REVISING FOUCAULTS

MODEL OF MODERNITY AND

EXCLUSION: GAUCHET AND
SWAIN ON MADNESS AND
DEMOCRACY
Wim Weymans

ABSTRACT This article reveals how Marcel Gauchet and his late wife Gladys
Swain revise Foucaults history of madness and modernity by arguing that the
history of modern civilization represents a recognition of the mad, rather than
their exclusion. Turning to the French Revolution, the article then examines
the relationship between disciplinary practices and a wider democratic context.
It shows that while Foucault reduces democratic societies to proto totalitarian
practices, Gauchet and Swain give a broader and more historically complex
account of asylums and the democratic context in which they emerge. This allows
them to see resistance in the asylum and in democratic societies in general: while
Foucault thought the panoptic asylum revealed modernitys ultimate success,
for Gauchet and Swain it proved only its failure. However, the article ends by
arguing that, despite all their differences, Gauchet and Swains critique of contemporary societies remains in some respects indebted to Foucault.
KEYWORDS

exclusion Foucault Gauchet inclusion madness

INTRODUCTION
Even more than 45 years after its first publication, Foucaults history of
madness remains a controversial work, particularly amongst historians. Yet
most historians criticize Foucaults lack of sources and factual inaccuracies
(e.g. Porter, 2004: 17, 19; Scull, 2007), and very few fundamentally challenge
his underlying theory of madness and modernity. This article seeks to fill
Thesis Eleven, Number 98, August 2009: 3351
SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)
Copyright 2009 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd
DOI: 10.1177/0725513609105482

34

Thesis Eleven (Number 98 2009)

that lacuna by examining an alternative theory of madness and modernity that

explicitly challenges Foucault. In Madness and Democracy (1980) (Gauchet
and Swain, 1999), Marcel Gauchet (b. 1946) and his late wife Gladys Swain
(194593) refute Foucaults reading of modernity as he developed it in works
such as Madness and Civilization (1961) (Foucault, 1976, 2001, 2006) or the
famous Discipline and Punish (1975) (Foucault, 1975, 1979). Although Gauchet
and Swains critique itself is already more than 25 years old, it has thus far
hardly been acknowledged, even in France (notable exceptions are Ferry and
Renaut, 1988: 156ff; Furet, 1999; Seigel, 1999). This is regrettable, as Gauchet
in particular tries to offer an account of modernity that can be read as not
just a critique of Foucault but also as a more convincing alternative.
Gauchets main argument against Foucault is, as we shall see, that
modernity does not exclude mad and other strange people from humanity,
but instead radically includes them. Moreover, Gauchet disagrees with
Foucaults underlying suggestion that democratic societies can be reduced to
a disciplinary project. Yet I will also show that even when rejecting Foucaults
theory of modernity, Gauchet and Swain still focus on typically Foucauldian
topics such as institutions, subjectivity, power and experience, and they do
so by developing the same broad and daunting theses that made Foucault
famous (Furet, 1999: 568). This explains why Gauchets work is seen by many
as an alternative to Foucaults work, not only because of its theoretical depth
but also because of its wide historical scope. It comes as little surprise, then,
that Gauchet has now become one of Frances most influential public intellectuals, which is ironically a position Foucault once occupied. However,
towards the end of this essay I will also argue that Gauchets critique of
modernity, for all its merits, comes perhaps a bit too close to Foucault.
CONFLICTING THEORIES ABOUT MODERNITY AND INCLUSION
Although Foucault and his younger critics write a history of madness
that is more than 500 pages long, their scope is radically different. The length
is unsurprising in Foucaults case, as he gives an account of the history of
madness from the Middle Ages until the 19th century. Gauchet and Swain,
by contrast, write a form of microhistory in which they deal with only the
birth of the asylum for the mentally ill at the beginning of the 19th century.
Even though the form of their work suggests the opposite, Gauchet and Swain
are, very much like Foucault, writing a history of modern Western civilization.
Unlike many historians before them, Gauchet and Swain have, like Foucault,
no problem with the idea of a grand speculative history as such. This is
testified to by Gauchets Disenchantment of the World (1985) in which he
sketches a history that with regard to its scope goes far beyond the most
daring thesis Foucault ever made (see, for instance, Gauchet, 1985: xxii), as
he gives an account of history from primitive societies until the present. This
grand narrative is not the only similarity with Foucaults approach. Just as

Weymans: Gauchet and Swain on Madness and Democracy

35

Foucault combined an analysis of philosophical texts with the history of

concrete institutions or practices, so Gauchet and Swain drew parallels between concrete practices of the human spirit (as announced in the French
title of their book) and the philosophical ideas of Descartes and Hegel
(Gauchet et al., 1983: 82).
Gauchet and Swain even follow the same chronological hiatuses Foucault
had proposed. The first phase in both accounts of madness and modernity
covers the mediaeval and Renaissance periods, when mad people lived at
large in society. The second period starts with the great confinement (le
grand renfermement) of 1656 when, at the beginning of the modern epoch,
the mad were forcibly removed from society and locked up. This period is
called the classical age (lge classique). It ends with the beginning of the
third and last period, which starts with the liberation of the mad from their
chains by Pinel, just after the French Revolution (Foucault, 2001: xiv). Most
importantly, Foucault and his younger critics start from the same question,
namely, to what extent modern Western societies are actually able to include
strange and abnormal people, like the mad, as part of humanity. However,
their respective answers to this question are radically different.
Foucaults revisionist answer is well known. He starts with a contrast
between modern societies from the great confinement onwards and their
pre-modern variants in the Renaissance period. For Foucault, modern societies do not, as they usually claim, include the mad and other strangers in
humanity, but rather radically exclude them, by locking them up in institutions, such as mental asylums. He contrasts this with the pre-modern mediaeval and Renaissance periods in which the mad were in his view included
as part of humanity despite their strangeness. They were allowed to live
and move freely in society, although they questioned and disrupted social
order. Back then, society still communicated with the mad, and included and
respected the uncanny, strange and sacred values they represented. In modern
society, by contrast, the wild and untamed strangeness of the mad was no
longer tolerated, but rather excluded in what would become the normalization of everything abnormal. Instead of listening to the madmans uncanny
ideas, people imposed reason on them. A silence now replaced communication with the mad (see for all this mainly Foucault, 1976: 15109).
By contrast, Gauchet and Swain offer a very different answer to the
question of inclusion. For them, strange people were only seen as human
and included in humanity with the start of modernity, not before it. The premodern period was, then, not one of inclusion, as Foucault believed, but
rather one of the exclusion of strange people. Within the mediaeval system,
people did not perceive each other as similar and part of humanity, as
Foucault argued, but rather as naturally different. Hence the natural separation between master and servant, man and woman, normal and mad people.
From the moment that, with the dawn of modernity, the modern logic of
inclusiveness and equality took over from the logic of natural exclusion,

36

Thesis Eleven (Number 98 2009)

people no longer perceived each other as naturally different. Instead, they

could identify themselves with people they used to see as inhuman, even
with the mad. Society was then no longer organized around the principle
of natural exclusion, but rather by the idea that what used to be strange and
utterly different was in fact similar and equal (Gauchet, 1980: 93ff; 2007: v).
These radically different answers can be explained by their different
conceptual background. Foucault is clearly inspired by a Heideggerian and
Nietzschean view in which modernity means the exclusion of everything
strange and uncontrollable in the name of a reason and science which
imposes its norms on those who do not fit in (Ferry and Renaut, 1988: 12932,
13843). By contrast, Gauchet and Swain are inspired by De Tocquevilles
idea of the equality of conditions (galit des conditions) in which Western
civilization is seen not as a process of the exclusion of strange people from
humanity, but rather of the expansion of humanity in the name of formal
equality (Gauchet, 1980: 43120; Gauchet et al., 1983: 80).
One could also argue, on a deeper level, that Foucault and Gauchet
start from a different vision about the inclusion of strange and abnormal
groups of people. Foucault suggests that we can include strange or sacred
beings into humanity without reducing their strangeness to common norms.
Inclusion of the mad through communication then goes together with respect
for their strangeness. The problem with reason is exactly that it reduces this
absolute otherness to something relative to reason and societal norms. For
Gauchet and Swain, one cannot have it both ways. In their view, there is
either sacred strangeness that is by definition not part of humanity, or else
there is strangeness that is seen as part of humanity but which is therefore
no longer sacred, strange or transcendent. The only other that can be included
is an alter ego, an other that is like me.
REVISING THE HISTORY OF MADNESS
With this different underlying theory of modernity in mind, we can
now see how this makes Gauchet and Swain interpret the history of madness
differently. Let us begin with the first two periods: the one before and the
one after the great confinement. For Foucault, during the mediaeval and
Renaissance periods madness was still respected as such, since the night of
madness was not yet invaded by the light of reason (Foucault, 1994a: 165;
1976: 52; 2001: 36, 64). From the fact that they were then still permitted to
physically live within society, Foucault inferred that mad people were included
(Foucault, 1994b: 133). Moreover, people then still communicated with the
mad. Foucault speaks about a certain tolerance towards mad people who
were accepted for what they were (Foucault, 1994b: 134), and therefore not
excluded from society. He links the mediaeval and Renaissance experience
with the powers that the mad could exert in society: people were deeply
afraid of these dangerous and fascinating creatures, who confronted mankind

Weymans: Gauchet and Swain on Madness and Democracy

37

with its own uncanny desires, violence, death and nothingness. The mad
exerted a social power as representatives of a transcendent, menacing order
(Foucault, 1976: 28ff, 302, 36ff., 45, 5960, 63, 889, 201). On all sides,
madness fascinates man (Foucault, 2001: 23). Foucault termed this fascinating side of madness that haunted society as tragic and argued that it could
be found in particular in the works of art by Bosch, Shakespeare or Cervantes
(Foucault, 1976: 39ff, 43, 5960). It was precisely this danger of absolute
or tragic madness that would be reduced and controlled during the modern
period (Foucault, 1976: 52, 556).
For Gauchet and Swain, by contrast, the mad could then still live in
relative proximity with normal people not because they were included as
part of humanity, but rather because they were radically excluded from it.
Mad people were seen as more than human (God-like creatures) or inferior
to humans (like wild animals). In either case they were regarded as absolutely
different from the rest of humanity and hence excluded from humankind
(Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 489ff). The mad or the feast of the fools were
tolerated because they had a special function within a religious universe:
they served as a kind of foil (repoussoir) to legitimize existing order (Gauchet,
2007: xvixvii; Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 490). The apparent physical proximity of the mad and the normal was thus facilitated by the fact that they had
nothing in common, and the former were therefore not seen as a threat.1 That
was also why, according to Gauchet and Swain, the mad in the mediaeval
and Renaissance period were still exposed to the public gaze. It was only
with the dawn of modernity that they were slowly protected from this public
spectacle through confinement in institutions (Gauchet and Swain, 1980:
4912, 495; Foucault, 2001: 68ff).
This brings us to the great confinement of 1656, in which the mad were
confined and chained, because, according to Foucault, their mental condition
was henceforth seen in terms of reason, which excluded them, since it sought
to tame the other of reason in order to define and reassure itself (Foucault,
1976: 48, 52, 56). The uncanny, violent, fascinating or tragic side of madness
was now naturalized, mastered, disarmed or exorcised (Foucault, 1976: 43,
55, 70, 89). As Foucault writes: Madness was thus torn from that imaginary
freedom which still allowed it to flourish on the Renaissance horizon
(Foucault, 2001: 64). He further explains: In the Renaissance, madness was
present everywhere and mingled with every experience by its images or its
dangers. During the classical period, madness was shown, but on the other
side of bars (Foucault, 2001: 70). He concludes: Confinement did seek to
suppress madness, to eliminate from the social order a figure which did not
find its place within it (Foucault, 2001: 115). Madness eventually became
unreason, the straightforward negation of reason (Foucault, 1976: 23740;
2001: 834, 1068, 11516). The mad were now seen as inhuman animals that
must be excluded from human relationships (Foucault, 1976: 5957): Those
chained to the cell walls were no longer men whose minds had wandered,

38

Thesis Eleven (Number 98 2009)

but beasts (Foucault, 2001: 72). This heralded the birth of our modern society,
and with it an ever-expanding process of exclusion of those who did not fit
in (Foucault, 1976: 237ff; 1994b: 135).
Again, Gauchet and Swain see things differently. After the CounterReformation the symbolic system that had given the fool his allegedly natural
place in society collapsed. The mad indeed became naturalized and lost their
sacred meaning (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 493ff, 387ff). Yet, if mad people
came to be confined in the middle of the 17th century, this was not because
reason . . . no longer felt any relation to it and . . . would not compromise
itself by too close a resemblance to madness, as Foucault thought (2001: 70),
but rather because the mad were seen as people who in all too many ways
resembled the rest of us. This resemblance was felt as a threat, hence their
exclusion from society in order to protect them from society and vice versa.
This same exclusion was, however, the consequence of a primordial inclusion. The modern exclusion presupposed that the mad were seen as human
first, which, according to Gauchet and Swain, had not been the case during
the mediaeval period (Gauchet et al., 1983: 78; Gauchet, 2007: xviixix). In
short, for Gauchet and Swain, pre-modern societies can allow for a factual
proximity towards the mad because they see the mad as different in principle. Conversely, modern societies de facto removed the madman from
society precisely because he was seen as de jure similar (Ferry and Renaut,
1988: 159; Gauchet, 2007: xvxvi, xix).
According to Gauchet and Swain, Foucaults reading of the mediaeval
and Renaissance periods is distorted by his present-day experience. Ironically,
Foucault, and especially his more radical followers, can only defend the mad
and sympathize with them because they can see some basic similarity between themselves and the mad. If they were to have lived in the Middle
Ages they would not have been able to see anything human in madness at
all, because within the mediaeval and Renaissance symbolic regimes no such
resemblance was possible. Viewed according to present-day categories, the
mediaeval and Renaissance systems seem inclusive, but that judgment can
only be made retrospectively, thanks to a modern gaze (Gauchet, 1994a: xxvii,
xxxvxxxvi; 2007: viii; Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 4978; Gauchet et al., 1983:
78). Precisely because people living in pre-modern societies saw the social
order as naturally hierarchical, natural differences between normal people and
their inhuman mad counterparts were not perceived as problematic. We can
perceive these differences as problematic only because we live in a society
in which natural differences can be contested in the name of a principle of
formal equality that includes everyone, regardless of natural differences. Now
that it has become clear that Gauchet and Swain interpret madness and
modernity differently, I will focus on what was, for all these French authors,
the core of modernity: the period that started with the French Revolution
and the birth of the asylum.

Weymans: Gauchet and Swain on Madness and Democracy

39

MADNESS AND DEMOCRACY

In 1793, in the wake of the French Revolution, Philippe Pinel liberated
the mad from their chains and brought them to his own asylum to cure them.
Was this the end of the great confinement and the beginning of a more
humane and scientific treatment of the mad, now retitled the mentally ill,
as medical tradition suggested? As so often with Foucault, he unmasks this
apparently humane and emancipatory act by showing it to be a subtler act
of exclusion or discipline (Foucault, 2001: 206, 2234). For him, Pinel does
not break with the modern Western tradition of exclusion: on the contrary,
he actually reinforces it. The mentally ill are now seen merely as another
social type, rather than something utterly different (Foucault, 1976: 5945, 597,
606). Moreover, they also have to internalize moral ideas and to objectify and
control themselves by acquiring a sense of guilt (Foucault, 1976: 374, 602,
605). The sacred violent world of the madman is now replaced by the rule
of morality through a gigantic moral imprisonment (Foucault, 1976: 612, 623,
632). The Asylum, Foucault tells us, sets itself the task of the homogeneous
rule of morality, its rigorous extension to all those who tend to escape from
it (Foucault, 2001: 258). The mentally ill are now not only imprisoned from
without but also from within (Foucault, 2001: 256ff). They are put in a state
of obedience and blind submission, just like docile animals or children
(Foucault, 1976: 416, 593, 606ff).
Although Gauchet and Swain express doubts about the historical
accuracy of Foucaults research on Pinel,2 their fundamental difference lies
once again in their interpretation of modernity. They see Pinels different
attitude towards the mentally ill as an expression of a new phase in the ongoing inclusion of otherness within Western civilization. Foucaults main claim
was that Enlightenment figures like Pinel actually reinforced confinement
and the madmans inhuman status (Foucault, 2001: 2278). Where Foucault
stressed the continuity between Pinel and the great confinement, Gauchet
and Swain, by contrast, defended the importance of the Pinelian rupture
(rupture pinlienne) (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 312, 426, 432). In what did
this rupture consist? Before Pinel, mad people were regarded as having no
awareness of their predicament. Like animals, they had no capacity for
reason, choice or subjectivity. Yet this total absence of subjectivity was often,
strangely enough, seen as the result of a highly subjective and conscious
choice to paradoxically abolish any free conscious choice. Madness was thus
associated with either the apex of consciousness or its total absence (Gauchet
and Swain, 1980: 303ff, 309ff, 313, 344, 408, 432, 496). This dualist view of
madness lived on into the 19th century. Consider philanthropists like Daquin,
who protected the mad from brutal treatment, not out of any empathy for
them but out of consideration for the onlookers who might be shocked by
this inhuman spectacle. So it comes as no surprise that one did not object
to the exposition of the mad to the public gaze, as this was deemed harmless
for people who had no awareness of their situation (Gauchet and Swain,
1980: 42832, 491).

40

Thesis Eleven (Number 98 2009)

Rather than reinforcing the madmans inhuman status, Pinel and his
student Esquirol radically changed it. For Gauchet and Swain, Pinel does not
reduce madness to medical reason, as Foucault would have it, but he rather
attributes to the mad a human ability to experience.3 The very idea that
the mad do experience something consciously itself co-originates with the
asylum and does not precede it. The asylum and the ongoing discovery of
the humanity of the mad go hand in hand. Even if their relation to themselves and the world is seriously undermined, mad people remain somehow
reasonable subjects who happen to be isolated from the world of others
(Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 211, 330, 33641, 496). Their isolation no longer
means that they are totally locked up in themselves. Instead, they remain
accessible from within because they maintain a basic level of subjectivity
like other human beings (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 69, 85, 330). Madness
is neither reason nor its absence, but the two combined (Gauchet and Swain,
1980: 210, 351, 409). Once it becomes clear that the mad experience themselves as we do ourselves, the idea of curing them becomes conceivable, as
does the idea of their reintegration into society via Pinels penetration of
the human spirit. Moreover, Pinels project does not mean the end of communication with the mad, as Foucault suggested (1976: 6045), but rather
represents an attempt to finally, for the first time in history, develop such a
communication.
At first sight, both Foucault and his critics seem to agree that the asylum
aims to control the internal self of the mentally ill. As Gauchet and Swain
explain, however, this should not simply be regarded as an act of moralistic
mastery of the individual through an anonymous institution. For one, if
doctors entered the human spirit, it was only to liberate this alienated patient
from his or her social isolation and restore his or her subjectivity. Moreover,
they stressed that, initially, the institution did not interfere in the personal
relationship between patient and doctor.
But how do Gauchet and Swain respond to the reproach that Pinels
moral treatment was too moralistic, as Foucault was keen to stress (1976:
613, 623, 632)? For Gauchet and Swain, Pinels and Esquirols moral treatment is far less moralistic than that of their predecessors. Until then, mad
people were seen as individuals who either made morally wrong, sinful
choices (for madness, against God) or as amoral animals with whom one
could not argue (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 312, 344, 408, 4956). Not so
for Pinel and Esquirol. True, their treatment is indeed moral, since they
think the patient is not hurt physically but rather in his moral capacity to
relate to the world and himself. Yet this does not imply moralism, as they
see the mad not as morally responsible for their acts but as victims who
nevertheless remain human (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 34751).
But what about the mastery that doctors acquire by entering the human
spirit? Here too, Gauchet and Swain are cautious. Even if doctors try to awaken
the human part in the mad through masterful methods like isolation or, more

Weymans: Gauchet and Swain on Madness and Democracy

41

frequently, moral shocks, it remains true that these methods are in themselves not sufficient if they are not supported by the patient. Doctors, therefore, ultimately depend on the patient, and consequently have only very
limited power (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 3803, 457, 475ff).4 Pinels project
is thus not the successful continuation of a disciplinary mastery through
reason, but rather a false start. Not only did it cure far fewer patients than
it had promised (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 81ff, 88ff), but it was even incapable of forcing the mad to communicate.
THE ASYLUM AGAINST ITSELF
It is precisely this lack of mastery that made Pinel and Esquirol turn
some years later to the institution of the asylum as a means of treatment.
Doctors resorted to the institution when they realized that restoring communication on an abstract level between doctor and patient was not enough.
If the doctor alone could not gain control of the patients mind, maybe the
asylum could help. Real communication also implied the involvement of
others, and it thus also required resocialization (Gauchet and Swain, 1980:
1734). From then on, it was the institution, not the doctor, which was to
cure the patient (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 94ff, 173, 178, 262, 264f, 267,
27282, 4834). A doctor controlling the institution as a whole replaced direct
contact between patient and doctors.
Yet, despite its noble intentions, this seems akin to the panoptic power
of institutions over individuals, as described by Foucault. In the asylum, he
explains, everything was organized so that the madman . . . must know that
he is watched, judged, and condemned (Foucault, 2001: 267). Long before
he published Discipline and Punish, Foucault had indeed discovered the
masterful gaze and surveillance in the mental asylum, where he saw it as a
force turning the madman into a passive object that eventually had to learn
to even objectify himself (Foucault, 1976: 6036, 61719). The silent nonreciprocal gaze of the asylum now replaced the common language and reciprocity that had been typical of the experience of madness during the
Renaissance (Foucault, 1976: 603, 605, 616). Gauchet and Swain admit that,
at this point in its history, the asylum indeed wanted to realize a humanitarian end by disciplinary means, such as supervision or forced labor
(Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 17980, 199200, 2689). Gauchet, Swain, and
Foucault all agree that the doctors were then drawn to an ideal of total
control on the part of the institution over the patients through mechanisms
of discipline and control (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 107ff, 13448, 144ff,
195, 199200, 264ff, 27382; Foucault, 1976: 416, 6036, 6179, 632).
Like Foucault, Gauchet and Swain also place the dream of total control
in the asylum in its wider context (Foucault, 1994d; Gauchet and Swain, 1980:
20, 12631). They all argue that the asylum, more so than political institutions,
reveals the essence of a modern democratic society, starting with the French

42

Thesis Eleven (Number 98 2009)

Revolution. The asylum can thus be seen as a modern political laboratory,

a microcosm in which broader evolutions in democracies become transparent
(Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 20, 126, 128, 131, 400; Gauchet et al., 1983: 80).5
Yet, while Foucault reduces democratic societies and social structures to the
microphysics of power and its local tactics and technologies, Gauchet and
Swain maintain that we can only understand such practices of power when
we at the same time examine broader traditional collective representations
of power in terms of popular sovereignty or juridical equality. In so doing,
Gauchet agrees with thinkers like Furet, Lefort or Rosanvallon (Weymans,
2005: 2657) or, earlier, Durkheim or Mauss, who all argued that collective
representations are crucial to understand social reality and processes such
as individualization.
Gauchet and Swains focus on collective democratic representations of
power helps them to explain why the asylum emerged in its specific disciplinary form. When a democratic society is no longer structured according to
a given plan or order, it must organize itself through the modern bureaucratic state which serves as a common point of reference for individuals
living together on a basis of equality. The French Revolution meant not only
the liberation of society from a hierarchical divine order, but also the dependency of society on its sovereign citizens. In order to preserve its collective
self-mastery, a democratic society would then do well to keep these citizens
under control (or make them control themselves) by using closed institutions like schools or the asylum (Gauchet, 2002a: xx; Gauchet and Swain,
1980: 115ff, 499500).6
However, both the history of the modern state and the asylum have
shown that this dream of controlling the mad and other citizens could indeed
degenerate into totalitarian panoptic nightmares represented by the asylum
(Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 118120, 143, 387ff). Although Foucault, Gauchet
and Swain all acknowledge that democratic societies were tempted by a
panoptic dream of total control, they interpreted the content of this dream
differently. For Foucault, the panoptic machine was designed to totally
exclude all abnormal people from humanity. For Gauchet and Swain, the
panoptic device intended to totally integrate mad people into humanity. In
a society where the mad lose their natural place, their social role is now the
states responsibility. Rather than turning the mad into lesser human beings,
the asylum was driven by the desire to fully transform them into complete
human beings like the rest of us (Ferry and Renaut, 1988: 164).
Their different perspective explains why for Gauchet and Swain the
asylum aims at incorporating individuals in a democratic society rather than
at mere individualization. In their view doctors in the post-revolutionary
asylums were no longer inhibited by a tradition that used to protect the
mad from external interference in their minds and were instead guided by
the idea that one could control or modify the human spirit in order to make
the mad enter society again (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 21213, 3989, 4089).

Weymans: Gauchet and Swain on Madness and Democracy

43

The democratic desire for collective self-mastery explains the states attempts
to fully control the human spirit or force individuals to control themselves
so that all individuals are unified in one transparent collective body (Gauchet
and Swain, 1980: 2689). Concretely speaking, it was hoped that if the mad
could live together with their peers, it would help them return to humanity,
which is why dormitories and working places increasingly substituted for
individual cells (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 172, 1778).
Still, the question remains as to whether these different dreams of total
control ever became real. Foucault thought they did and that the asylum
revealed the true nature of our democratic society: a large panopticon in
which everyone is disciplined, norms are internalized and resistance is futile.
For him, we live in a totalitarian society based on discipline rather than a
democratic regime founded on juridical principles. For Gauchet and Swain,
however, it is time to wake up and realize that the panoptic totalitarian nightmare was only a dream or illusion which has never been realized. The panoptic gaze may well exist as an idea, but in practice it sees nothing at all
(Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 14953, 15861).
Gauchet and Swain are able to see diversity and resistance at the local
level because they refuse to reduce normalizing discourses and representations to a microphysics of power.7 Instead, they acknowledge a necessary
tension between these juridical representations and a complex reality that is
guided by these representations and yet also diverges from them. Normalizing ideas and representations, then, do not just generate one specific type
of disciplinary practice but rather give rise to many conflicting practices
and interests. Even if a democratic society necessitates a state-bureaucracy
to organize itself, at the same time it nonetheless allows for social pluralism,
conflict and a free civil society (Weymans, 2005: 26570). This is because it
leaves the future open and does not, as in totalitarian regimes, reduce it to
a substantial plan. Rather than disciplining society ever more, the growing
bureaucracy increasingly tries to follow an ever creative and inventive society
that ultimately resists it (Gauchet, 1985: 25562, 2658; Gauchet and Swain,
1980: 154ff).
Any (totalitarian) attempt to reduce this creativity or open future to a
fixed plan is doomed to fail (Weymans, 2005: 274). For Gauchet and Swain
a democratic bureaucratic state should therefore not be identified with its
totalitarian derailments, if only because democracy itself ensures their failure.
This diagnosis of the failure of the totalitarian project coincides with the
collapse of the belief in a communist alternative in Western societies in the
late 1970s. At that point Foucault himself also shifted the focus of his work
and came to study and acknowledge the practices of freedom and resistance
in a way that seems at odds with the world of Discipline and Punish.8 Similarly, Michel de Certeau refuted Foucault by highlighting everyday practices
that tactically elude surveillance. Yet for both Certeau and the later Foucault,
resistance is localized at a micro-level, which eludes panoptic surveillance

44

Thesis Eleven (Number 98 2009)

and modernity without really undermining it (De Certeau, 1990: 217). For
Gauchet and Swain, by contrast, the failure of the totalitarian panopticon was
structural and localized at a macro-level as well.
Long before resistance became visible in society at large, it could be
observed in the asylum itself (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 158ff). Its collectivist
experiment had been ambiguous from the very start. Despite all discipline
and control, part of the plan was to trust individual patients to cook, eat and
work together on their own (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 182ff). Moreover, the
result of this group dynamics evidently escaped the doctors control, as its
failure made crystal clear. Simple things like working together proved more
difficult than expected (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 193). Attempts to control
patients (albeit with good intentions) by integrating them into a homogeneous
mass also failed: even mad individuals, as it turned out, resisted attempts to
be controlled (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 89, 20, 14962, 2245).
While Foucault reduces democratic societies to a specific type of asylum,
Gauchet and Swain see democratic institutions as different historical answers
to the question of how to organize popular sovereignty. For Gauchet and
Swain the history of the asylum should not be identified with one brief but
spectacular phase, since it had many, often contradictory, phases. In the
wake of its collectivist totalitarian failure the asylum simply continued to
develop as new plans were tried out. Once it became clear that it was impossible to control fully the human spirit, another ideal emerged: that of an almost
utopian form of asylum that was cut off from society. In such a countersociety there was hope that, since the mad were amongst themselves, they
would, paradoxically, learn to communicate with each other and, perhaps,
with normal people as well. Inclusion would thus be obtained through segregation (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 200ff, 213ff). Inspiration was found in
contemporary projects with the deaf: it was believed that they would be able
to learn to communicate if they were left on their own, amongst their peers
(Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 204ff). Ironically, all this leads de facto to the
asylum as it was before Pinels reforms (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 2157).
But like the dream of total power, this dream of total detachment from society
failed as well (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 218ff, 2236).
After this, it became clear that it was useless to resocialize the mad by
forcing them artificially in or out of society. In one further respect mad
people were like normal individuals as they too were people with a particular background, from which they should not be detached (Gauchet and
Swain, 1980: 220ff). Hence a new form of the asylum developed in which
this concrete embeddedness of the mad was taken into account. No further
inspirational ideas were developed following this last vision for the asylum,
and, while the number of institutions increased, the belief in the asylum waned
(Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 22738). Little more happened until, in the 1960s,
the asylum came under attack from anti-psychiatrist thinkers like Foucault.
The history of the asylum thus appears as a succession of ambitions
and failures, ending not with a cure of the mad, but rather with a fierce

Weymans: Gauchet and Swain on Madness and Democracy

45

critique of its raison dtre. Is the asylum, then, nothing more than a failure?
Gauchet and Swain point out that, despite all this, the asylum had one very
important, albeit involuntary, success (reussite involontaire): it changed our
view of the mad (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 1678, 196, 2256). Thanks to
the asylum in its different forms, we have learned to see the mad as people
who can in principle communicate, be sociable and who are, like us, related
to a particular background. We can now identify with them and perceive them
as similar (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 20, 100, 178, 185, 1968, 225, 357ff, 467).
Yet, in reducing the otherness of the mad, the asylum ultimately undermined
itself. For, if the mad are human beings like us, what, then, gives us the
right to lock them up? The history of the asylum, Gauchet and Swain write,
is a long project of the institution against itself (contre elle-mme) (Gauchet
and Swain, 1980: 224 (my translation). See also pp. 100, 190, 194, 501). From
their almost Hegelian perspective, all this was no coincidence: this major
paradox of the asylum is part of its essence and should therefore necessarily
transpire sooner or later (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 100, 126, 226, 495, 499,
501). The anti-psychiatric movement and Foucaults critique can, ironically,
be regarded as the very result of the asylum they criticize, since it presupposed an identification with the mad, produced by the asylum. Both the
asylum itself and contestation of it are part of the same democratic logic
(Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 497, 5001). Gauchet and Swain again insist that
Foucaults own critique of the asylum and the way he sympathized with the
fate of the mad was only possible within a modern, democratic and inclusive horizon.
MODERNITY AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
Foucaults charge against modernitys masterful exclusion of everything
strange and other not only targeted the asylum but also mankind in general.
Had mankind in modern society not successfully tried to establish an identity
by excluding everything different and other? Again, Gauchet and Swain see
things differently. For centuries this identity was fixed by a natural or religious order or stable symbolic frameworks that provided humans, on the one
hand, with a stable identity (they knew perfectly well what their role in society
was) while making them, on the other hand, dependent on that collective
order which preceded them. Then, as we have seen, these traditional frameworks were slowly undermined by a logic of equality. The mad thus needed
a new identity in a social order that is now based on equality rather than
on natural difference. While, following the French Revolution, mad people
were being reintegrated into society, normal people declared themselves
autonomous. Individuals thus labored under the temporary illusion that a
transparent identity and an almost limitless independence were possible.
However, as they do away with any external dependence and become
fully independent, they are now confronted with a dependency on something which they cannot control but which nevertheless remains a vital part

46

Thesis Eleven (Number 98 2009)

of their identity: the unconscious, which is for Gauchet and Swain a typically
modern invention (Gauchet, 1985: 2467, 1992, 2003: 202ff; Gauchet and
Swain, 1980: 11, 330, 365ff, 405, 504).9 As individuals external independence
increases, so too does their internal dependence (Gauchet, 2002a; Gauchet
and Swain, 1980: 17, 405, 485ff; Gauchet et al., 1983: 80ff).
This wider evolution has, yet again, been foreshadowed by the asylum:
in 1800 the doctors at the asylum still thought they were autonomous, while
diagnosing the mad as being dependent on some strange part in themselves.
But only 100 years later, Freud declared that we are all dependent on something uncontrollable in ourselves, called the unconscious, thus blurring the
boundary between the normal and the pathological by democratising madness. This is not to say that we have all become mad, but it does mean that
the logic of equality includes otherness in ourselves so that, as a consequence,
we are all divided between a subjective pole on the one hand and an uncontrollable part on the other (Gauchet, 1994a: xxxivxxxv, 1994b: 1435,
1997: 78; Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 508). As a result, the structuring of
normal experience involves the virtual madness present in all of us (Gauchet,
2002b: 7).
Gauchet and Swains revisionist view of the history of madness thus
amends Foucaults view of people in relation to their other. For Foucault,
the movement of inclusion appears to be a triumph of man and reason over
everything other that lies beyond them. For Gauchet and Swain, modernity
does not mean that madness is reduced to an irrational vocal outburst (represented by Nietzsche, Van Gogh or Artaud) that now and then interrupts
the homogeneous and domineering discourse of the West, but rather that
madness appears within the very heart of democratic society and its citizens
(Foucault, 1976: 65463; Gauchet, 1985: 233, 237). For Foucault modernity
represents the total control of an other in ourselves, and he explains that
in our societies this presence of the animal in man, a presence which constituted the scandal of madness, is eliminated (Foucault, 2001: 76). For Gauchet
and Swain, by contrast, we ought to admit that we cannot control ourselves
despite our autonomy. Madness refers not to something other than reason,
but rather a structural contradiction within reason (Gauchet, 2007: xxi; Mayol,
1978: 148). It is no pseudo-other that we can control and objectify, but rather
something that truly escapes us. Inclusion of strangeness is thus no longer
a reduction of an original experience to a homogeneous rational society, as
Foucault would have it. Instead it implies the discovery that we can never
fully grasp our identity. It means in fact a displacement and enhancement
of otherness within the very heart of humanity, rather than a mere safe
reduction and control of that otherness to its minimal level, as Foucault
believed (2001: 2401). People within a modern democratic society appear
very different from Foucaults vision. They are not the reasonable triumphant
creatures that have finally controlled and objectified strangeness but are uncertain, without a stable identity and with an uncontrollable part in themselves.10

Weymans: Gauchet and Swain on Madness and Democracy

47

EPILOGUE
Foucaults interpretation of the history of madness was influential partly
because of its critical stance. His writings criticized the way in which the mad
were confined in Western civilization in the name of an original inclusion.
Gauchet and Swain attacked Foucaults critical model from two angles: they
viewed the pre-modern tolerance of the mad as itself a form of exclusion
and stressed that true inclusion of otherness was only possible in modern
Western society. Secondly, they showed that institutions and practices that
tried to control people or the mad met with structural resistance. Thus, they
offered a more complex and approving account of the treatment of the mad
in modern Western civilization. But if Gauchet and Swains critique of
Foucault holds, can they still criticize modern society?
Their work proves that they can. Firstly, they unmask discourses that
assume that complete control over individuals can be realized. Such a belief
in total control rests on the mere denial of factual and structural resistance.
This denial was at work within totalitarianism, in the asylum and, according
to these authors, in psychoanalysis as well.11 The historian, however, can
point to forgotten forms of resistance (Gauchet, 1994a: xxivxxv; Gauchet
and Swain, 1980: 916, 323). This first type of critique, unlike Foucaults,
is one that operates from within democratic societies. It shows that modern
societies produce legitimate resistance rather than diminishing it and that
one could therefore criticize pathological versions of modern societies in the
name of modernity itself, but not in the name of something that precedes
it. Gauchet and Swain also stress that social scientists criticizing modernity
should not only acknowledge internal resistance but also be aware that their
critique against modernity is itself indebted to the modern society they criticize. Gauchet and Swain have shown convincingly that we should not project
the problems of the present onto an idealized past, since this makes it harder
to understand both the present and the past.
There is, however, a second model of criticism operating within Gauchets
more recent work in particular which comes much closer to Foucaults model.
While both Gauchet and Foucault agree that modern individuals are essentially produced by state institutions, Foucault criticizes this production process
while Gauchet applauds it. For Gauchet, peoples independence and apparent
autonomy were indeed only possible thanks to bureaucratic institutions like
the state (Gauchet and Swain, 1980: 393, 403ff, 488). As we have seen, these
institutions produced individuals not just through technologies of power but
also through a socialization process whereby individuals learn to refer to a
general viewpoint as citizens. However, just as the asylum was undermined
by its own success, democracy also undermined itself (Gauchet and Swain,
1980: 404).12 The more it supported individuals, the less these individuals
were willing or able to refer to and support the common good. Where individuals used to find it self-evident that they should put aside their particular

48

Thesis Eleven (Number 98 2009)

interests for the common good, they now openly profess their freedom of
choice. For Gauchet they thereby bite the hand that feeds them. As a public
intellectual he deplores this evolution as he believes that this will ultimately
undermine individual freedom. Gauchet indeed suggests that the triumphant
individual lacks the capacity to relate to society as a whole, which makes
him or her in his eyes an impoverished and even a pathological human being.
Moreover, increasing individual sovereignty thus also undermines collective
sovereignty, societys ability to govern itself.
However, while Gauchet criticizes contemporary society and its democratic diseases (Gauchet, 1994b: 1446, 2000: 3741, 2002a; Gauchet et al.,
1983: 856), he seems unable to offer an alternative. All we can do is sit
and wait till the internal contradictions of our society lead to a new situation
(e.g. Gauchet, 2003: 3256). This can be explained by the fact that, for all
their differences, Gauchet and Foucault both attributed a lot of power to state
institutions. Once these institutions are too strong (in Foucaults diagnosis)
or too weak (in the case of Gauchet), there is not much individuals or other
agents can do to amend this situation.
Other intellectuals who belong to Gauchets generation, like Pierre
Rosanvallon (b. 1948), are less pessimistic. He, for example, argues that beyond
institutions there is room for resistance and alternative ways to socialize individuals (e.g. Rosanvallon, 2006). This is because he puts less weight on state
institutions than Foucault and Gauchet had done. For all his critique of
Foucault, Gauchets cultural criticism and theory of agency or change remains
more in Foucaults debt than he would, perhaps, care to admit.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were presented at conferences and workshops
at the University of Sussex, Cambridge University, UC Berkeley and the New York
Area Seminar in Intellectual and Cultural History. I would like to thank audiences
for their comments and suggestions. For comments on previous versions thanks are
owed to John Dunn, Jonathan Conlin and Samuel Moyn.

Wim Weymans is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of

History at Columbia University. He holds degrees in history (MA), philosophy (PhD)
and political theory (MPhil) from the universities of Cambridge and Leuven, Belgium.
More recently he was a Fulbright scholar at UC Berkeley (2006) and Visiting Scholar
at NYUs Remarque Institute (2007). He is chiefly interested in French social, historical and political thought post-1968 (especially Lefort, Gauchet, Rosanvallon and De
Certeau). He has also written on the problem of the current crisis of political representation and on debates on republicanism and political freedom. [email: ww2199@
columbia.edu]

Weymans: Gauchet and Swain on Madness and Democracy

49

Notes
1. This implicitly contests Foucaults thesis that during that period a common
language was possible (see Foucault, 2001: xii, 111, 115, 262).
2. Swain had already proven in 1978 that the liberation of the mad in 1793 had
been a myth, established by Pinels successors (see Gauchet, 2007: ivv; Swain,
1997; Weiner, 1994).
3. One wonders whether the later Foucault does not acknowledge in part
that the mad person retains a certain freedom, albeit freedom from an external
obstacle, rather than, as with Gauchet and Swain, towards an internal one. See,
for instance, Foucault (1994c: 719).
4. For Foucault on the shower as a form of shock therapy, see Foucault (1976:
4012, 6201).
5. For the notion microcosm in Foucault see, for example, Foucault (2001: 265,
274). For the laboratory see, for example, Foucault (1975: 206).
6. This structure offers a striking analogy with the way in which, according to
Berlin, an idea of positive freedom can degenerate into totalitarianism (see
Berlin, 2002). Neither Foucault nor Gauchet and Swain have compared their
own ideas on this topic with Berlins.
7. See on the issue of resistance in Foucaults theory also De Certeau (1990: 7581,
98100).
8. In fact shortly after the publication of Surveiller et Punir he developed the idea
of (albeit rather excessive) resistance within the panoptic universe. See, for
instance, Foucault (1994d: 2056; 1997).
9. Foucault seems to agree that the unconsciousness is a typically modern invention, e.g. Foucault (1976: 374).
10. See on this topic in Gauchets work, the context in which it emerged and the
way Lacan influenced it, the excellent analysis by Samuel Moyn (2009).
11. For the (ambiguous) relationship towards psychoanalysis in Gauchet and Swain,
see Azouvi (1983: 8792).
12. See the aforementioned title of Gauchet (2002a: La Dmocratie contre ellemme [Democracy against itself].

References
Azouvi, Franois (1983) Les ruses de la draison, Esprit November: 8792.
Berlin, Isaiah (2002) Two Concepts of Liberty, in Henry Hardy (ed.) Liberty. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
De Certeau, Michel (1990) Linvention du quotidien: I. Arts de faire, ed. Luce Giard.
Paris: Gallimard.
Ferry, Luc and Renaut, Alain (1988) La pense 68. Essai sur lanti-humanisme contemporain. Paris: Gallimard.
Ferry, Luc and Renaut, Alain (1990) French Philosophy in the Sixties: An Essay on
Antihumanism, trans. Mary H.S. Cattani. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press.
Foucault, Michel (1975) Surveiller et punir. Paris: Gallimard.
Foucault, Michel (1976) Histoire de la folie lge classique. Paris: Gallimard.
Foucault, Michel (1979) Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan. Hammondsworth:
Penguin.

50

Thesis Eleven (Number 98 2009)

Foucault, Michel (1994a) Prface [Preface to the original 1961 edition], in Dits et
crits 19541988. I 19541969, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald. Paris: Gallimard.
Foucault, Michel (1994b) La folie et la socit, in Dits et crits 19541988. II
1970 1975, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald. Paris: Gallimard.
Foucault, Michel (1994c) Lthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la libert, in
Dits et crits 19541988. IV 19801988, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald. Paris:
Gallimard.
Foucault, Michel (1994d) Lil du pouvoir, in Dits et crits 19541988. III 1976
1979, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald. Paris: Gallimard.
Foucault, Michel (1997) Il faut dfendre la socit Cours au Collge de France
(19751976). Hautes Etudes Gallimard. Paris: Seuil.
Foucault, Michel (2001) Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason, trans. Richard Howard [abridged translation]. London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel (2006) History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa
[complete translation]. London: Routledge.
Furet, Franois (1999) Quand ltat perd la raison, in Un itinraire intellectuel. Paris:
Calmann-Lvy.
Gauchet, Marcel (1980) Tocqueville, lAmrique et nous. Sur la gnse des socits
dmocratiques, Libre 7: 43120.
Gauchet, Marcel (1985) Le dsenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la
religion. Paris: Gallimard.
Gauchet, Marcel (1992) Linconscient crbral. Paris: Seuil.
Gauchet, Marcel (1994a) la recherche dune autre histoire de la folie, in G. Swain,
Dialogue avec linsens: Essais dhistoire de la psychiatrie. Paris: Gallimard.
Gauchet, Marcel (1994b) The Democratic Malaise: An Interview with Marcel Gauchet,
Thesis Eleven 38: 13857.
Gauchet, Marcel (1997) De Pinel Freud, in G. Swain, Le sujet de la folie. Paris:
Calmann-Lvy.
Gauchet, Marcel (2000) A New Age of Personality: An Essay on the Psychology of
Our Times, Thesis Eleven 60: 2341.
Gauchet, Marcel (2002a) La Dmocratie contre elle-mme. Paris: Gallimard.
Gauchet, Marcel (2002b) Redefining the Unconscious, Thesis Eleven 71: 423.
Gauchet, Marcel (2003) La condition historique. Entretiens avec Franois Azouvi et
Sylvain Piron. Paris: Stock.
Gauchet, Marcel (2007) La folie lge dmocratique, in M. Gauchet and G. Swain,
La pratique de lesprit humain. Paris: Gallimard.
Gauchet, Marcel and Swain, Gladys (1980) La pratique de lesprit humain: Linstitution asilaire et la rvolution dmocratique. Paris: Gallimard.
Gauchet, Marcel and Swain, Gladys (1999) Madness and Democracy: The Modern
Psychiatric Universe, trans. Catherine Porter. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Gauchet, Marcel et al. (1983) Un nouveau regard sur lhistoire de la folie. Entretien
avec Marcel Gauchet et Gladys Swain, Esprit November: 7786.
Mayol, Pierre (1978) Review of G. Swain, Le sujet de la folie, Esprit JulyAugust: 148.
Moyn, Samuel (2009) The Assumption by Man of His Original Fracturing: Marcel
Gauchet, Gladys Swain, and the History of the Self, Modern Intellectual History
6(2): 31541.
Porter, Roy (2004) Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-doctors & Lunatics.
Stroud: Tempus.

Weymans: Gauchet and Swain on Madness and Democracy

51

Rosanvallon, Pierre (2006) Democracy Past and Future, ed. Samuel Moyn. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Scull, Andrew (2007) Scholarship of Fools, The Times Literary Supplement 23 March.
Seigel, Jerrold (1999) Foreword, in M. Gauchet and G. Swain, Madness and Democracy: The Modern Psychiatric Universe, trans. Catherine Porter. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Swain, Gladys (1997) Le sujet de la folie: Naissance de la psychiatrie. Paris: CalmannLvy.
Weiner, Dora B. (1994) Le geste de Pinel : The History of a Psychiatric Myth, in
M. S. Micale and R. Porter (eds) Discovering the History of Psychiatry. New
York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weymans, Wim (2005) Freedom through Political Representation? Lefort, Gauchet and
Rosanvallon on the Relationship between State and Society, European Journal
of Political Theory 4(3): 26382.