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Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Eds.) - The History of The Social Sciences PDF
Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Eds.) - The History of The Social Sciences PDF
B O O K R EV I EW S
Guy G. Stroumsa. A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. 240 pp. $35.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-
04860-7.
Guy G. Stroumsa is a widely published scholar on religion in antiquity. The present book
studies the history of his discipline, the comparative study of religion, in what Stroumsa finds
its very beginning, the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book
is of interest to scholars in other human sciences for at least three reasons: the approach taken,
the claims made for the history of the human sciences, and most important, the significance
of the topic of religion for understanding human action.
The approach is Kuhnian, with Stroumsa’s narrative framed in terms of a paradigm shift
that occurred in the middle of the seventeenth century, which he calls an “intellectual revolu-
tion”: “the epistemological foundation of the new cognitive structures invented for understand-
ing religious phenomena” (p. 5). He draws parallels with “the birth of modern psychology in
the same period” (p. 170), citing the work of Vidal (2006). This paradigm continued until the
mid-nineteenth century, when, “with the formation of modern scholarly disciplines, the study
of religions . . . could not retain its essentially interdisciplinary character” (p. 164). The his-
tory serves another purpose as well, as Stroumsa states that “the history of a discipline [in the
humanities] remains a must for any epistemological reflections” (p. 113). The ultimate aim
of this history, however, is announced on the first page: “The religious explosion of the pres-
ent day, with the urgency of its immediate threats, has taken us by surprise” (p. vii). This ex-
plosion, then, frames the questions that the book seeks to answer.
The title nods to Vico’s New Science, but this book is not about Vico, except incidentally.
It is rather about “the views developed in some of the books in Vico’s library” (p. 4). Indeed,
the publication of the first edition of La scienza nuova in 1724 marks the midpoint of the time
studied in the book, from roughly 1614 to 1794. In 1614, Isaac Casaubon “effectively tore
down the Renaissance holistic conception of religious history” (p. 4); 1794 saw Charles
Dupuis’ study that sought a single origin of all religions. This period was not, however, only
forged by groundbreaking texts. Three events produced a cultural crisis leading to the re-
working of the category of religion: European encounters with the peoples of the Americas,
and especially Peru, but also China and elsewhere; the Renaissance, with its interest in an-
tiquity; and the religious wars, which served to relativize claims of one true faith. The out-
come, according to Stroumsa, was the “development of a single concept of religion” (p. 7),
in place of the older category of true versus false religions. With the new category came a
conception of the unity of humankind.
Stroumsa presents the details of this narrative with studies of the major figures and texts
in several areas, introducing (for this reviewer) some extraordinary individuals in the process.
Chapters deal with efforts to understand the religious practices in Peru—to what could the
Europeans compare them? The result was the emergence of a comparative approach to reli-
gion. Following is a chapter devoted to the beginnings of the historical critical approach, with
interest in ancient Judaism, and to a historical comparison of the Bible and Homer. Interest
among Christians in contemporary Judaism is also presented, with special attention to the
work of Richard Simon, who made the “first scholarly comparison of Judaism and
Christianity” (p. 70), with an ethnological approach in the ascendant. Chapter 4 deals with
417
418 BOOK REVIEWS
the beginnings of philological and historical readings of the Bible as well as the related com-
parative study of myth. Theories of the histories of religion developed: Either idolatry (called
by Ralph Cudworth in the seventeenth century by the new and less derogatory term polythe-
ism) was a degeneration of an original monotheism (based on a reading of the Bible) or, in
the view of John Spencer, one of the heroes of the text, it marked a stage in a progressive re-
finement of religious beliefs (pp. 96–97). (Spencer’s views influenced Vico.) The final chap-
ters deal with Iranian religion, changing views of Islam (putting Christianity, Judaism, and
Islam on a par, to the credit or denigration of all three), Chinese civic religion, and ancient
Roman practices. The text contains great depth of scholarship that overflows a brief review.
In conclusion, A New Science contributes to the history of the human sciences on a num-
ber of fronts as it documents the move from Renaissance symbolic interpretation to philolog-
ical and historical hermeneutics, the remaking of the category of religion to mean an
essential element of all societies, and “the inception of the secularization process” (p. 12). The
structuring of the text in terms of paradigms of knowledge works well, and while Stroumsa
does indicate the incomplete nature of this paradigm, this talk of paradigms does downplay
the continuation of older and less generous views of non-Christian religions. In situating the
ethnological studies of Peruvian religion by José de Acosta published in 1590, for example,
the accent is not on the conflicts that produced the suppression of native culture but rather on
Acosta’s conclusion of the “the Indians’ deep religiosity” (p. 17), misguided to be sure from
the Christian perspective, but no more so than were the ancient Greeks and Romans. Stroumsa
wants to argue for the dawn of new views, assuming the story of conquest better known.
Again, Richard Simon’s seventeenth-century view that “Christianity and Judaism are essen-
tially the same religion” (p. 74) is balanced by noting that Simon did not doubt the evilness
of the Jews. While the Kuhnian narrative form dominates, then, a non-Kuhnian one simmers
in the background.
The history of the study of religion has an important role to play in the history of the
human sciences. An understanding of changing conceptions of human nature and action can-
not ignore it.
REFERENCE
Vidal, F. (2006). Les sciences de l’âme, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Champion.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 47(4), 418–420 Fall 2011
View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20502
© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Eds.). The History of the Social Sciences
since 1945. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 268 pp. $25.99 (paper).
ISBN: 978-0-521-71776-2.
Historians of the social and behavioral sciences tend toward the particular in their work. As
in many other historical subfields, one finds here a skepticism of broad strokes and an accompa-
nying preference for careful, “dirty-fingernails” investigation. Because of this, a book called The
History of the Social Sciences since 1945 is likely to sound to many like an overreach. Many may
There is a remarkable amount of variation in the degree to which the chapters address
the institutional contexts at work in the histories of these fields. Some may prefer more
institution-centered approaches to the history of the social sciences. The chapters in The
History of the Social Sciences since 1945 are dedicated to questions (the editors list these
questions on pp. 4–5) that only occasionally touch on institutional concerns. Such a concern
for institutions appears to be beside the point for chapters as synoptic as these.
The conclusion, entitled “Toward a History of the Social Sciences,” and written by
Backhouse and Fontaine, outlines some of the possibilities for approaching the history of the
social sciences with a focus on interdisciplinary connections. Backhouse and Fontaine address
the role played by the political context of the Cold War and the 1960s, survey the impact of
positivism on the fields considered in their volume, and examine how and why the fields
of psychology and economics came to spur numerous cross-disciplinary research projects
after 1945. The conclusion thus stands as a kind of interdisciplinary capstone on a volume that
consists of discipline-centered approaches to the history of the social sciences. I suspect rather
more could be done with this. Though these topics are raised in some of the chapters here,
there is little explicit concern for some equally important issues at work in the history of the
social sciences. For instance, it would have been helpful to have seen more reflection on how
computer technology has related to projects of professionalization and methodological refine-
ment across the disciplines. The conclusion also could have benefited from greater attention
to the increasing importance of funding for social science research that comes from the for-
profit sector of the economy. Certainly it is not just the history of economics that tells us some-
thing about how markets and social science research relate to each other.
One of the reasons the editors stop short of pursuing more synthesis is that they know the
project they undertake is only beginning. The History of the Social Sciences since 1945 is an
excellent book. It is offered as an extended prolegomenon to a broader and more systematic un-
derstanding of the history of all the social sciences. The chapters collected here function on at
least two levels: They offer excellent (if necessarily too short) histories of several social science
fields, and each of them points toward how we might continue to bring these histories together.
For this reason, The History of the Social Science since 1945 is a great success.
REFERENCE
Porter, T. M., & Ross, D. (Eds.). (2003). The Cambridge history of science, Vol. 7: The modern social sciences.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 47(4), 420–422 Fall 2011
View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20503
© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Galin Tihanov (Ed.). Gustav Shpet’s Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory.
West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009. 369 pp. $39.95 (paper). ISBN-13:
978-1557535252.
two of his brothers, also prominent scientists. (His psychoanalyst sister, Sabina, better known
in the West, perished during the Nazi invasion in 1942.) In 1936, Vygotsky and Aron Zalkind,
leader of the broad Soviet program of child studies called pedology, were among those who
“died at the right time” of natural causes; otherwise, they too would surely have been shot in
the purges, which still destroyed much of their work and drove it all underground for decades.
It is understandable that the early Soviet period should have been misunderstood or even
unknown. Recent scholarship indicates that, although the early Soviet period obviously
brought in some important new players—those of leftist politics (Spielrein) and Jewish her-
itage (Spielrein and Vygotsky) who had less chance before the Revolution—there was some
consistent growth of European influence from the late-imperial era. Cosmopolitan scholar-
ship was brewing quite strongly right before the Revolution, if somewhat subdued by tsarist–
religious repression and certainly colored by local conditions and interests. Shpet was an
important part of this latter intellectual stream, and the scholars who contributed to this vol-
ume have delineated many aspects of his influence, rendering a very valuable resource in
English, indeed in general.
REFERENCE
Shpet, G. (1991). Appearance and sense: Phenomenology as the fundamental science and its problems. Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers. (Original work published 1914.)
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 47(4), 422–424 Fall 2011
View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20504
© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Evelyn Fox Keller. The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010. 120 pp. $18.95 (paper). ISBN-13: 978-0822347316.
In this concise and clearly written book, the historian and philosopher Evelyn Fox Keller
makes a decisive intervention into the nature–nurture debate. After sketching the history of
the debate, she turns to the conceptual and linguistic problems that she believes lie at its heart
and that help to explain its remarkable persistence. She traces the longevity of the debate to
a failure of our language—to our indiscriminate use of certain terms with multiple meanings,
and to the slippage between those meanings. That slippage has allowed partisans on the “na-
ture” side of the debate to make the misconceived claims for genetic determinism that they
do. Keller’s proposed solution is not to stop using those terms, however, but rather to recog-
nize and embrace their polysemy, and to reformulate the questions we ask in that light.
In her historical chapter, Keller traces the formulation of “nature versus nurture” to the writ-
ings of Francis Galton, and to Galton’s interest in a particulate theory of heredity. Before the late
nineteenth century century, Keller argues, nature and nurture were not seen as opposing forces;
they were understood as intertwined, and only distinguished (when they were) as referring to
what occurred before birth and what happened after. “Nurture” was usually used as a verb, and
“hereditary” as an adjective. Galton, however, started using them both as nouns. Following
Carlos Lopez Beltran, Keller argues that Galton’s conception of “heredity” shows “his ontolog-
ical commitment to the material concreteness of whatever it was that lay behind the hereditary
complexity of DNA and its interactions in the cell. She wants us to envision it less as “master
molecule” and more as “molecular resource” for the cell. Finally, she cautions us that language
matters, that we must become aware of the multiple meanings of words and of subtle shifts be-
tween those meanings. Rather than abandon the word “heritable,” though, she suggests that we
embrace its polysemy, thereby allowing for the possibility of many different modes of trans-
mission of traits from one generation to the next. Heritable does not mean exclusively “genetic.”
Keller’s book should be required reading for all those scientists, popularizers, and re-
porters whose claims for genetic causation of traits commit the very errors that her analysis
so skillfully elucidates. Her book is so clearly written that laypeople, too, could use her ar-
guments as powerful tools to assess and reject ubiquitous assertions about the power of ge-
netic determinism.
Reviewed by NADINE WEIDMAN, Harvard University.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 47(4), 424–426 Fall 2011
View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20505
© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Andrew D. Evans. Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 293 pp. $29.00 (paper). ISBN-13: 978-0-
226-22268-4.
The origins of Nazi racial theory have often been sought in late nineteenth-century an-
thropology. In his carefully researched Anthropology at War, Andrew Evans challenges the
oversimplification of this narrative. He elucidates the strong “liberal” tradition of the late
1800s, a tradition in which racial superiority and inferiority played no major role. He then ar-
gues for the transformative experiences of World War I in changing the dominant outlook in
German anthropology toward a more biologized and hierarchical view of European peoples.
Evans first provides an excellent introduction to the anthropological traditions created
by Rudolf Virchow, Adolf Bastian, and other founders of German anthropology. Explicating
the separation of race, nation, and Volk that characterized the liberal approach, Evans does
not use the term “liberal” lightly. He carefully outlines the complex relationship between the
anthropologists’ scientific and political values, including Virchow’s participation in the revo-
lution of 1848. The ideas of Comte de Gobineau and early Nordicism were not part of their
vision for a new science of man. What was particularly important for Virchow and Bastian
was the unity and uniformity of the human species across diverse peoples, a core position tied
to their commitment to monogenism. Although liberal anthropologists may have held com-
mon stereotypes regarding Jews, the growing anti-Semitism of the 1880s and 1890s was
absent or was actively opposed by these anthropologists, particularly by Virchow.
Franz Boas, who worked under both Virchow and Bastian, is not an important figure in
this book, but Evans makes it clear just how indebted Boas was to Virchow and Bastian for
his idea of “psychic unity” and his conception of an empirically based anthropology. Evans’s
thorough archival research also provides an important picture of the formation of anthropol-
ogy as an academic discipline, but one that retained the active interest of physicians and am-
ateurs. Through examination of their correspondence, announcements, programs, and grants,
as well as the role of museums and exhibits, he documents the disciplinary “boundary-work”
“small adjustments” helps us understand how science and politics “act as resources for one
another” (p. 8). By showing how World War I created a fusion of scientific and political aims,
Evans has made an important contribution to the history of anthropology.
REFERENCE
Klautke, E. (2006). German “race psychology” and its implementation in Central Europe: Egon von Eickstedt and
Rudolf Hippius. In M. Turda & P. J. Weindling (Eds.), Blood and homeland: Eugenics and racial nationalism in
central and southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (pp. 23–40). New York: Central European University Press.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 47(4), 426–428 Fall 2011
View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20506
© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Kenneth M. Pinnow. Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism,
1921–1929. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. 288 pp. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN-
13: 978-0801447662.
Life and death have always been of primary interest to people, and innumerable authors
have explored this truly immortal theme. Kenneth W. Pinnow found his own niche in the
ocean of research on life and death, exploring the phenomenon of suicide as a social problem
in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and its challenge to the Bolsheviks’ struggle for the collec-
tivist society of the future. In his book, Pinnow deals with suicide primarily as a “problem of
modern government rather than an existential drama” (p. 4) and, thus, “seeks to understand
how governmental officials and social scientists conceptualized, studied, and gave meaning
to suicide” (p. 5) and made sense of the tensions between individual and collectivist values
of the “new society.”
The book uncovers the way the Soviets dealt with suicide from the three specific per-
spectives of forensic medical practitioners, statisticians, and military authorities, and focuses
on the operations of three institutions: the Department of Forensic-Medical Expertise, the
Department of Moral Statistics at the Central Statistical Administration, and the Political
Administration of the Red Army. Pinnow’s meticulous analysis of the social practices and the
evolving meaning of Soviet suicide presents an important aspect of the struggle for the “new
man” in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, which definitely makes this book of considerable in-
terest to historians of the Soviet Union—but not only to them. For a number of reasons, this
book should also resonate with scholars in the history of the behavioral and human sciences
who are not necessarily involved in research on the Soviet Union and its science.
Despite its focus on suicide, the book exposes the larger picture of the Soviet variety of
integrative, cross-disciplinary, and applied “Big Science” in the making in the 1920s. The rev-
olutionary spirit of radical social transformation involved virtually all spheres of life and a
distinctly Soviet science that was emerging out of the vestiges of the old, prerevolutionary
tradition. Driven by the prerevolutionary scientism shared by local intellectuals and the ut-
terly practical concerns of overcoming the postrevolutionary social problems of orphaned
state” became an export item to the crisis-ridden Western Europe and North America im-
pressed by the success of the Soviet economy, and, for that matter, Soviet science. The truly ex-
citing history of the transnational circulation and inevitable transformation of ideas and social
practices still remains to be told, and is certainly beyond the scope of Pinnow’s research on
Soviet suicide. Yet the contribution of his book to the growing literature on Soviet modernity—
especially as it reveals itself in Soviet and international social research and practice—is really
important and thought provoking.
From this standpoint, it is particularly interesting to see how the book presents the
outcome of the struggle against suicide and the massive interventions of the Soviet social sci-
ence state into the lives of individuals and social practices. Standardized questionnaires,
propaganda, and surveillance—despite the scope of application and enthusiasm of the
activists—all appeared hardly efficient, and in fact proved the elusiveness of suicide and the
lack of control over the minds of Soviet citizens. In fact, it was the formalization and stan-
dardization of these interventions, suggests Pinnow, that undermined the hope for the success
of the campaign against suicide among the utopian “new men” of the future classless society.
And this is yet another lesson that we might learn from Pinnow’s book today, in the age of
the domination of post-positivist reductionistic and fragmented human sciences.
Reviewed by ANTON YASNITSKY, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 47(4), 428–430 Fall 2011
View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20519
© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Uljana Feest (Ed.). Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen. New York: Springer,
2010. 320 pp. $139.00 (cloth). ISBN-13: 978-1441914316.
The question of how we collect knowledge about the world, and how we validate that
knowledge in terms of the modes of investigation we adopt, has been a mainstay of our philo-
sophical engagement with the world. The experiential consciousness of human situatedness
is the beginning of both curiosity and the gradual development of curiosity into a formalized
dialogue with the environment in which our lives take shape. In the most comprehensive
sense, the term “methodology” concerns our experience of being and knowing, and, more
precisely, of desiring to know. If questions of epistemology and methodology are sometimes
perceived as rather formal, then we should not forget this relationship between the desire to
know, to understand, and the rigor of methodological specification. In other words, we should
not lose sight of the idea that the question of how we acquire and validate knowledge is only
a formalized extension of the wonder which properly underpins human enquiry.
Wilhelm Dilthey’s emphasis on the fundamental importance of experience for method-
ology is already a recognition that epistemology concerns both knowledge of the world and
knowledge of ourselves, and this volume, edited by Uljana Feest, represents a valuable
engagement with precisely this double-edged quality. The book comprises a collection of es-
says on a theme, and is an insightful contribution to an area which only at a first glance pres-
ents itself as rather specialized and esoteric: the conceptual dichotomy of Erklären and
Verstehen, translated in this volume as “explanation” and “understanding.” Researchers
working in fields such as sociology, epistemology, social philosophy, psychology, the history
and philosophy of psychology, intellectual and cultural history, the philosophy of science, the
The engagement with these questions evidenced in the essays covers ground as diverse
as German cultural politics and educational ideology (Denise Phillips); Protestant theology
and hermeneutics (Bernhard Kleeberg); popular science writing (Safia Azzouni); the philos-
ophy of Hippolyte Taine (Philipp Müller); nineteenth- and twentieth-century French thought
(Warren Schmaus); William James’s ideas on human understanding (David E. Leary); scien-
tific praxis (Katherine Arens); British perspectives on the relation between the natural sci-
ences and the humanities (Roger Smith); experience in the writings of Dilthey, Rickert,
Bradley, and Ward (Christopher Pincock); German historicism (Jacques Bos); the
Methodenstreit (Filomena de Sousa); Mill, von Kries, and Weber on causality, explanation,
and understanding (Michael Heidelberger); the social sciences—Weber, Simmel, and
Mannheim (Daniel Šuber); and orthodox logical empiricism (Thomas Uebel).
In the background of these various analyses the figure of Wilhelm Dilthey, whose name
is indelibly stamped on the Erklären/Verstehen debate, looms large, and in a sense this book
might be read as an indirect study of the influence of Dilthey on nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Western thought. Indeed, on reading the title of the book one might even wish to add
the subtitle, “Dilthey’s Legacy.” The volume does a service in renewing a sense of the im-
portance of Dilthey’s work for a diverse range of fields of research in Western thought. While
the book quite rightly emphasizes the decidedly German context of the Erklären/Verstehen
dichotomy, it also seeks to consider responses to this problematic in other national traditions
(Austria, France, Britain, and the United States). This is certainly an area in need of further
research and while, as the editor admits (p. 11), there are national traditions missed out here
(e.g., Russia and Italy), this collection nevertheless goes some way in “opening out” a char-
acteristically German discourse and emphasizing its wider resonance.
While there is some explicit discussion of the significance of the Erklären and Verstehen
debate to more recent and even contemporary debates and issues, this is something which,
ultimately, the book only really touches upon, and it is regrettable that there is not a
concluding piece to the volume which addresses this issue in more detail and which directly
revisits the two defining research questions noted above with an eye to specific current philo-
sophical and other concerns. Nevertheless, this collection of essays will serve as a point of
departure for a fuller consideration of the continuing significance and implications of the
Erklären/Verstehen debate, not to mention how this debate affects our current understanding
of the distinction between the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences, in a
contemporary culture preoccupied with specialization and yet desirous of a renewed holism.
Reviewed by ROBERT W. BUTTON, Plymouth, Devon, U.K.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 47(4), 430–431 Fall 2011
View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20520
© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc
This unusual and excellent book begins, not with the birth of Herman Helmholtz in
1821, but with a “Prelude,” a masterful, but awkward, fancied description of the world of his
father in Potsdam in that year. This unfolds as August Helmholtz looks about him and rumi-
nates on philosophy, science, and the political surroundings of his day. The Prelude sets the
tone and establishes the structure of the book. Meulders will not only tell us the facts of an
immensely influential life, but will set that life in its complex and evolving context.
Who was Helmholtz? Physicists, physiologists, psychologists, and philosophers who
study the nineteenth-century foundations of current thought all know about limited pieces of
him. Helmholtz straddled our current intellectual boundaries. As a physician he established
the existence of conservation of energy in living things. As a physicist he showed how color
vision works and how sound becomes music. As a physiologist he managed to explain the
basis of human perception, the unconscious inference that constructs a meaningful world
from chaotic sensory input. As an inventor, apparatuses he devised working with technicians
such as Rudolph Koenig (whom the book does not mention), ranging from electrical stimu-
lation of nerve impulses to measure their speed, to spun-brass resonators to pull apart the
components of complex musical sounds, were innovative and important. In all these he rooted
his work in experiment and systematic observation, and on quantitative measurement.
The author hypothesizes that Helmholtz is not as well known as he should be because
of the wide-ranging nature of his contributions. In the compartmentalized intellectual world
that followed his, Helmholtz’s extraordinary contributions to physics, physiology, perception,
and philosophy can hardly be assimilated. In Helmholtz’s lifetime, science as we know it be-
came formalized and codified; Helmholtz was important in this development. The author
makes much of the contrast between the empirical, quantitative, and experimental approaches
that exemplified Helmholtz and his eighteenth-century predecessors. These were philosopher-
scientists whose tools were introspection upon experience and simple observation of nature.
Meulders gives us a whole chapter, for instance, on Goethe, whose notions of how color
vision works were supplanted by Helmholtz.
The book is a biography, in that it follows its subject from birth through his life, his oc-
cupations, his marriages, his many publications and well-attended public lectures, and his
thought. We learn little, however, of his private life; the author characterizes him as distant,
secretive, and personally uncommunicative. Quotes from his letters to his first wife (who was
REFERENCE
Koenigsberger, L. (1955). Herman von Helmholtz (F. A. Welby, Trans.). New York: Dover. (Original work published
1906.)
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 47(4), 431–433 Fall 2011
View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20521
© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc
Heather Murray. Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North
America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 289 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
ISBN 978-0-8122-4268-3.
The scene is so familiar as to be almost unremarkable: A young person sits down with his
or her parents and, usually tearfully, declares, “I’m gay.” In her innovative and insightful study
Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America, Heather
Murray demonstrates how this “increasingly formalized and scripted” ritual of disclosure be-
came an essential, almost obligatory part of gay life, and she shows how it testifies to an en-
during “impetus for family integration” among gay men and women (pp. 179–180). Although
historians and other scholars have generally focused on the alternative kinship bonds forged
by gay people, Murray argues, “the family of origin, as both a lived relationship and a sym-
bol, has been a central animating force and preoccupation of both gay culture and politics and
has shaped gay thought more broadly” since the mid-twentieth century (p. viii). Murray mines
an extensive corpus of private and published writing by gay people and their parents to pro-
duce a careful intellectual history of this phenomenon. She argues that gay people’s shifting
hopes, fears, and expectations regarding their relationships with their parents—and parents’
evolving understandings and misunderstandings of their gay children—not only evinced but
also facilitated a broader move from reticence to disclosure around homosexuality that trans-
formed gays “from secret to known, even formalized, selves” (p. 193). These changes, in turn,
both registered and fueled fundamental transformations in the meaning of family life.
In the decades immediately after World War II, men and women who experienced same-
sex attractions sought to balance their gay lives with their family relationships. Most often
they chose discretion, a strategy that, as Murray shows, involved varying, calibrated con-
cealments and disclosures on the parts of children and parents alike. In the late 1960s, how-
ever, the gay liberation generation began to insist that embracing and disclosing one’s gay
identity was a political imperative. Even as some gay liberationists cast their parents as sym-
bols of a repressive past, many also prioritized coming out to their parents, insisting that their
families know and recognize their authentic sexual selves. Similarly, lesbian-feminists’ polit-
ical commitments as “women-identified women” led them to critique their families, but also
to seek closer, more empathetic relationships with their mothers and other family members.
For many parents of gay men and women in the 1970s, these personal, politicized revelations
were bewildering and incomprehensible. But some parents responded with a movement of
their own. In an especially perceptive and persuasive chapter, Murray describes how this
“parents’ movement” played a crucial symbolic and practical role at a time when gay politi-
cal gains were threatened by the emerging religious right. The organization now known
as Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) originated as a kind of ac-
tivist parents’ auxiliary to gay liberation. But by the late 1970s, in response to conservative
attacks, parents’ rhetoric more and more insisted defensively that homosexuality was a natu-
ral, if perhaps unlucky, variation, and that gays and lesbians were ordinary, moral people.
Simultaneously, it embraced an “ethos of parent grief,” emphasizing the emotional burdens
of parenting a gay son or daughter in a hostile world and seeking to provide sympathy and
support to parents (p. 133).
Scholars have often cited the creation of informal peer care-giving networks during the
AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s when describing how gay people have historically forged
new “chosen” families. In the final chapter of Not in This Family, Murray seeks to decenter
this analysis, showing how families of origin were also an important part of reactions and re-
sponses to the crisis. While parents’ attitudes varied, many shared in their stricken sons’ ex-
periences of discrimination and social isolation, “placing them closer to their gay children
and intensifying the relationships—often ambivalently but nonetheless recognizably—be-
tween them and their gay sons” (p. 138). Some parents became activists. Some forged close
relationships with their children’s friends and partners. Meanwhile, public health campaigns
instructed parents to provide care for their sons, and many gay men sought their families’ suc-
cor. The AIDS crisis, Murray argues, cemented new expectations that gay children’s rela-
tionship with their parents would be characterized not only by emotional openness, but also
by ongoing support and nurture. By century’s end, if parents could not escape the fact of gay-
ness, so too was the family an unavoidable presence in the lives of gay people.
Like recent works by David K. Johnson (2004) and Margot Canaday (2010), Murray’s
study eschews a customary focus on the emergence and evolution of gay identities, commu-
nities, and politics. Instead, she places postwar gay and lesbian history at the center of
broader historical transformations—in this case, the fraught ascendance of the companionate
family. Gayness, she suggests, posed a special challenge amid the family’s shift from a pri-
marily practical, economic institution to a primarily intimate, affectionate one. Gay people
and their parents were thus key interpreters of these changes in the family; they offered un-
paralleled insights into the uncertainties and intergenerational tensions that resulted. The
move from postwar discretion to contemporary revelation, Murray argues, exemplifies how
the reconfiguration of family life produced both new freedoms and new burdens.
Murray has examined an impressively broad range of published and archival sources, in-
cluding over two dozen collections of personal papers, and she reads them with care and acu-
ity. (The sources come from both the United States and Canada, but Murray focuses on their
commonalities rather than on national differences.) Gay cartoons and artwork evocatively
REFERENCES
Canaday, M. (2010). The straight state: Sexuality and citizenship in twentieth-century America. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Johnson, D. K. (2004). The lavender scare: The Cold War persecution of gays and lesbians in the federal govern-
ment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Reviewed by BRIAN J. DISTELBERG, Department of History, Yale University, New Haven, CT.