It's a “Mad World”: Mental Illness and Corporeal Anxiety in the Social Contract

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Thought and Philosophy & International History and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Political Thought and Philosophy: Historical Approaches

Abstract

How does mental illness complicate contemporary notions of democratic citizenship? In this chapter of my dissertation, Power and the Politics of Madness, I explore “mental illness,” as a condition of improper reason in the person, in the context of democracy and democratic ideas of citizenship. Recent political theories of citizenship treat mental illness as an exception to the citizenship norm and conclude that 'mental illness' is a quality of a few individuals and requires special laws and a qualified political status in accordance with democratic principles (Pincock 2017, Cohen 2014, Failer 2002). However, a closer examination of the discourses on mental illness and democratic citizenship reveals that mental illness is not simply a practical problem for democracies, but represents a larger goal of democracy to quell citizens' corporeal vulnerability and establish order through the balance of freedom and authority, including the political exclusion and coercion of some of its members.

In this chapter, I tease out the psychological orientation to the mentally ill that underlies exclusionary policies, such as the segregation of the mentally ill in schools and hospitals, amended civil rights, and their confinement in the carceral system. I reconstruct the Lockean social contract as a system of shared rights and responsibilities aimed at balancing authority and freedom by distributing political power amongst citizens and vesting aspects of it in the government. I argue that a fallible human nature, the right to enforce the natural law, and the general inconveniences of the state of nature prompt citizens to form the social contract as the best means to establish corporeal security. The “mad” complicate this security because they fail to meet the Lockean standard of reason. Rather, according to Locke, they reason improperly, “putting wrong propositions together and drawing false conclusions from them.” Foucault, interestingly in Madness and Civilization, understands this kind of “unreason” as a disharmony of human logic and knowledge as not a quality of individuals, but of an uncontrollable, chaotic world. By reading Locke with Foucault, we get a sense of the anxiety over corporeal security that motivates the social contract and the need to suppress its “unreasoning” members. I conclude that the mentally ill are not simply a practical problem for democracies, but that they represent the violence and chaos of a world that will not yield to human control through reason and knowability, which democracies strive – but ultimately fail – to overcome.

Author

• Anna Daily, University of Colorado Boulder