Madness and Democracy written by Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, is positioned, from the outset, in dialogue with Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. An understanding the work of Gauchet and Swain and the accomplishments of book requires a basic familiarity with the intellectual context. Which is to say in order to fully appreciate Madness and Democracy one must be familiar with Madness and Civilization.

Following Madness and Civilization, Madness and Democracy takes a multidisciplinary approach, mobilizing a political, cultural, historical, philosophical, anthropological, psychological, phenomenology. The text begins in specific historical phenomenon and moves from the exigencies of the particular to develop a broad understanding of humanity in general. For example, interpretations of specific treatments used to cure the insane in the early ninetieth century become fodder for a highly abstract understanding of the logic of power, democracy and subjectivity. The text is highly philosophical and would be quite opaque to a reader not already versed in the language of the field.

The central thesis of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization is that the emergence, creation or birth of the modern and rational subject must be understood in terms of a necessarily confined and disciplined Other, the madman. Foucault sees the insane asylums as forms of social control that function to cordon off the Other who is understood in terms of difference.

Gauchet and Swain take on a like project, and consider the relationship between the political and the individual through the figure of insanity. However their understanding of this relationship differs significantly from that of Foucault. Where Foucault understands forms of social control, such as the insane asylum, as engendering the creation of the modern subject, Gauchet and Swain regard such forms of social control as responsible for the emergence of the modern democratic citizen. Thus while Foucault describes a process of individuation whereby the subject is differentiated from the collective, Gauchet and Swain describe a more complex process which is simultaneously one of differentiation and one of integration. The citizen is from the outset both individual and part of the collective.

Gauchet and Swain focus their attention on the work of the French alienists Philippe Pinel and Jean-Etienne Esquirol. Both Pinel and Esquirol believed that insanity originated in the passions of the soul and did not fully or irremediably affect the patient’s reason. They further believed that in order to cure insanity, the insane must isolated from society, thus the term alienist. Emphasizing the humanitarian and optimistic hope for and belief in a cure espoused by Pinel and Esquirol, Gauchet and Swain interpret the modern relationship to the insane as not wholly characterized by difference but as a relationship to an Other who bears a fundamental similarity. The modern sane/insane doctor/patient relationship, according to Gauchet and Swain must be understood both in terms of difference, the madman is not like me, and in terms of similarities, the madman is the same as me (and thus curable).

Where Foucault identified forms of social control such as the insane asylum as manifestations of deep rooted forces of Western civilization, Gauchet and Swain emphasizing the ultimate failure of the asylums recognize totalitarian forces of control not as originary but rather as insidious corruptions of humanitarian democratic ideals. Gauchet and Swain present the asylums and the modern relationship to the insane as a complex and paradoxical situation.

Acknowledging the duplicity of the modern relationship to the insane, referring to both the optimistic humanitarian ideals that founded the asylums and to the totalitarian impulses that undermined the humanitarian project, Madness and Democracy, is consistently thoughtful and at no point polemic. While a difficult read, the book presents and negotiates a nuanced and complex understanding of the modern political relationship to the insane.

Kathryn Walker is a doctoral student in York University’s Social and Political Thought program. Her work is focused on the relationship between moods, rationality and politics. Kathryn is also part of the j_spot editorial collective.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychotherapy