Madness and Democracy

by Gladys Swain, Marcel Gauchet

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 glimm

ISBN: 9780691033723

351 pages

Published: 1999-05-23

Publisher: Princeton University Press

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