Foucault's The Great Confinement: Literature Analysis

Throughout American history, the societal attitudes and practices towards the poor, the criminal, the insane, the orphan, and the delinquent have changed and evolved. Prior to the Civil War, Americans “did not define either poverty or crime as a critical social problem” (Rothman, 1). After the war, however, this view shifted, and Americans in the Jacksonian era began to view individuals falling into this category as undesirable. To combat this perceived ‘issue’, Americans began confining these ‘incurables’ into institutions like the penitentiary, the almshouse, the orphanage, or the asylum. In his work Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault discusses the same idea, but through the lens of Western Europe, suggesting that a moral panic brought on by rapid industrialization and the shifting of society is what ultimately caused ‘The Great

The two agree on the end result of these institutions - keeping these people separate from society- but not on the origins. In Foucault's work, specifically the chapter ‘The Great Confinement’, he observes the phenomenon of confinement through the lens of the Hôpital Général in France in 1656. He writes, “from the beginning, the institution set itself the task of preventing ‘mendicancy and idleness as the source of all disorders…” (Foucault, 47). As the society in Western Europe during what Foucault defines as the classical age, went through a massive shift of industrialization, a labor crisis came along with it. The idea of confinement was originated by the elites as a new attitude towards the ‘idle’ and poor came about. Societies, especially in cities, became obsessed with ridding themselves of labor problems that they linked to the unemployed, or impoverished beggars. The idea of ‘madness’ and the need for those who fall into that category was created by a society who began to place an extremely high ethical value upon