Recovery From Schizophrenia: Psychiatry And Political Economy

106 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SCHIZOPHRENIARevolutionary to the old social and political order, the Enlightenment ideas werecentral to the capitalist transformation of production. Leaving aside, for themoment, the American Revolution (1776–83), the culmination of eighteenthcenturyEnlightenment philosophy and its associated political, economic andtechnological changes was (what Hobsbawm refers to as) the “dual revolution.” 21This comprised the French Revolution of 1789 and the contemporaneous BritishIndustrial Revolution (which Hobsbawm dates from the 1780s, when the Britisheconomy became “airborne” 22 ).“It is significant,” writes Hobsbawm,that the two chief centres of the [Enlightenment] ideology were also thoseof the dual revolution, France and England…. A secular, rationalist andprogressive individualism dominated ‘enlightened’ thought. To set theindividual free from the shackles that fettered him was its chief object….Liberty, equality and (it followed) the fraternity of all men were itsslogans. 23Enlightenment ideas, then, gave the French Revolution its slogan, the determinedcapitalist his individualism, and the innovators of moral treatment theirphilosophical base. Beyond France and England, the sites of the origin of thehumane treatment methods were also centers of Enlightenment ideology andprogressive politics. Savoy, culturally linked to France, instituted enlightenedpeasant liberation shortly before the French Revolution; 24 and Chiarugi inFlorence was under the influence of one of the most remarkable reforming princesof the eighteenth century, Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, a man stronglyinfluenced by Enlightenment ideas. Moral treatment, moreover, was most avidlyadopted by another enlightened nation—postrevolutionary, industrializingAmerica.When moral treatment, then, set the insane “free from the shackles,” themovement was a component of the dual revolution that shook the Westernworld. This is most compellingly revealed in the image of Pinel, at the height ofthe French revolution, striking the chains from the insane of Bicêtre and LaSalpêtrière. But the essential connection between the Industrial Revolution andthe new methods of managing the insane can, similarly, be demonstrated. Centralto an understanding of the process are the changes that were taking place in thedeployment of labor.THE GROWTH OF WAGE LABORIn 1780, on the eve of the dual revolution, France and Britain were the twoeconomic giants of Europe. In volume of trade they were nearly equal. France’sforeign trade had increased fourfold in 60 years and her colonial system in someareas was stronger than that of the British. 25 Each of these countries, like the restof Europe, was experiencing staggering population growth. In the half-century