He wrote the book between 1955 and 1959, when he worked cultural-diplomatic and educational posts in Poland and Germany,[2] as well as in Sweden as director of a French cultural centre at the University of Uppsala.

[6] Yet Renaissance intellectualism began to develop an objective way of thinking about and describing reason and unreason, compared with the subjective descriptions of madness from the Middle Ages.

To revert such moral errors, society's new institutions to confine outcast people featured way-of-life regimes composed of punishment-and-reward programs meant to compel the inmates to choose to reverse their choices of lifestyle.

In turn, institutional confinement conveniently made insane people available to medical doctors then beginning to view madness as a natural object of study, and then as an illness to be cured.

Those institutions were product of two cultural motives: (i) the new goal of curing the insane away from poor families; and (ii) the old purpose of confining socially undesirable people to protect society.

Brown, Foucault's book about Madness and Civilization is "a call for the liberation of the Dionysian id"; and gave inspiration for Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari.

In his 1994 essay "Phänomenologie des Krankengeistes" ('Phenomenology of the Sick Spirit'), philosopher Gary Gutting said:[11][T]he reactions of professional historians to Foucault's Histoire de la folie [1961] seem, at first reading, ambivalent, not to say polarized.

There are many acknowledgements of its seminal role, beginning with Robert Mandrou's early review in [the Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale], characterizing it as a "beautiful book" that will be "of central importance for our understanding of the Classical period."