IS HISTORY DEAD? | PAGE 1, 2, 3, 4
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Windschuttle notes that behind these new histories lurks a revisionist impulse that prevents historians from taking the facts at face value. In many of these theories, the native cultures invariably end up being valorized over the bad imperialist white men. One of the reasons historians don't criticize these new trends is that they're afraid of being painted as reactionary colonialists. But Windschuttle shows just how superficial such sympathies for oppressed peoples are. He points out that despite these historians' sympathy for the imperial culture of Tenochtitlan, they have done little to resurrect the views of their conquered neighbors. The interest of cultural studies theorists in the conquest of the Americas, Windschuttle argues, "derives only in small part from any real sympathy they might have for the natives and far more from their fervor to adopt a politically correct stance against their own society."

A reckless disregard of facts also distorts the "histories" of Michel Foucault. The works of Foucault, a radical French theorist obsessed with the supposed cultural repression inherent in modern "bourgeois" society, have become de rigeur over the past 20 years or so, required reading for both undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities. Inspired by Foucault's famous declaration that "theory ... is practice," seemingly an entire generation of academics has come of age believing that by reading Foucault's books, and talking about them at conferences and cafes, they were committing radical political acts. Unfortunately for Foucault's admirers, his theories, when exposed to the historical record, implode into rubble.

In "Madness and Civilization," the work that made Foucault's reputation, the theory runs as follows. In the "classical age" of Western reason, circa 1650-1789, a rational, "bourgeois" civilization was constructed in opposition to "madness," by a process Foucault calls "the great confinement," in which the unemployed, the poor, the criminal and the insane were locked up in workhouses, charitable institutions, prisons and, especially, asylums. In this way, Foucault argues, a morally authoritarian "work ethic" was enforced on the West, which stifled individual freedom and bred bland "bourgeois" conformity.

As in his later works on the development of clinical medicine and the modern penal system, Foucault's main concern in "Madness and Civilization" is to show that nefarious power relations dominate the institutions that govern the modern world. By defining "madness" in opposition to Western reason, asylums enforce community norms of behavior. In its focus on individual patients, instead of on diseases, modern clinical medicine separates people into the healthy and the sick ("The Birth of the Clinic"). In its use of strict timetables, standardized architecture and institutional uniforms, the modern prison, like industrial factories and military barracks, exerts control over individuals' use of time and space ("Discipline and Punish"). In all three books, Foucault aims to demonstrate the connection between knowledge and power. (He prefers, in fact, not to separate the terms at all, and usually speaks of "knowledge/power"). Respectively, then, modern psychiatry exerts tyranny over our minds, clinical medicine exerts tyranny over our bodies and the prison model of social surveillance exerts tyranny over our actions.

Now, these are pretty nifty theories, and they have held great appeal for many self-loathing bourgeois undergraduates wishing to rebel against conformist bourgeois parents. But as Windschuttle shows, the history is shaky, at best. Europe did, for example, experience a "great confinement," although not during Foucault's classical age of reason. Between 1650 and 1789, in fact, the total number of subjects confined to asylums in Foucault's native France grew in near proportion to overall population growth, from 2,000 to about 5,000. From 1815 to 1914, by contrast, the number of asylum inmates grew 20-fold, to more than 100,000. A similar mass confinement took shape in 19th century England as well.

In both cases, Windschuttle argues, the asylum movement was born of political idealism, out of a nascent democratic politics. It was animated not by the desire of tyrannical psychiatrists to exclude the mentally ill from bourgeois society, but by democratic reformers who believed the condition of insanity to be temporary and therapeutically treatable. Of course, these somewhat naive hopes were never perfectly realized. Mental patients have often been misdiagnosed or maltreated, and most of those confined have never been fully "healed." But the modern impulse to view insanity as an unfortunate condition under which fellow humans are suffering through no fault of their own, which Foucault decries, is in fact far more humane than was medieval treatment of village idiots and madmen, for example, who were often accorded the same status as domestic animals or exposed to humiliating public ridicule. Foucault's theory of the victimization of nonconformists by way of modern reason, Windschuttle demonstrates, is patronizing to the insane, insulting to the modern psychiatric profession and historical nonsense.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Foucault's admirers still carry the relativist torch he put down