Tuesday Book Club: Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

A History That Still Feels Like the Present

This week’s Tuesday Book Club choice is Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault. It’s not a beach read, granted, but it’s one of those books that leaves a permanent mark on how you see the world.

I was required to read it during my social anthropology course, and I’ll admit I didn’t go in expecting it to do more than tick a box on the syllabus. But it turned out to be one of the most quietly seismic books I’ve ever read. It didn’t just change how I thought about madness. It changed how I thought about normality, about institutions, about power and about history itself.

What’s It About?

Foucault traces the shifting definitions and treatments of 'madness' in Western Europe, from the Renaissance through to the modern era. It’s a history of exclusion; of how societies define what’s outside the norm and how they lock it away, literally and figuratively.

But more than a straight history, the book asks deeper questions: Who gets to define sanity? What happens when behaviour that was once accepted becomes criminalised, or medicalised? What is lost when madness is no longer seen as part of human experience, but as something to be eradicated?

Why It Stuck with Me

What really struck me was how blurred the line is between sanity and madness, and how that line has been drawn and redrawn throughout history. The book made me realise that we’re not nearly as different from people in the 16th or 17th centuries as we might like to believe. The trappings have changed, yes, but the urge to exclude, label and manage “difference” is still with us.

And now, in the internet age, when norms of behaviour and interaction are being questioned and upended every day, Foucault’s work feels more relevant than ever. Who’s considered rational or irrational online? Whose voices are amplified, and whose are silenced? The old dynamics haven’t disappeared; they’ve just gone digital.

Let’s Talk About It

Have you read Madness and Civilization, or any of Foucault’s other works? Did they challenge the way you think about history, health, power, or selfhood? Do you find echoes of his ideas in today’s world?

Join the conversation with #TuesdayBookClub and #Foucault on X (formerly Twitter) and Bluesky. We’d love to hear your thoughts, whether you’ve tackled the book recently, studied it years ago or are wondering whether now might be the right time to dip in.