Madness and Enlightenment. - Review - book reviews

Public Interest, Wntr, 2000 by Brian C. Anderson

So what does this dawning era of humbled modernity, unveiled as a negative image by the asylum, look like? It distrusts any utopian efforts to solve the political problem, though it believes the general democratic drift of the modern world to be just. It is sharply aware of the limits of what the state or any centralized authority can do. It recognizes the deep and impenetrable mystery of the human soul. It has a sense of tragedy. We can see it, I believe, in the abandonment of the most vaulting dreams to recreate the human world; we can see it in the reorganization of businesses away from top-down, heavily bureaucratic management toward more flexible, decentralized practices; and we can see it, too, in our confused, groping steps toward a new approach to the mentally ill that would neither recreate the big asylum nor leave, as did deinstitutionalization, the insane to fend for themselves.

Madness and Democracy, translated with clarity by Catherine Porter, is not without difficulties. It is gnomic in expression and, like Foucault's Madness and Civilization, concentrates too extensively on French history (a useful complement to Gauchet and Swain is Klaus Dorner's Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry, which draws on German as well as French and English experiences). More troubling, the authors' periodization of history is too rigidly schematic and wrongly downplays the role of actual historical actors in favor of abstract anthropological forces inexorably shifting behind the backs of men. But Gauchet and Swain's Madness and Democracy is impressive: a book of grand aspiration that illuminates crucial aspects of our humbled modern condition,

( .) Princeton University Press. 323 pp. $29.95.