In the critical volume, Foucault (1985), the philosopher José Guilherme Merquior said that the value of Madness and Civilization as intellectual history was diminished by errors of fact and of interpretation that undermine Foucault's thesis—how social forces determine the meanings of madness and society's responses to the mental disorder of the person. Specifically problematic was his selective citation of data, which ignored contradictory historical evidence of preventive imprisonment and physical cruelty towards insane people during the historical periods when Foucault said society perceived the mad as wise people—institutional behaviors allowed by the culture of Christian Europeans who considered madness worse than sin. Nonetheless, Merquior said that, like the book Life Against Death (1959), by Norman O. 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.[10]
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." Twenty years later, Michael MacDonald confirmed Mandrou's prophecy: "Anyone who writes about the history of insanity in early modern Europe must travel in the spreading wake of Michael Foucault's famous book, Madness and Civilization."
Later endorsements included Jan Goldstein, who said: "For both their empirical content and their powerful theoretical perspectives, the works of Michel Foucault occupy a special and central place in the historiography of psychiatry;" and Roy Porter: "Time has proved Madness and Civilization [to be by] far the most penetrating work ever written on the history of madness." However, despite Foucault being herald of "the new cultural history", there was much criticism.[11]
In Psychoanalysis and Male Homosexuality (1995), Kenneth Lewes said that Madness and Civilization is an example of the "critique of the institutions of psychiatry and psychoanalysis" that occurred as part of the "general upheaval of values in the 1960s." That the history Foucault presents in Madness and Civilization is similar to, but more profound than The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) by Thomas Szasz.[12]
