The Ordinary Bussines of Life Princeton Roger Backhouse

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol.
40(3), 319–321 Summer 2004

Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002 /jhbs.20030
© 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
B O O K R EV I EW S
ESSAY REVIEW: NAZIS, NIETZSCHE, AND NIHILISM
Carol Diethe. Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power: A Biography of Elisabeth Forster-
Nietzsche. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003. 214 pp. $34.95 (cloth).
ISBN 0-252-02826-0.
Charles Bambach. Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 350 pp. $45.00 (paper). ISBN 0-8014-4072-6.
Since Walter Kaufmann’s landmark Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist

and key studies by Danto and Schacht, scholarship on Nietzsche in the past twenty-five
years has seldom waned. One would imagine this is largely the result of Nietzsche’s rela-
tionship to some of the most important philosophical movements in the twentieth century:
existentialism, postmodern thought, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and (usually) right-
wing sociopolitical thought. This last point, Nietzsche’s association with hard-line conser-
vatism, is often based on the view of Nietzsche as having an almost pathological hatred of
“weakness” of any kind, and an interpretation of the Übermensch (superman) concept that
entailed a master race rescuing humanity from modernity and nihilism. Such a view, while
not without some generic basis, has been severely confabulated with the Nazi movement,
which used Nietzsche’s name in connection with their own putrid distortions of these con-
cepts. After World War II, Nietzsche was posthumously indicted at the Nuremberg trials as
believing in the primacy of Germany and the superiority of a master race. As a result of this
and other false connections, his reputation among scholars and the public was severely
scarred. Thanks to Kaufmann’s work, as well as many others, the idea that Nietzsche could
ever be construed as a type of “proto-Nazi” has been flatly rejected and disproved using
Nietzsche’s own writings.
Carol Diethe’s Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power is part biography of Elisabeth
Forster-Nietzsche and part genealogy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s work as presented to the Nazis
through the hands of his sister. Diethe paints a portrait of Elisabeth Nietzsche that is fair and
thoughtful but never vindictive or glossy. This is quite an accomplishment, considering
Elisabeth’s egomaniacal handling of her brother’s affairs and philosophical legacy after his
collapse in 1889. For the last 11 years of his life, Nietzsche was little more than a vegetable,
probably the result of a syphilitic infection. His mother was the primary caretaker of her son
until she died in 1897. For the last three years of Nietzsche’s life, Elisabeth was in sole con-
trol over her brother. Her main energies were directed toward establishing the Nietzsche
Archive, which would collect Nietzsche’s letters, notebooks, and manuscripts. The most im-
portant of these were a collection of notebooks and other miscellaneous manuscripts that
Elisabeth published as The Will to Power, rightly regarded as the most controversial work in
the Nietzschean oeuvre. However, the controversy is based on the impression that this was a
complete posthumous text and one Nietzsche would have wanted published. Clearly, this is
not the case, and Diethe reveals how Elisabeth saw this as an opportunity to pursue her own
pretentious agenda of intellectual and social status. As Diethe notes, and her rather clever title
implies, Elisabeth’s own unrefined “will to power” is what ironically and sadly co-creates her
319
320 BOOK REVIEWS
brother’s The Will to Power. Elisabeth portrayed herself as having understood her brother’s
work (which she did not), as having a close sibling connection and history together (which
they did not), and as, therefore, the person best suited to interpret her brother’s ideas and in-
tentions. All of this helped to justify her “tinkering” with Nietzsche’s writings and construct-
ing The Will to Power, and the Nietzsche Archive in general, according to her own selfish and
myopic understanding. The result was disastrous for Nietzsche’s reputation: The Will to Power
would be one of the main sources for the promulgation of Nazi ideology, and—perhaps the
greatest tragedy of all—Nietzsche’s other writings would now be seen through the distorted
lens of Fascist propaganda (Zarathustra, in particular).
So, in short, Diethe does a remarkably even-handed and often insightful job of not only
conveying the damage done by Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, but her personality as well. She
navigates a middle ground between telling the story of “Elisabeth” and the story of
“Nietzsche’s sister” (even though most readers will likely find the former infinitely more in-
teresting than the latter). I also often found myself wanting more of her insights on what
specifically Elisabeth altered and how this might be taken into consideration when re-read-
ing Nietzsche. Diethe’s understanding of Nietzsche is obviously profound; perhaps she
might consider offering us a revised, “de-Elisabethed” commentary on The Will to Power.
There is also a tempting hint of psychobiography in this work, particularly concerning the
unusual family constellation of Friedrich and Elisabeth situated among a powerful trio of fe-
male figures and no father. More insights are certain to be gained here; the Nietzsche well
is far from dry.
Also far from “dry” is Bambach’s Heidegger’s Roots, although it is extremely dense and
not for the novice in the ways of Heidegger’s thought, Western philosophy (particularly the
Greeks and nineteenth-century German Romanticism), and, of course, Nietzsche. Bambach’s
account is a highly detailed and contextualized examination of the various links between the
Nazi party and Heidegger. As a result, it places Heidegger’s thought within a historical and
sociopolitical perspective that will be essential to Heidegger scholars and those who see his
work as relevant to contemporary hermeneutics. Most psychologists and many historians of
psychology are perhaps only vaguely familiar with Heidegger’s work and may have at-
tempted Being and Time at one point, only to be left bewildered and confused, unsure if the
lack of understanding was their fault or his. In any event, Bambach’s work should convince
us that Heidegger is important not only as a thinker against modernism, but as an example
of the perils of attempting to see beyond one’s own context. Hermeneutics may liberate some
but still condemn others, and it is no escape from our own ideé fixe, nor a guarantee against
individual myopia.
Heidegger is widely (and rightly) regarded as one of the most important philosophers of
the twentieth century, as continuing and extending a line of Nietzschean thinking regarding
concepts such as truth and being, and as bringing 2,500 years of “philosophy as a metaphysics
of being” to a close. While we may not particularly like or admire “Heidegger the person,”
Bambach makes it clear that Heidegger’s ideas are a product of deep thought and originality
and are vitally important for us to consider. Once we situate Heidegger within Nazi Germany
during the 1930s, perhaps his importance becomes even greater for what it says about the re-
lationship between politics and our sense of identity as human “beings” and as a culture, or,
in Heidegger’s terms, a “world.”
Although it is impossible to succinctly summarize the vast array and depth of his argu-
ments, Bambach states that the evidence is unequivocal: Heidegger was a Nazi. What Bambach
then asks, in true Heideggerian fashion, is “what is a Nazi?” and “what kind of Nazi was
Heidegger?” The answer to this question lies in the historical context of a nineteenth-century
BOOK REVIEWS 321
German Romantic vision about the essence of the Volk, the reception of modernism as ni-
hilism, and the way German “rootedness” is tied to historical connections to ancient Greek
culture. The way out of our aimless, uprooted age involves a kind of Nietzschean “eternal re-
turn” to an unessentialized conception of being that marked pre-Socratic thought. The pre-
Socratics—or, as Nietzsche would argue, the “pre-Platonic philosophers”—were not merely a
step toward a science of nature, but a unique form of thinking about the relationship of being
and world. Unfortunately, these philosophers have become a victim of modernist presentist
thinking, as the “pre” denotes.
The historical connection between Germany and ancient Greece formed not only a philo-
sophical platform, but a political one as well. What is of vital importance for us today is
Bambach’s demonstration that this political platform of a privileged German destiny, which lay
in their rootedness in the earth and language, is a defining focal point for Heidegger’s hermeneu-
tics, and one on which turns far more than we may have previously understood. To break from
the ecumenical spirit of modernity, to rise above our crass, lowest common denominator-oriented
bourgeois culture—this was for Heidegger the future for the German Volk, an imminent future
that became a fixture in his thought. Although he would later criticize the National Socialist gov-
ernment, the news of the death camps and genocide, the loss of the war, and the subsequent split-
ting of Germany failed to shake Heidegger’s vision of the German Volk transforming Europe. So
“rooted” in this belief was Heidegger, that, in the end, he placed it even above the relentless crit-
ical thought that he claimed to value so highly.
Although he did not do as much damage to our understanding of Nietzsche as Elisabeth,
whom he apparently disliked and distrusted, Heidegger’s writings on Nietzsche have been ex-
tremely influential. Heidegger’s relationship to Nietzsche is exceedingly complex and
changed a great deal over the course of his life, but in terms of Nietzsche’s identification with
the Nazis, this is something that evolved later in Heidegger’s writings. Initially, Nietzsche was
understood by Heidegger as a “comrade in arms,” one of the first to recognize the signifi-
cance of the pre-Socratic philosophers’ notion of being for the history of Western philosophy.
Heidegger even used Nietzsche in some of his criticisms of the Nazis. However, Heidegger
later came to view Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power as part of the modern quest for a
metaphysics of being; according to Heidegger, Nietzsche was the “last metaphysician.” As
such, it seems to be more than a distinct possibility that Elisabeth Nietzsche’s construction
and publication of The Will to Power, and its subsequent proliferation as an edifice of National
Socialist propaganda, was central to Heidegger’s reading of this text.
Reviewed by SCOTT GREER, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Prince Edward
Island, Canada.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 40(3), 321–322 Summer 2004
David Healy. The Creation of Psychopharmacology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 2002. 469 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-674-00619-4.
In this thought-provoking, sweeping book, Healy argues that twentieth-century changes

in psychopharmacology have fundamentally altered the relationships of “health, behavioural
322 BOOK REVIEWS
norms, behavioural control, . . . alienation,” and productive forces in Western societies (p.
358). For Healy, this revolutionary process has, at the turn of the twenty-first century, placed
us on novel (and largely unsteady) conceptual, therapeutic, and social footings. To understand
how we got there, and what we might do about it, Healy provides a detailed and critical ac-
count of the history of psychopharmacology that places a huge body of scientific literature
within changing social, economic, and cultural contexts.
This is a book about shifting mental health paradigms (or thought styles) in keeping with
the early work of Ludwick Fleck and Thomas Kuhn, or, more recently, the work of Ian
Hacking. In far greater detail than could ever be captured in this review, Healy argues that the
reasons why some pharmaceuticals had a short life in patient treatment while others fared
much better had less to do with scientific merit or efficacy and more to do with the persua-
sive capacity of the theory surrounding the drug, the power of the pharmaceutical industrial
complex promoting the drug, and the culture of acceptance or rejection of drug-based ther-
apy. This explains, for example, how the dopamine receptor hypothesis was able to kill off
transmethylation. In a broader fashion, Healy employs this kind of analysis to explain how
psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry have shifted their attention from the delirious pa-
tient to the psychotic patient to the patient with personality disorder to the patient with symp-
toms of distress and depression; or, how our social organization has shifted from a theocracy
to a democracy to a “sanitocracy.”
For Healy, the discovery of chlorpromazine was the pivotal moment in the articula-
tion of novel conceptualizations of “the self,” the role of psychiatry, and the use (and
surely for Healy, the abuse) of psychopharmaceuticals. Chlorpromazine opened up a “new
realm of behavioural control” (p. 344), and presaged, with the help of Prozac’s mass dis-
tribution in North America, the popularization of Western self-identity as neurobiological
in orientation. The logical outcome of these developments, in Healy’s view, has been our
present era of “cosmetic psychopharmacology,” with the principal role of psychiatry be-
coming “the management of personality” (p. 387). This new paradigm has worked well for
the pharmaceutical industry’s bottom line, resulting in an ever-expanding market for med-
ication, at the same time that it has made psychiatry increasingly “pharmacocentric” (i.e.,
the science of psychiatry has become restricted to pharmacology, to the exclusion of other
scientific disciplines).
Healy leaves us contemplating the profound implications of a mental health paradigm
with such an extensive “therapeutic gaze”—although he does not himself use the term, nor,
surprisingly, does he consider how well Foucault’s ideas about “social control” or “self-disci-
pline” could (in my view) be made to fit with his argument. Instead, in Healy’s book, Foucault
is placed on a short list with other antipsychiatrists, who are in turn considered as part of a
misguided antipsychiatry movement that ironically contributes to the ascendance of a “psy-
cho-pharmaceutical complex” (p. 364). Healy’s summary dismissal of important thinkers in
the highly charged field of madness studies will likely generate considerable debate, as will
his rather overdetermined argument about the dominance of the psychopharmacological in
contemporary society. Nevertheless, by synthesizing such a massive historical record of sci-
entific research material, and critically evaluating it within social, cultural, and economic
contexts, Healy has written an authoritative work in the field that will be the benchmark for
future considerations of the subject.
Reviewed by JAMES E. MORAN, Assistant Professor, History Department, University of Prince
Edward Island, Charlottetown, PE, C1A 4P3.
BOOK REVIEWS 323
Roger Backhouse. The Ordinary Business of Life: A History of Economics from the
Ancient World to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2002. 248 pp. $35.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-691-09626-0.
This is a survey of over 2,000 years of economic thought. It goes without saying that
the only way to present so many thoughts in about 300 pages is by selecting, selecting, and
selecting. So there are two main points to be raised in a review. First, what were the author’s
principles of selection? What criteria were used to compress such an unwieldy mass of ma-
terial into a manageable length? Second, how has the author decided to present his vision
of the history of economics? And once we understand his goals, how well has he executed
the task?
Fortunately, Backhouse is quite explicit about his aims. He is so plain and I find his aims
so commendable that it is best to quote him directly: “The view underlying this book is that
economic ideas were present even in antiquity, and that those ancient ideas are relevant in try-
ing to locate the origins of modern economics. . . . My argument can be summed up by say-
ing that economics does not have a beginning or a ‘founder’; people have always thought
about questions that we now consider part of economics” (p. 6).
Backhouse realizes that one frequently distorts the past by looking at it through the lens
of the present, particularly since past ages may have been asking different questions. As a re-
sult, it is hard even to claim that we have “progressed.” He does introduce two innovations.
First, he minimizes the use of “great names” as an organizing principle; this emphasis upon
economics as the science of man in the business of ordinary life—the definition of Alfred
Marshall, the great Victorian economist—is a welcome change. Second, and perhaps more
radically, he devotes almost half the book to the twentieth century. Indeed, the twentieth cen-
tury is presented with considerable clarity; I would particularly recommend the section on the
growth of national income accounting. And even though his sympathies do not appear to be
with the present dominance of mathematical methods, his criticisms are muted.
If we turn to the earlier centuries, I have several points to query. A few errors have crept
in. The idea that Francis Hutcheson considered Mandeville’s “spending is good” thesis to be
false because Hutcheson thought altruism would cause any deficit in spending to be made up
is at least misleading and probably wrong (p. 113). Similarly, the claim that Malthus only ad-
vanced the thesis of the arithmetic and geometric progressions as one set of ideas among
many is definitely misleading. The progressions were important for two reasons. First, they
gave the impression of mathematical precision to the readers of Malthus’s Essay and provided
a veneer of “science” to the Essay. Second, it showed the true originality of Malthus to lie in
the claim that population is always too great, and not in the repetition of the well-known idea
that population could become too great.
The most significant omission lies in neglecting the impact of Christianity. Who knows
today that the “Invisible Hand”—now taken to be a reference to the market—was really a way
of referring to God? So it is no surprise that the most persistent and effective popularizers of
free markets were staunch Christians like Richard Whately, the archbishop of Dublin. The
failure is most significant in not giving the Irish Christians their due in founding development
economics. The Irish were the first colony of Europe, and it makes sense that they should also
324 BOOK REVIEWS
have started the first coherent program for economic development because of their situation.
It is a good story and it is true. Perhaps Backhouse will find room for it in a second edition.
Reviewed by SALIM RASHID, Professor of Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820.
Joan C. Tonn. Mary P. Follett: Creating Democracy, Transforming Management. New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. 640 pp. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-300-09621-6.
Mary P. Follett was a remarkable person. Best known today for her pioneering work in
management theory and practice, Follett also played a major role in the development of neigh-
borhood community centers, both in her local Boston area and nationally. She was a dedicated
community activist, worked for women’s suffrage, was an early advocate of vocational guid-
ance and placement, and authored influential books on political power (The Speaker of the
House of Representatives), the nature of democracy (The New State: Group Organization, the
Solution for Popular Government), and group studies (Creative Experience). Born in Quincy,
Massachusetts, in 1868, Follett overcame both a difficult childhood (primarily due to an al-
coholic, often absent father) and limited educational opportunities for women to graduate
with honors from Radcliffe College. Hampered by a debilitating, chronic illness for most of
her adult life, Follett nevertheless managed to create an impressive body of work. Her writ-
ings and lectures on topics such as conflict, power (“power-over” versus “power-with”), au-
thority, leadership, and group processes anticipated modern management theory and practice
and continue to have relevance today.
As Joan C. Tonn notes in her excellent biography, Follett’s work has been rediscovered
by organizational and management theorists at least three times since her death in 1933 and
is currently the subject of scholarly inquiry in a number of diverse fields. An obvious ad-
mirer of Follett, Tonn has produced a sympathetic, richly detailed, meticulously referenced
biography. The biography is organized as a straightforward narrative, beginning with a dis-
cussion of Follett’s ancestry and parents, her difficult childhood, her struggle to obtain an
education, and her adult life as an advocate, author, and lecturer. Tonn traces Follett’s ca-
reer from civic worker through her transition to prominent lecturer on business administra-
tion and management. Tonn convincingly demonstrates that Follett was not an armchair
philosopher. Her ideas came from years of observation and experience (e.g., dealing with
the rough-and-tumble world of Boston politics in championing her school centers).
Particularly adept at placing Follett in the context of the Progressive Era, Tonn is also good
at describing the intellectual climate of the times and Follett’s large circle of friends and
collaborators. Although in these discussions I occasionally found Follett fading a bit too far
in the background, our understanding of Follett’s life and work benefits from this level of
detail, allowing Tonn to expand on the many factors that influenced Follett’s intellectual and
personal development. Tonn is appropriately circumspect in her discussion of Follett’s per-
sonal life, avoiding unwarranted speculation and sticking to documented evidence. Of par-
ticular note are Tonn’s sensitive treatment of Follett’s long-term friendship with Isobel
BOOK REVIEWS 325
Briggs and her coverage of the twists and turns of her convoluted and tempestuous collab-
oration with Eduard Lindeman. Regarding Follett’s work, Tonn provides a very serviceable
summary of major themes and ideas.
I have to confess that I have a weakness for biographies that purport to resurrect (rela-
tively) neglected lives and careers. Knowing of Mary Follett from her inclusion in early, pio-
neering works of industrial psychology (e.g., Viteles, 1932) and management (Metcalf, 1927),
and her occasional appearance in “classic” collections of readings in organizational theory
and behavior (e.g., Shafritz & Ott, 2001), I looked forward to learning more about Follett’s
work and life. Joan Tonn did not disappoint with this long overdue biography.
REFERENCES
Metcalf, H. C. (Ed.). (1927). The psychological foundations of management. Chicago: A. W. Shaw Co.
Shafritz, J. M., & Ott, J. S. (2001). Classics of organization theory (5th ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt.
Viteles, M. S. (1932). Industrial psychology. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Reviewed by ANDREW VINCHUR, Associate Professor of Psychology, Lafayette College,

Easton, PA 18042.
Janet Browne. Charles Darwin: The Power of Place. Volume II of a Biography. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. 591 pp. $37.50. ISBN 0-679-42932-8.
In 1993, I noted in this journal that a prior dearth of “big” biographies of Charles
Darwin had recently been alleviated with the appearance of lengthy volumes by Bowlby
(1990) and Desmond and Moore (1992). Although my review found much of value in both
of those works, I concluded by suggesting that neither one should be considered “defini-
tive,” because Darwin meant “too many things to too many people to be encompassed de-
finitively in a single volume however big it may be” (Fancher, 1993, p. 270). Now, with the
completion of the longest biography of them all, by Janet Browne, it seems appropriate to
revisit the issue.
The first volume of Browne’s biography, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, appeared in 1995
and described Darwin’s life through 1856 as he began writing Natural Selection, the pro-
jected multivolumed exposition of the evolutionary theory he had been privately nurturing
for two decades. Browne’s second volume opens with the disruption of that leisurely task
by the arrival in 1858 of Alfred Russel Wallace’s famous letter and manuscript, outlining an
almost identical theory and stimulating Darwin to go public sooner than he had planned
with his momentous “abstract,” the 490 pages of The Origin of Species, in 1859. Taking
Darwin from that point to his death in 1882, this volume deals with his “years of fame,” as
he worked tirelessly—and with great success—to promote publicly the ideas he had culti-
vated privately during the years covered by the first volume. The two volumes combined
comprise nearly 1,200 pages.
Browne worked for several years as associate editor on the project to publish The
Correspondence of Charles Darwin, and the biography clearly reveals her intimate familiar-
326 BOOK REVIEWS
ity with this vast resource. She skillfully uses letters and family documents to present a com-
pelling “insider’s view” of Darwin both as a person and as a scientist. I cannot do justice to
the detail and richness of Browne’s presentation here, but will just briefly mention some il-
lustrative examples. Earlier accounts of Darwin have typically emphasized his modesty, ami-
ability, and personal charm—qualities that helped him to get along with Captain FitzRoy and
his shipmates on the Beagle, for example, not to mention his priority rival Wallace and the in-
numerable colleagues and correspondents he persuaded to provide him with data and infor-
mation to support his theory. These qualities do not disappear in Browne’s characterization
but they are at least partially offset by her portrayal of some other, less lovable traits. She
shows how intensely competitive he was, for example, striving mightily as a young man to
outcollect rival beetle collectors (sometimes earning their enmity in the process), or to defeat
his family and friends in billiards or backgammon games in his maturity. She reveals Darwin
as a sharp financial manager, making shrewd investments for himself and his family, but
showing little generosity in paying his servants. She shows him as often self-indulgent and
“selfish,” inconveniencing his family with demands ostensibly deriving from his illness and
refusing even to attend the funerals of his mentors Henslow and Lyell. Most significantly,
Browne brilliantly shows how all of these individually positive and negative characteristics in-
teracted to make Darwin a supremely successful promoter of his scientific theory. Sometimes
he used his manifold charms to get what he needed from informants and colleagues or to dis-
arm critics; other times he plotted quite cold-bloodedly and ruthlessly as to how best to win
over allies or vanquish his opponents. Browne clearly admires Darwin and does not com-
pletely erase his image as the benevolent and affable sage. But she also presents a nuanced
and believable view of him as a human being with human frailties.
To return to my opening issue: Is this a “definitive” biography of Darwin? In at least one
sense I believe it is, because I cannot conceive of anyone making better use of the sources and
presenting a more detailed, convincing, and interesting account of what Darwin was like to
himself and to those who knew him. Still, there are things Browne does not do. She makes no
attempt to duplicate the wealth of information about social and political background factors
that have been provided by Desmond and Moore (1992), for example, so that work remains a
unique and indispensable source for all serious Darwin scholars. And for all of the detail that
Browne provides about Darwin’s personal life, she does not venture to “explain” him from a
psychological point of view—something that the psychoanalyst Bowlby (1990) tried to do by
invoking his attachment theory and suggesting that the early death of Darwin’s mother was
the crucial formative experience of his life. Browne has provided a wealth of new material
that might profitably be used as a starting point for future psychobiographers with alternative
theoretical orientations. Accordingly, there is still some biographical work left for the Darwin
industry to do. But it is safe to say that Browne’s two volumes will remain as the standard ref-
erence source on the facts of Darwin’s life for a long time to come.
REFERENCES
Bowlby, J. (1990). Charles Darwin: A new life. New York: Norton.
Browne, J. (1995). Charles Darwin: Voyaging, a biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Desmond, A., & Moore, J. (1992). Darwin: The life of a tormented evolutionist. New York: Warner Books.
Fancher, R. (1993). Review of Desmond and Moore’s Darwin: The life of a tormented evolutionist. Journal of the
History of the Behavioral Sciences, 29, 269–270.
Reviewed by RAYMOND E. FANCHER, Professor of Psychology at York University, Toronto,

ON, Canada, and Editor of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences.
BOOK REVIEWS 327
Mary Bowman-Kruhm. Margaret Mead: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,

2003. 160 pp. + photographs. $27.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-313-32267-8.
This book is not intended for a professional or academic audience. Rather, it is part of a
new series of biographies intended, so the publisher claims, for high school students and un-
dergraduates. Whatever its virtues, it should not be assigned to undergraduates. They would
do better reading Mead closely.
Bowman-Kruhm, an instructor in Johns Hopkins University’s School of Professional
Studies programs in business and education, and author of over 30 books for children and
young adults, has read and relies upon previous biographical studies. She has also inter-
viewed a number of scholars, including Dana Raphael, who knew Mead over a period of
years, but only one, Hillary Lapsley, who, to my knowledge, has worked extensively with
Mead’s papers. The book contains easily correctable errors of fact (e.g., the Dutch had not
completely colonized Bali by 1900, nor did Jane Belo study under Mead—both on p. 70).
More important, it repeats the common, even orthodox, misunderstandings of Boasian an-
thropology and Mead’s work.
According to Bowman-Kruhm’s version of events, those engaged in the nature-nurture
debate espoused either the view that all human differences should be understood as re-
ducible to biology or that these same differences result solely from nurture. For Bowman-
Kruhm, the important thing to understand is that Mead’s arguments in Coming of Age in
Samoa (1928) and Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) opposed theories of adolescence and
the thinking of children as biologically determined. This makes Mead an advocate of nur-
ture, as much received opinion expects of a good Boasian. But this opinion misunderstands
or ignores Mead’s debt to Gestalt psychology; she read Koffka’s The Growth of the Mind
(1924) during the summer of 1925. It also misunderstands or ignores her adaptation of
William McDougall’s distinction of temperament (inherited, innate predisposition) and
character (the organization of learned habit) to ethnographic materials; this distinction is
present in a muted way in the first two of Mead’s popular books (but check the indices), and
is crucial in Mead’s discussion in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935).
For Mead after 1932, temperaments are not covariant with physiological sex as such, but
they are temperaments nonetheless. This should indicate that the reception of Mead has
been too simple; there is more to Mead’s argument than that we could live otherwise than
we do. Bowman-Kruhm becomes snippy with Mead when Mead’s ideas from Sex and
Temperament and Male and Female (1949) in particular, do not conform with the way those
ideas have been generally received.
Franz Boas claimed many human differences arose within the various and particular his-
tories of distinct peoples. For Bowman-Kruhm, this makes Boas and the Boasians, including
Mead, advocates not only of nurture but also of so-called cultural relativism. Yet the Boasians,
including Mead, were stern critics of scientific racism and its social consequences, these
being culturally and historically contingent phenomena as the Boasians, notably but not ex-
clusively Mead’s friend Ruth Benedict, well understood. Human beings (even the Boasians)
are not to assume that their own local, temporally specific experiences give them privileged
knowledge of universal moral truths or so-called “human nature,” but also not that anything
goes, and what we call natures both change and differ.
328 BOOK REVIEWS
Once again, Bowman-Kruhm is concerned with received versions, even caricatures, of

complicated ideas, not the ideas themselves. Had she kept the received versions and Mead’s
ideas somewhat more separate, Bowman-Kruhm would have written a different and more
complicated and useful book—one suitable for students attending university.
REFERENCES
Koffka, K. (1924). The growth of the mind (R. M. Ogden, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work
published 1921)
Mead, M. (1928). Coming of age in Samoa. New York: William Morrow and Co.
Mead, M. (1930). Growing up in New Guinea. New York: William Morrow and Co.
Mead, M. (1935). Sex and temperament in three primitive societies. New York: William Morrow and Co.
Mead, M. (1949). Male and female: A study of the sexes in a changing world. New York: William Morrow and Co.
Reviewed by GERALD SULLIVAN, Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of

Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556-5611.
Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull. Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade: The
Management of Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London with the Complete Text of
John Monro’s 1766 Case Book. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of
California Press, 2003. 352 pp. $44.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-520-22660-7.
The most important aspect of this volume is the case book, which serves as its core.
Preserved it would seem largely by happenstance, it was written by eighteenth-century
alienist John Monro. Monro is most frequently remembered as physician to Bethlem Hospital
from 1751 to 1791, but this case book instead records his private patients for the year 1766.
His practice was considerable, and the case book describes the maladies of 100 individuals.
It is strongest at describing the circumstances of the maladies, the symptoms, and the occa-
sions on which they manifested themselves, allowing insights into how insanity was perceived
and when it was thought to be necessary to seek medical attention. Indications are also some-
times given as to how the patient was referred to Dr. Monro, allowing important insights into
the practice networks of an eighteenth-century mad-doctor. Sadly, little information is con-
tained as to the treatment employed, limiting the insights provided by the volume into the cur-
ative regimes of the period.
Because of difficulties of legibility of the original, the editors have not provided a fac-
simile edition of the original case book. Instead, through the use of different typefaces, they
have maintained the layout and presentational idiosyncrasies of the original. The result is a
pleasantly readable and informative text.
If the case book itself is the most important aspect of the volume, the commentary is
nonetheless exemplary. Andrews and Scull provide a readable and engaging account of the
case book itself and its importance to scholarship on eighteenth-century madness. The sub-
stantive connections they draw are intelligent, and their citation of the existing literature is
extensive without being intrusive. They point out, for example, that Monro’s private patients
were not solely the violently mad or severely disordered, but included also the 18th-century
BOOK REVIEWS 329
“worried well”—those for example with sleep, speech, or relatively minor eating disorders,
or with relatively nonsevere depression. The case book further calls into question the no-
tion that the doctor was a last recourse, approached only when the symptoms had become
entrenched. The authors acknowledge the difficulties of generalization from one brief
source, but they correctly view this as a challenge to the received histories of eighteenth-
century madness. They further argue that the case book shows Monro questioning the de-
sirability of confinement of the mad and being hesitant in the application of physical re-
straint. In all of these points, the volume is consistent with and continues the reassessment
of eighteenth-century insanity commenced by Roy Porter. Issues of gender, family dynam-
ics, the status of the patient, and the pragmatics of running a mad-doctoring business are
also discussed with intelligence.
I found the most tantalizing question to be what Monro thought he was doing when he
made the notes. Andrews and Scull do address this question with considerable sophistication,
but their answers are not wholly satisfying. The authors suggest that the case numbering sys-
tem may correspond to a receipt book, now lost, but that does not explain the record itself. It
does not seem that the book was to enlighten Monro’s contemporaries. Andrews and Scull
suggest that it may have been to enlighten his successors in the family mad-doctoring busi-
ness (p. 20). This suggestion is problematic, however. An outcome is recorded in only a mi-
nority of cases, let alone any indication of successful treatment strategies. To use the modern
jargon, the notes concern primarily patient presentation. Hints are made at a legal context for
the notes, but as the editors note, legal requirements to maintain case records do not com-
mence until the nineteenth century and they were not kept as a matter of routine prior to that
time. While notes might have been relevant in a defense to an eighteenth-century wrongful
confinement action, most of the patients chronicled were not admitted to madhouses. While
the content of the notes is instructive, their context remains a mystery.
Reviewed by PETER BARTLETT, School of Law, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United
Kingdom, NG7 2RD.
Lawrence Goldman. Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science
Association 1857–1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xvi + 430 pp.
£50.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-521-33053-X.
The (British) National Association for the Promotion of Social Science has had some bad
press or has, at best, been overlooked in histories of sociology. It has been neglected, and
worse, accused of “frustrating” the development of a theoretical science of society by divert-
ing the talents of socially concerned Victorians to social reform and party politics, because
the history of sociology has valued high theory over empirical enquiry. Against this view,
Goldman argues that, on its own terms and in the eyes of similar organizations in other coun-
tries, the Social Science Association (SSA) succeeded. Members of the American Social
Science Association and the Verein für Sozialpolitik, parallel organizations in the United
States and Germany, envied the British SSA for its access to government and its political ef-
330 BOOK REVIEWS
fectiveness. Academic sociology, suggests Goldman, was not the primary goal of these or-
ganizations but, partly at least, a consequence of “the frustration of the political aspirations
of the liberal middle class” (p. 340) in these other countries. Some of Goldman’s arguments
are not new, as the book incorporates his important articles from the late 1980s, but the ar-
guments are developed here in a richer context.
The very large number of members, the breadth of expertise represented, and the in-
volvement of reforming politicians all contributed to the effectiveness of the SSA. At its
inaugural meeting in Birmingham in October 1857, Lord Brougham addressed a crowd of
over 5,000. Lord John Russell, a former (and future) prime minister, moved a motion in-
augurating the new Association. A large number of gentry, bankers, merchants, and man-
ufacturers of the town and district were present. This illustrates the numbers mobilized by
the Association, its respectability, its connections to reform, and its access to parliamen-
tarians. The meeting, held less than three months previously, at which it was decided to
found the Association was smaller and reveals a different side of the organization. The 28
men and—unusual for a Victorian organization—15 women who met at Lord Brougham’s
London house included public health experts (e.g., John Simon), leaders of the recent
campaign for a Married Women’s Property Act (e.g., Bessie Rayner Parkes), and lawyers
from the Law Amendment Society. Other groups active from the beginning were philan-
thropists engaged in the reform of juvenile criminals, members of the labor aristocracy,
and advocates for the reform of middle-class or secondary education. Through the SSA,
public opinion was brought to bear on the government and administration. Philanthropists,
activists, and experts proposed and discussed legislative measures for reform before an au-
dience that included reforming MPs and government administrators. Conversely, the gov-
erning class, which had survived the political reforms and upheavals of the first half of the
century, needed social expertise and used the SSA as a “voluntary bureaucracy” to develop
social policy.
The book is impressively thorough in its attention to both historiographical context
and Victorian context. It covers the history of social science, the history of law reform,
the Victorian women’s movement, debates about labor relations in the mid-Victorian pe-
riod, and more. Readers of JHBS are likely to be interested in Goldman’s conceptualiza-
tion of the history of “social science” (Chapter 10). Rejecting efforts to impose coher-
ence by leaving out movements and genres that do not fit modern definitions, Goldman
wants a history that includes secular religious movements such as Comtean positivism
and Owenite socialism; social statistics and Marxian socialism and all the movements
that sought to discover the laws governing the social order; the literary and journalistic
forms that embodied a self-analytical “sociological imagination”; and the Social Science
Association. He notes that the original proposal was for a “National Association for the
Moral and Social Improvement of the People” and that many critics derided the name as
pretentious and inapplicable to its activities. However, having stated these reasons against
including the SSA in a history of social science, Goldman goes on to argue that, like ad-
vocates of other social theories and forms of social enquiry, the SSA members claimed
that they were applying scientific method to social problems and hence were producing
a social science from which practical recommendations followed. The format was popu-
lar rather than academic, but, he concludes, the SSA represented a widely held scientific
ideal and pursued it with a political effectiveness which, rather than being a sidetrack
from social theory, was admired by other similar movements. The SSA was mainstream
rather than a diversion.
BOOK REVIEWS 331
Reviewed by RUTH BARTON, Associate Professor of History, The University of Auckland,
Auckland, New Zealand.
Denis Fisette (Ed.). Husserl’s “Logical Investigations” Reconsidered. Dordrecht, the

Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. 235 pp. $93.00 (cloth). ISBN 1-4020-
1389-2.
In 2001 in Montreal, Denis Fisette organized an international conference to celebrate the

centenary of Logical Investigations, and, thanks to his editorial work, 12 of the studies origi-
nally presented there are now available to the public. Elegantly avoiding the risk of rigid mon-
umentalization associated with commemorative gestures, Fisette’s book presents the thematic
horizon of Husserl’s Opus Magnum as a lively and prolific research program. The distin-
guished scholars who contribute to this collection explore a vast array of themes that frame
the architecture of Logical Investigations, including logic, intentionality, theory of knowl-
edge, language, universals, mereology, and grammar.
Section I of the book groups three contributions by Dagfinn Føllesdal, David Woodruff
Smith, and Denis Fisette, and has two major aims: to give a general account of the overall
philosophical project of Husserl’s work and to emphasize the ideas of intentionality and the-
ory of science as unifying ingredients of Logical Investigations. Section II comprises a fasci-
nating and thorough discussion of Bolzanian influence on Husserl. Jan Sebestik investigates
some of the Husserlian concepts that can be traced back to Bolzano. Rolf George compara-
tively analyzes Bolzano’s and Husserl’s critique of psychologism. Wolfgang Künne scruti-
nizes Husserl’s objection to Bolzano’s claim that questions are a peculiar type of judgment
and therefore have truth-values. Section III, which includes studies by Robin Rollinger,
Richard Cobb-Stevens, and Karl Schuhmann, retains the same historical perspective and
delves into the relationship between Husserl and his teacher, Franz Brentano, as well as into
the reception of Logical Investigations in the Munich Circle, whose founder was Johannes
Daubert. Section IV collects three studies by Roberto Poli, Dallas Willard, and James
Mensch. While the first two studies are dedicated to explaining the theory of wholes and parts
with respect to the formal ontologies that can be derived from it and in relation to the realism
that underlies it, the third examines the dual determination of consciousness, namely, the re-
lationship between physiologically determined mental processes and ideal laws of logic.
Taken together, these studies compose a detailed cartographic enterprise that orients the
reader within the complex topology of Husserl’s text. Deserving a special notice, Robin
Rollinger’s incisively critical essay points out the weakness of the Husserlian arguments for posit-
ing names and static fulfillment and accuses Husserl of committing the “phenomenological fal-
lacy” (p. 149). Dagfinn Føllesdal and James Mensch situate the problematic of Logical
Investigations within the ensemble of Husserl’s oeuvre. Comparatively analyzing the thetic com-
ponents of intentional acts such as perception, remembering, imagination, and valuing, Føllesdal
argues that the reality-character of the world as well as the ways we justify our claims refer back
to the unthematic consciousness related by Husserl to the Lebenswelt. He concludes that the “tra-
332 BOOK REVIEWS
ditional idealism/realism distinction is ill suited to capture Husserl’s position” (p. 17). Mensch re-
gards Husserl’s career as a “motivated path” (p. 213) whose main ligne de force is the problem of
the objectively valid knowledge. In Mensch’s view, Logical Investigations does not offer a satis-
factory account of the relationship between ideal and real contents of judgments. It is by inter-
preting ideal meanings not as “objects of reference” but rather as “referring functions” (p. 216)
that one can understand why an ideal intentional content is, from the outset, intersubjective.
Due to its highly technical phenomenological terminology, Husserl’s “Logical
Investigations” Reconsidered might scare away the neophytes. However, it would remain a
valuable guide for those who want to explore one of the crucial philosophical works in the
philosophy of the twentieth century.
Reviewed by VICTOR BICEAGA, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada.
Thomas Dixon. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological

Category. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 287 pp. £47.50 (cloth). ISBN
0-521-82729-9.
Like so many other psychological categories, “emotion” is a relatively recent historical

invention. The term can be found in some eighteenth-century texts, but only in the course of
the nineteenth century is it generally adopted to refer to “a set of morally disengaged, bodily,
non-cognitive and involuntary feelings,” a working definition used by Thomas Dixon in ex-
ploring the historical emergence of the modern category of emotion.
In a series of closely argued and well-documented chapters, Dixon shows that this cate-
gory had no equivalent in earlier discourse. “Affections,” for example, encompassed rational
variants, and the venerable concept of the “passions of the soul” was profoundly different
from emotions in its strong moral connotations. Dixon makes the important point that the
meaning of all psychologically significant concepts derives from their embeddedness in net-
works of related concepts. In traditional usage, “passions” were part of a discursive web in
which “sin,” “self-love,” “conscience,” and so on, played crucial roles. “Emotion,” however,
quickly became part of a morally neutral discourse that linked it to such concepts as “organ-
ism,” “organ,” “bodily expression,” and so on. As a result, the domain of phenomena covered
by “emotion” is not at all the same as that covered by the older “passion.” Dixon clearly
demonstrates that “emotion” constitutes a specifically modern discursive construction rather
than an analogue of some ancient psychological category.
Because one is dealing with a network of interconnected categories, historical changes
can only be understood in terms of the shifting relationships among them. The change from
passion to emotion implicated concomitant changes in the understanding of several other cat-
egories—will, reason, and desire, in particular. Dixon presents a superb analysis of the inter-
relationship between the historical fate of the will and the passions. He pays less attention to
changes in the meaning of rationality, especially the instrumentalization of reason, and to the
new, quasi-biological understanding of individual desire.
BOOK REVIEWS 333
This is partly due to the legitimate restriction of his analysis to the English language
literature where the origins of “emotion” can be traced to the naturalistic mental philoso-
phy of Scottish writers, especially Hume and Thomas Brown. The nineteenth-century re-
construction of psychological categories was accomplished on this foundation, but it also
depended on the tripartite division of cognition, affect, and conation imported from
Germany. Dixon recognizes this but limits himself to exploring only specific aspects of this
line of historical development.
Instead, he deals very fully with the way in which Brown’s purely mental understanding
of “emotion” was converted into a psycho-physical category in the subsequent work of Bain,
Spencer, and Darwin. His account culminates in William James’s appropriation of this phys-
icalized category for the nascent discipline of psychology, a move that assisted the rhetorical
affiliation of psychology with the natural sciences.
Dixon regards the emergence of the modern category of emotion as part of a seculariza-
tion process that affected the entire network of categories used to classify and conceptualize
human experience and conduct. But he also insists that the historiography of psychology
ought not to limit itself to providing an account of such dominant trends. There were opposi-
tional tendencies whose less physicalist and more cognitive interpretation of “emotion” de-
serves to be rescued from historical oblivion.
Measured against the sharper, more differentiated analysis presented in this book, the
conventional understanding of “emotion” begins to look like a very blunt instrument. Dixon’s
contribution is not “merely” historical; it has considerable relevance for contemporary at-
tempts to achieve a richer conceptualization of affective life.
Reviewed by KURT DANZIGER, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, York University, Toronto,
Canada.
Nils Gilman. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 344 pp. $48.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8018-
7399-1.
Created by academic social scientists during the 1950s and 1960s, modernization theory
provided the dominant American framework for thinking about postcolonial nations by pro-
moting the belief that such countries would achieve “modernity” on the model of the United
States. Its close connection to state policy making and access to private foundation money
made modernization theory far more consequential than most social scientific paradigms,
while making its mandarin proponents vulnerable to the charge that they were ideological ser-
vants of American power. Nils Gilman points out that modernization theory thrived in a Cold
War context, as it promised to explain how the United States could help third-world countries
achieve a capitalist modernity that would inoculate them from the threat of Communist
takeover. Yet, Mandarins of the Future is original precisely because it does not explain mod-
ernization theory by its Cold War context alone.
334 BOOK REVIEWS
As Gilman demonstrates, modernization theory not only influenced U.S. foreign policy,
but it also revolutionized American social science in several respects. Interdisciplinary in na-
ture, modernization theory’s attention to political, psychological, and sociological factors set
it apart from theories that concentrated solely on economic development. It represented a
postwar turn toward grand theory that drew specifically upon Talcott Parsons’s attempt to de-
velop a general theory of social action and appealed to those who wanted to “think big” about
the tremendous problems of the postcolonial world. In political science, it transformed the
subdiscipline of comparative politics, which had previously concentrated its attention almost
entirely on the West. Though original in these respects, modernization theory remained con-
sistent with a long-term Enlightenment tradition of social science that sought to impose
“order, plan, and mastery” on the world (p. 7).
One of Gilman’s most significant accomplishments is demonstrating that modernization
theory was a project of a technocratic midcentury liberalism that wanted to create, from the top
down, a global New Deal order. In contrast to today’s neoliberals, who put unlimited faith in
market mechanisms alone, modernization theorists believed that the state had an important role
to play in ensuring the welfare of its population. Gilman even asserts that the postcolonial
world was “a stage on which domestically frustrated liberals could act out their reformist fan-
tasies” (p. 20). Yet it seems to me that domestic political complacency, rather than frustration,
led modernization theorists to offer the United States as a model of modernity for the rest of
the world. After all, modernization theorists’ domestic reform agenda focused on the one re-
gion of the United States they felt to be most like the postcolonial world, the segregated South.
By placing modernization theory in a larger social and historical context, Gilman’s account
contains larger insights about the intellectual and political history of the postwar United States.
One of the best chapters in the book explains modernization theory’s remarkably precipitous de-
cline in the early 1970s as a result of a series of interrelated factors, including the decline of wel-
fare-state liberalism in the face of criticism from the left and the right; domestic strife that led
many to wonder whether the United States had achieved a stable, fixed point of modernity that
other countries could emulate; and the rise of postmodernist skepticism about metanarratives.
Gilman convincingly catalogues modernization theory’s many faults: its arrogant assurance
that it provided the only theory capable of understanding the postcolonial world; its failure to con-
sider the importance of national and local differences; its unwillingness to recognize that moder-
nity takes on many different forms; its often shoddy empirical work; its failure to understand the
self-interested nature of state action; its sole focus on the individual nation-state to the exclusion
of analyzing global systems of power and exchange; and its resolute antipopulism and embrace
of an elitist theory of democracy. Gilman is most critical of modernization theorists, such as
Lucian Pye and Walt Rostow, who concluded that authoritarian military regimes were often the
best agencies for constructing modernity in the postcolonial world. “It is difficult to escape the
conclusion,” Gilman writes, “that American postwar apologists for military dictatorship occupy
a moral position akin to Martin Heidegger’s in his celebration of early Nazism” (p. 190).
Given Gilman’s blunt and relentlessly well-documented criticisms of modernization the-
orists throughout the text, it is surprising that he concludes that contemporary policy regarding
the postcolonial world should “actualize the best parts of 1950s modernization theory—its vi-
sion of a healthier, wealthier, more equal, and more democratic world” (p. 276). In particular,
Gilman finds fault with postmodernist critics who point out the flaws in modernization theory
without offering any plan for dealing with the very real problems of the postcolonial poor.
Thus, Gilman sensibly argues that contemporary thinking about the postcolonial world should
combine the welfare-oriented liberalism of the modernization theorists with a greater empha-
BOOK REVIEWS 335
sis on democracy and human rights. Thus, like any good history of social science, Mandarins
of the Future both helps us understand a past paradigm in its historical context and offers in-
sights for those seeking to comprehend the social world of today.
Reviewed by DANIEL GEARY, Department of History, Washington University in St. Louis.
Martin S. Staum. Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race and Empire
1815–1848. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. 245 pp. $39.95 (cloth).
ISBN 0-7735-2580-7.
The debate about the revolutionary principle of equality and the breakdown of social order
following the French Restoration saw the development of a strong interest in scientifically based
differentiation and classification of people. Martin S. Staum’s recent book Labeling People in-
vestigates the discussion of three learned societies founded in Paris between 1821 and 1839,
leading up to the February Revolution of 1848, and the practical effects of their discussion.
First, Staum reviews two eighteenth-century diagnostic approaches: Lavater’s physiognomy
and P. Camper’s “facial angle” (the angle between the horizontal and the line extending from the
most prominent point of the forehead to the front of the upper incisor teeth). This characteristic,
in particular, was used to determine race and intelligence. When, in 1807, the German physician
F. J. Gall introduced his “craniology” to Paris, a continuous debate about this new method of in-
terpretation of physical appearance began. Gall’s theories remained controversial until his death
in Paris in 1928. After his death, the Société phrénologique (1831) was founded. Practical appli-
cations were explored, especially in the field of criminology, but phrenology offered ethnological
classification too. This, however, was the domain of the Société de géographie and Société eth-
nologique de Paris, which aimed to provide and justify scientific racial classifications and hier-
archies. Only brief mention is made of the pursuit of the same goal by the Société des
Observateurs de l’homme de Paris between 1799 and 1804. For the early nineteenth-century
scholars, empirical methods of observation, exploration, and measurement were the self-evident
basis of knowledge. Expedition reports and travel stories provided additional material. The prob-
lem of heredity or whether it is possible to influence human abilities and dispositions was dis-
cussed in the same way as intelligence theory is discussed today. Denial that “savages” could be
“civilized” often allowed slavery, colonial imperialism, and exploitation to be legitimized.
The present book is based on extensive relevant literature and on personal files, lists of
members, and other handwritten archive material concerning the history of the learned soci-
eties. A very subtly differentiated picture results: for example, a clear picture of the support-
ers and opponents of phrenology emerges. Even though the theory of phrenology was associ-
ated with several forces of social reform and humanitarianism, more frequently it was used to
debase other races or classes and to legitimize their exploitation. The author takes great care
to bring out the individual development and position of several protagonists, and this allows
the reader to understand the discussion within and between the learned societies and to clearly
see that these societies played a significant role in the formation of the early social sciences.
336 BOOK REVIEWS
The historical example of the human need for classification and differentiation of others
in the first half of the nineteenth century evokes a current parallel case: the author repeatedly
points to The Bell Curve (1994), in which Herrnstein and Murray describe tested intelligence
as an inherent and largely unchangeable cognitive ability and as a stable predictor of numer-
ous social variables (delinquency, poverty, dependency on welfare, etc.). Herrnstein and
Murray’s conclusions and recommendations bear an alarming resemblance to those of the
phrenologists and ethnologists around 1830. Modern methods of diagnostic testing can also
serve to “construct the Other” and, like the reading of faces and cranial forms or the measur-
ing of facial angles, they are open to optimistic or deterministic interpretation.
Martin S. Staum’s book is an excellent contribution to the history of the social sciences
that enriches the history of ideas with a socio-historical approach by analyzing the debates of
the early learned societies in their historical context.
REFERENCE
Herrnstein, R. J., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New York:
Free Press.
Reviewed by JÜRGEN JAHNKE, Professor of Psychology, Pedagogical University of Freiburg,

Germany.
Robert Arnott, Stanley Finger, and C. U. M. Smith (Eds.). Trepanation: History,

Discovery, Theory. Lisse, the Netherlands: Swets and Zeitlinger, 2003. xii + 408 pp.
$99.00 (cloth). ISBN 90-265-1923-0.
I have to start by declaring my interest and my ignorance: I know two of the editors of
this book and admire their work in the history of the neurosciences very much, but I know lit-
tle detail of the history of trepanation. However, like almost everyone I know, including neu-
roscientists, I have been fascinated by the mere fact of trepanation. The main question is
“Why was it done?” But there are others, such as “How was it done?” and “Who did it?” The
virtue of the book, and it is a quite outstanding one, is that, insofar as answers are possible,
they are provided by the world’s most authoritative researchers in the field.
The editors explain that in April 2000 they held the very first international conference on
the subject of trepanation and that this book is essentially a record of its proceedings.
Contributions came from 34 workers from some 13 countries and from disciplines as diverse
as medicine, neurology, anthropology, archaeology, geography, and the history of medicine.
Although a complete bibliography would include some 1,000 titles, these papers give as up-to-
date a picture as one could wish for of what is known about trepanation as we move further
into the twenty-first century. All that I found missing was discussion of the use of trephining
in pioneering modern brain surgery.
Almost all of the papers are excellent, and all of them are of considerable interest. The
stage is set by two papers (Chapters 1 and 2) devoted entirely to the history and scientific re-
BOOK REVIEWS 337
ception of the Peruvian skull “found” by Squier, which first aroused the interest of Broca
and then Horsley. The range of countries, areas, or societies in which trepanation is known
or suspected to have been practiced is extensive, and each receives coverage in its own chap-
ter or chapters: Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, Etruria, Celtic Austria, the Czech
Republic, Russia, the Ukraine, Egypt, Mongolia, South Siberia, South and North America,
the South Pacific, and in Western European medicine from Hippocratic times onward.
Methodological issues include a study of the time course of bone healing after modern trepa-
nation and discussions of the problem of distinguishing between trepanation and
pseudotrepanation (Chapters 3, 5, 6, 11, 14, and 16) and detailed studies of the actual tech-
niques used (Chapters 17, 20, and 21) and the social contexts of use from ancient to modern
times (Chapters 4, 19, 20, 22, 23, and 24).
Hence, almost everyone did it. So far, there is no definite evidence from India, China, or
Japan. That it was done with the same techniques poses an interesting problem of origin(s).
Although the materials varied among bamboo, stone, metals, or shells, the methods were and
are confined to cutting, scraping, and sawing or incising, grooving, and drilling. So, why was
it done? The answer to this question is less clear. In some cases, the skulls themselves provide
physical evidence of surgical purpose in treating such conditions as fractures, tumors, and in-
tracranial pressure. Where there is no such evidence, the frontal site of the trepanation and tra-
ditional practice (still extant in some communities) suggest it was for the treatment of such
functional disorders as headache and migraine, or even insanity. In others, there is no positive
evidence of any kind, and, in the absence of written historical record, the most common de-
fault position is that the operation was performed as part of some magico-religious ritual; nat-
urally, this cannot be concluded with any certainty.
I have some reservations. Although these are conference papers, a stricter editorial pen-
cil could have been used. There is too much overlap (e.g., the origins of the terms trepan and
trephine), no attempt has been made to resolve differences (e.g., the prevalence of trepanation
in Italy or Egypt and the techniques and history of the method), one lot of tables is missing
(in Chapter 18), there are some mismatches between references cited and listed, the separate
author and name indexes are very confusing, and there is an unfortunate reference to the con-
temporary practice of trepanation among “savages.” Although I think these reservations are
important, they are, alongside the achievement of the editors and contributors, really quite
minor. Trepanation is a most impressive work.
Reviewed by MALCOLM MACMILLAN, Professor of Psychology, Deakin University, Burwood,
Victoria 3125, Australia.
Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Eds.). The Cambridge History of Science: Volume
7: The Modern Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 762 pp.
$125.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-521-59442-1.
Cambridge University Press is publishing an eight-volume survey of the history of sci-

ence, under the general editorship of Wisconsin historians David C. Lindberg and Ronald L.
338 BOOK REVIEWS
Numbers. Each volume, from ancient to modern science, with the modern period divided
into physical, biological and earth, and social sciences, has (or will have) a substantial col-
lection of commissioned essays to provide an overview of what scholarship has achieved in
this area, which is indeed substantial. It seems to me self-evidently valuable to ask special-
ists to sum up and make their work accessible in this way. It is worth pausing to notice just
what a change has occurred for it to be possible for the social sciences to take a place along-
side the physical sciences in such a project. There is no tormented inquiry here about
whether social science is “science” or not. Rather, the volume carries through the past
decades’ shift in professional direction; for these authors, history of science is history.
Moreover, implicit throughout this volume is the view that the grand plot of modern history
is “modernity,” in which the attempt has been made to order life by instrumental reason, and
the social sciences are central actors in the story. As the editors, in a lucid survey of the rel-
evant historiography, assert, “Historians and social scientists are mutually implicated in each
other’s work” (p. 9).
It is a straightforward pleasure to welcome this book. Nobody will doubt that “the social
sciences” is an extremely nebulous area, covering many disciplines, professions, and practices,
from psychology through political science, economics, social and cultural theory, and anthro-
pology to social policy questions, “development,” the management sciences, and accounting.
It is extremely helpful to have summary views over such a range collected together. The arti-
cles are almost all readable, accessible, and informed, although authors have taken somewhat
different views of quite how comprehensively they are meant to cover their assigned topic.
The scope of the project is large—there are 43 chapters by 40 authors, many of whom
have contributed to the historical orientation they write on. The editors have thoughtfully
shaped this mass into four parts, each with a useful introduction: sciences of the social to the
late nineteenth century; the disciplines in Western Europe and North America since about
1880; the internationalization of the social sciences; and social science as discourse and prac-
tice in public and private life. Each part carries a large-scale and significant thesis.
First, the conceptualization of “society” as an entity and, hence, as the subject of a sci-
ence is modern. This theme brings to material, often familiar from general accounts of the
origin of the social sciences, a definite shape and successfully links “theory” (Comte, Marx,
Weber, etc.) with “practice” (statistics, the social survey, travel ethnography, etc.). It also im-
plies the modern emergence of the psychological subject and, hence, that psychology as a
field belongs with the social sciences. Psychology is indeed subsumed in this volume; there
is nothing here, for example, on biological approaches to psychology. Second, the develop-
ment of modern disciplines in the decades on either side of 1900 is a crucial historical turn-
ing point. A series of chapters in Part II displays twentieth-century disciplinary structure.
Third, if the social sciences are now worldwide—and Part III discusses this internationaliza-
tion—this has opened up, rather than resolved, questions about the relationship between
Western disciplines and traditions of ordering collective life elsewhere (from Brazil to
Morocco to Japan). Readers ignorant of this dimension, like myself, will find these chapters
a general education. The chapter on Russia and Eastern Europe is the only one on psychol-
ogy in this part, and it is perhaps a pity that there is no comment on what the Soviet experi-
ence meant for the whole project of ordering by social science. Fourth, the social sciences,
however theoretically and methodologically elaborated, never have been separate from the
business of practically ordering human affairs. Part IV, which includes chapters on such top-
ics as managing the economy, intelligence, gender, and the modernization thesis, and in which
ideas originating in the United States are overwhelmingly predominant, embeds the social sci-
BOOK REVIEWS 339
ences as, not in, modernity. In the process, these chapters embed the history of science fully
in modern history. So much has this theme been present in the early parts, however, that there
is some overlap and repetition. (This may be positive, as one imagines readers picking out
particular chapters according to need, not reading through.)
The editors have done wonderfully well to assemble so much comprehensible writing
over such a range. Where else, for example, could one learn, in a few short clear pages, about
the structuring effects of accounting practice? But there is one absence, or silence, that raises
interesting questions. There is no chapter on the history of linguistics. The point can surely be
made that language or symbol systems generally are the medium of human sociality and that
the history of what language has been understood to be is therefore constitutive of social sci-
ence. The absence of attention to language leaves one modern dimension of the social sci-
ences historically adrift. It also inadvertently reinforces a historiography that stresses the
management rather than the culture, the methodology rather than the expression, of moder-
nity, if I may make this distinction. In this sense, these chapters reinforce a historiography
linking the social sciences to the natural sciences, rather than to what Anglo-Americans call
the humanities. There is also no discussion of social psychology (and here one might include
psychoanalysis), the area that most obviously ties together the modern shaping of the indi-
vidual and society, and this leaves chapters on sociology and psychology unrelated. Nearly all
chapters focus on historical rather than philosophical and conceptual questions, except to a
degree in Part I in relation to the shaping of the subject matter of social science. However, a
number of chapters explore the epistemic, not only practical, consequences of particular
methodologies (statistics, financial control, social surveys), political events (the Cold War,
mass unemployment, colonization and decolonization), and social experiments (the religion
of humanity, education, welfare).
The volume is a major contribution to communicating a contemporary understanding of
science as integral to the life of the modern world. Both general historians and historians of
science, not to mention scientists themselves, who think science is something apart may find
this weighty volume hard to ignore. Readers who already work in one of the many branches
of this protean field will find most helpful and interesting ways into related areas. Students
and teachers alike will surely find it a major resource.
Reviewed by ROGER SMITH, Reader Emeritus in History of Science, Lancaster University and
Institute for History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
Moscow, Russia.
David Bindman. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. 264 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8014-4085-8.
We tell psychological colleagues unversed in historiography that presentism and histori-

cism are two basic and independent perspectives—with the latter being more scholarly and
objective. Yet a short reflection on methodology suggests that rather than distinguishing two
340 BOOK REVIEWS
types of historiographical attitudes, it would be more adequate to distinguish between naïve

presentism, in which past performances are described and evaluated in terms of contemporary
standards, presentist historicism, and historicist presentism. The distinction between these last
two stems from the insight that a pure historicism is not workable because it is impossible to
completely eradicate current horizons from research or because questions and interests
emerge from the present. Thus, in presentist historicism, one is aware of the fact that histori-
cal studies are motivated by contemporary interests, but, in choosing such a perspective, one
intends to do justice to historical circumstances. In historicist presentism, one uses historical
material in order to elucidate current topics. Because of the dialectical relationship of these
two programs, the line of separation lacks precision.
Such methodological distinctions become significant when we deal with issues such as
“race” and racism. Did racism exist in the eighteenth century even when researchers did not
use a biological concept of race? Can we refer to racism only when we talk about the nineteenth
century, during which “race” was studied systematically and eventually informed our contem-
porary meaning and practices? Bindman chooses to refer to human variety instead of race and
uses terms such as prejudice, stereotype, or biological nationalism instead of racism. He em-
phasizes repeatedly that his book is not about “race,” because the eighteenth century did not
have a coherent, static, and consistent usage of the term, and “race,” from a conceptual point
of view, was a “fragile and unstable” (p. 8) concept with little theoretical foundation. He ar-
gues convincingly that Kant’s definition of “race” in the second half of the eighteenth century
was not widely accepted in academia and that “race” was one category, no more important than
“variety” or “nation.” Accordingly, Bindman is required to suggest that racism did not gener-
ally exist prior to the nineteenth century because racism “must have as a foundation a theory
of race to justify the exercise of prejudice” (p. 13). Yet, he does not see that it is possible to dis-
cuss racism without a developed concept of “race”—for example, when contemporary genet-
ics demonstrates that the biological concept of race is untenable, a fact that does not wipe out
racism. We are aware of the historicist-presentist implications of such a position but we sug-
gest that Bindman, in his attempt to do justice to eighteenth-century discourses, cannot evade
a presentist historicism: his research questions emerge from current concerns, his examples
only make sense within a presentist horizon, and the title of the book has a presentist meaning
for his readership.
If there is (or is not) a connection between concepts of human variety in the eighteenth
century and later meanings of “race,” we can know that only in hindsight and this knowledge
cannot be excluded. When Bindman chooses to discuss Winckelmann’s theory of aesthetics,
in which this influential expert of Greek art described the horizontal eyes of the Chinese as
being “an offense against beauty” (p. 89), it may not have been racist because Winckelmann
did not have a nineteenth-century concept of “race”—and as Bindman so efficiently points
out, “Winckelmann’s Greeks . . . did not constitute a ‘race’ but a ‘Nation’ ” (p. 91). But why
else did Bindman choose to describe those ideas? He cannot leap back into the eighteenth
century, ignoring current horizons, and it is impossible—as Bindman tried—“not to read back
later attitudes into the eighteenth century” (p. 11). He selects quotes that are labeled as racist
now and argues that these statements were not racist because there existed no theory of “race.”
However, one could argue that these quotes may not have been particularly significant to in-
dividuals during the eighteenth century but are of relevance to us today precisely because of
their seemingly racist connotations. Bindman can escape a naïve presentism but he cannot es-
cape a presentist historicism, and it is not sufficient, methodologically, to explain that some
issues can appear appalling in retrospect and take a “dispassionate tone” (p. 7) toward them
throughout the book.
BOOK REVIEWS 341
The importance of the presentist dimension also appears in the title of the book.
Although the book “is about ideas of human variety in the eighteenth century and their rela-
tionship to ideas of beauty” (p. 11), the book is not subtitled “Aesthetics and the Idea of
Human Variety in the 18th Century,” but “Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th
Century.” Implicitly, Bindman (or the publisher) acknowledges continuity between human va-
riety and “race” and, in order to promote the book, uses the term “race” to attract a larger read-
ership (or, to speak in economic terms, a larger market). Of course, Bindman is aware that
human race has become one of the great topics of the social and human sciences and, in his
epilogue, he even draws a legitimate continuity of racial aesthetics to Leni Riefenstahl’s films
and the neoclassicism of Nazi sculptures.
That historiographical issues emerge is due to the repeated accentuation by the author. Yet,
they should not detract from the academic achievements of the book. In each chapter, an ex-
tensive overview of the literature on the history of “race” and aesthetics and an analysis of il-
lustrations that complement and corroborate the written material is provided. In fact, Bindman
successfully integrates the fields of “race” and aesthetics, and any person interested in the his-
tory of “race” will find the chosen paintings extremely useful; indeed, the focus on aesthetics
represents a unique strength of this book. Bindman’s scholarship is excellent, particularly when
he reconstructs the theories of Winckelmann, Lavater, the Forsters, Kant, and Camper.
For example, he points out that Winckelmann was influenced by climatic theory,
whereby the concept of climate not only involved the seasons, but also the social climate of a
country and even nutrition. Winckelmann made the case that classical Greek art was superior
to any other and suggested that an ideal climate was responsible. He claimed that the perfect
temperate conditions caused the people of Greece to have “a natural good taste” (p. 82),
which led to “harmonious and mutually respectful social relations between philosophers,
poets and artists” (p. 82) and to the production of superior art. Well aware of, and discontent
with, the theory that Greek culture originated in Africa, Winckelmann compared Egyptian to
Greek art and argued that the former was more bizarre than beautiful, certainly less beautiful
than that of the Greeks or even the Etruscans. Winckelmann argued that beauty itself was not
subjective and the lack thereof, caused by climatic conditions, led to deformities, which can
be best seen in the case of Africans who have “the mouth swollen and raised, such as the
Negroes have in common with the monkeys of their country” (p. 89). Bindman also argues
that Winckelmann shifted between hope and anguish regarding whether the superior state of
the Greeks could be revived and points out that his vision of the “resurrection of the spirit of
ancient Greece in the modern German body” (p. 226) was attempted in Nazi Germany.
Ape to Apollo, a phrase referring to the illustrations of skulls and profiles that indicate a
chain of being from apes to the classical Greeks, contains information and analyses previ-
ously not published and provides the reader with an interesting and well-illustrated, informed,
knowledgeable, and wide-ranging book on the history of aesthetics and race.
Reviewed by THOMAS TEO, Associate Professor of Psychology, and JASON GOERTZEN, M.A.
Candidate, History and Theory of Psychology Program, York University, Toronto, Canada
M3J 1P3.

The Ordinary Bussines of Life Princeton Roger Backhouse

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Ordinary Bussines of Life Princeton Roger Backhouse

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol.

40(3), 319–321 Summer 2004

ESSAY REVIEW: NAZIS, NIETZSCHE, AND NIHILISM

Since Walter Kaufmann’s landmark Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist

David Healy. The Creation of Psychopharmacology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

In this thought-provoking, sweeping book, Healy argues that twentieth-century changes

Joan C. Tonn. Mary P. Follett: Creating Democracy, Transforming Management. New

Reviewed by ANDREW VINCHUR, Associate Professor of Psychology, Lafayette College,

Reviewed by RAYMOND E. FANCHER, Professor of Psychology at York University, Toronto,

Mary Bowman-Kruhm. Margaret Mead: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,

Once again, Bowman-Kruhm is concerned with received versions, even caricatures, of

Reviewed by GERALD SULLIVAN, Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of

Denis Fisette (Ed.). Husserl’s “Logical Investigations” Reconsidered. Dordrecht, the

In 2001 in Montreal, Denis Fisette organized an international conference to celebrate the

Thomas Dixon. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological

Like so many other psychological categories, “emotion” is a relatively recent historical

Reviewed by JÜRGEN JAHNKE, Professor of Psychology, Pedagogical University of Freiburg,

Robert Arnott, Stanley Finger, and C. U. M. Smith (Eds.). Trepanation: History,

Cambridge University Press is publishing an eight-volume survey of the history of sci-

We tell psychological colleagues unversed in historiography that presentism and histori-

types of historiographical attitudes, it would be more adequate to distinguish between naïve

You might also like