When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world.This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition.History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined?Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud.The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.

当它于1961年在法国首次出版时，书名是Folie et Déraison。当该书于1961年在法国首次出版时，名为 "Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique"，很少有人听说过一个名叫米歇尔-福柯的34岁的哲学家。当1967年以《疯狂与文明》为题的英文节选版出版时，米歇尔-福柯已经震撼了整个知识界。本译本是第一版完整的法文第一版和第二版，包括所有的序言和附录，其中一些是现有法文版中没有的。《疯狂史》始于中世纪，生动地描述了对麻风病人的排斥和禁锢。福柯问道，为什么在中世纪末麻风病院被清空时，它们会变成禁锢疯子的地方？为什么在1656年的几个月内，巴黎每一百个人中就有一个被禁闭？从笛卡尔和早期启蒙思想到巴黎总医院的建立以及早期精神病学家菲利普-皮内尔和塞缪尔-图克的工作，福柯始终关注的不仅是对疯狂的科学和医学分析，而且还有附着在疯子身上的哲学和文化价值。他还敦促我们认识到疯狂所代表的创造性和解放的力量，出色地引用了戈雅、尼采、梵高和阿尔托的例子。《疯狂的历史》是一部鼓舞人心的经典作品，它挑战我们理解疯狂、理性和权力以及塑造它们的力量。