But just when people believed they could grasp it, affirm it and proclaim its value, all that was actually harvested was the irony of contradictions: the liberty of the madman was given a free reign, but in a space that was more enclosed and more rigid, less free than the always slightly indecisive space of confinement; the madman was freed from his association with crime and evil, only to be locked into the rigorous mechanisms of a determinism.