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"I did not wish to write a book on sexual behavior," says Foucault. "What I wanted to know was what questions people posed on sexuality, and why. Why, for example, did questions about sex play a larger and larger role in the Christian practice of confession in the 16th and 17th centuries?" After restudying Greek and Latin texts, Foucault says he shifted "the center of gravity" in his newest book to include more classical material on a Foucaultian range of questions: What advice did the Greeks give to newlyweds? What diets did their doctors prescribe? Did they think men or women got more enjoyment from love?
As the son of a physician in provincial Poitiers, Foucault turned to the study of psychology, and disliked it, particularly his internship at Ste. Anne mental hospital in Paris. "I felt very close to and not very different from the inmates," he says. "I was also uneasy about the profession of medicine. It was there that the question was planted: What is medical power? What is the authority that permits it?" After teaching psychopathology in Paris, and then French at Sweden's University of Uppsala, the restless young Foucault held official positions in Warsaw and Hamburg. Out of his wanderings, internal and external, came Madness and Civilization, which begins with a poetic evocation of the medieval ships of fools—those wandering hulks that really did bear captive cargoes of madmen away from their own communities.
Foucault had some specific historical questions to ask: Why were the various hostels and shelters of Paris consolidated in 1656 into one general hospital? Why were similar institutions soon built in all provincial cities? And why were they filled not only with the chronically ill but with both the insane and the unemployed?
Because, Foucault argued, the dawning Age of Reason was also an age of classification, a time of new differentiations between the normal and the abnormal, and thus of radical new forms of social regulation. Instead of regarding the insane as possessors of a special kind of knowledge, as the Middle Ages did, the Age of Reason locked them up and silenced them. Today Joan of Arc would be treated with Thorazine. Yet Foucault not only insisted that the changing definitions of insanity are arbitrary, but that they also define sanity and, indeed, reason itself. And those definitions also change.
Many modern historians assume that history flows glacially in a certain direction, and that it is their function to chart that flow, toward liberty, or capitalism, or the national state. Foucault claims, by contrast, that there are sharp breaks—"discontinuities," he calls them—separating one historical period from another. At each such break, the new age unconsciously creates a new intellectual framework for its view of the world.
Foucault calls this framework an episteme, from the Greek word for science or knowledge. It represents a radically different sense of whether a statement is true, even of what life itself is.