[Madness and Civilization] is a work of such distinction that it takes some time to accustom one's self to its sustained intensity and verbal momentum, before one can begin to come to terms with the measure of its truth, as total picture or in terms of its constituent elements.

Foucault's overall plan is to excavate the sane perception of madness (la folie) of the 17th and 18th century in Europe, and France in particular. He lays before us the archaeology, as he puts it, of the broken dialogue between reason and unreason: he reveals by a phenomenological method the history of how the theoretical, experiential and practical connotations of madness (as error, blindness, animal innocence and human culpability, derangement of reason and monstrous freedom) came at the beginning of the 19th century to be imprisoned in the medical theory and practice of pathology.

He shows clearly how, in...