Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (French: Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique, 1961) is an examination by Michel Foucault of the evolution of the meaning of madness in the cultures and laws, politics, philosophy, and medicine of Europe—from the Middle Ages until the end of the 18th century—and a critique of the idea of history and of the historical method. Although he uses the language of phenomenology to describe the influence of social structures in the history of the Othering of insane people from society, Madness and Civilization is Foucault's philosophic progress from phenomenology toward something like structuralism (a label Foucault himself always adamantly rejected). Background Philosopher Michel Foucault developed Madness and Civilization from his earlier works in the field of psychology, his personal psychological difficulties, and his professional experiences working in a mental hospital. He wrote the book between 1955–1959, when he worked cultural-diplomatic and educational posts in Poland and Germany, as well as in Sweden as director of a French cultural centre at the University of Uppsala. Summary In Madness and Civilization, Foucault traces the cultural evolution of the concept of insanity (madness) in three phases: the Renaissance; the Classical Age; and the Modern era Renaissance In the Renaissance, art portrayed insane people as possessing wisdom (knowledge of the limits of the world), whilst literature portrayed the insane as people who reveal the distinction between what men are and what men pretend to be. Renaissance art and literature further depicted insane people as intellectually engaged with reasonable people, because their madness represented the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy. Yet Renaissance intellectualism began to develop an objective way of thinking about and describing reason and unreason, compared with the subjective descriptions of madness from the Middle Ages. Neo Classical Age At the dawn of the Age of Reason in the 17th century, there occurred "the Great Confinement" of insane people in the countries of Europe; the initial management of insane people was to segregate them to the margins of society, and then to physically separate them from society by confinement, with other anti-social people (prostitutes, vagrants, blasphemers, et al.) into new institutions, such as the General Hospital of Paris. Christian European society perceived such anti-social people as being in moral error, for having freely chosen lives of prostitution, vagrancy, blasphemy, unreason, etc. To revert such moral errors, society's