What does it mean to be mad? In Madness and Civilisation, perhaps his masterpiece, Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the Middle Ages, when insanity was considered part of everyday life and fools and crazies walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and a wall was erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.

"Foucault's book belongs, both by reason of it content and its profundity, in the class of such treatise - at once historical, scientific and ethical - as Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death."

The New-York Times Book Review.