Madness and democracy
Subtitle: the modern psychiatric universe
By: Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain ; translated by Catherine Porter,  with a foreword by Jerrold Seigel.
Contributors: Swain, Gladys, 1945-
Series: New French thought
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Princeton, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 323
Subjects: Psychiatric hospital care.; Power (Social sciences); Mental illness -- Social aspects.; Mental Disorders -- therapy.; Hospitals, Psychiatric.; Power (Psychology); Psychotherapy -- methods.
Description: "How the insane asylum became a laboratory of democracy is revealed in this provocative look at the treatment of the mentally ill in nineteenth-century France. Political thinkers reasoned that if government was to rest in the hands of individuals, then measures should be taken to understand the deepest reaches of the self, including the state of madness.

Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain maintain that the asylum originally embodied the revolutionary hope of curing all the insane by saving the glimmer of sanity left in them. Their analysis of why this utopian vision failed ultimately constitutes both a powerful argument for liberalism and a direct challenge to Michel Foucault's indictment of liberal institutions."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-315) and index.