by lepers seems a strange amalgam, but what appears to us as a confused sensibility was evidently a clearly articulated perception to the mind of the classical age. And it is this mode of perception that needs to be addressed for any understanding of the sensibility to madness of the period we often term the age of Reason. For that act of drawing a line around a space of confinement, of giving it a special power of segregation and assigning madness a new land, however coherent and...
- History of Madness (2013)
(p.62) Confinement, the signs of which are to be found massively across Europe throughout the seventeenth century, was a ‘police’ matter. In the classical age the word had a meaning that was quite precise, refering to a bundle of measures that made work possible and necessary to all those who could not possibly live without it. Voltaire was soon to formulate the question, but Colbert’s contemparies had voiced it already: ‘What? Now you are setup as a body of people, but you still haven’t found a way to force the rich to make the poor work? Evidently, you have not even ...
- History of Madness (2013)
(p.63) In 1532, the Parliament of Paris had decided to arrest all beggars and force them to work in the city sewers, chained upin pairs. The crisis quickly worsened, as on 23 March 1534, an order was given to expel ‘poor scholars and indigents’ from the city, and the singing of hymns before sacred images in the streets was forbidden. The wars of religion swelled the ranks of these indigents, where peasants thrown off their land met deserters and redundant soldiers, poor students, the sick and the unemployed. When Henri IV besieged Paris, the city had a population of less than...
- History of Madness (2013)
(p.65) In 1622 a pamphlet appeared, the Grevious Groan for the Poor, which was attributed to Dekker, and underlined the peril the country faced, while condemning a widespread negligence:Though the number of the poor do daily increase, all things yet worketh for the worst on their behalf; [for there hath been no collection for them,no, not these seven years, in many parishes in the land, especially in thecountry towns; but] many of these parishes turneth forth their poor, yea,and their lusty labourers that will not work, [or for any misdemeanourwant work,] to beg, filch and steal for their maintenance, so that...
- History of Madness (2013)
(p.66) In the mid-eighteenth century, France once again found itself in crisis. Rouen was home to 12,000 workers who were forced to beg, Tours had just as many, and the workshops and factories in Lyon too began to close. The Comte d’Argenson, who had charge of the department of Paris and the mounted police, gave an order to arrest all beggars in the kingdom. His police set out to do it in the countryside, and the same was done in Paris, where they could not escape, since they were‘harried from all sides’. But outside the times of crisis, confinement took on...
- History of Madness (2013)
(p.68) Why is there such disorder at Bicêtre?’ asked the Revolutionaries of 1789. The answer had already been provided by the seventeenth century: ‘Idleness. And the simple remedy is work.’
- History of Madness (2013)
(p.69) What to modern eyes appears as a clumsy dialectic between prices and production took its real significance from an ethical consciousness of work, where the complexities of economic mechanisms were less important than the assertion of a value.In this first take-off period of industrialisation, labour did not appear to be linked to problems it might cause. On the contrary, it is seen rather as a general remedy, an infallible panacea that solves all forms of poverty. Labour and poverty face each other in a simple opposition, and the domain of the one is in inverse proportion to that of the...
- History of Madness (2013)
(p.71) ‘What then is the disorder of an idle life? Saint Ambrose replies quite unambiguously that it is a second revolt against God.’ In the houses of confinement, work therefore took on an ethical significance: as idleness had become the supreme form of revolt, the idle were forced into work, into the endless leisure of labour without utility or profit. The economic as well as moral demand for confinement was thus the result of a certain experience of work. In the classical world, work and idleness created a dividing line that replaced the exclusion of the lepers in the medieval world....
- History of Madness (2013)
(p.72) From the classical age, and for the first time, madness was seen through an ethical condemnation of idleness in the social immanence now grounded on a community of work. That community of work had an ethical power to exclude, which allowed it to expel, as though to another world, all forms of social uselessness. It was in this other world, surrounded by the sacred powers of labour, that madness was to take on the status still familiar to us.
- History of Madness (2013)
(p.73) It is in such a context that the obligation to work is best understood: it was both an ethical exercise and a moral guarantee. It was a moral ascesis,a punishment, and the sign of a certain disposition of the heart. Prisoners who showed the ability and the desire to work could be set free, not so that they might be useful members of society once again but because they had renewed their allegiance to the great ethical pact that underpinned human existence.
- History of Madness (2013)
(p.77) Confinement was an institutional creation peculiar to the seventeenth century. It immediately took on a scale that bore no relation to the practice of imprisonment in the Middle Ages. As an economic measure and a social precaution, it was an invention. But in the history of unreason, it signals a decisive event: the moment when madness is seen against the social horizon of poverty, the inability to work and the impossibility of integrating into a social group. It was the moment when it started to be classified as one of the problems of the city. The new meanings assigned to...
- History of Madness (2013)
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