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In the 1750s the Danish kingdom and the Moroccan Empire came into contact, and concluded a bilateral treaty. As part of the accord, a Danish chartered company was established. The company was short-lived and the “special relationship” between the two powers soon withered. A result of this episode was a handful of texts that sought to describe Morocco to a Danish audience—an adventure tale, a captive narrative, an orientalist chorography, and a biography of the emperor—which sought to produce truths about the Danish encounters with Morocco, but also truths about the place and the peoples of Morocco. The article discusses these texts, where they originated, to whom they circulated, and what they had to tell about Morocco.

Since antiquity, some men have not been considered accountable for their actions when they transgressed the law, and were exempted from legal penalties, or given lesser ones. Why? The rationale for legal exemption has varied over time. So have the labels assigned to such lawbreakers, and even the personnel involved in the labelling process. For centuries, settling the question of deviant mental states of relevance to the court seemed relatively unproblematic. It was thought that personal acquaintance would easily discover such states of mind and the court could then be notified. It was not until the nineteenth century that western society felt a need to regulate this problematique. As a result, or as a precondition for this process of settling the question of legal accountability, the matter came to be construed in part as a medical problem. Physicians, and later psychiatrists, came to be regarded as possessing specific knowledge in this area which qualified them to judge a person's legal accountability. Personal knowledge of the deranged defendant was supplanted by professional knowledge of sanity and insanity as the basis for authority on the matter of accountability.

In this article I intend to historicise Musil's discussion of responsibility and agency by tracing the genealogy of Moosbrugger in light of Michel Foucault's writings on power. Two historical roots of this figure are of particular interest: early nineteenth-century French alienism and late nineteenth-century positivist criminology. Both of these traditions made the demi-fou, i.e. the partially insane, the touchstone of a critique of law and law's conception of man. Through the work of early nineteenth-century alienists, the madman intervenes in discourses on criminal responsibility for the first time. For late nineteenth-century criminology this body becomes a model for a society that must be defended. Moosbrugger is the offspring of these traditions but as a modernist figure he is also something more: he is, as Musil says, our collective dream.