What do you think?
Rate this book
The Regulation of Madness: The Origins of Incarceration in France
Regulation Of The Origins Of Incarceration In France by Castel, Robert
Hardcover
First published August 11, 1988
26 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 19, 2021
It's become increasingly apparent that Foucault's scholarship in History of Madness contains some critical gaps, leaps, and claims with dubious foundations. For those of us still inspired by his analysis of the conditions of possibility of the psychiatric matrix, Castel is a godsend. This is the second book of his I've read after The Psychiatric Society (with Francois Castel and Anne Lovell), and there is simply no one else from his time or after writing with the same level of attention to detail or following arguments and developments so carefully. It's amazing and unfortunate that his work has not received the same amount of attention as someone like Nicolas Rose, who I see as a sort of spiritual successor to his and Foucault's project in the history of psy-disciplines.
To be clear, The Regulation of Madness is clearly not written for a lay public; it's very much an intervention that will mostly appeal to those invested in teasing out the contradictory web of discourses, laws, and practices that constitute psychiatry. It will doubtless bore and confuse someone with only a general knowledge of the field. For those invested in these histories, though, Castel's work is indispensable and dazzling. This is remarkable to me, because I do not usually find that sociology has the tools for a critical historical method; or, put differently, its analysis ends up kneecapped by the descriptive concepts it employs. Not so with Castel, who is a different sort of "sociologist," or maybe not really one at all. Though he only mentions Marx once, he adopts the principle that social concepts are inextricably tied to an political economic matrix that conditions their possibility.
The book basically concerns the origins of psychiatry in France, sometimes considered the world historical origins of the field in general. Among his primary concerns is the question: with the rise of liberal contract society and the growth of capitalism, what does that society do with those who are not "responsible" to themselves, to the law, etc? The simple answer is: it retains a royal residue that defines such people as "wards" in need of guardians. But things are not so simple. The admittance of this residue in the contract society required the productions of a massive infrastructure and a "matrix" of discourses and services that mutually reinforced and justified one-another. The paradoxes and consequences of that rollout form the bulk of the book. And Castel is not content to tell this story in broad strokes. No, instead, he painstakingly reconstructs the debates, the technical innovations, and the economic realities that prioritized some decisions over others. This is where the book will likely bore the average reader, but I would say it's in these details that the most exciting interventions of the book lie, for the antinomies he's describing here have not vanished. For instance, his insistence on the primacy of the moral justification (over the secondary economic one) for institutional peonage appears to be a fairly marginal argument (after all, who cares what the justification is?) But this moral vocabulary still colors the present-day debates about sheltered workshops and work day-centers. Understanding the historical dimensions of this debate and the primacy of work as moral rectitude allow one to better grasp the ideology and contradictions of the ideology of peonage and disabled labor today.
Whenever I read Castel, I experience that sort of panic one gets when someone carefully dissects and possibly eviscerates commonplaces you hold to be true (this was especially so in The Psychiatric Society) , revealing dimensions and effects that clearly exceed carefully crafted existential boundaries. His pronouncement on the exemplary function of the La Borde clinic in France in the 1970s as a "pilot project" serving as a smokescreen for the general misery of secteur psychiatry had to hurt some of his friends like Guattari, and would probably wound those who place great stock in the pilot projects of today, but Castel does not shirk from inconvenient questions that need to be grappled with by the critics of institutional psychiatry. And nor does he present such critiques with a vague radical slogan like "all delusion is political protest" (Cooper), which would de facto make any and all treatment a matter of suppressing revolt. Platitudes have no place in this analytic, which can be frustrating, of course, because it places the onus on us, the contemporary readers, to think with the contradictions he exposes.
To be clear, The Regulation of Madness is clearly not written for a lay public; it's very much an intervention that will mostly appeal to those invested in teasing out the contradictory web of discourses, laws, and practices that constitute psychiatry. It will doubtless bore and confuse someone with only a general knowledge of the field. For those invested in these histories, though, Castel's work is indispensable and dazzling. This is remarkable to me, because I do not usually find that sociology has the tools for a critical historical method; or, put differently, its analysis ends up kneecapped by the descriptive concepts it employs. Not so with Castel, who is a different sort of "sociologist," or maybe not really one at all. Though he only mentions Marx once, he adopts the principle that social concepts are inextricably tied to an political economic matrix that conditions their possibility.
The book basically concerns the origins of psychiatry in France, sometimes considered the world historical origins of the field in general. Among his primary concerns is the question: with the rise of liberal contract society and the growth of capitalism, what does that society do with those who are not "responsible" to themselves, to the law, etc? The simple answer is: it retains a royal residue that defines such people as "wards" in need of guardians. But things are not so simple. The admittance of this residue in the contract society required the productions of a massive infrastructure and a "matrix" of discourses and services that mutually reinforced and justified one-another. The paradoxes and consequences of that rollout form the bulk of the book. And Castel is not content to tell this story in broad strokes. No, instead, he painstakingly reconstructs the debates, the technical innovations, and the economic realities that prioritized some decisions over others. This is where the book will likely bore the average reader, but I would say it's in these details that the most exciting interventions of the book lie, for the antinomies he's describing here have not vanished. For instance, his insistence on the primacy of the moral justification (over the secondary economic one) for institutional peonage appears to be a fairly marginal argument (after all, who cares what the justification is?) But this moral vocabulary still colors the present-day debates about sheltered workshops and work day-centers. Understanding the historical dimensions of this debate and the primacy of work as moral rectitude allow one to better grasp the ideology and contradictions of the ideology of peonage and disabled labor today.
Whenever I read Castel, I experience that sort of panic one gets when someone carefully dissects and possibly eviscerates commonplaces you hold to be true (this was especially so in The Psychiatric Society) , revealing dimensions and effects that clearly exceed carefully crafted existential boundaries. His pronouncement on the exemplary function of the La Borde clinic in France in the 1970s as a "pilot project" serving as a smokescreen for the general misery of secteur psychiatry had to hurt some of his friends like Guattari, and would probably wound those who place great stock in the pilot projects of today, but Castel does not shirk from inconvenient questions that need to be grappled with by the critics of institutional psychiatry. And nor does he present such critiques with a vague radical slogan like "all delusion is political protest" (Cooper), which would de facto make any and all treatment a matter of suppressing revolt. Platitudes have no place in this analytic, which can be frustrating, of course, because it places the onus on us, the contemporary readers, to think with the contradictions he exposes.
Displaying 1 of 1 review