Simmel On Culture Selected Writings PDF

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Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences: Vol. 34(3), 279–280 Summer 1998 line of ART
䉷 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0022-5061/98/030279-02
Roger Chartier. On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices. Trans. Lydia
G. Cochrane, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. 191 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
ISBN 0-80185435-0. $18.95 (paper). ISBN 0-80185436-9.
On the Edge of the Cliff is a collection of eleven essays by the French cultural historian,
Roger Chartier, originally published in 1986 – 1994 and now reprinted with a new introduc-
tion. The book discusses a number of writers relevant to cultural history: the unconventional
historians Philippe Ariès, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Hayden
White; the sociologist Norbert Elias; the bibliographer D. F. McKenzie. Additionally, in two
chapters Chartier focuses on the French Revolution, taking issue with the approaches of two
historians, Robert Darnton and Keith Michael Baker.
The last third of the book, although interesting, is only loosely connected to the first
two-thirds, and so I shall leave these chapters aside: three of them are explications and ap-
preciations of Elias’s sociology of culture, while the final chapter offers an appreciation of
Ariès, the historian of private life. The theme that unites the rest of the book is simple and
programmatic. In brief, Chartier attacks what he sees as the confusion, by historians, of
“discursive practices” with “nondiscursive practices.” His title derives from an image sug-
gested by the late Michel de Certeau. According to de Certeau, when the historian turns from
offering a discourse about discourse to offering a discourse about practices, “the theoretical
operation suddenly finds itself at the limits of its normal terrain, like a car at the edge of a
cliff. Beyond, nothing but the sea” (quoted by Chartier, p. 70). Too frequently, according to
Chartier, the car tumbles over the edge. Chartier contends that this is what has happened in
the much-bruited “linguistic turn” in recent historiography, a turn that he sees as promoting
“the dangerous reduction of the social world to a purely discursive construction and to pure
language games” (p. 4). One consequence is the linguistic relativism that Chartier finds, and
criticizes, in Hayden White.
Chartier is a well-informed historian equipped with a clear mind. He has a talent for
rapid and incisive summary and a gift for zeroing in on weak points in any argument. Much
of what he says in On the Edge of the Cliff is informative and well justified. The claim that
one ought to distinguish between discourse (or “discursive practice”) and nondiscursive prac-
tice seems justified under many circumstances, although it is surely more difficult than Char-
tier thinks to establish the boundaries between the two. Many of Chartier’s specific
descriptions and analyses hit the mark or at least come close to it. For example, in the chapter
“Discourses and Practices: On the Origins of the French Revolution,” he punctures Robert
Darnton’s claim that “we know for certain” that late eighteenth-century clandestine books
communicated sedition to the French (quoted on p. 75). As Chartier points out, sedition might
equally have been present beforehand, a precondition for the reception of such books. Yet
Chartier is perhaps a trifle ungenerous in failing to point out how massively Darnton has
contributed to the study of various forms of eighteenth-century practice, from mesmerism to
the book trade. Similarly, Chartier’s criticisms of Baker catch out some weaknesses in Baker’s
all-too-linguistic treatment of the Revolution, but hardly amount to a worked-out alternative.
But while as a general matter Chartier is right to insist on the distinction between dis- short
cursive practice and nondiscursive practice (or between discourse tout court and practice tout standard
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court), in avoiding linguistic reductionism he risks a reduction of discourse to practice. In Base of text
Chartier’s conceptual model, “discourse” appears only as “discursive practice,” and “discur-
sive practice” invariably has nondiscursive practice as its telos. It is as if there is an unac-
knowledged and unjustified materialism here, with the “ideal” realm of language to be taken
seriously only insofar as it serves the “material” realm of practice. In any case, whether
intentionally or not, the model excludes textual and philosophical concerns from the ambit
of legitimate historical research. To the extent that such concerns are not merely ideological,
they are a matter of symbolic or semantic contents that are not reducible to the world of
practical interest — although they obviously emerge within that world and have close relations
to it. For Chartier, an investigation of artistic or literary works focusing on how such works
arise from “a negotiation between a creator or a class of creators and the institutions and
practices of society” has a place within the historical discipline (p. 20; Chartier here quotes
the “new historicist” literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt). But given what we might call
Chartier’s “pragmatic reductionism,” an investigation of artistic, literary, or philosophical
works focusing on matters peculiar to those domains would not have a place within the
historical discipline.
It seems clear that in his wish to maintain history’s claim to “remain among the social
sciences” (p. 19), Chartier promotes a would-be unified program for the pursuit of historical
knowledge. Chartier does not want history to be “an untrammeled literary activity open to
chance and worthy only of curiosity;” he wants to preserve the status of history as a form of
scientific knowledge (pp. 27, 19). But even as he rejects any attempt to base the claim of
history to scientificity on the “one model” of physical science, his wish to give “new foun-
dations” to “the critical realism of historical knowledge” amounts to a not fully acknowledged
attempt to promote “one model” for historical understanding (p. 27). A generation ago ad-
herents of the Annales school of historiography, out of which Chartier comes, pretty much
acknowledged that the Annales dream of writing a unified “total history” was unrealizable.
But remnants of that totalizing dream persist — not at the substantive level, but at the levels
of conception, program, and method. It is akin to the old positivist dream of unified science.
Notwithstanding his residual adherence to such a view, one can learn a good deal from
Chartier. But it seems to me that one could learn even more from a combination of the
disciplined Chartier with the more undisciplined and even anarchic insights of some of the
writers whom he discusses in this book.
Reviewed by ALLAN MEGILL, professor of history at the University of Virginia, Charlottes-
ville, VA 22903.
Professor Chartier comments:
I thank Professor Megill for his close and acute reading of my book. I would like to try
to comment on three of his points.
1) I do not think that “artistic, literary or philosophical works” have no a place within
the historical discipline. As I tried to show in my book, Forms and Meanings (1995), a new
understanding of the more classical works (in my case a Molière play) could be built by the
alliance between textual criticism and cultural history. It seems to me that historians can now
contribute without any documentary or “pragmatic” reductionism to a new form of critical
analysis that focuses on the process through which the meanings of works were and are short
constructed. Such a project supposes necessarily the uses of different approaches and tech- standard
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niques able to refer the works back to their conditions of possibility and the forms of their Base of text
transmission and appropriation without ignoring their radical specificity.
2) I do not dream of a “unified” or “total” history. I wanted only to stress the necessity
of a common reflection on the criteria which allow one to distinguish between the kind of
knowledge produced by an historical narrative, always tied to the past the “reality” of which
the narrative tried to make understandable, and the knowledge produced by the fables and
the fictions. It seems to me that this issue is central in order to avoid the reduction of history
to a fiction among others and to resist the mythical, forged, and ideological reconstructions
of the past. But I think that there are different ways of writing history that achieve such a
goal.
3) Professor Megill is absolutely right when he stresses the difficulty in defining “prac-
tices” and still more “discursive practices” and when he warns us off the risk of a “reduction
of discourse to practice.” Some other critics of my book have pointed out exactly the reverse:
the risk of dissolving the practices into their discursive representations. In order to answer, I
can make only three suggestions for a common reflection: 1. To displace the distinction
between discourse and practice by considering the latter as a specific logic (Bourdieu’s sens
pratique) or as a set of “tactics” opposed to the “strategies” imposing discourse, norms, or
productions (according to De Certeau’s distinction). 2. To consider that the representations
of the practices (in the texts, the images, etc.) always designate and miss them, 3. To define
“discursive practices” by analyzing the different constraints (linguistic, conceptual, aesthetic,
economic, etc.) that make possible and limit the production and appropriation of discourse
for each discursive or interpretive community.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences: Vol. 34(3), 281–282 Summer 1998
Julie A. Reuben. The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and
the Marginalization of Morality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. 376
pp. $55.00 (cloth). $18.95 (paper). ISBN 0-226-71020-3.
This work is nothing less than a comprehensive reinterpretation of the transformation of

higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Julie A. Reuben takes
as her focus the fracturing of the nineteenth-century faith in the unity of truth by a series of
developments that ultimately led intellectuals to associate truth with value-free science and
social science and to relegate moral questions to the margins of intellectual life in the uni-
versity. In the process of telling this story, Reuben illuminates a broad range of intellectual,
cultural, and organizational changes that together created a distinctly modern university.
Reuben sees the transformation of higher education as the ironic result of efforts of
intellectuals and educational leaders to preserve a place for morality while trying to accom-
modate the needs of both science and economic development. The process unfolded in three
stages: 1) From roughly 1880 to 1910, educators tried to make religion and science compatible
by reforming religion, moving away from narrow denominational positions, and promoting
a scientific study of religion. 2) From 1900 to 1920, they discarded the centrality of religion
and tried to establish secular sources of morality, with many believing that science itself short
would promote social reform and preserve traditional moral values. 3) From roughly 1915 to standard
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1930, as scientists grew insistent on the value-free nature of their enterprise, educators worked Base of text
to create a place for morality in the humanities and in the extracurriculum.
Reuben argues that the split between truth and morality was effectively codified in the
1930s by logical positivism, which proclaimed the meaninglessness of value statements in
science and social science, and by emotivist ethics, which emphasized the emotional rather
than the cognitive dimension of ethical decisions. From the first, however, Reuben believes
that the separation of knowledge and morality has bred a kind of uneasiness among academics,
an uneasiness that is now beginning to surface powerfully in “disciplines ranging from the
philosophy and history of science to postmodern literary criticism” (p. 268).
Reuben’s sweeping study does not replace two other monumental works on the trans-
formation of higher education, but it does take issue with them on important matters. Reuben
disputes Laurence R. Veysey’s claim in The Emergence of the American University (1965)
that ideals of research, utility, and liberal cultural competed with each other; instead, she
argues, educators believed in all three ideals and tried to find a place for each of them in the
modern university. Reuben finds less fault in George Marsden’s The Soul of the American
University (1994) but offers a subtly different account of secularization, one that focuses less
on the rise of liberal Protestantism than on the failed effort to make religion and science
compatible.
Reuben will be faulted by some for making sweeping claims about higher education on
the basis of a fairly narrow institutional focus (she studies only eight major research univer-
sities). Such an approach inevitably leaves many important stories untold. Yet Reuben is
interested primarily in capturing the cutting edge of educational developments, and she has
managed to do this magnificently. This is an extraordinary piece of scholarship — conceptu-
ally rich, wonderfully documented, gracefully written, and very likely to become a classic in
both educational and intellectual history.
Reviewed by B. EDWARD MCCLELLAN, professor of education at Indiana University,
Bloomington, IN 47405.
Laurence D. Smith and William R. Woodward Eds. B. F. Skinner and Behaviorism in

American Culture. Cranbury NJ: Associated University Presses 1996. 348 pp. $47.50.
ISBN 0-934223-40-8.
Two highly respected historians of psychology, Laurence D. Smith and William R.

Woodward, have collaborated to produce an important addition to the growing body of B. F.
Skinner historiography.1 The particular value of the Smith and Woodward volume lies in the
ability of many of the contributors to move easily from biographical to intellectual to disci-
plinary to contextualized social history all within a brief chapter. Such historiographic feats
are possible only with immersion in archives and detailed interviews, strategies for which
many of the authors are already well known. While the chapters are highly diverse in focus,
they are bracketed by two elegant and related analyses. Daniel Bjork’s opening chapter places short
Skinner’s views within the larger context of nineteenth-century liberationist vs. traditionalist standard
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thought. Laurence Smith’s outstanding closing chapter identifies how Skinner’s themes of Base of text
optimism, intervention, and human malleability, in tension with the theme of determinism,
were all important features of the American cultural landscape.
In Part 1, Bjork’s contribution is followed by Smith’s chapter on the Baconian roots of
Skinner’s utopian vision, thus extending his excellent earlier work on this problem. Nils
Wiklander then presents a more biographical analysis of the sources of Walden II, and de-
scribes the role of the Harvard Society of Fellows and other experiences in shaping Skinner’s
social philosophy. In Part 2, “Skinner as Scientist,” Stephen Coleman continues his outstand-
ing work on the development of Skinner’s research program, James Capshew gives a won-
derfully detailed examination of Project Pigeon and its larger context, and Eckart Scheerer
provides a discussion of radical behaviorism and cognitive psychology, translated from his
1983 book on behavior analysis. Three chapters on “Skinner’s Personal World” follow.
Rhonda Bjork summarizes Yvonne (Eve) Skinner’s life via sensitive use of interviews and
diaries. Elizabeth Jordan uses the Aircrib to open discussion of child rearing in the Skinner
family and the more general “paradox of freedom and control” (208), a recurring theme in
many of the chapters. John Cerullo examines Skinner’s personal relationships at Harvard and
finds that conventional conceptions of the academic “mandarin” do not describe Skinner’s
career. The final section contains a useful history of teaching machines by Vargas and Vargas
and an analysis by Woodward and Robinson of divergence in the behavior analysis com-
munity on the issue of quantitative analysis. Terry Knapp, who, like Coleman and Smith, is
also a contributor to the 1995 James T. Todd and Edward K. Morris volume on Skinner,
analyzes the themes in the secondary literature on Skinner, with appropriate use of cumulative
records. In an Appendix, noted archivist Clark Elliott discusses the available sources on
Skinner and his colleagues at the Harvard University Archives, a unique and commendable
contribution to a volume of this sort.
With any work on Skinner and radical behaviorism, there is always more to be wished
for. Although Part 4 is titled “The Diversification and Extension of Behaviorism,” there is no
chapter on the extraordinary influence of Skinner’s work on applied behavior analysis in
mental retardation and special education. Nor would the uninformed reader learn of Skinner’s
direct and indirect influence on the fields of juvenile delinquency, infant and child develop-
ment, autism, behavioral pharmacology, environmental psychology, and many other areas.
Although some chapters discuss the place of Walden II in utopian thought, there is no dis-
cussion of the actual communities inspired by Walden II. There is little indication of how
Skinner helped to found the community of behavior analysis, although Woodward touches
on this issue in his interesting Introduction. There are few references to the frequent discus-
sions of Skinner’s epistemology in behavior analysis journals. The important place of the
concepts of evolution and selection in Skinner’s position, although noted by Smith, lacks
extended treatment. For some of the contributions, more attention to the work of “insiders”
who have written extensively and carefully on behavior analysis and its history, particularly
Morris, would have been helpful.2 But to ask all this is to ask too much of one volume which
was not, in any case, primarily devoted to analysis of Skinner’s philosophy or influence.
Instead, Smith and Woodward’s purpose was to locate Skinner’s work within certain per-
sistent themes of American culture, and in this they have succeeded admirably.
NOTES
1. For example, Daniel J. Bjork, B. F. Skinner: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Special issue, American short
Psychologist, 47 no. 11. (1992); Modern Perspectives on B. F. Skinner and Contemporary Behaviorism, James T. standard
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Todd & Edward K. Morris, Eds. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995); Daniel N. Wiener, B. F. Skinner:
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Benign Anarchist (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1996).
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2. See, for example Todd and Morris, Modern Perspectives; also Edward K. Morris, “Contextualism, Histori-
ography, and the History of Behavior Analysis,” in Varieties of Scientific Contextualism, S. C. Hayes, L. J. Hayes,
H. W. Reese, & T. R. Sarbin, Eds. (Reno, Nev.: Context Press, 1993).
Reviewed by ANDREW S. WINSTON, professor of psychology at the University of Guelph,

Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada.
Professors Smith and Woodward comment:
We thank Andrew Winston for his appreciative review and for his clear recognition of
our goal, which was to situate B. F. Skinner’s life and work in the larger American culture.
The inclusion of more material on Skinner’s influence on applied behavior analysis would
indeed have been congruent with this goal, but we felt that previous work has covered much
of this ground in admirable detail, allowing us to focus on broader cultural and ideological
themes.1
The contributors’ relative neglect of Skinner’s use of the concepts of evolution and
selection was premised on our judgment (quite possibly fallible) that such concepts play no
crucial role in operant thought. As J. E. R. Staddon has argued, there are many viable inter-
pretations of Darwinian concepts and their implications for psychology, but Skinner’s use of
them was largely superficial and unanalyzed.2 In fact, we suspect that the appeal to Darwinian
notions by workers in the operant tradition serves more the rhetorical function of drawing on
the prestige of biology than the intellectual function of establishing genuine links to biological
thought and practice. Scholars wishing to form their own opinions will find relevant discus-
sions in A. C. Catania and S. Harnad (1988).3
Winston’s observation that our volume pays relatively little attention to the existing
historical work by “insiders” is well-taken. JHBS readers may wish to consult the volume
edited by James T. Todd and Edward K. Morris for a more internal “scientific” history of
Skinner’s work and legacy. Their excellent volume did not appear until ours was in the late
stages of production, but we join Winston in recommending that work to readers.
NOTES
1. For example, A. E. Kazdin, History of Behavior Modification: Experimental Foundations of Contemporary
Research (Baltimore: University Park Press, 1978).
2. J. E. R. Staddon, Behaviorism: Mind, Mechanism and Society (London: Duckworth, 1993).
3. A. Charles Catania and Steven Harnad, The Selection of Behavior: The Operant Behaviorism of B. F. Skinner:
Comments and Consequences. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
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Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences: Vol. 34(3), 285–286 Summer 1998 Top of text
䉷 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0022-5061/98/030285-02 Base of text
John Forrester. Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 309 pp. $27.95 ISBN 0-674-53960-5.
John Forrester’s new book of essays is an interesting contribution to the literature about
Freud, which continues to proliferate. Unfortunately, even after over more than a hundred
years of debate, it still seems that writers in this field can be classified into those who are
“pro” as opposed to those who are “anti.” Although one might have thought that by now we
should be at a more sophisticated level of discussion, the charge against Freud for having
created a “pseudo-science” reached a new kind of ferocity in Frederick Crews’s famous 1993 –
1994 articles in The New York Review of Books. Although there were many reasons for
thinking that the complacencies of the American psychoanalytic establishment deserved a
thorough shaking-up, it is disconcerting (to me at least) that an impression may be now abroad
that psychoanalysis deserved to be seen as junk science.
On this score Forrester is, in my opinion, on the side of the angels. He takes Freud
seriously as a figure within intellectual history, and in the last chapter of this book Forrester
tries to deal with criticisms like those advanced by such writers as Stanley Fish, Adolf Grün-
baum, Frank Sulloway, and also Crews. Forrester is in the Department of History and Phi-
losophy of Science at Cambridge, yet he also brings to bear on Freud the sensibilities of a
literary critic. Forrester rightly sees Freud as part of Western moral thought, a thinker whose
ethical practices and preachings deserve close scrutiny.
Forrester is ardently Francophilic, and in this book and in his earlier ones, there are
plenty of references to the seminars and essays of Jacques Lacan. For reasons that still escape
me, the French have been especially receptive to the ideas of Melanie Klein. Although there
is no school of Kleinian analysts in Paris, her writings — even the most speculative — are
treated with dead seriousness there. One will not find in Forrester skepticism or humor about
the French Freud. British intellectuals have long taken Klein far more seriously than she has
been taken on this side of the Atlantic, and it is true that Lacan and Klein both had problems
with the powers that be within international psychoanalysis. But one would hope for more
lightness of touch in citing Lacan or Klein, yet without falling into the same barrel as Crews.
Fanaticism has dogged the history of analysis from the outset. And intellectuals, espe-
cially those like Forrester who do not practice analysis themselves, have been apt to be more
devoutly loyalist than experienced clinicians who know some of the key drawbacks to the
inherited traditions of thought.
Although I believe Forrester is on the right track in standing against the crudeness of
some of the most recent assaults on Freud, I did not learn as much from his pieces as I might
have hoped. For example one chanter takes off form a couple of sentences in Freud’s Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in which he infers from the Biblical judgment of
King Solomon the idea that envy can be related to justice: “If one woman’s child,” Freud
wrote, “is dead, the other shall not have a live one either. The bereaved woman is recognized
by this wish.” That seems to me a wicked reading, and also Nietzschean But Forrester goes
on to link it with Rawls’s liberal theory of justice; it is, on Forrester’s part, a high-wire trapeze
act, but not one of general interest. I would expect Rawls to be shaken by Freud’s commentary.
Forrester uses the term “historiography of psychoanalysis” more than once, but a hot-house
interest in Rawls makes for a dessicated argument detached from the organic flow of anything short
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Chapter 2 of Forrester’s book had the most interest for me, since it deals with the Freud- Base of text
Ferenczi letters, and the emotional triangle between Ferenczi, the woman Ferenczi eventually
married, and her daughter (Elma), as well as how they all were involved with Freud. Here
Forrester is working concretely from the published texts of the first two volumes (out of a
total of three) of the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence. In the mid-1960s, however, I interviewed
Elma, as well as others who knew the people; and although Forrester is ingenious in reading
these letters, it can be alarming how he misses some of the most striking points that
would be evident to someone who had even a passing acquaintance with the human beings
involved.
There is something in Forrester’s tone, a bit caustic and expressing certitude, that I found
off-putting. Perhaps it is partly a question of national culture, and Forrester’s presence in
Oxbridge with accounts for this mannerism. As an American liberal, I remain committed to
the idea that it is possible to learn from anyone: Jungians, Rankians, Adlerians, etc. have all
something to teach. My own pluralistic outlook does not preclude intellectual convictions.
Forrester would be more persuasive if he seemed less sure of himself. He sometimes pontif-
icates in his notes. I can appreciate Crews’s rhetoric even if I reject most of his conclusions.
All around it seems to me a pity that it is not possible to be more generous and tolerant of
the points of view of others.
Reviewed by PAUL ROAZEN, professor emeritus of social and political science, York Uni-
versity, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Dr. Forrester comments:
It is gratifying that Dispatches from the Freud Wars raises so many issues. I am intrigued
that Professor Roazen finds Freud’s argument, which I examine in great detail, “wicked,” and
I hope that elsewhere he will explain why that is so and also his imputating to Rawls the
experience of being “shaken” by Freud’s commentary. Rawls discussed Freud’s theory at
length — and that is why I in turn addressed Rawls at such length, despite having some
sympathy for Roazen’s view that it is a “dessicated” argument. I did not forget, however,
that, despite its dessication, Rawls’s was perhaps the most influential political theory of the
twentieth century. And certainly Roazen has interesting views on Klein and Lacan.
On the question of Roazen’s path-breaking work in interviewing participants in the
history of psychoanalysis, which he mentioned in connection with Elma Palos, one of the
protagonists in my book, it would be of very great benefit to the world of scholarship if
Professor Roazen could eke the texts of these interviews available in published or manuscript
form — I am not looking forward to the day that an intrepid journalist is obliged to repeat
Janet Malcolm’s work by writing In the Roazen Archives.
I hope that the review will send readers to the book. The book has six chapters, one on
envy, one on the question of morality and Freud’s psychoanalytic technique, one on Freud’s
collection of antiquities, one on is dream theory, one a review of psychoanalytic historiog- short
raphy, and one on recent debates (the Freud Wars). standard
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I. Bernard Cohen. Interactions: Some Contacts between the Natural Sciences and the
Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994. 204 pp. $16.95 (paper). ISBN
0-262-53124-0.
Historians of psychology have long recognized the powerful influence that advances in
the natural sciences, notably Newtonian physics and Darwinian biology, have exerted on
explanations of mind and behavior. Perhaps less well known, however, are the range and
extent of contacts, to use I. Bernard Cohen’s inclusive term, between the natural sciences and
the various social sciences, which include economics, sociology, political science, and an-
thropology as well as psychology. In the four essays constituting this brief volume, culled
from a larger work edited by Cohen and called The Natural Sciences and The Social Sciences:
Some Critical and Historical Perspectives, the dean of American historians of science ex-
plores the ways that concepts, principles, and methods of natural science nourished early
thinking in social science, especially economics and sociology. As he points out at the start,
“Ever since the time of Aristotle, the natural sciences and medicine have furnished analogies
for studies of governments . . . and analyses of society. One of the fruits of the Scientific
Revolution was the vision of a social science . . . that would take its place among the
triumphant sciences, producing its own Newtons and Harveys” (p. 1).
Given that concepts, principles, and methods of natural science have succeeded so ad-
mirably in explicating physical processes in inanimate objects, and biological processes in
living organisms, are they not likely also to succeed in explicating processes in collections
of organisms, in human societies? The use of metaphors and analogies, as Cohen notes, has
proved instrumental in scientific discovery and explanation. Indeed, some psychologists main-
tain that analogy and metaphor are central to thinking in general. The expansion of scientific
knowledge arises in part from the proliferation and pruning of metaphors, and the deployment
of models and analogies is one of the themata, to use Gerald Holton’s term, of scientific
discovery.
Central to the first essay is the distinction between functional analogies and structural
or formal homologies. The Newtonian principle of gravitation inspired both. To mention a
few examples, in gravitation David Hume saw an analogy to the psychological association
of ideas, and Emile Durkheim an analogy to social attraction. Léon Walrus went further,
proposing a mathematically explicit commonality between gravitation and economic demand:
in modern terms, that prices vary inversely with supply and directly with demand. Unfortu-
nately, Walrus’s rule exemplifies what Cohen calls a “mismatched homology;” a proper
homology to Newton’s law of gravitation would have demand growth in direct proportion to
two variables and in inverse proportion to the square of a third. Unlike analogies, homologies
claim a formal identity between two domains and, consequently, can be designated as accurate
or inaccurate, correct or incorrect.
Analogies, on the other hand, need not imply a precise equivalence between domains.
Nevertheless, analogies, including those drawn from natural science, may turn out more or
less useful, more or less appropriate, more or less relevant. In the first essay, Cohen explores
the special role played by two natural sciences of the nineteenth century, namely, the rational
mathematics of mechanics and energy and the new biology centered on cell theory, evaluating
critically how the former inspired the development of neoclassic, or marginalist, economic short
theories (Walrus, William Jevons, Vilfredo Pareto, and, later, Irving Fisher), and how the standard
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latter inspired organicist social theories (Paul von Lilienfeld, Albert Schäffle, and René Base of text
Worms). Natural science provided not only a fecund source of ideas for social sciences but,
just as importantly, a prima facie means for their justification and validation.
The second long essay moves back to the seventeenth century and the Scientific Revo-
lution, as Cohen examines how the preeminence of mathematics found expression in such
arenas as international law (Hugo Grotius) and economic and political statistics (John Graunt,
William Petty) and how the Galilean analysis of physical motion and the physiology and
anatomy of William Harvey found expression in political and social science (Thomas Hobbes,
James Harrington). Cohen makes a strong case for the claim that natural science played a
deep and abiding theoretical role in the development of these early theories of society, flawed
as many of them may have been in their reliance on inappropriate analogies or mismatched
homologies.
Sandwiched between the first two essays and a very brief history of the terms natural
science and social science is the third section, which recounts a series of conversations be-
tween Cohen and Harvey Brooks regarding the relation of natural science to social science
after World War II. Notable are Brooks’s observations regarding the attitudes of natural
scientists toward social science and the status of the social sciences within such federally
established bodies as the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences,
and the President’s Science Advisory Committee. This dialogue is likely itself to become a
core document in future historical analysis of the contacts between natural science and social
science. My only lament about this section, and indeed about the volume as a whole, is that
it is so brief. Contrary to the aphorism written by Robert Browning and popularized by Mies
van der Rohe, less is not always more.
Reviewed by LAWRENCE E. MARKS, fellow, John B. Pierce Laboratory, and professor of
epidemiology and psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06519.
Simon Kemp. Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages. Westport CT: Greenwood Pub-
lishing Group Inc., 1996. 152 pp. $52.95. ISBN 0-313-30051-8.
A wise man once said that those who seek to be bridges are likely to get walked on by
both sides.
As a trained medievalist (in literature) now spending the large majority of his working
time in a clinical health care setting, I readily sympathize with the task Simon Kemp has set
himself. He is seeking to bridge the culture gap between psychology and academic history —
indeed, in some sense the early history of academics itself. He is trying to show that modern
psychology has a relevant pre-modern history, and to suggest to academic historians that the
careful use of anachronistic categories implied by the book’s title can provide a useful focus
of inquiry and need not be distorting or “presentist.”
After a quick look at European thought from circa 400 to 1200 in his first chapter, “The
Early Middle Ages,” Kemp proceeds, in the next chapter, “The Inner Senses,” to the heart of short
his book, an admirably concise and illuminating summary of a very sticky topic, “Aristotle’s standard
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Cognitive Psychology.” This fine guide provides the first useful definition I have read of the Base of text
sensus communis. An Aristotelian schema to explain the synthesis of sensory data, this con-
cept held sway in many fields of thought — including, incidentally, literary theory — until the
mid-nineteenth century. Kemp provides citations to the loci classici for this and many other
key Aristotelian notions and issues, while keeping in view the tantalizing puzzle they offered
to the intellectuals of the late Middle Ages, and still, in some cases, to us today.
In the chapter on “Cognition and the Rational Soul,” Kemp outlines the opinions of
Avicenna and Averroes, Alfredus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and Dominicus Gundissalinus.
These thinkers struggled with such questions as: “How can a fragile physiological process
like the flow of refined fluids between three bulges in the head be so closely linked to integral
functions of a soul believed to be immortal?”
In next discussing “Medieval Applications,” he shows how these intellectual structures
provided the underpinnings for effective medieval arts, like memory training, and less useful
pastimes, like dream theory. While Kemp mentions the influence of dream theory on the
“dream poems” of Chaucer and others, I waited in vain for any mention of the scene in the
Nun’s Priest’s Tale in which Chaucer sends up the fascinating uselessness of medieval dream
theory. Chanticleer the Rooster has a prophetic dream of being eaten by a fox, a dream that
could be considered true or false: he is pursued by Renard, but escapes. His wife takes a
physiological reductionist (yet completely traditional) view of the whole matter, saying, “Take
a laxative!”
Kemp makes no claim of comprehensiveness but rather provides a fine introduction to
his topic, ending with a necessarily tentative but stimulating short essay in comparison,
“Medieval and Modern Theories of Cognition.
This book would serve well as the basis for an interdisciplinary conference bringing
together medievalist experts in history and literature with psychologists and sociologists. The
proceedings could be assembled into a website complete with virtual reality models to argue
the interpretation of the three mysterious pouches, “little bellies” (ventriculi), that in medieval
physiology were the scene of the critical interface between body and soul.
As Kemp observes, medieval schemata can help to inspire modern research hypotheses.
On the empirical level, as someone who works daily with people whose ills are categorized
with such words as “chronic paranoid schizophrenia,” “bipolar disorder with psychotic fea-
tures,” or “adjustment disorder,” I find that an observation like Aristotle’s that “in some
mentally disordered people, images are mistaken for memories” (Kemp’s paraphrase, p. 41)
stimulates much reflection. For all our impressive biology and pharmacology, how close are
we to being able to say what madness is?
Reviewed by MARK INFUSINO, who holds a Ph.D. in English and pursues research in the
history of medicine in the time he can spare from his day job in occupational therapy at the
Neuropsychiatric Institute and Hospital, University of California, Los Angeles.
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Edward Tufte. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative.
Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997. $45.00. ISBN 0-961-3921-26.
This is the third of a series of important and beautiful books written, designed and
published by Edward Tufte. The first of these books, The Visual Display of Quantitative
Information (1983), set out a definitive aesthetic and ethic for the presentation of quantitative
data, along with telling criticism of “statistical stupidity”, such as indulgence in irrelevant
elaboration (“chart junk”), and downright dishonesty. Tufte’s second book, Envisioning In-
formation (1990), and the present one, pursue his fascination with both exceptionally fine
and breathtakingly bad practice. According to Tufte, whereas his second book was about the
depiction of “nouns” (states of affairs) his latest book concerns the depiction of “verbs”
(processes, cause-effect relations). Visual Explanations covers a remarkable range of material,
from John Snow’s use of maps, in the mid-nineteenth century, to plot the incidence of cholera
in central London and hence pinpoint the source of infection, to the function of graphical
displays first to obscure and then help reveal the cause of the Challenger space shuttle disaster.
These later books, however, do not in my view achieve the same unity of purpose. There is
no lack of intriguing material, but the examples that Tufte so fascinatingly presents do not
coalesce quite so convincingly around the declared themes.
Although the three books by Tufte do not directly address psychologists nor draw in any
sustained way on psychological principles, they do invite some interesting psychological
questions. For instance, although perceptual theorists have long been impressed that two-
dimensional pictures can represent ‘depth’, they have largely disregarded the equally curious
fact that static displays are sometimes able to convey a vivid impression of events and pro-
cesses, even in the absence of “conventional” devices such as arrows or the use of multiple
images. Furthermore, despite the computing and other resources available to them, psychol-
ogists continue to be remarkably unadventurous and inept in their use of graphics.
Finally, there is the historical dimension. The historians of the human sciences are still
highly text-bound and seldom consider other relevant artefacts, such as apparatus, buildings,
furniture, ‘jobs’, and (as Tufte’s important work should alert us) graphical material. The study
of the “cognitive,” rhetorical, and political functions of graphic displays, from cumulative
records to sociograms, has hardly begun. Indeed, as historians, we might reflect on our own
use of graphics. For instance, what are all those portraits of bearded ‘founding fathers’ doing
in our textbooks?
Reviewed by ALAN COSTALL, Reader in Ecological Psychology at the University of Ports-
mouth, Portsmouth, PO1 2DY, England.
Mauro Antonelli. Alle radici del movimento fenomenologico. Psicologia e metafisica nel
giovane-Franz Brentano [At the Roots of Phenomenological Movement. Psychology short
and Metaphysics in the Young Franz Brentano]. Bologna: Pitagora, 1996. 479 pp. standard
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alla Psicologia descrittiva [Franz Brentano, Psychologist. From the Psychology from the Base of text
Empirical Point of View to Descriptive Psychology]. Bologna: Pitagora, 1996. 125 pp.
Mauro Antonelli. Die Experimentelle Analyse des Bewusstseins bei Vittorio Benussi [The
Experimental Analysis of Consciousness in Vittorio Benussi]. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1994. 218 pp.
Mauro Antonelli. Percezione e coscienza nell’opera di Vittorio Benussi [Perception and
Consciousness in Vittorio Benussi’s Work]. Milano: Angeli, 1996. 217 pp.
The growing interest in Brentano and his school is well documented in these works by
an Italian historian of psychology who has been working for a long time in the Institute of
Philosophy of Graz University. Because Antonelli could study manuscripts and unpublished
works both in Graz and Würzburg, he has enriched our knowledge of the origins and devel-
opment of Brentano’s thought with new and important material. In the book on the young
Brentano, the influence of Aristotle’s theory is deeply analyzed: it goes from the work of F.
A. Trendeleburg (Brentano followed his lectures on psychology and Aristotle in Berlin, 1858 –
1859) and his project refounding Aristotelian philosophy to Brentano’s studies on Aristotle’s
concepts of being (1862) and psychology (1867). Through a comparison with other contem-
porary theories (F. E. Beneke, F. Ueberweg, and R. H. Lotze), the original characteristics of
Brentano’s theory of intentionality and the aims of empirical psychology are shown in the
part devoted to the masterpiece Psychology from the Empirical Point of View (1874). The
second book on Brentano analyzes the subsequent development of Brentano’s ideas up to his
proposal of a “descriptive psychology” at the end of the ’80s. Compared to the genetic
psychology, concerned with sources and conditions (included the physiological ones) of psy-
chological phenomena, the descriptive psychology is restricted to data from consciousness,
trying to pick out the single elements and to describe and to classify the forms of their
connections.
The Graz (or Austrian) school of psychology was founded by Alexius Meinong, one of
Brentano’s pupils. Vittorio Benussi, considered by E. G. Boring “the most productive and
effective experimental psychologist that Austria had,”1 studied with Meinong at Graz begin-
ning in the winter of 1899 – 1900 and worked in the laboratory of experimental psychology
until November 1918, when he decided to go back to his native Trieste. In 1919, Benussi
became professor of psychology at the University of Padua (he suicided in 1927 at the age
of 49 years, probably as a consequence of his strong depressive attacks). The two books by
Antonelli are currently the most informative source on Benussi, from the first research on
time perception and visual illusions to his discussion with K. Koffka on the perception of
form (and the theoretical differentiation between the Komplextheorie and the Gestalttheorie).
During his Padua period, Benussi proposed a new conceptual framework for the experimental
research in psychology, largely founded on methods of suggestion and hypnosis (moreover
he was attracted by psychoanalysis and gave lectures on this theory). A final part of the two
books deals with the Italian Gestalt school, starting with C. L. Musatti who was Benussi’s
pupil and assistant; it was represented by other psychologists like F. Metelli and G. Kanizsa,
especially known for their research on visual perception.2
NOTES
1. A History of Experimental Psychology (2nd ed., New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950), p. 446.
short
2. Other recent Italian-language books on Brentano and the Graz school: L. Albertazzi and R. Poli (Eds.), Brentano standard
in Italia [Brentano in Italy] (Milano: Guerini e Associati, 1993); R. Brigati, Il linguaggio dell’oggettività. Saggio long
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su Meinong [The Language of Objectivity. Essay on Meinong] (Bologna: Thema, 1992); V. Fano, La filosofia
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dell’evidenza. Saggio sull’epistemologia di Franz Brentano [The Philosophy of Evidence. Essay on Franz Brentano’s
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Epistemology] (Bologna: Clueb, 1993); P. Spinicci, Il significato e la forma linguistica. Pensiero, esperienza e
linguaggio nella filosofia di Anton Marty [Meaning and Linguistic Form. Thinking, Experience and Language in
Anton Marty’s Philosophy] (Milano: Angeli, 1991). The following Italian translations are also worthy of noting: F.
Brentano, La psicologia di Aristotele [Aristotle’s Psychology], S. Besoli, ed. (Bologna: Pitagora, 1989); La psicologia
dal punto di vista empirico [Psychology from the Empirical point of View], L. Albertazzi, ed. (3 vols, Roma-Bari,
Laterza, 1997); A. Meinong, Empirismo e nominalismo [Empirism and Nominalism], R. Brigati, Ed. (Firenze: Ponte
alle Grazie, 1991); C. Stumpf, Psicologia e metafisica [Psychology and Metaphysics], V. Fano, Ed. (Firenze: Ponte
alle Grazie, 1992); K. Twardowski, Contenuto ed oggetto [Content and Object], S. Besoli, Ed. (Torino: Boringhieri,
1988).
Reviewed by LUCIANO MECACCI, head of the department of psychology at the Università

degli Studi di Firenze, 50125 Firenze, Italy.
Penelope Harvey. Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation State, and the Universal
Exhibition (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). 208 pp. $65.00 (cloth). $22.95
(paper). ISBN 0-41513045-X.
What are the relationships between representation and reality in our contemporary world
where communication technologies have complicated that relationship, and when the other
becomes the familiar? And how can the anthropological tradition of ethnography fuse with
the theoretical tradition of cultural studies to answer that question? The author, a senior
lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Manchester, uses her observations of the
Universal Exhibition held in Seville in 1992 as a vehicle for thoughtful reflections upon these
questions.
Although Expo ’92 ran from April to October, Harvey was able to make only three brief
visits during the final three months, and two additional trips in 1993. The first problem she
had to confront, therefore, was how to apply her anthropology to a mass phenomenon that
attracted 45 million visitors over a six-month span. Her next step was to link her observations
of cultural practice to the abstract speculations about consumption by such cultural theorists
as Jean Baudrillard, Jean Lyotard, and Michel de Certeau.
Following the Introduction, Chapter Two addresses the important methodological issue
of how one might “do” effective anthropology when, during this massive public event, culture
and context became self-evident (anthropology carried out in the context that produced it).
She reports on her Expo observations beginning in Chapter Three, examining how national
pavilions represented their modernity rooted in tradition and their cultural diversities within
unified national boundaries. Chapter Four, perhaps the most perceptive of the lot, explores
the changing representational relationships between technology and culture. Chapter Five,
“Citizens as Consumers,” looks at how visitors she interviewed and observed (she does not
indicate how many) appeared to make sense out of the national and corporate messages
directed at them. This is a key part of her analysis. The Expo visit, she argues (134), “becomes
a particular kind of cultural practice with implications for the ways in which we might theorize
consumption in the late twentieth century.” short
Harvey returns to her initial problem in the final chapter: how “anthropology might draw standard
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on cultural studies in seeking to describe the ways in which people live mass popular culture” Base of text
(177). No question that this is an important issue for anyone interested in interdisciplinary
studies of modern society. Less ambiguous linkages between theoretical inquiry and empirical
observations might have been achieved, however, had the author connected more frequently
to those cultural theorists more firmly grounded in research traditions (many of whom also
practice in England, and some of whom she also cites) than to the three philosophically
inclined notables she selected for special attention.
Reviewed by MICHAEL M. AMES, professor, University of British Columbia Department of
Anthropology, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z2, Canada.
Nina Sutton. Bettelheim: A Life and a Legacy, David Sharp in collaboration with the author,
trans. New York: Basic Books, 1996, 606 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0-465-00635-3.
Bruno Bettelheim initially came to the attention of psychologists with his classic article
on surviving concentration camps, but he was best known for his work with troubled children.
He became a god of the child psychiatry movement for his uncompromising dedication to
the rearing of healthy children. He fell from grace, however, after his suicide in 1990; psy-
chologists, former patients, and co-workers accused him of lying about his academic creden-
tials/faking reports of cure rates for the autistic children at his school, plagiarism, and hitting
the children under his care. Others argued on his behalf, and the result has been an acrimonious
debate about the real Bruno Bettleheim.
Two recent biographies have attempted to put Bettelheim into perspective. The one under
review here by Nina Sutton is by far the more sympathetic of the two. Hers is not an easy
task, for Bettelheim was a difficult and deeply neurotic man. Born in 1903 into an assimilated
Jewish family in Vienna, as a child he was frequently ill and physically awkward. His father
died while Bruno was a young man, requiring him to take over the family lumber business.
This interfered with his education, although in the late 1930s he obtained his doctorate (in
aesthetics) and fell in with a group of psychoanalytic therapists, teachers, and social workers
in Vienna. As a young adult, he became a man haunted by guilt and shame, convinced of his
physical and personal unattractiveness; he was frequently depressed and often contemplated
suicide.
Perhaps the critical event of his life was his incarceration at Dachau and Buchenwald
for nearly a year. One could not have predicted that he would survive physically, let alone
psychologically. After his release, he moved to Chicago in 1939, where he managed to get a
number of research and teaching jobs. In 1944, he was offered the directorship of the Ortho-
genic School run by the University of Chicago, which he transformed into the most famous
school for disturbed children in the world. After retirement in the 1970s, he moved to Cali-
fornia, where increasing ill health, the death of his wife, difficulties with his children, and a
general lack of purpose made him a bitter and depressed old man.
What is the reality of Bruno Bettleheim? Some charges of the critics are true. Despite short
his claims, had no academic training in psychology, and his psychoanalytic credentials were standard
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weak. The concentration camps he lived in were a far cry from what they became (although Base of text
certainly bad enough), and he was, at best, presumptuous in generalizing his experiences
there. He did hit children, especially during his later years at the school. He had a precarious
grasp on different kinds of mental disorder and what constitutes a “cure.” Many of his earlier
books were written in part by a friend. The man who preached about how we should rear
children was a distant parent and a difficult spouse.
Sutton does not think him a fraud, however. She recognizes that deeply neurotic per-
sonality led him to embellish his accomplishments. Generally she does not excuse his faults,
but she does try to explain. For example, his hitting of the children was infrequent and was
generally done for therapeutic benefit, and the wildly exaggerated claims for cures of autistic
children were designed to get more money for his school. Sutton also emphasizes Bettelheim’s
clinical skills, especially his putative abilities to intuit what was troubling the children under
his care.
In her lengthy biography, Sutton does not attempt a deep evaluation of Bettelheim’s
theories, but she clearly believes they have merit. Those who believe they do not are likely
to think that Sutton has let him off entirely too easily. Others may conclude that Bettelheim
adds up to less than the sum of his parts — a man whose complexities and contradictions
diminish rather than enhance his lasting reputation. In any event, this is an outstanding bi-
ography, detailed and well written; it provides enough information for readers to draw their
own conclusions.
Reviewed by DAVID J. SCHNEIDER, professor of psychology at Rice University, Houston,
TX.
William H. Tucker. The Science and Politics of Racial Research. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1994. 371 pp. $17.95 (paper) ISBN 0-252-02099-5.
The main message of William H. Tucker’s The Science and Politics of Racial Research
is simple: there has never been any scientific value to the investigation of racial differences
in intelligence and other behavioral traits. Such research has always reflected the political
biases of the investigators, who have most typically tended to side with the forces of repres-
sion. Society would be better served if such research were discouraged, and if the boundary
between science and public policy were kept clear and absolute.
In order to substantiate these conclusions, Tucker surveys developments within racial
science from the late eighteenth century until the 1970s, focussing mainly on the United
States. Well-researched and clearly argued, Tucker’s study makes a strong case for the du-
bious quality of scholarship on racial differences and an impassioned plea for the irrelevance
of such research to questions of political rights and social justice. Tucker also raises the issue
of the social responsibilities of scientists, arguing throughout against the attempt by racial
scientists to absolve themselves from the uses of their findings on the basis of their role as
impartial discoverers of truth. short
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halves. The first quickly covers the late-eighteenth-century origins of research into racial Base of text
differences, followed by the emergence of the American school of physical anthropology
around Samuel Morton. Tucker then concentrates on the development during the 1880s –
1920s of various psychological accounts of racial differences within the general confines of
social Darwinism and eugenics. Tucker’s account here breaks little new ground. Following
on the work of Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel J. Kevles, and numerous other scholars, Tucker
argues that social Darwinism and especially eugenics served to transform political/social
questions into scientific/biological ones and to allow racial scientists to use the findings of
their investigations to promote various social policies — including sterilization of the less fit,
restrictions on immigration and interracial unions, opposition to social welfare programs, and
promotion of marriages among the naturally able — while retaining their allegiance to sci-
entific objectivity and neutrality.
The second, less generally familiar, half of Tucker’s work begins with the development
of eugenics in Germany during the Weimar and Nazi periods. Tucker summarizes nicely how
fears of national decline became racialized and focused on the unfit, and he underscores the
relative seamlessness of the transition from Weimar to Nazi eugenics and from scientific
stigmatization to racial purification. His theme here is the danger that science will replace
morality, an issue that pervades the final two sections of the book as well. In his chapter on
the social sciences, integration, and the War on Poverty, Tucker remains skeptical even of
“good” uses of investigations into racial difference, noting that reliance on scientific claims
about the equality of the races has often served to open up space for challenges from opponents
on the basis of their racial studies. Tucker concludes with an extended discussion of the
controversy over Arthur Jensen’s theory of the genetic inferiority of the intelligence of black
Americans. In addition to describing carefully the controversy itself and thoroughly critiquing
all of Jensen’s scientific claims, Tucker provides a detailed analysis of the right-wing and
neo-Nazi organizations that adopted and in instances also promoted research into racial dif-
ferences, noting that Jensen and such supporters as Hans Eysenck and Raymond Cattell
showed little concern about the uses made of their research by such groups. This retreat into
the neutrality of science, Tucker concludes, cannot be condoned, and he closes by urging that
some sort of balance be struck between the legitimate demand for unfettered scientific research
and the need to discourage investigations that are scientifically worthless and socially intol-
erable.
Articulated in terms of freedom of speech melded with social responsibility, there is
little controversial about Tucker’s proposal. But the devil, as we know, lies in the details, and
it is in the pragmatics of producing this synthesis that Tucker seems at the very least vague.
First, he is confident throughout his study that it is relatively easy to determine which scientific
questions are worth pursuing and which are not. The criteria, however, by which he has
determined that investigations of racial differences in intelligence are valueless while those
of incidence of sickle-cell anemia or Tay Sachs are “genuine” are not well spelled out. Second,
Tucker is adamant that a firm boundary be maintained between science and public policy,
with policy guided by sociomoral considerations and science used primarily to provide tech-
niques of implementation. How this boundary is to be erected, however, and whether it is
even tenable save as a retrospective means of exempting scientific research from consequences
are questions that Tucker leaves unraised. Given the extensive recent analysis of the connec-
tions between power and knowledge, one might well wonder whether any attempt to disen-
tangle the social, moral, political, and scientific was either possible or desirable.
These questions aside, Tucker has produced a useful and insightful analysis of the past short
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of attention that he accords the right-wing and neo-Nazi organizations that have found comfort Base of text
and legitimacy in the findings of racial science, Tucker is surely to be commended for insisting
that the production of scientific knowledge cannot be wholly separated from its uses.
Reviewed by JOHN CARSON, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Science & Tech-
nology Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-2501.
Mikolaj Kruszewski. Writings in General Linguistics. Konrad Koerner, Ed. Amsterdam/

Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1995. 228 pp. ISBN 1-55619-315-
7.
This handsomely presented volume of Writings in General Linguistics by the nineteenth-

century Polish scholar Mikolaj Kruszewski (1851 – 1887) at last fills a great gap in the history
of linguistics. It includes Kruszewski’s major theoretical works, On Sound Alternation, trans-
lated by the late Robert Austerlitz, and An Outline of Linguistic Science, translated by Gregory
M. Eramian. It shows painstaking editing and historiographical work and is the result of a
joint labor of love of the two translators and the editor, Konrad Koerner, in an effort to
provide an authoritative edition and English translation of Kruszewski’s writings. The book
is published as Vol. 11 in the series Amsterdam Classics in Linguistics, a subseries of Am-
sterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, of which Koerner is editor-
in-chief. It is the aim of the above series to restore inaccessible classics in linguistics to a
wider audience and to provide detailed historiographical and theoretical analyses of linguistic
science. Koerner is also editor-in-chief of the journal Historiographia Linguistica, which
serves a similar aim. Thus, there is no person better than Koerner, who is widely respected
as a meticulous editor and a living encyclopedia of the history of linguistic science, to have
undertaken a project of this scope.
Mikolaj Kruszewski’s theory is a “lost paradigm” in the history of linguistics, in the
sense that, on the one hand, it could have started a new paradigm in linguistics under better
historical conditions and, on the other, while Kruszewki’s writings continued to be inacces-
sible and almost forgotten, he nevertheless exercised a strong covert influence on several key
linguists in the twentieth century.1 In his extensive introduction, Koerner documents the
historical lines of influence of Kruszewski on other linguists, including: 1) Kruszewski’s
mentor and collaborator, the Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845 – 1929);2 2)
nineteenth century linguists of the Neogrammarian period, including Hermann Paul (1846 –
1921), who adopted Kruszewski’s distinction between “sound change” (Lautwandel) and
“sound alternation” (Lautwechsel), and Hugo Schuchardt (1842 – 1927), who referred to Kru-
szewski in his polemic with the Neogrammarians (xv); 3) twentieth century linguists who
may have adopted Kruszewski’s theoretical concepts without full acknowledgement, includ-
ing John Rupert Firth’s (1890 – 1960) idea of “(habitual) collocation” (xxvii) and Jerzy Ku-
rylowicz’s (1895 – 1978) law “of the inverse ratio between word use and its content” (xxx),
and, most importantly, 4) direct influence on Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913) and Roman
Jakobson (1896 – 1982), key figures in twentieth-century structuralist theory. short
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The most tantalizing of Kruszewski’s many lines of covert influence is his influence on Base of text
Saussure and Jakobson and, hence, on the development of structuralism. Kruszewski is a
seldom acknowledged, but rather obvious, source of some of the ideas in Ferdinand de Saus-
sure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale,3 as Koerner already showed as early as 1973 in his
monograph on Saussure,4 and as was also claimed on several occasions by Roman Jakobson,
in whose judgment Kruszewski was “one of the greatest theoreticians of language among the
world linguists of the late nineteenth century” (xiii).5 In particular, Saussure’s idea of “as-
sociative” vs. “syntagmatic” relationships in language bears a particularly striking resem-
blance to the idea of “associations by similarity” and “associations by contiguity”, which are
crucial concepts in Kruszewski’s theory (xxvi – xxvii). The relationship between Kruszewski
and Saussure was one of mutual influence; although Kruszewski died in 1887, long before
the appearance of Saussure’s Cours, he was familiar with Saussure’s work in historical lin-
guistics;6 Like Saussure, Kruszewski consistently used the term “system” and “systems” in
reference to language (xxx – xxxii), and also consistently analyzed words as “signs”;7 thus,
the fundamental ideas of Saussurean structuralism were already explicitly developed in Kru-
szewski’s writings. As for Saussure’s familiarity with Kruszewski, indirect evidence is given
in the form of a reproduction of the title page of Saussure’s personal copy of Kruszewski’s
Ueber die Lautabwechslung (On Sound Alternation), from the library of the University of
Geneva (1). One of the problems of linguistic historiography in establishing a direct line of
influence is of course the fact that Saussure’s Cours was not written by Saussure himself but
was posthumously reconstructed by his students on the basis of their lecture notes; thus,
possible acknowledgements of the sources of Saussure’s ideas have been irretrievably lost.
The present volume includes a revised translation of Kruszewski’s On Sound Alternation
(Ueber die Lautabwechslung, 1881), and a new translation of An Outline of Linguistic Science
(Ocherk Nauki o Jazyke, 1883; German version Prinzipien der Sprachentwicklung, 1884 –
1890). The first of these texts represents the earliest systematic attempt in the history of
linguistics to make the distinction between historical phonology and, to use twentieth century
terminology, synchronic phonology. The contributions to the development of phonology were
jointly Baudouin’s and Kruszewski’s; Kruszewski, however, had the more theoretical pen-
chant of the two and can be credited with the introduction of the phonological terms “pho-
neme” (14) and “sound alternation” into modern linguistics.8 The relationship between
Kruszewski’s phonology and modern schools of phonology has been the subject of a thorough
analysis by Jurgen Klausenburger, from which a summary table is reprinted in the book (4).9
The second text, An Outline of Linguistic Science, is Kruszewski’s main work in theoretical
linguistics. The translation is a tour de force and a major contribution to linguistic histori-
ography. The translation is based on the original Russian text of 1883, with careful reference
to the (somewhat shorter) text of the 1884 – 1890 German translation, in places where the
latter differs from the original. In addition to the author’s original footnotes from the Russian
text, the translator adds several footnotes from the German text, where these serve to illu-
minate certain points, as well as editorial footnotes of his own; all additional footnotes are
carefully differentiated from the original. The translator has also added glosses for the many
linguistic examples used by Kruszewski, and exact bibliographical documentation of sources
cited by Kruszewski; again, all editorial additions are clearly differentiated. Therefore, in this
text we have at last an authoritative English edition of Kruszewski’s work. In light of the
value of the book for historical reference, it has been printed on higher quality paper which
meets the standards for permanent archival library collections.
The reader who holds Kruszewski’s book may well wonder whether, notwithstanding short
all its historical significance, it is still relevant to any theoretical issues today. For the reader standard
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reluctant to dip into what may be abstruse detail, let us provide an appetizer by quoting the Base of text
summary theses provided by Kruszewski himself at the end of the book (173):
“I. Language changes because of the complexity and indeterminateness of its elements:
sounds, morphological parts, and words.
II. This boundless variability is explained by the symbolic character of language.
III. The elements of language — sounds, morphological parts, and words — not only
change but also disappear. For this reason language constantly creates new material by
means of reintegration of the available material.
IV. Laws of association have the same importance for the understanding of not only
psychic, but also linguistic phenomena. [ . . . ]
V. While developing, language constantly strives for a full general and particular cor-
respondence between the world of words and the world of ideas.”
Contained in these theses, I believe, are at least two reasons why Kruszewski may still
be relevant today. The first of these is the still unresolved theoretical issue of the relationship
between synchrony and diachrony, rephrased in the Chomskyan era as the relationship be-
tween language form (the concern of theoretical linguistics) and language use (the concern
of “softer” linguistics, e.g., sociolinguistics and pragmatics). Kruszewski’s work was a sys-
tematic attempt to construct an explanatory theory of language change. In the process, he
offered a conception of the language system which was dynamic and which could accomodate
the relationship between synchrony and diachrony, as Koerner points out in the final section
of his introduction (xxxii). The second reason why Kruszewski may still continue to be
relevant is contained in that once outmoded term, “the laws of association.” Implicitly refer-
ring to Kruszewski’s concepts of the laws of association, Roman Jakobson used the terms
“similarity” and “contiguity” interchangeably with the terms “selection” and “combination,”
translating from a more associationist to a more behaviorist terminology. The same opposition
is present in Jakobson’s use of the terms “metaphor” and “metonymy”; these oppositions
structure Jakobson’s theoretical accounts of aphasia and of the poetic text.10 But one need
not even look back as far as Jakobson for the possible relevance of a revamped associationism.
Recent efforts to provide a synthesis of the connectionist model of human cognition have
resurrected a more associationist way of thinking about neural networks, with the difference
that “associationist models rested on assumptions of linearity [while] the multi-layer nets
connectionists use are nonlinear dynamical systems, and nonlinear systems can learn rela-
tionships of considerable complexity. They can produce surprising, nonlinear forms of
change.”11 What could have greater “nonlinear dynamical” complexity than the system of
language, which is at once learned by the speaker’s brain in each individual’s cognitive
development, and is a historically changing dynamic social system? I believe that it would
not be out of place for today’s cognitive scientists to take a second look at their nineteenth
century predecessor Kruszewski, who was so intent on constructing a theory of development
by applying the laws of psychology, not to the infant science of neurology, but to the sys-
tematic empirical evidence of the “boundless variability” of language.
Reviewed by JOANNA RADWANSKA-WILLIAMS, visiting professor of linguistics, Nanjing
University, Foreign Experts Building 305, Nanjing 210093, Jiangsu Province, China
NOTES
1. Joanna Radwanska Williams, A Paradigm Lost: The Linguistic Theory of Mikolaj Kruszewski. (Amsterdam/ short
Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company 1993). standard
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2. For an excellent appraisal of Baudouin’s life and work, see Joachim Mugdan, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay
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(1845– 1929): Leben und Werk (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1984).
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3. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Generale, Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, Albert Riedlinger,
eds. (3rd edition, Paris: Payot 1931; 1st ed. 1916).
4. E[rnst] F[rideryk] Konrad Koerner, Ferdinand de Saussure: Origin and Development of his Linguistic Theory
in Western Studies of Language. (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1973).
5. This quotation is taken from Jakobson’s appraisal of Kruszewski, “Znaczenie Kruszewskiego w Rozwoju
Jezykoznawstwa Ogolnego [The significance of Kruszewski in the Development of General Linguistics]”, first
published as an introductory article in the Polish edition of Kruszewski’s works, Mikolaj Kruszewski, Wybor Pism,
edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Jerzy Kurylowicz (Wroclaw, Warszawa & Krakow: Ossolineum, 1967), and
reprinted in Italian in Richerche Slavistiche 13 (1967): 3– 23, and in Russian with a summary in English in Roman
Jakobson, Selected Writings Vol. II: Word and Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), 429– 449, summary 449–
450.
6. Ferdinand de Saussure, Memoire sur le Systeme Primitif des Voyelles dans les Langues Indo-Europeenes.
(Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1879 [1878]).
7. Joanna Radwanska-Williams, “Mikolaj Kruszewski’s Semiotics,” in Multiple Perspectives on the Historical
Dimensions of Language, Kurt R. Jankowsky, ed. (Munster: Nodus Publikationen, 1996).
8. For the exact history of the term “phoneme”, see “Zu Ursprung and Entwicklung des Phonem-Begriffs: Eine
Historische Notiz,” in Konrad Koerner, Toward a Historiography of Linguistics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1978),
177– 188.
9. Jurgen Klausenburger, “Mikolaj Kruszewski’s Theory of Morphophonology,” Historiographia Linguistica 5
(1978): 109– 120.
10. Radwanska-Williams, A Paradigm Lost, 164.
11. Jeffrey L. Elman et al. Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press 1996), 47.
Claire G. Fox, Gordon L. Miller, and Jacquelyn C. Miller, Eds. Benjamin Rush, MD: A
Bibliographic Guide. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996. 216 pp. $79.50.
ISBN 0-313-29823-8.
Benjamin Rush is one of the most controversial figures in nineteenth-century American

medical history. As an humanitarian, he was instrumental in founding a wing for treatment
of the insane at Pennsylvania Hospital and was a founder of the College of Physicians there
in the period immediately after the American Revolution. He sought to treat the insane, a
group who had received precious little of the ministrations of the medical profession in the
colonies. His belief that persons afflicted with madness could be treated, even cured, marks
him as an heroic figure. His techniques were no less heroic, featuring strenuous methods
which included bloodletting, near drowning, and literally frightening the insane back in to a
compos mentis state. A prodigiously productive author, Rush published his thoughts on a
broad range of subjects interesting to reformers in the early national period, including tem-
perance, agriculture, paper money, and medicine.
He wrote what he thought of as scientific treatises on many of these subjects. His most
interesting efforts were those in which he attempted to explain the cause of insanity. Rush
believed that hypertension caused madness, specifically irregular motions in the blood vessels
of the nervous system and the brain.1 short
The book under review is a bibliography of Benjamin Rush designed to facilitate research standard
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related to Rush’s life, career, and writings. Rush was something of a polymath, writing on Base of text
all manner of social, political, and medical issues of interest in the early Republic, as this
bibliography attests. His work on temperance will be particularly useful for historians who
wish to connect Rush’s early work on alcoholism with that of the antebellum reformers. In
tracking down all of Rush’s published works, the editors accomplished a remarkable feat;
many of them are obscure pamphlets and lectures of previously unknown location. Chrono-
logically organized, the bibliography allows the researcher to pinpoint the exact location of
the works cited. All entries are cross referenced to original and subsequent editions.
A comprehensive bibliography of secondary works on Benjamin Rush covers the period
1769 to 1996. The editors have listed virtually every published work that refers to Rush;
consequently, a great variety of medical, historical and legal sources are listed. A title, subject,
and author index complete the volume and increase its accessibility immensely. In short, this
volume is an essential reference for anyone interested in madness, psychiatry, medicine, and
social mores in the Early National period.
Reviewed by MARY ANN JIMENEZ, an historian who is professor of social policy at Cali-
fornia State University, Long Beach, Long Beach CA 90840-0902.
NOTES
1. Benjamin Rush. Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (Philadelphia, 1812), 17.
Eugene Taylor and Robert H. Wozniak, Ed. Pure Experience: The Response to William
James. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1996. 261 pp. $72.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper).
ISBN 1-85506-412-X.
Because William James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism have become classics of phil-
osophical psychology, they are usually read outside of the contexts of debate that surrounded
them, or as representatives of their era without much attention to the role they played in
disagreements of the time. This book takes long strides toward remedying the fate of James’s
success in opening empiricism to the full range of human experience beyond the simple
sensations emphasized by traditional empiricists. James conceived of radical empiricism to
counter modern Cartesian dualism with the proposition that mind and body, subjective ex-
perience and objective referents of that experience, are “only one primal stuff or material in
the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and . . . we call that stuff ‘pure expe-
rience’ ” (2). Taylor and Wozniak point out that this monism is the basis for a radical plu-
ralism, “in that ‘pure experience’ is infinitely variegated in its nature” (xv).
The editors offer a helpful introduction which summarizes the influences on James’s
ideas, including Swedenborgianism, American Transcendentalism, the philosophies of sci-
ence of Chauncey Wright and Charles Sanders Peirce, psychical research, and experimental
psychopathology. Given this rich contextualization, it is surprising to read Taylor and Woz- short
niak’s argument that “nothing in their history had prepared Western philosophers and psy- standard
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chologists for radical empiricism” (xxxi). The editors also emphasize the “colossal Base of text
misunderstanding that befell the doctrine of ‘pure experience’ ” (xxxi), but the twenty-two
densely reasoned, careful responses published between 1904 and 1915 cover a spectrum of
reactions from critique to endorsement. None could dismiss him, and in their recognition of
James’s framing of the terms of debate on consciousness, this volume presents a thick de-
scription of early-twentieth-century philosophical psychology and James’s centrality in that
history.
The editors tacitly agree with James critic Bertrand Russell who called James’s first two
essays, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” and “A World of Pure Experience,” “the most im-
portant in the book” (215). Russell’s essay was a review of the posthumously published Essays
in Radical Experience; the first chunk of Pure Experience is a reprinting of these seminal
essays, which first appeared in the inaugural volume of the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology,
and Scientific Methods in 1904.
Russell’s critique of James clearly states the heart of many of the disagreements printed
here: James’s book “is interesting and delightful to read,” but “I cannot believe that empiri-
cism, however radical, requires that we should deny the difference between mind and matter”
(218). Other essays line up with this resistance to breaking down dualism. Walter Pitkin is
the most harsh in his characterization of radical empiricism as a philosophy that “make[s] the
known thing identical with the knowing of it,” and he counters that “experience is . . . an
outgrowth and function of something not merely empirical (120 and 121). Similarly, George
Sabine criticizes the “psychological treatment of the subjective processes underlying cogni-
tion” in radical empiricism (89). Wendell Bush challenges radical empiricists to think about
the “essential privacy” of this view of experience (102). G. M. Stratton suggests limits to the
universal application of pure experience, which comprehends no difference between mind
and body, because pure experience occurs mostly in periods of “innocence,” including child-
hood and reflective moments (Theodore Flournoy provides a mystical hint that pure experi-
ence may be “a sort of unattainable limit which we only approach . . . by trying to live in
the present moment without reflecting upon it” [233]; and editor Taylor shows James’s ex-
tension of this line of thinking in his psychological work after The Principles in William
James on Consciousness Beyond the Margin [1996].) B. H. Bode, in one of two essays, forces
clarification about the relation of radical empiricism to relativism with astute observations on
“our awareness of a world beyond our individual experience” (60). Some of the essays push
this idea even further; most notably, another one by Pitkin, draws on an old misunderstanding
of James’s “will to believe” as a will to make-believe based on the invention of concepts in
“each man’s own sweet will” (205).
Beyond these critiques, many of James’s contemporaries supported his theory of radical
empiricism. John Dewey said “the real significance of the principle is that of a
method . . . identical in kind . . . with that of the scientist” — high praise indeed from
Dewey, because it meant: “go to experience and see what it is experienced as” (114). In the
spirit of radical empiricism, Horace Kallen compares James favorably with Henri Bergson,
because for both, “Forms and concepts are invariably abstractions that miss the heart of
reality” (212). Flournoy is most sympathetic to radical empiricism in stating that “what actual
experience presents is a multiplicity originally given as one act or one field of consciousness”
(220).
Although John Russell criticizes radical empiricism for confounding the process of
knowing from the knowledge itself, he acknowledges that it effectively solves “vexed prob-
lems . . . of ethical and religious belief” by turning to “the flank of the skeptic and the short
agnostic, instead of making the frontal attack” (171). With a similar spirit, Bertrand Russell standard
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astutely notes that because of his mediating position, James makes “alternatively the impres- Base of text
sion of materialism and of idealism, according to the context” (215).
The great virtue of this book is similar to the virtue of James’s thought in general: they
both steer through a mass of opposing theories and provide ways to understand their relations.
Reviewed by PAUL JEROME CROCE, associate professor and chair, Department of American
Studies, Stetson University, DeLand, FL 32720.
Cristina Mazzoni. Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Myticism, and Gender in European Culture.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. 225 pp. $42.50. ISBN 0-8014-3229-4.
“Was the saint hystericized . . . or was hysteria canonized?” Cristina Mazzoni asks
provocatively at the beginning of this book. Indeed, Mazzoni’s project in Saint Hysteria is
to examine the ways the discourses of mysticism and hysteria inform and are informed by
one another, primarily in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twen-
tieth. Although, she confesses, the extent of scholarly work on hysteria “lends the field of
hysteria the appearance of saturation,” her study moves the research, she says, in “a new
direction by investigating the dialogue of hysteria with its repressed other,” female mysticism
(3).
For Mazzoni, indeed, mysticism and hysteria are female conditions, linked in antiquity
with the organic reproductive body — the wandering uterus — and in the nineteenth century
with the erotic body. Thus the affective mysticism she studies “explicitly or implicitly de-
scribes the mystical union of Christ and the soul in terms of the marriage or even the sexual
encounter between bride and bridegroom”; the medical discourse, the retrospective diagnostic
gaze that viewed historically past outbreaks of witchcraft or histrionic epidemism as undi-
agnosed madness (6). This medical discourse, in addition, linked its retrospective diagnoses
to its own displaced or “repressed other,” female eroticism and pleasure (13, 3). Mazzoni
represents hysteria, possession, and mysticism as situated within a cross-cultural discursive
matrix that enables science, medicine, religion, and culture to infect and deconstruct one
another.
In chapters on late nineteenth-century medical discourse, the aesthetics of naturalism,
decadent-symbolist literature, and the texts of female mystics, Mazzoni writes “an episodic
history of the link between hysteria and the supernatural” (14). She argues that, deploying
the tools of retrospective diagnostic medicine, the positivist gaze, taxonomy and classification,
and rhetorical appropriation, Charcot, Lombroso, Krafft-Ebing, Freud, and Lacan “pathol-
ogize religiousity” and “gender it as feminine” (28). Mazzoni’s literary-critical chapters, then,
triangulate the discourses of literature, medicine or science, and religion, using the notion of
genre or discursive mode to frame the interpenetrations she examines.
Naturalism in late nineteenth-century France, she maintains, estheticized the ill woman,
allying itself with positivistic science and taking “the pathological as its privileged object”
(54). Decadent literary texts, Mazzoni argues in her next chapter, problematize the “unsat- short
isfactory clinical self-definition” naturalistic texts establish, largely by mimicking the prac- standard
tices of hagiography and pathography (91). Thus decadent fiction may displace the hysterical long
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object (constituted by the positivistic clinical gaze) by creating the mystical subject (which Base of text
needs no interpreter) and may reverse positivistic and naturalistic paradigms, portraying mad-
ness as a “heterodox form of religious discourse” (102). Whatever rhetorical and tropological
strategies these texts display, however, their discursive economies, Mazzoni claims, subvert
the scientific gaze and render the binaries of, for example, sainthood and symptom undecid-
able (148).
And, finally, asking whether the self-representation in women’s mystical writing is “com-
patible” with the “demands of feminism,” Mazzoni argues that autobiographical writings by
a twentieth-century hysterical saint and a medieval hysterical mystic deploy the rhetoric of
ecstatic somatic conversion to subvert the dualisms of flesh and spirit, of natural and super-
natural, and of organic and functional disease to debunk diagnostic views of mysticism.
Positioning her own text alongside and against the feminist theories of Simone de Beauvoir
(mysticism is a “case of masochistic justification”), Julia Kristeva (of “subversive hysterical
conversion”), and Luce Irigaray (of “an ‘other’ abjection,”) Mazzoni interprets mystical dis-
course with the tools of psychology, but without, she says, pathologizing it (158).
Linking the discourses of literature and medicine, Saint Hysteria makes a significant
contribution to the scholarship on hysteria. Like many other recent books, Mazzoni’s appro-
priates a diagnostic entity, alongside the related forms of demonic possession and female
mysticism, to leverage medical notions into the domains of culture and feminist theory. This
strategy recycles a medical pathology by representing sufferers as mimicking hysteria to
challenge the positivist male gaze and male individuality while refusing to submit to silence
and powerlessness.
Yet this strategy also leaves unanswered a variety of methodological questions about
historical reference and the workings of discourse theory. Mazzoni sidesteps, for example,
some central theoretical questions here: was hysteria a “transhistorical” phenomenon or was
it constituted within a specifically historical setting (7)? What causes and consequences ani-
mated the “parallel historical trajectory” of hysteria and mysticism? How did the two dis-
courses “bear upon” each other “throughout the centuries” (17)? Mazzoni’s stance toward
nineteenth-century science and toward an emergent psychoanalysis is likewise problematic,
for only from a narrow perspective can scientific positivism be represented as serving to
objectify female ecstatic sexuality. Yet this is a book of literary criticism, and the author
succeeds at bringing to the attention of scholars in literature, feminism, and science studies
a series of texts they will not have otherwise encountered. The author succeeds, too, in moving
the scholarship on hysteria forward by illustrating the interaction of the medical discourses
of hysteria with those of religion and mysticism.
Reviewed by DIANNE F. SADOFF, Professor of English, Miami University, Oxford, OH
45056.
Lia Formigari and Daniele Gambarara, (Eds.) Historical Roots of Linguistic Theories.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995. 309 pp. $79.00 (cloth). ISBN 1-55619-610-5.
short
Kurt R. Jankowsky, (Ed.) History of Linguistics 1993. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995. standard
380 pp. $100.00 (cloth). ISBN 1-55619-614-8. long
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At first sight, Historical Roots of Linguistic Theories (henceforth Roots) and History of Base of text
Linguistics 1993 (henceforth 1993) are closely analogous. Not only did both books appear in
the same series published by the same firm in the same year. Also they are both proceedings
of conferences on the history of linguistic scholarship. I have been unable to detect any label
attached to the conference that Roots emerges from: it was held at the University of Calabria,
17 – 18 September 1992, 1993 reflects the “Sixth International Conference on the History of
the Language Sciences” in Washington, 9 – 14 August 1993.
In spite of the apparent similarities, there is ostensibly also a contrast between the two
books. Roots aims to be as coherent a body of papers as one might expect from any confer-
ence; 1993 is content to represent itself as a much more disparate collection. The respective
editorials are commendably clear on this. In Roots “the papers [ . . . ] have [i] in common
[ . . . ] their theme [. . . and, ii] a common methodological outlook (vii, emphasis added);
thus, the history of linguistic ideas, as to [i], is restricted to “France and Italy in the modern
period”, and, as to [ii], is not “a separate activity from research on language” (ibid.). In 1993,
however, there is a “wide range of topics”; and the editor aimed “to do full justice to the
individuality of [. . . each] paper [ . . . ] without jeopardizing any peculiarities tied to the
unique nature of the individual paper” (xii, emphasis added).1 Naturally, these outcomes
broadly correlate to the sizes of the conferences: in Calabria there were 19 papers, 17 of
which are published in Roots; in Washington, some 80, and 32 in 1993.2
One of the signs of the current flourishing of historiography of linguistics is that there
is a sufficient number of participants in the discipline to have allowed the two conferences
to share no single speaker between them (a paper by Auroux, one of the authors in Roots,
was “read by title only” (xix) – i.e. apparently not – in Washington). At the same time, one
senses that there may be evidence here of uncontrolled growth: the various scholars working
in the discipline might be beginning to lose touch with each other. In apparent inversion of
the editorial policies as cited above, it is 1993 rather than Roots that by itself goes some way
to allaying such a concern. In 1993 there are, at least, three cases of reference to other papers
read at the same conference (Konrad Koerner, to Peter Schmitter; Brigitte Nerlich, to Einar
Haugen; Brigiite Bartschat, to Frank Vonk); and, further, three acknowledgments of produc-
tive conference interchanges (John Joseph, Julia Falk, Ranko Bugarski).3 Although ostensibly
more united, Roots boasts neither. Another primarily reassuring fact emerges from collation
of the two volumes: contributors in Roots do refer to 1993’s authors (although naturally not
to their papers in 1993 itself), and vice versa. To some extent, however, this evidence of
healthy interaction is marred by a semblance of a mutual admiration society. The four con-
tributors to 1993 who refer to Roots authors are Koerner (to Sylvain Auroux and Raffaele
Simone), Joseph and Keith Percival (to Auroux), and Nerlich (to Formigari); and these four
are also precisely the only 1993 authors who feature in Roots: Auroux in turn refers to 1993’s
Koerner and to Nerlich;4 Koerner is also referred to in Roots by Giorgio Graffi and by Gam-
barara, and Joseph and Percival by Gambarara and by Daniel Droixhe, respectively.
Let us return to another aspect of the editorial intentions: the overall aim in Roots to
have historiography of linguistics interact with current language study proper. At the risk of
slighting other luminaries in linguistics, I will illustrate the relative success in this respect by
noting that six out of the 17 papers in Roots refer to Noam Chomsky: the ones by Formigari,
Jean-Pierre Séris, Antonio Pennisi, Graffi, Simone, Sebastiano Vecchio; by contrast, in 1993
Chomsky is a reference only in five out of the 32 papers: Koerner, Bugarski, Frederick J.
Newmeyer, Bruce Nevin, Sung-do Kim. The last four are, unsurprisingly, in 1993’s sixth
part, on “Contemporary Issues,” with five papers in all. However, not even any of these four short
papers could easily have competed for inclusion in Roots, since they do not address the history standard
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of language studies in France or in Italy (although Kim’s paper is in French): 1993’s “Con- Base of text
temporary Issues” are all primarily located in North America, with excursions to Serbo-
Croatia (Bugarski), and to Hjelmslev (Kim), whereas Newmeyer devotes four pages (338 –
342) to disparaging the commonly perceived ‘America-centric’ bias of Chomskyan generative
grammar. The only paper in 1993 that would conceivably have satisfied Roots’s Franco-
Italian criterion is the one by Douglas Kibbee: “Dictionaries and Usage in 17th-Century
France: Le Naif François” (167 – 178); which very paper, however, would saliently have
foundered in respect of relevance to contemporary language studies: “Naif François as a
grammatical buzzword lasted less than a century [. . . ;] in the first half of the 17th century,
the term virtually disappeared” (175).
Yet it is not obvious to what extent Roots has really been successful in having its
contributions informed by contemporary strictly linguistic relevance, more than 1993, at least
if we measure by reference to Chomsky. For instance, in Formigari’s paper, the actual point
made in relation to Chomsky is that “professional linguists were largely absent even from
the Humboldt renaissance [ . . . ] inaugurated by Chomsky’s interpretation” (6 – 7, emphasis
added); as if to reinforce the abortive nature of this reference, Formigari fails to supply an
actual bibliographical specification of it. Similarly, Pennisi merely drops the term, “Chom-
skian semiotic framework” (89), but does not give any further account, and Chomsky is absent
from his bibliography. Finally, rather like Formigari, Simone also uses Chomskyan generative
grammar to illustrate abortive contemporary relevance: in this case, of “user-centered lin-
guistics” whose “influence on today’s research is to be considered as very restricted” (235);
and she does not include any entry by Chomsky in her bibliography, either.
If it is in just three out of Roots’s 17 papers that Chomsky really figures in line with the
volume’s editorial policies, this does not contrast too sharply to the five papers out of 32 in
1993 after all. But of course the 1993 instances could then be subjected to similar scrutiny.
In that case, the picture shifts considerably again. Koerner’s reference is to Chomsky as
would-be historiographer, which actually yields only “the distortion by a 20th-century linguist
of ideas about language held by 17th, 18th or 19th century scholars” (15). If this is not even
worse than abortive current relevance, then there is at least straightforward abortion in Bu-
garski: “the famous Chomskyan ideal speaker-hearer who turns out to be tacitly literate”
(325) does not attain an entry in the bibliography. And both Nevin and Kim actually keep
contemporary relevance at bay as well, by referring to Chomskyan works no more recent
than 1964 and 1975, respectively. It is really only — and in fact passim — in the contribution
to 1993 by Newmeyer that Chomsky, through 1991, represents current relevance; but then,
in 1993 this was indeed not supposed to be a unifying factor in the first place.5
On the whole, therefore, my impression is that neither Roots nor 1993 really represent
the historiography of language studies directly impinging on current linguistic research. But
only in the former case does this amount to a criticism, since only Roots avows the purpose —
if not the achievement — of such effects.
Reviewed by FRITS STUURMAN, a member of the faculty of the Department of English,
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
NOTES
1. See also the eponymous ‘multiple perspectives’ in the companion volume, Multiple Perspectives on the His- short
torical Dimensions of Language, Kurt Jankowsky, ed. (Munster: Nodus, 1996). standard
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2. Eighteen more papers from the “Sixth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences”
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appear in Multiple Perspectives, Jankowsky, ed.
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3. Also in three papers in Multiple Perspectives, Jankowsky, ed.
4. And to Schmitter, who contribute to Multiple Perspectives, Jankowsky, ed.
5. Four more papers refer effectively to Chomsky in Multiple Perspectives, Jankowsky, ed.
A. Paul Hare and June Rabson Hare. J. L. Moreno. London: Sage Publications, 1996. 137
pp. $44.00 (cloth), $18.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8039-7969x.
This small volume belongs to a series intended to provide an introduction to the leading
innovators in counseling and psychotherapy. It is not a technical book, but rather a sympa-
thetic account of the life and contributions of Jacob Levy Moreno (1889 – 1974) written for
the general public. Moreno’s life covered a wide range of activities such as theater, religion,
psychiatry and psychotherapy, interpersonal relationships, small and large groups, and edu-
cation. All these are presented by Hare and Hare in a manner worthy of the impact and
historical relevance of each contribution.
The book has five chapters and a select bibliography of J. L. Moreno. In the first chapter,
the authors depict Moreno’s life as that of a wanderer. He was born in Bucharest, in a
Sephardic Jewish family, and in 1909 he entered Vienna University after two years of intense
soul-searching and direct encounters with God. From 1918 through 1925, he served as a
public health officer in Bad Vöslau, Austria, and became a “miracle man” for many patients.
In 1925, he left for the United States to promote an electromagnetic recorder that he had
invented, but it proved to be a failure. After a period of depression and anger he succeeded
as the founder of psychodrama and sociometry, although he was always a controversial figure.
The second chapter offers an introduction to Moreno’s major theoretical contribution,
his socionomy or science of social laws. Central to it is the notion of spontaneity and creativity
in society and the individual. According to Hare and Hare, Moreno was more a visionary
than a systematic thinker. He considered human beings to be in direct contact with God, the
creator of the universe, sharing in His power to change all things. Moreno’s theory of society
focused on the networks of interpersonal relations, the most significant for each individual
forming the smallest unit within a cultural pattern, the “social atom.”
More interesting for the practitioner is the chapter about psychodrama and sociometry,
Moreno’s major contributions to practice. The psychodrama is “a social atom repair work”
to help people to find an optimal placement in a social network. The authors provide excellent
coverage of the technique and its social counterpart, the sociodrama, illustrated with excerpts
from therapeutic sessions directed by Moreno himself. The underlying concept was that every
individual is characterized by a certain set of roles that he imposes with a varying degree of
success upon the others. Moreno’s emphasis was more on action than on words. He insisted
that verbal interchange should be more based on an encounter, with group members sharing
revelations about themselves instead of analyzing and interpreting.
The final chapters review criticism of Moreno’s work and assess his general influence.
Hare and Hare clarify the most common misunderstandings and warn the reader about the short
potential abuses of psychodrama when used by inadequately trained directors. They also standard
mention the lack of empirical studies, mainly because of the difficulty of distinguishing long
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Moreno’s personal style from his technique. In spite of this, it is estimated that the number Base of text
of practitioners who use psychodrama is between 5,000 and 10,000, working in the main
countries of the world.
This small volume certainly has much to offer those interested in psychodrama and
sociometry. It remains at a descriptive level, it is true, and does not attempt a historical analysis
of the facts. Hare and Hare have, however, succeeded in providing an accurate and readable
introduction to Moreno’s life and work.
Reviewed by JOSÉ M. GONDRA, professor of the history of psychology, Basque Country
University, in San Sebastián, Spain.
Harvie Ferguson. The Lure of Dreams: Sigmund Freud and the Construction of Moder-
nity. London: Routledge, 1996. 249 pp. $16.95 (paper). ISBN 0-415-04836-2.
Harvie Ferguson’s The Lure of Dreams is one of a spate of recent books that attempt to
read the various modernisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as manifes-
tations of a postmodernist consciousness. In this case it is Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams
that is held to be an exemplary postmodernist text, accurately representing the new social,
psychological, and philosophical realities of the fin-de-siècle. This brief characterization,
however, does not mean that the book is easy to follow, or that the author’s thesis is easily
evaluated. There are two sources of difficulty.
One is methodological. Much of the book consists of detailed summaries of Freud’s
concepts, particularly his metapsychology, so lengthy and dense that the thread of the argu-
ment gets lost for long stretches. As a result, not enough space is devoted either to clarifying
the essential terms of the argument or actually to arguing it. The expositions do not by
themselves yield the conclusions Ferguson wants to draw from them, given the plethora of
existing alternative interpretations. To the extent they can be grasped however, his conclusions
seem, though anchored in a solid and sophisticated knowledge of Freud’s texts, significantly
wrong-headed in their interpretation of the spirit of Freud’s work and its place in the intel-
lectual history of his times. Perhaps even more serious, since he has already discounted
“simplistic” conventional interpretations of Freud, his conclusions betray significant confu-
sions about the historical relationship between “modernism” and “postmodernism” that are
endemic to the current genre.
The “irrationality” of the dream, according to Ferguson, is not properly understood as
the dreamer’s attempt to disguise prohibited wishes; after all, “their appearance in dreams
hardly seems to constitute a danger, either to society or to individual psychic health.” (73)
Rather, in its alogical, disconnected nature, the dream comes “to signify the incomprehensible
[sic] interconnected and yet fragmented character of modern life.” (70) By modern life, Fer-
guson means the dizzying flux and arbitrariness of the new urban environment of the late
nineteenth century city famously described by Freud’s contemporary, Simmel, but Ferguson
interprets that environment through the post-Marxist lens of Deleuze and Guattari as a con-
sumerist paradise/nightmare, in which pseudo-liberated women were pulled every which way short
by the infinite possibilities of shopping without any inner direction. In this setting, the modern standard
unified bourgeois ego was destroyed, replaced by the hysterical body as a “continuous and long
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unbounded surface” (32) of endless wishes, with no foundation in anything “inside” the self. It Base of text
is this body which is manifested in dreams, but dreams are thus the truth of the world: “modern
life,” according to Freud according to Ferguson, “can be seen as an outbreak of dreaming.” (126)
Ferguson’s interpretation of Freud as postmodernist goes to the very heart of Freudian
theorizing. Thus the inconsistencies and contradictions of Freud’s various theoretical models,
which Ferguson astutely demonstrates, do not represent failed efforts at unified theory build-
ing; rather, he writes, in them “the fragmentation of modern life . . . is itself consecrated
to the task of explanation.” That is, Freud was never really interested in systematic unity;
Freud’s very theorizing is “the ‘dream’ of science, a mode of representation which . . . is
sensitive to the multiplicity of meaningful perspectives immanent in experience.” (156 – 157)
This kind of interpretation is not likely to rescue Freud for contemporary Freud bashers
who deny him any claim to scientific theorizing. But however one assesses the validity of
Freud’s theorizing, Ferguson does not present an accurate historical picture of it. As the
quotation about dream wishes not being a danger to individual psychic health glaringly il-
lustrates, Ferguson often reinterprets Freud simply by ignoring what Freud believed. But the
problem with this postmodernist interpretation goes deeper. Whether or not Freud was a
scientific physician, he was certainly a metaphysician. He was a positivist who never doubted
the existence of reality or the distinction between reality and fantasy. He was a relentless
dualist who never doubted that conflicting purposes were built into the very structure of the
universe, whether it was the first more modest dualism of human purpose, reality principle
versus pleasure principle, or the later cosmic dualism of Eros versus the death instinct. Some-
thing crucial to the intellectual and spiritual history of the twentieth century is lost when pre-
World War I thinkers are assimilated so cavalierly to postmodernism. There are undoubtedly
seeds of postmodernist disillusionment with foundations and grand narratives in fin-de-siècle
art and thought, but hardly anyone was Nietzsche yet. However much fin-de-siècle thinkers
rejected the false unities and reconciliations of pre-war society and ideology, they believed
in an underlying truth, whether instinctual or spiritual, which it was the job of clear-eyed
thinkers and artists to discover for the edification and even the salvation of humankind. It
was only after World War I that foundations and dualisms give way to the multiplicities and
existential voids of Martin Heidegger, Hermann Hesse, Luigi Pirandello, Karl Mannheim and
others — and even these voids were qualified by hopes of the kind that did not fully disappear
from advanced European thinking until the post-1968 collapse of the Marxist master narrative,
a collapse that, as Nietzsche had erroneously predicted for Christianity, drew all other master
narratives with it into the abyss.
Reviewed by GERALD N. IZENBERG, professor of modern European intellectual history at
Washington University in St. Louis, 1 Brookings Drive, St. Louis MO 63130.
Lawrence W. Levine. The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. 203 pp. $20.00. ISBN 0-8070-3118-6.
Part of the time I spent reading Lawrence Levine’s book, The Opening of the American short
Mind was in the main reading room of the Library of Congress. Perched around the rotunda standard
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of that beautiful room stand 16 statues, each a figure of great learning and accomplishment. Base of text
In other words, they are a nineteenth century canon, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Michel-
angelo, Moses, and so on. Only three Americans inhabit the rarified domain of these worthies:
the legal authority, Chancellor Kent, the inventor Robert Fulton, and the scientist, Joseph
Henry. No Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, or Hawthorne stands here. Not only is this pantheon
vivid testimony to Levine’s main point — that the canon is always changing — it points to
another problem that helps energize the debate about what contemporary universities should
teach students about their culture and history. Like other former colonial societies, ours has
long suffered from a “cultural cringe” — or a feeling that civilization in the new world suffers
from comparison to the traditions of the old. The long reach of this feeling of inferiority
continues to shape our arguments.
Levine clearly intends his book to constitute an informed polemic that will enter into
the discussion about the contemporary university and what is taught there. He makes and
sustains strong arguments against the chorus of critics of multiculturalism, the late Alan
Bloom, in particular, but a good many others including fellow historians Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr., John Higham, and George Kennan. While Levine employs a great many arguments against
the attacks of this group upon the contemporary university and its intentionally diverse cur-
riculum, the most telling one is historiographic. He characterizes much of their worry as
uninformed. Not only have the critics got their history of the American university wrong (or
incomplete), they evidence little understanding of the long development of the curriculum or
the struggle over changing it. Indeed, like so many critics of modern society, they root their
beliefs in the shifting sands of their own generational experience. Like so many others, they
appear to argue that the 1950s was the model for American society and that the 40 years that
have followed constitute an aberration (an argument that becomes increasingly difficult to
sustain over time).
On the contrary, Levine celebrates the contemporary state of academic scholarship. Par-
ticularly in history, he contends, there has never before been such a dynamic and creative
outpouring of knowledge. Levine is also optimistic about the growing diversity of American
society. Speaking of his own experience of multiculturalism, he welcomes the changes that
appear everywhere and are written upon the changing countenance of American identity.
While Levine directly confronts many of the essential contentions of defenders of an
established canon of European and American great books, his arguments are focused on only
one element of the contemporary culture wars. For example, he does not explore to any depth
arguments over gender and the role of women in the academy or as subjects of scholarship.
Nor does he engage the problem of affirmative action, which is related to but certainly not
confined entirely to issues of what is taught in the university. Who is taught is another, equally
contentious and difficult problem. Nor, finally, does he take on the esthetic argument about
the canon and the defense of great works for their depth, complexity, and moral beauty. This
is an important element of the conservative critique of the contemporary university — perhaps
the only defensible one, but it is usually just asserted not demonstrated. It would have been
interesting to see what Levine would have made of this contention.
Levine’s other important claim is that the conservative critics of the university fall short
in their definition of culture. They appear uninterested in how culture is created except to
assert the undemonstrable: that American civilization is a melting pot. Whatever the intentions
of the cultural nationalists who invented such terms, the idea has not been terribly helpful.
Cultures immigrating to America do not melt down in the cauldron of Anglo-Saxonism.
Instead a huge variety of European, Asian, African, and South American cultures persist in short
America, making it normal for individuals to negotiate between choices rather than lose their standard
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identities. In fact, this multiple existence (W. E. B. Du Bois called it “twoness”) may well Base of text
be the distinguishing mark of American civilization.
The dispute over the canon comes at a particularly important turn in American cultural
history. Much of the “debased” culture that critics deplore is, in fact, what other nations
around the world increasingly want to consume. However vulgar, mass culture has always
been closer to the experience of the masses of Americans because they have made it their
own. This phenomenon appears now to have the same function elsewhere. At a time when
American cultural exports are winning the world market, when intellectual and cultural pro-
duction is one of the most important of our exports, it is ironic that the criticism by cultural
critics remains so intense. This suggests to me a final but fundamental point. The culture wars
appear in part to continue a long, discomforted history of American intellectuals and their
love/hate relationship with American culture itself. Their deep-seated cultural doubt now fuels
a desire to restrain the rapid changes in the curriculum of the American university. But do
they really have the right answer?
Reviewed by JAMES GILBERT, professor of American history, History Department, Univer-
sity of Maryland, College Park MD.
Richard Mandel. A Half-Century of Peer Review, 1946 – 1996. Bethesda: Division of Re-
search Grants, National Institutes of Health, 1996. 340 pp.
In 1994, the National Institutes of Health distributed nearly $7.1 billion for medical and
biological research, much of it through the ingenious device of “study sections,” committees
of non-governmental scientists who decide what and who deserves support. A post-World
War II innovation, study sections marked a radical departure from previous federal research
policies in agriculture and public health, where government officials distributed money ac-
cording to a complex calculus of technical need and political influence. Intended to calm the
fears of elite medical researchers that Public Health Service officials would “dictate” the
course of scientific inquiry, the new committees were a brilliant public relations success. Yet
the new mechanism left NIH officials with an enduring dilemma: what to do when committee
decisions were not in step with other views of research priorities? The recent AIDS initiatives
are but the latest of repeated efforts to resolve the tensions between the results of a decen-
tralized, researcher-driven, grants process, and the desires of others — patient advocacy
groups, Congressional influentials, medical school deans and, last but hardly least, the pri-
orities set by the directors of NIH’s nineteen institutes.
Richard Mandel provides a history of the NIH peer review process and of the Division
of Research Grants (DRG) that for decades has managed NIH’s grant giving. Mandel reports
on the crucial episodes in DRG’s history: the initial creation of the study sections; the loyalty
oath crisis of the Korean war; the enormous expansion of the NIH grants program in the
“Shannon Years” (1955 – 1968); and the various post-1968 onslaughts on DRG, from sources
which include several secretaries of Department of Health, Education and Welfare, at least short
one NIH director, the U.S. Congress, and, in 1973, President Nixon’s Office of Management standard
and the Budget, which briefly proposed abolishing study sections entirely (145). He concludes long
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with an account of post-1982 attempts to revivify DRG, efforts hampered by the ever-growing Base of text
workload of grants reviewers, and the increasing costs of biomedical research, which lowered
the number of successful applicants.
The Division of Research Grants emerges from this tale as the pioneer and champion of
peer review. As Mandel recounts, DRG’s history can be divided into roughly two eras: a
period up to the mid 1960s, when DRG succeeded in placing investigator-initiated projects
at the heart of NIH funding policies, and the last thirty years, when the centrifugal forces
within and outside of NIH increasingly directed the flow of research dollars. In the earlier
era, DRG staff established uniform standards for grants evaluation, educated grants reviewers,
and, for a time, advised NIH directors about research policy. For much of the later period,
(with some notable exceptions in the 1980s), they appear to have served an almost clerical
function, and at times were hard pressed to ensure their bureaucratic survival.
Unlike earlier accounts of postwar NIH, most notably Steven Strickland’s The Story of
the NIH Grants Programs (1989), Mandel’s story is admirably based on contemporary ad-
ministrative documents. If administrative memos were the key to history (as government
bureaucrats appear to think they are), this would be a compleat historie. Nonetheless, Man-
del’s study, “produced by Logistics Applications, Inc” and “United Information System, Inc.”
for the Division of Research Grants, is far from adequate, much less complete. Mandel is a
shrewd observer and a careful reader of the existing historical literature on NIH and peer
review. Nonetheless, a story constructed from the documents and perspectives found in DRG
files, and not pursued elsewhere (in the federal bureaucracy, to the White House, Capitol Hill,
and beyond the beltway, to the research community), inevitably misses much of the action.
To take just one example, one cannot understand the 1955 Long committee which almost
took NIH out of the grant giving business, without following the paper trail to the offices of
Secretary Oveta Culp Hobby who commissioned it, or without knowing of her boss’s (Pres-
ident Eisenhower) long standing ambivalence about public aid to medical education. Even
within the NIH “walls,” Mandel fails to explain why the National Cancer Institute, in partic-
ular, fought DRG for the right to “program” research funds outside the purview of DRG-
managed peer review.
It is not the details which matter here so much as the dynamics, and, most often, the
dynamics are difficult to discern from Mandel’s detailed account. For the members of DRG,
and for very specialized researchers in the history of medical research, Mandel has performed
a valuable service. But the reader interested in understanding why we have the present-day
system of medical research, who is for it, who is ’agin it, and why, will not find the answer here.
Reviewed by HARRY M. MARKS, associate professor, Institute of the History of Medicine,
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21205.
Sacha Bem and Huib Looren de Jong. Theoretical Issues in Psychology. London: Sage
Publications, 1997. 194 pp. $22.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8093-7826-X.
short
Theoretical Issues in Psychology is an impressive work. Although I have some minor standard
reservations about the book (which I shall briefly outline), I view it as a tour de force on long
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many philosophical and theoretical issues in psychology. Indeed, it is particularly strong in Base of text
just what the authors intend to be strong — the philosophy and sociology of science and the
philosophy of the mind. Furthermore, it is an accessible tour de force. It takes the reader on
a relatively comfortable intellectual journey (or narrative), while noting important conceptual
sights along the way. This combination of intellectual substance and reader accessibility is
rare among books in psychology. For this reason, the work deserves a place on every psy-
chologist’s book shelf.
Bem and Looren de Jong begin the book with a chapter that essentially frames the
conceptual issues (or problems) of psychology. This is particularly helpful, because many
psychologists seem to assume that there are no intellectual problems — only empirical prob-
lems waiting to be solved by the mechanism of science. Bem and Looren de Jong show quite
lucidly, however, that psychologists need to address a host of conceptual issues, including
issues of knowledge, science, explanation, functionalism, reductionism, and causation (the
authors’ description of the issues related to functionalism is particularly insightful).
The remaining three chapters attempt to address these problems by examining two basic
topics: the science of psychology and the nature of the mind. The first of these chapters
(Chapter 2) depicts the story of the philosophy of science. It begins with a charitable rendition
of positivism and its decline, and then proceeds to describe the many “subjectivist counter-
attacks” on positivism. The chapter ends with a clear discussion of the “realism-relativism
quagmire” (p. 73). The authors offer a sophisticated pragmatism as our escape from this
quagmire, but they do not grind this pragmatic ax to the exclusion of other relevant issues.
Throughout the book, the authors’ own perspective is apparent without being heavy-handed.
In Chapter 3, they review the literature involving the sociology and psychology of sci-
ence. With a contextless science (positivism) essentially rejected, this chapter describes the
many approaches to science that have been proposed to take the place of positivism. Ac-
cording to Bem and Looren de Jong, these approaches are all based on the relativity of
knowledge. They focus on the social factors that “construct” knowledge, rather than the data
that justify it. These approaches include critical theory, the “strong programme,” and the line
of work that preceded and followed the work of Thoma Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. The final
section of the chapter considers the psychological aspects of science — the so-called “science
of science.”
The last chapter deals extensively with the philosophy of mind, particularly as it pertains
to psychology and cognitive science. This chapter may be the strongest of the book. Many
different philosophy-of-mind threads are woven together into an instructive tapestry. Some
of the more interesting, mainstream topics include consciousness, identity theory, intention-
ality, rationality, representation, the computational theory of mind, eliminative materialism,
and network activation theory. Here, the connections made to folk psychology are especially
noteworthy. The authors consider these mainstream approaches to be fundamentally mecha-
nistic, and so they end the chapter with a brief summary of a few alternatives to mechanism,
including approaches that are associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hillary Putman, Lev
Vygotsky, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
My main problems with the book are relatively minor, given its many strengths. The
first concerns writing style, particularly the authors’ “voice.” Although the authors avoid the
temptation of pushing their own views, it is often difficult to know when the authors are
advancing their own arguments and when the authors are merely describing the literature.
This distinction may ultimately be problematic. Still, it is an important practical consideration
when a reader wants to understand the coherence and main argument of the book. For this short
reason, the primary message of the book is not at all clear. standard
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My second problem concerns one of the main themes of the book — the avoidance of Base of text
relativism. Although I am sympathetic with this theme, the book treats relativism somewhat
stereotypically (e.g., “relativism implies that the world is as it pleases us to see it,” p. 152).
That is, relativism is made into an oversimplified “bad guy,” and many other types of rela-
tivism are not acknowledged. For example, the authors seem to lump the hermeneutic tradition
together with other “subjectivist” and “relativistic” approaches (though not always explicitly).
The problem is that proponents of the hermeneutic tradition have expressly rejected these
types of relativism.1 Even if the authors would contend that this tradition fails to overcome
relativism, a more sophisticated discussion of relativism is sorely lacking in the book. Indeed,
a sophisticated discussion of the relativistic aspects of the authors’ own favorite — pragma-
tism — is also lacking.
NOTES
1. G. A. M. Widdershoven, “Hermeneutics and Relativism: Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Habermas,” Journal of Theo-
retical and Philosophical Psychology, 12 (1992): 1– 11.
Reviewed by BRENT D. SLIFE, professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, Provo,

UT 84062.
Paul Ricoeur. The Hermeneutics of Action. Richard Kearney, Ed. 213 pp. $65.00. ISBN 0-
7619-5139-3. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1996.
This collection includes three recent essays by Paul Ricoeur, and nine essays by his
friends and interpreters, most of which were papers presented at a celebration of Ricoeur’s
eightieth birthday in 1993 in Naples, Italy. The fact that the authors come from nine different
countries is testimony to the international influence of Ricoeur’s work. The book concludes
with four review-essays of recent French publications, including the collections of Ricoeur’s
essays published as Lectures I, II, III (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991, 1992, 1994) and Olivier Mongin’s
Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Le Seuil, 1994). The majority of these essays elucidate or expand on
themes in Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
In his first essay in this volume, “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,” Ricoeur deals
with some of the problems in creating a new political organization of Europe that, because
of the history, culture, and languages, of the individual countries cannot simply follow the
model of already-existing federal states such as Germany, Switzerland, or the United States.
The latter countries already hold the “same symbols of sovereignty (currency, army, diplo-
macy).”(3) Ricoeur wants to explore some models of integration and difference, such as the
model of the translation of one language into another. In addition to encouraging multi-
lingualism, Ricoeur says it can prefigure a multi-culturalism where differences are appreciated
and integrated. The second is a model of the exchange of memories, “precisely at the level
of the customs, rules, norms, beliefs and convictions which constitute the identity of a cul-
ture.”(5 – 6) Finally, he suggests a model of forgiveness: “The history of Europe is cruel: wars short
of religion, wars of conquest, wars of extermination, subjugation of ethnic minorities, ex- standard
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pulsion or reduction to slavery of religious minorities; the litany is without end.”(9) But he Base of text
does not call for a forgiveness without a memory. The debt is not abolished, and that is why
forgiveness requires enduring patience.
In another of Ricoeur’s essays, “Love and Justice,” he reflects on a dialectic between
love and justice and searches for practical mediations. One of the features of love is in the
power of metaphors linked to the expressions of love. Justice, on the other hand, is tied to
principle and argument. Ricoeur wants “to build a bridge between the poetics of love and
what we might now call the prose of justice, between the hymn and the formal rule.”(32) In
the end, both love and justice are addressed to action and “because love is hypermoral, it
enters the practical and ethical sphere only under the aegis of justice.”(37)
Ricoeur’s essays, published here in English for the first time, are the most valuable part
of this collection. But, almost as valuable, certainly for the Ricoeur scholar and researcher,
are the essays by some of the foremost interpreters of Ricoeur’s work. Peter Kemp, for
example, devotes his article to a comparison between Ricoeur and Lévinas, while Domenico
Jervolino compares Ricoeur with Gadamer on the hermeneutics of praxis. Jean Greisch writes
a very illuminating account of the relation between testimony and attestation. David Ras-
mussen gives a lucid account of the relation between narrative identity and the self, and
Richard Kearney discusses narrative imagination and its relation to ethics and poetics.
This book is an important addition to the works by and about Paul Ricoeur. It is not
intended for the beginner, but the Ricoeur scholar who is already familiar with his major
works will find some very clear and competent commentaries, explanations, and critiques of
the main themes of Ricoeur’s latest work.
Reviewed by CHARLES E. REAGAN, professor of philosophy and executive assistant to the
president, Kansas State University, Manhattan KS 66506-0112.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences: Vol. 34(3), 314–315 Summer
Leslie Margolin. Under the Cover of Kindness: The Invention of Social Work. Charlottes-
ville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997. 256 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-8139-
1713-1.
Ever since Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s Regulating the Poor: The Func-
tions of Social Welfare (1971) and Michael Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (first American
edition 1977), “social control” has been a fashion in all sorts of social analysis. Social workers,
child welfare workers, visiting nurses are not really interested in the well being of their clients,
this argument runs, but in their own hegemonic control in the service of what is usually
described disdainfully as “middle class values.” The “state” is often considered a co-con-
spirator. Leslie Margolin’s Under the Cover of Kindness is firmly, almost formulaically in
this school: conclusion, method, even some of the rhetoric is predictable.
Margolin argues that in the last years of the nineteenth and first years of the twentieth
century, social workers or proto- social workers arrogated to themselves the right to inves- short
tigate and intrude into the most intimate aspects of their clients’ lives. The detailed records standard
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that they kept, and kept from the clients, were themselves instruments of power. Social Base of text
workers’ “degrading [of] the poor vested the social worker with the authority needed to
monitor and control them.” (98)
The historical parts of the book are really background to Margolin’s critique of recent
developments. Social workers now say they are aware of the problems of social control and
intrusion, but their very discussions of it, Margolin maintains, strengthens their control. They
inoculate themselves against criticism. They may claim to be “empowering” the poor, but
“the language of empowerment legitimizes social work.” He ends his book by asking for
“[n]ew, radically different understanding.”
The historical section is very weak. The author ignores changes over time. The author
ignores any counter currents within social work, such as Amos Warner’s American Charities,
which emphasized the importance of the economic environment. Margolin ignores the
“agency” interpretation, advocates of which argued that the poor learned how to use the
system(s) and were not merely powerless victims. The author ignores the fact that many poor
immigrants wanted to become Americans and were grateful to agencies which helped them.
The author ignores that most central of books on the history of social work, Roy Lubove’s
The Professional Altruist.
The latter part of the book puts social workers in one double bind after another. If they
assert their power they are intruding. If they deny it, they are asserting it in a disguised form,
and worse yet, fooling themselves. “The authority of the profession is never better displayed
when it is contradicted.” (169) Margolin argues that consciousness of these internal contra-
dictions leads to “burn out” among social workers. He does not consider that low pay and an
impossible work load might be factors.
Margolin is right to call attention to the class nature of social work. “Surveillance of the
poor [is] entirely different from . . . surveillance of the middle class,” (172) but after all,
the intent of social work has always been primarily to deal with problems relating to poverty.
He makes the essentially romantic assumption that the clients — poor clients — have a wise
social vision and the social workers do not. He assumes that any power imbalance between
social worker and client must be pernicious.
The problem of intrusiveness in the “helping professions” is a real one, and one much
discussed in graduate schools of psychology and social work, and by practitioners. Margolin
cites several notorious horror stories of, for example, innocent people accused of child abuse,
with awful consequences. Yet there are also notorious cases of child protective agencies not
intervening soon enough, also with terrible consequences. Margolin does not mention these
but instead provides a blanket condemnation of any and all intervention. It is as if no social
worker has ever helped any one. And yet what is the alternative? If a family is starving or
beating a child, should not some public authority “intrude”? Is that an imposition of middle
class values?
The issue of too much intrusion or not enough is terribly complex. It is not helped by
such a one-sided approach as this. Margolin’s final sentence asking for a new understanding
does not offer the faintest clue as to what shape he thinks that new understanding should
take.
Reviewed by DANIEL LEVINE, professor of history, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
04011.
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Asher Horowitz, and Terry Maley, Eds. The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the
Twilight of Enlightenment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. $24.95 (paper).
ISBN 0-8020-6980-0.
John Patrick Diggins. Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy. New York: Basic
Books, 1996. $28.00. ISBN 0-465-01750-9.
Studies of Max Weber’s thought and life have begun to proliferate beyond the boundaries
of sociology, as both of these books demonstrate. The collection of twelve articles (some
published previously) complied by Horowitz and Maley focusses attention on the familiar
theme of “rationalism” and “rationalization” in Weber’s work, though from the standpoint of
the political theory and the philosophy of Enlightenment. The poles of the argumentation are
established, roughly, by Kant’s liberal idealism and Nietzsche’s cultural criticism, with Weber
left negotiating the contested terrain between the two. The paradoxes of Weber’s alleged
“illiberal liberalism” (p. 10) are at stake in these discussions, as are a variety of other issues,
from the problem of disenchantment to the character of modernity and Weber’s “methodo-
logical” turn of mind.
A consistent argument cannot be attributed to these diverse contributions. Nevertheless,
as a coordinated production, Barbarism of Reason manages to convey the sense of malaise
and anguish that discussions of Western “rationalism” are likely to provoke nowadays, and
this sense is grounded, more or less, in a Frankfurt-School-inspired analysis of Weber’s
thought. But therein lies the difficulty. For Weber was not only cautious about the use of
rationalism — this “superficially simple concept,” as he once said — but he also could wax as
enthusiastic as Marx about the worldly achievements of the modern rationalistic ethos. The
origins and problems of capitalism formed the core of his substantive concerns, and “barba-
rism” is the term he attached to “unreason” and the absence of civilized society. It was the
distrust of reason that bothered Weber as much as the abuse of reason. But this collection
slights that emphasis while paying homage to the regrets and sense of loss our fin-de-siècle
seems to share with Weber’s generation.
Anguished intellect in the “tragic” mode is also the theme of Professor Diggins’ treatment
of Weber. But whereas contributors to the preceding collection often attempt to work through
Weber’s thinking so as to leave it behind, this author’s effort retrieves and represents the sage
from Heidelberg as a timely corrective. Known previously for his work in the history of
American thought, Diggins’ foray onto new ground is guided in part by his interest in re-
minding us of an alternative, “Weberian” vision of our history associated with an Abraham
Lincoln, Herman Melville, or Henry Adams — a vision he says we ought to heed in democratic
times. This case is difficult to make, however, as the example of Adams shows, and Weber’s
complicated positions often tend to impede the effort.
But this book is also supposed to be about Weber’s life and work, and in that respect it
is an awkward contribution that should be used with caution. Biographical snippets usually
drawn from well-known sources, primarily Marianne Weber’s 1926 biography of her husband
(Max Weber: A Biography, tr. 1975), are combined, sometimes inexplicably, with well-re-
hearsed topics in the massive Weber literature: authority, the Protestant ethic, status, etc. The
result is a pastiche relying heavily on uncritical acceptance of Marianne’s perspective — “the
divine Marianne” (268). Much is made of the connection between Weber and America, a short
potentially fruitful avenue to explore, and yet Weber’s relationship to the most important standard
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thinker he actually met in the U.S. — William James — is never discussed. The author in fact Base of text
shows little knowledge of the details of Weber’s 1904 journey, and only superficial awareness
of his reception in the American social sciences, as documented in German by Agnes Erdelyi’s
Max Weber in Amerika (1992). Moreover, the text is marred by annoying substantive errors,
incorrect identifications, and misspellings that indicate hasty production and raise questions
about the interpretation. The reader seeking enlightenment on these topics thus will be better
served by the older literature, starting with Marianne Weber herself, or even Reinhard Ben-
dix’s Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (1960).
Reviewed by LAWRENCE A. SCAFF, Department of Political Science, The Pennsylvania State
University, University Park PA 16802-6200.
Irina Sirotkina. No Asylum: State Psychiatric Repression in the Former USSR. New York:
New York University Press, 1996. 290 pp. $45.00 ISBN 0-8147-9312-2.
Lev (Leo) Tolstoy, who was friendly with the director of a psychiatric clinic, was once
invited to attend some theatricals played by the patients in the clinic. During the interval, he
was greeted by a patient, whom he recognized as one of his friends. “Ah, Lev Nikolaevich,”
he addressed Tolstoy cheerfully, ‘I am so glad to see you! How long have you been with
us?” 1 This anecdote, embodying the expectation that a writer should be in a madhouse,
possibly illustrates a cultural attitude that made socially alienated intellectuals vulnerable to
being labeled insane.
The authors’ conclusion that intellectuals were subject to involuntary hospitalization
more often than people of other occupations appears to confirm this cultural attitude. Yet, for
the reason that many psychiatric detainees were blue-collar workers as well as for other
reasons, Smith and Oleszczuk question that cultural factors were the only explanation for the
psychiatric incarceration of healthy individuals that took place in the Soviet Union from the
1920’ s onwards. They argue that it was a result of deliberate policy by the Party-state, directed
towards political and religious non-conformists, to prevent — without much publicity — the
dissemination of dissent. How, then, should we understand why intellectuals, who did not
comprise the largest group of dissidents, were disproportionally victimized? Smith and Olesz-
czuk explain it by emphasizing intellectuals’ political salience as well as by suggesting that
psychiatric repression targeted a particular kind of dissent activity rather than a particular
social group. Thus, symbolic opposition (acts such as renouncing Soviet citizenship, refusal
to bear arms for religious reasons, returning Party cards, as well as demonstrating and creating
a dissident group) attracted sanctions more often than opposition in the form of violence and
hijacking. Believers in “true Marxism” (and critics of the hypocrisy of Party bureaucracy),
proponents of nationalist and anti-Communist views and authors, editors and distributors of
the dissident literature — samizdat — were confined to psychiatric hospitals for the longest
periods. Apparently intellectuals were more active in these kinds of symbolic opposition and
therefore more penalized. short
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the USSR is that Smith and Oleszczuk have undertaken a sociological study. They place a Base of text
heavy emphasis on the thorough application of sociological procedures, from constructing an
unbiased sample to formulating a range of hypotheses and testing them statistically. To
achieve an objective overview, the authors often compare the uses and abuses of psychiatry
in Russia and in the USA. Such thoroughness is partly provoked by the criticism that Soviet
psychiatric officials advanced against those who wrote about psychiatric repression in the
past. The authors’ position as social scientists protects them from any such accusations, giving
them the authority to conclude that the danger of political abuse of psychiatry still exists in
Yeltsin’ s Russia. In the past, the decision to deter a dissident in a mental hospital was not
necessarily taken at the top level, and much was left to the discretion of local authorities. In
spite of recent legal and political developments, neither this lower level of political power
nor the medical system in Russia has essentially changed. The authors’ final message is that
the threat of abuse will remain unless “new professional conduct standards bar the way and
alternative professional career paths can be pursued which are not controlled by the govern-
ment, Party agencies or similar authorities.”
NOTE
1. TL Sukhotina-Tolstaia, Memoirs (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1976), 435.
Reviewed by IRINA SIROTKINA, a researcher at the Institute for the History of Science and
Technology, Moscow 103012, Staropansky 1/5, Russia and currently Visiting Scholar in the
Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, Cambridge MA 01239.
Wout van Bekkum, Jan Houben, Ineke Sluiter, and Kees Versteegh. The Emergence of
Semantics in Four Linguistic Traditions: Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic. Amster-
dam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series III — Studies in
the History of the Language Sciences 82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997. 322 pp.
$85.00 (cloth). ISBN 1-55619-617-2.
This book is an odd collection of essays — one each by the four different authors, and a
brief conclusion by all of them jointly — on notions of semantics at work in ‘linguistic
traditions’ which largely eschew semantics. It is odd not just because of the governing search
for theories of meaning in traditions that were largely indifferent to theories of meaning. It
is odd because the book grew out of discussions the authors had with each other, and because
they reportedly commented extensively on each other’s drafts, and yet each essay seems fully
oblivious of the others. There are links among these traditions, especially among the Greek,
Hebrew, and Arabic traditions, but they remain unexplored. It is odd because there are only
the most cursory attempts to develop the implications of these traditions for modern work.
There are implications for current work, especially coming out of the Sanskrit and Greek short
traditions, but these get no examination. Why, then, was the book written? Apparently because standard
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That said, the four scholars all do their jobs competently, offering précis of the four Base of text
traditions, within the respective parameters they adopt, including usefully annotated bibli-
ographies of suggested further readings.
Wout van Bekkum’s account of the Hebrew tradition spans the period from the sixth
century BCE to the fourteenth century CE, identifying the principal landmarks in what is,
overwhelmingly, a story of exegetes who broach semantics largely as a way to chart the
territory between “literal” meaning and theologically driven interpretations of canonical Ju-
daic texts.
Exegesis is firmly in the driver’s seat for Kees Versteegh’s essay, as well; so much so
that what he titles “The Arabic Tradition” might be better labeled “The Islamic Tradition”.
Important grammatical work written in Arabic (in particular, work which seems especially
germane to this volume, since it explores Hebrew and Greek lines of thought) is ignored to
follow hermeneutic approaches of the Qur’an from roughly 750 to 1500 CE.
Devotion to canonical texts, in fact, is said (in the preface, and again in the conclusion)
to be the defining theme of the four traditions schematized in this volume. But it falls away
somewhat with Jan Houben’s treatment of the Sanskrit tradition, which confronts, on the one
hand, the monumental and largely a-religious Paninian formal grammar, and, on the other
hand, the varied Hindu, Buddhist, and Jainist schools, each with differing textual allegiances.
Covering more conceptual territory, the Sanskrit essay also covers a broader swath of time
(eighth century BCE — eighteenth century CE) than the others.
And exegesis is virtually absent altogether in Ineke Sluiter’s history, which chronicles
the Greek linguistic and philosophy-of-language traditions between the fifth centuries, BCE
and CE (though there is some discussion of the Homeric epics as problematizing much of
the early Greek language scholarship).
The joint Conclusion is the most interesting piece in the book, but it says virtually
nothing about historical points of contact or influences among the traditions, and only sketches
very hastily the areas of theoretical overlap or common interest.
The endmatter includes a helpful chronological table and two indexes (of Names and of
Subjects).
This is a book, scholarship by shared area code notwithstanding, that would be a useful
reference in libraries at institutions where history of linguistics and/or philosophy is a subject
of serious inquiry. But only the most specialized individuals will find it profitable to purchase
it for themselves.
Reviewed by RANDY HARRIS, associate professor of English at the University of Waterloo,
in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1.
Lorne Falkenstein. Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. 465 pp. $45.50 (paper). ISBN 0-8020-
2973-6.
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acknowledged achievement of the aesthetic: that Kant argues there for the view that intuitions Base of text
are extended in space and time. The book offers both an alternative reading of Kant’s aesthetic
and a comprehensive review of related secondary literature.
Falkenstein’s claim that sensible intuitions possess spatial and temporal properties runs
counter to standard readings of Kant’s aesthetic. Most commentators read Kant’s aesthetic as
a defense of the claim that synthetic activity at the level of sensibility generates representations
called intuitions. The form of intuition is distinct in essence and origin from the extended
matter of the brain, although the content of an empirical intuition is a product of both the
form of intuition and the matter of sensation. Kant’s broader thesis is that intuitions and
concepts are brought together in understanding by additional cognitive processes, and this
forms the basis for our representations of objects in space and time.
Falkenstein rejects this view, arguing that intuitions are themselves sensations disposed
in space and presented over time. The sense organs organize sensory inputs at a physiological
level, supplying the form of intuition that determines the spatio-temporal structure of sensa-
tion. Interpreted in this way, Kant holds that human physiology plays an important role in
our representation of the spatio-temporal properties of objects. Such an emphasis on physi-
ology constituted an important departure from the rational psychology prevalent in Kant’s
day.
It is a controversial matter whether Kant held the thesis Falkenstein advances. Sense
organs and the brain may be objects of possible experience, but it is hard to see how extended
sensible intuitions could be. This means that Kant’s theory of cognition is won at the price
of his metaphysics and epistemology, which is relentless in criticizing theories founded on
claims reaching beyond possible experience. Another consequence of Falkenstein’s reading
is that it is difficult to see Kant as advancing any form of idealism about space and time.
Rather, the corporeal imagination works on extended sensations in forming judgments about
spatio-temporal properties of objects, and those spatio-temporal properties are dependent on
the constitution of sense organs. Falkenstein’s Kant often sounds like a materialist.
But there is so much to recommend Kant’s Intuitionism that it hardly seems to matter
in the end whether Falkenstein is right. As a commentary on the Kant literature, the book is
extensive and well researched, and its thesis has far reaching implications. The argument
offers a refreshing and unique perspective on Kant’s philosophy that will appeal to those with
an interest in cognitive psychology. Finally, the book has the overwhelming merit of opening
up new directions for historical scholarship on Kant. A “must” read for Kant scholars and
historians interested in theories of cognition, Kant’s Intuitionism is a highly original and
thought provoking work.
Reviewed by JENNIFER MCROBERT, assistant professor of philosophy at Acadia University,
Wolfville, NS, Canada, B0P 1X0.
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Daniel Walker Howe. Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 342 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-674-
16555-1.
Making the American Self is at once a history of, and argument for, the process of self-
construction. Focusing on selected American figures and their writings on the self, Daniel
Walker Howe maps out a wide-ranging discourse on self-making running from roots in faculty
psychology and the Scottish Englightenemnt to the reincarnation of self-constructions in
Romanticism and Transcendentalism. The writers whom Howe analyzes are a diverse lot, but
he gives them collective coherence through his thesis, which he develops with striking eru-
dition, deep conviction, and luminous clarity.
In Howe’s view, the ideal of reaching one’s full potential by exercising self-control and
achieving a balanced character was an important and largely beneficial thread in eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century American culture. Howe, moreover, who is sensitive to the transat-
lantic nature of the ideal, underscores the growing scope of the dissemination of the idea
among Americans. He depicts the principle of self-construction as inherently democratic,
expanding over the course of the nineteenth century from an original appeal to white male
elites to engage working class Americans, African-Americans, and women. Abraham Lin-
coln’s emergence from frontier obscurity, Frederick Douglass’s narratives of self-liberation,
and Margaret Fuller’s quest for female heroism all exemplify for Howe the democratization
of the American bent for self-making.
Howe’s argument, however, runs against the grain of a significant body of historical
scholarship. The self-empowerment he imputes to the idea of self-making contests the view
of historians who regard the drive toward self-construction as a corollary of the market rev-
olution and the subsequent need for an internalized form of social control. Indeed, critics of
the market revolution tend to read the ideal of self-control as a highly manipulative variant
of social control. The debate into which Howe plunges, then, is an important one. It is not
only over whether or not disciplined selves are liberated selves — a maxim he firmly believes
in — but also whether or not we should classify those seeking to shape the selves of others
as self-interested or humanitarian. Howe insists on the humanitarianism of his reformers
throughout and denounces the contemporary association of self-making with entrepreneurship
as a modern corruption of what was once an essentially moral and benevolent ideal.
Although Howe’s celebration of faculty psychology appears in contexts that will leave
some readers unconvinced, as in his discussion of Dorothea Dix and Horace Bushnell, it is,
nonetheless, suffused with dazzling insights. Not least of these is his observation that the
ideal of self-government was both political and psychological. Thus he deftly demonstrates
that faculty psychology with its emphasis on balance and control is a perfect lens for viewing
the Federalist and enables us to understand how Publius could be both a classical republican
and proto-liberal. As this reading of Publius suggests, in the world of lumpers and splitters,
Howe is a lumper, a fact that frees him to place the spiritual perfectionism of a Henry David
Thoreau under the same broad umbrella of faculty psychology that covers the pessimistic
conservatism of a Horace Bushnell. But Howe, it should be acknowledged, is a brilliant
lumper whose explication of these diverse American texts on the self will help the reader short
see not only how the disciplined realism of faculty psychology created important bound- standard
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aries for nineteenth-century liberalism, but also why such an amalgam might serve Base of text
well today.
Reviewed by NORMA BASCH, professor of history at Rutgers University, Newark, Conklin
Hall, Newark NJ 07102.
Harriet Evans. Women and Sexuality in China: Female Sexuality and Gender Since 1949.
New York: Continuum, 1997. 270 pp. $49.50. ISBN 0-8264-0922-9.
For many feminist scholars, female sexuality lies at the heart of patriarchal control.
Harriet Evans’s study, however, is less focused on male domination than on the public dis-
course of sexuality created in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949. This dis-
course, according to Evans, is an important arena of government’s control over people’s lives.
Contrary to the conventional belief that sex was a taboo subject in the 1950s, Evans sees
an animated discussion about sexuality in many publications. But she also acknowledges the
ubiquitous presence of an intrusive Communist state, which dictated women’s private lives
by creating a uniform standard of sexual conduct in keeping with socialist ideals. Although
the new 1950 Marriage Law established people’s rights to sexual equality and free-choice
marriages, the official discourse of sexuality, argues Evans, was “premised on a naturalized
and hierarchical view of gender relations” (p. 6) that assumed a biological difference between
female and male and implied, among other things, that women are passive and submissive
whereas men are active and strong. That view defined acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
For example, it approved monogamous marriage and stressed women’s reproductive duty to
society, but it denied female sexual autonomy.
The 1980s witnessed the appearance of a different China. Rapid market reform and
changing social values resulted in a considerable waning of state control and the emergence
of a more diverse, open discussion of sexual issues. Abuse of women, prostitution, homo-
sexuality, and sexually transmitted diseases were now publicly discussed, indicating a greater
degree of willingness on the part of the government and society to bring formerly forbidden
subjects into the open. But Evans is quick to point out that, despite changes, the official view
that female passivity and male activity are biologically determined persisted. The state con-
tinued to condemn individual female sexual choice, defining a woman’s sexuality only
through the collective goals of family stability and socioeconomic progress. Independent
women sexuality remained marginalized and subjugated in the public dialogue.
The book does not advance any new theoretical insights into female sexuality. Rather,
it provides a clear overview of the history of debates over sexuality in the PRC. Evans’s
arguments are grounded in copious and careful readings of recent publications about sex and
women, such as the journals Women’s Studies (Nüxing yanjiu) and Popular Medicine (Da-
zhong yixue), bringing timeliness to the argument. She also presents a detailed and convincing
analysis of the government’s flawed, dogmatic division between “socialist” and “bourgeois,” short
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This is an informative and well-documented book. But its presentation is at times rep- Base of text
etitious. Certain key questions are inadequately explored, for example, the similarities and
differences between official and popular views on female sexuality. In fact, Evans tells us
little of the criteria she uses to determine which views are “official” and which are “popular.”
Although the book’s focus is public discourse of sexuality, the author wisely includes ma-
terials from individual women as well. These, however, are obscurely placed in the notes and
are too few to have a significant bearing on the overall argument. The struggle for control of
the sexuality discourse is best understood in both public and private spheres. Had Evans
introduced individual female voices directly into the text, she would have added the important
personal dimension of female experience to the debate.
Reviewed by CHANG-TAI HUNG, Jane and Raphael Bernstein professor of history and Asian
studies, Carleton College, Northfield, MN 55057; and professor of humanities, the Hong Kong
University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong.
Professor Falkenstein comments:
1) The central thesis of my book is that, for Kant, there are spatiotemporal relations
among sensations that are directly given and not produced by synthetic operations. But I do
not believe that, for Kant, “The sense organs organize sensory inputs at a physiological level,
supplying the form of intuition that determines the spatio-temporal structure of sensation.”
Kant did maintain that the spatiotemporal form of intuition is grounded in the constitution of
the subject, and indeed, on the way the subject is constituted so as to be affected by objects
(B41). But he did not describe this “constitution” in any more detail. He never said that
spatiotemporal form is imposed by the structure of the sense organs or the brain, and I do
not attribute this view to him. It is rather the case that our brains and sense organs appear to
us as they do in part because our sensations of our bodies are intuited in space and time. I
understand Kant’s position to involve no more than the claim that our sensory faculty is
constituted in some unknown — and indeed, unknowable — way, and that this constitution
determines that the effects of objects will originally appear to us as disposed in space and
time. (By “originally” I mean prior to any synthetic operations of the imagination or under-
standing.)
Perhaps, in saying even this much, Kant violated his own strictures against making
claims about things in themselves. But in that case, it is hard to see how reading him as
holding that sensations are originally given in an unordered mass and then assigned to lo-
cations in space and time by imagination or understanding would constitute any less a vio-
lation.
2) While I take Kant to have held that we do appear to ourselves as beings that have
physical bodies and sensations that occur at spatial locations on the skin or the visual field,
this is not by itself enough to convict Kant even of empirical, let alone transcendental ma-
terialism. There are two stories that have to be told about Kant’s account of the workings of
the mind. One concerns the operations of the lower cognitive faculty, sense, in delivering
intuitions. The other concerns the operations of the higher faculty, understanding, in bringing
the data of sense to a unity of apperception. Whatever one says about Kant’s account of sense,
it is a separate question — and one my book does not address — what his account of the
understanding is like. Sense could be a physiological faculty, understanding a psychic one,
as they were for Aristotle. To make a materialist of Kant would require offering an account short
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B. Michael Thorne and Tracy B. Henley. Connections in the History and Systems of
Psychology. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1997. 624 pp. $11.95 (paper). ISBN
0-395-67084-5.
Connections in the History and Systems of Psychology, one of several recent textbooks
competing for the history of psychology market, incorporates all the features now deemed
essential to these texts: photos of historical figures, end-of chapter summaries and questions,
suggested readings, key words, glossary, time-lines. The authors have taken pains to
ensure that students understand the material presented. For example, any term (not just psy-
chological concepts) that an undergraduate is likely to find unfamiliar is briefly defined when
introduced.
The unique feature of this book is, as the title implies, the emphasis on connections.
Concept maps delineate relationships between the individuals and ideas discussed in each
chapter. As well, throughout the text, the authors indicate more far-reaching connections. This
approach has both positive and negative aspects. On the plus side, the reader (presumably a
senior undergraduate) is reminded of the continuity of ideas and the inter-relationships among
historical figures. On the other hand, the authors not infrequently treat superficial similarities
between current and earlier ideas as if there were a direct connection, some sort of continuity
or influence. Examples include relating the ideas of Heraclitus and chaos theory, identifying
Leibniz as a forerunner of cognitive science because of his “mathematical calculator,” relating
Locke’s comments on how to reduce a child’s fear and Mary Cover Jones’s work on desen-
sitization, and stating that implosive therapy “owes an unrecognized debt to Goethe.”
The authors have been successful in producing a scholarly and comprehensive textbook,
one that focuses most extensively on individuals. As well as discussing in detail the contri-
butions of well-known figures, they include brief accounts of many more minor contributors
and individuals whose work is not included in other texts, making this text, with its extensive
indices, an excellent sourcebook for names and ideas in the history of psychology. Perhaps
by being so comprehensive, however, the authors were forced to reduce their coverage of
some important figures. When James Mark Baldwin is briefly introduced, his influence on
Jean Piaget is suggested. Here we have a real (perhaps controversial) connection. But Bald-
win’s ideas on child development are never discussed, and so the reader remains unaware,
for example, that Baldwin used the concepts of assimilation and accommodation before Pia-
get. Edwin Holt is introduced simply as one of William James’s students, although in a later
chapter the reader is referred back to Holt’s “motor theory of consciousness.” There was no
previous discussion of Holt’s ideas (and was it a motor theory?). William McDougall, a very
influential figure in his day, is given less attention than Z.-Y. Kuo (whose Ph.D., by the way,
was awarded in 1936, although his dissertation was accepted in 1923). David Krech (origi-
nally Isadore, not Ira, Krechevsky), who made substantial contributions in a number of areas,
is mentioned only in passing; and much more could be said about Erik Erikson.
But these are really minor quibbles. Thorne and Henley provide a lively and informative
account of psychology’s history.
Reviewed by NANCY K. INNIS, who is in the Psychology Department, University of Western
Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
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David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, Eds. Simmel On Culture: Selected Writings. Thou-
sand Oaks, CA. Sage, 1997. 302 pp. $85.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8039-8651-3. $28.95 (pa-
per). ISBN 0-8039-8652-1.
The writings of Georg Simmel continue to invite attention, both in the United States and
abroad. Following an interest in the 1980s in Simmel’s writings on love, such as Guy Oakes’s
Georg Simmel on Women Sexuality and Love (Yale, 1984) and the French collection Philo-
sophie de l’amour (Rivages Poche, 1988), collections in the nineties have focused more
broadly on cultural themes, such as Essays on Religion (Yale, 1997) and now the volume
under review. Perhaps this shift in thematic focus provides witness, not only to changing
academic tastes and trends, but to cultural crises at the waning of the twentieth century. For
Simmel’s writings on culture are preeminently, as Frisby notes in his Introduction, confron-
tations with crisis.
Simmel on Culture brings together for the first time a wide range of essays on culture
and related themes from Simmel’s corpus, many of which are newly translated for the volume.
The book opens with Simmel’s essays defining culture: its concept, crisis, tragedy, and future.
These are followed by more specific investigations into everyday life, spatial and urban cul-
ture, fashion and leisure, the culture of money and commodities, the politics of culture and
the culture of belief. The collection includes some standard and well-known pieces — “The
Concept and Tragedy of Culture,” “Metropolis and Mental Life,” “The Sociology of Socia-
bility” — as well as some little-known gems — “Sociology of the Meal,” “The Alpine Jour-
ney,” “Infelices Possidentes! (Unhappy Dwellers).” Translations are faithful and lucid. A
helpful list of bibliographical information is provided at the end of the volume.
The significance of this volume lies not only in the rich assortment of Simmel’s brilliant
writings, but in David Frisby’s satisfying Introduction. Simmel’s writings have too often been
read out of context, extracted from their placement in his books and mined for their insights
rather than read for their historical significance. In contrast, the Introduction positions the
texts in relation to contemporary debates, on the one hand, and the timing in Simmel’s career
or placement in his oeuvre, on the other. The result is an essay that breathes new life into the
selections by showing how they responded to or confronted the critical issues and movements
of his time. For example, one understands Simmel’s brief exploration of adornment better by
knowing its context in turn-of-the-century debates about art nouveau and location within the
chapter on “the secret” in his Soziologie. While these discussions of the context of Simmel’s
writings are too brief to be ultimately satisfying, some consolation can be found in the notes
and bibliography to the Introduction, which lists studies offering fuller treatment of the topics.
But there can be little doubt that this volume supports the continuing relevance of Simmel’s
writings to today’s world and the attempts to understand it.
Reviewed by GARY D. JAWORSKI, professor of sociology at Fairleigh Dickinson University,
Madison, NJ 07940.
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Carl F. Graumann and Kenneth J. Gergen, Eds. Historical Dimensions of Psychological

Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 284 pp. $44.95. ISBN 0-521-
48021-3.
Social psychology’s ardent courtship of the history of psychology continues, the editors
here being primarily identified with the former, most contributors with the latter. Following
an editorial introduction, thirteen papers are classified under four headings: “Disciplining
Psychological Discourse,” “History as Culture Critique,” “Early Antecedents,” and, more
cryptically, “Lived History.” Five authors are U.S. based, the remainder spanning Canada,
Germany, Britain and the Netherlands.
The introduction usefully reprises the rise of what the authors call a “postempiricist”
history of psychology, focussing on discourse rather than “foundational” narratives or history
of ideas. (Postempiricist? Kurt Danziger’s Constructing the Subject, noted as a “landmark
text,” was remarkably empiricist in methodology. It has often been the targets of empiricism
rather than empiricism itself that have changed.) Thereafter one soon realizes that the title
masks a diversity of different projects. There is, for example, relatively little that is genuinely
“historical” about Suzanne Kirschner’s “Sources of Redemption in Psychoanalytic Devel-
opmental Psychology,” in which she argues that psychoanalytic developmental psychology
might redeem valued insights of Romanticism but cites nothing pre-1960. Irmingard Staeu-
ble’s “Emancipation — A Failed Project? Remarks on the discourse of radical critique” is an
invaluable, autobiographically framed review of the fortunes of critical theory since the 1960s,
centered on the mainland European story, but lacking much direct discussion of explicitly
psychological discourse. Leaving aside Danziger’s and Nikolas Rose’s chapters as statements
of positions that have recently received book-length expositions,1 the most impressive for this
reviewer were Gerd Gigerenzer’s “From Tools to Theories: Discovery in Cognitive Psy-
chology,” Jill Morawski’s “Principles of Selves: The Rhetoric of Introductory Textbooks in
American Psychology,” and Lorraine Daston’s “The Naturalised Female Intellect.”
Gigerenzer’s subtly subversive paper describes how a “tools-to-theories heuristic” has
operated within psychologists’ use of statistics and cognitive psychology, exemplified by the
way in which methodological dependence on statistics generated theories of humans as in-
tuitive statisticians. “Scientists’ tools are not neutral. In the present case, the mind has been
recreated in their image.” (55) This bears on general questions regarding the nature of sci-
entific discovery, but the implication regarding psychology (if not the physical sciences) is
clearly that the tools-to-theories heuristic represents a reflexive process — psychologists are
constituting their subject matter in the very act of investigating it (which is also Danziger’s
conclusion).
This reflexivity is further illuminated by Jill Morawski, (one of the most learned, in-
sightful and productive historical psychologists around). Deep familiarity with founding texts
and willingness to treat textbooks seriously enable her to demonstrate how psychology simul-
taneously reflected, represented, and helped direct complex changes in American subjectivity
around the turn of the century. The quest for a scientific account of subjectivity was thus
inseparable from fundamental shifts in American psychological character during this phase.
Daston’s scholarly study of how eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers produced short
“naturalised” accounts of the female mind integrates feminist perspectives with primary standard
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sources to show that, while arriving at similar conclusions, the actual moves by which writers Base of text
reached them varied widely. Highlighting the “naturalisation” process, she again draws our
attention to the curious way in which psychological discourse creates and then objectifies its
own subject matter. This paper complements Brigitte Niestroj-Kutzner’s “Women as Mothers
and the Making of the European mind.” Niestroj-Kutzner’s recovery of the Enlightenment
German writer Joachim Heinrich Campe as virtually the first recognizable developmental
psychologist is especially important, and her general argument that concepts of motherhood
have been ignored in the historiography of childhood is convincing.
The editors’ papers are slightly disappointing. Graumann’s “Psyche and Her Descend-
ants” hinges on the premise that “professional” and everyday usages of psychological terms
are qualitatively different (the latter being primarily “evaluative”) — everyday uses being lay
transformations and distortions of professional scientific usage. The reviewer is skeptical. Do
psychologists use psychological language differently from anyone else (except in level of
sophistication) in their own everyday lives? The interplay between “professional” and every-
day psychological language is an absolutely central topic, but, in failing to critique the di-
chotomy, Graumann begs the key question. Kenneth Gergen’s “Metaphor and Monophony
in the Twentieth-Century Psychology of Emotions” is problematic in a different way. A
leading social constructionist theoretician, he is sensitive to the plurality of registers in which
our socio-culturally embedded emotional discourse is metaphorically conducted and circum-
scribed. As a history of the engagements of psychology with emotion, the paper is nevertheless
oversimplified. Psychodynamic perspectives are virtually ignored, and Magda Arnold
(1960) — an obvious key text — is not cited.2 Considerations of space preclude further dis-
cussion of individual papers, although it is good to see, in William Kessen’s finale — “The
Transcendental Alarm” — that Noah Porter is finally returning from repression.
The central tension in the book is between those (like the editors) who are engaged in
intradisciplinary theoretical projects and those who are using history to ground metadiscipli-
nary theoretical accounts of the discipline (while a third group is basically concerned with
critical social theory). As a unifying theme, “discourse” too is problematic, meaning different
things to different parties, while at least one contributor (Rose) is, in any case, more concerned
with institutional practice than with discourse per se. And has “history of ideas” really dis-
appeared? Ideas are accessible only via past “discourse,” and while no longer treatable as
transcendent phenomena with historical lives of their own, this perhaps means only that we
are now doing the history of ideas more satisfactorily. Such issues remain unarticulated in
this volume. If it marks a new stage in their relationship, the wedding between social psy-
chology and history is still some way off — they haven’t even had an argument yet!
NOTES
1. Kurt Danziger, Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language (London: Sage, 1997), and Nikolas
Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press,
1996).
2. Magda B. Arnold, Emotion and Personality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960).
Reviewed by GRAHAM RICHARDS, Centre for the History of Psychology, Department of

Psychology, Staffordshire University, College Road, Stoke on Trent, ST4 2DE, UK.
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Daniel Burston. The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R. D. Laing. Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, MA 1996. 275 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0-674-95 358-4.
In 1960, the Scottish psychiatrist, Ronald David Laing (1927 – 1989), published “an
existential study in sanity and madness,” The Divided Self. Perfectly attuned to the radical
politics of the 1960s, of which it was to become a core text, this critique of standard psychiatric
understandings of schizophrenia became “Ronnie” Laing’s passport to acclaim. For the next
two decades, he was genuinely famous, hobnobbing with leading artists, philosophers and
psychoanalysts, pioneering experimental treatments, becoming the leading guru of what has
been termed the “anti-psychiatry” movement (a term he himself disliked).
It is not surprising therefore that there have also been several previous biographical
works. A biography by his son was published in London in 1994, and Bob Mullan, a professor
of applied social studies from Wales, published the edited transcripts of several hundred hours
of tape recordings, in 1995, under the title, Mad to Be Normal: Conversations with R. D.
Laing. This, of course, was seen as complementary to Lang’s own memoir of his early life,
entitled Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Making of a Psychiatrist (1985). Throughout his
numerous publications, there is also considerable autobiographical material, and in 1985, in
a radio interview with Professor Anthony Clare, was surprisingly honest about himself, in
particular his alcoholism. As Daniel Burston, author of this latest version, makes absolutely
plain, Ronnie also suffered from an “aching addiction to fame.”
Thus in the first 150 pages of this well written account, we read of the brilliant only
child of a very strange marriage, brought up in the Glasgow of the industrial depression and
World War II. He developed an interest in psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and everything
else and never looked back on coming to the Tavistock Clinic in London in 1956. He fathered
ten children from four different mothers, was not very good at maths, indulged in large
quantities of LSD in the 1960s, starred at the bizarre “Dialectics of Liberation Conference”
in London in 1967 (David Cooper’s 1967 The Dialectics of Liberation gives one version),
and founded and helped run the unique therapeutic community, Kingsley Hall, in East Lon-
don, between 1965 and 1969. In this sense it was a life lived to the full, and he seems to have
been quite genuine in his wish to fuse spirituality, psychotherapy and politics. In the 1970s,
he became interested in the rebirthing movement, even the notion that fantasies might be true
memories, and he considered himself as “conflicted” due to failure to implant into his mother’s
womb. But by 1973 he was having to write a personal advice column for Cosmopolitan
magazine, not exactly the expected role of a leading and admired existential philosopher.
Yet Burston, not content with outlining the development of Laing’s thought and rela-
tionships, goes on to give a delightful “Topography of Babble,” an excellent summary of the
six basic models of human nature within “the mental health field,” and in two further chapters
launches into a “Philosophical Anthropology” and “The Critique of Psychoanalysis.” In the
latter, he accepts that “to non-analysts, controversies like this might sound like so much
academic disputation, a mere wrangling over words,” and it is extraordinary how repetitious,
neologistic, and hypothetical is much of this debate. We should perhaps not criticize the
author, therefore, for his inaccuracy in outlining certain of the neurobiological features of
schizophrenia and for his avoiding the rather important question as to whether or not psy-
choanalysis, whatever the theory or modus operandi, is actually helpful for those analyzed. short
The strength of this combination, of biography and the summaries and reviews of psy- standard
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chological ideas, is that it helps us put the psychoanalytic project into its historical perspective. Base of text
There will always be a tension between the “vital” and “mechanistic” understandings of
human nature, and Laing’s critique of the rather flaky psychiatry of his time was urgently
needed. There was no robust definition of schizophrenia, and the tightening up of operational
criteria, to define what we understand by the term schizophrenia, has led to a resurgent
neuroscientific spirit. Laing’s own conception of schizophrenia was multifactorial (and Bur-
ston lays it out very nicely), but rather quaintly he saw it as “an artefact of capitalist social
organisation.”
Perhaps most useful is the thematic subtext: what it takes to be famous. It is an odd
mixture, requiring immense intelligence (Laing was extraordinarily well-read), considerable
personal charm, remorseless energy and a minimal need for sleep, and a sense of the Zeitgeist
of the times. One should also concentrate on publishing popular books rather than learned
papers. Part of Burston’s dilemma is that much of what Laing said and wrote is contradictory
in the extreme, only partly masked by the complex language of existential phenomenology,
and it is likely that by the 1970s the effects of LSD and alcohol abuse were taking their toll
on his logical abilities. In fact, Laing might be summed up in the prophetic opening and
closing lines of The Divided Self. Thus there certainly seems to have been “a disruption of
his relation with himself”, while it is sadly unlikely that he discovered “the pearl at the bottom
of the sea”.
Reviewed by TREVOR TURNER, MD, FRCPsych, a consultant psychiatrist and honorary
senior lecturer at St Bartholomew’s and Homerton Hospitals, London, UK.
Roger French and Andrew Cunningham Before Science. The Invention of the Friars’
Natural Philosophy. Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1996. viii + 298 pp. $68.95. ISBN
1-85928-287-3.
Spanning the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Before Science argues that the parts played
by Dominicans and Franciscans in the development of natural philosophy were fundamentally
determined by the religious concerns of the founders, Dominic and Francis, and their im-
mediate followers. More specifically, the book points to the determination of Dominicans to
preach against dualistic heresy, especially in southern France, and to the Franciscan focus on
exemplary poverty and piety as the grounds for their natural philosophical interests. Both
were preaching and teaching orders. Both orders located in the towns, not in the countryside,
and became involved early in the schools and universities that emerged in the towns of the
thirteenth century.
The book proceeds to identify the Dominican natural philosophy as Aristotelian and the
Franciscan natural philosophy as a specific form of Neoplatonic called Dionysian, perception
of the natural world. Further, French and Cunningham tell us that the Dominicans emphasized
the reasoned and logical order of nature, a Christianized Aristotelian nature, directing attention
to the goodness of Creation and the divine cause of the Creation. Looking at nature a bit short
differently, Franciscans, the authors argue, saw the visible world as a basis for contemplation, standard
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ultimately mystical contemplation, of God. While aware of Aristotle’s works on nature, they Base of text
supposedly took their primary inspiration from the works of Dionysius the Areopagite and
from Platonizing lines of thought about divine illumination and the metaphysics of light; these
led to the mathematical study of light and vision.
Here it seems appropriate to begin to comment upon the themes and apparent intentions
of this book. There is a problem of audience with the book. If intended for historians of
medieval natural philosophy, or, as commonly called, historians of medieval science, the
book simply has nothing to offer. Since Pierre Duhem in the early twentieth century, spe-
cialists in the field — use of the word “science” is not simply a modern misnomer, contrary
to the authors’ claims — have been studying and revealing the natural philosophical doctrines
of Dominicans and Franciscans with various intellectual preconceptions, but not the uninfor-
med modernism claimed by the authors here.
French and Cunningham really seem to want to say two things: first, that the philosoph-
ical study of nature by Dominicans and Franciscans in the thirteenth century occurred because
of specific religious commitments; second, that in each case the religious foci determined
quite distinctive areas of natural study and distinctive approaches or methods for such study.
The first of these views, as a general view, is not new and not in dispute. The second view,
a claim of causal connection from a way of seeing God in nature to a way of studying nature,
is quite different and, as stated in the book, is in no way proven. Perhaps the first view is
appropriately addressed to an audience unfamiliar with medieval studies of nature and still
under the influence of the nineteenth-century ideologies expressed by John W. Draper and
Andrew D. White to the effect that (a) the Roman Catholic Church had never supported
scientific progress, and (b) fundamentalist Protestant groups opposed scientific progress just
as strongly as did Catholics. When voiced in the more modern secularist form, which says
that religion — certainly, medieval religion — opposes science, the Draper – White outlook
does, in fact, exercise influence even today.
While scholars specializing in the study of medieval natural philosophers have left be-
hind these ideologies, it is quite true that there are varying interpretations of the motives, the
inspirations, and especially the intellectual sources of individual natural philosophers among
the Dominican and Franciscan orders of the thirteenth century. Before Science, however, does
nothing to advance these sorts of study. The book’s claims are, at this level, simply too
universal and untenable because too causal. Let us take a look at the most obvious and most
extravagant example, the book’s approach to the studies of perspectiva by a few Franciscans.
The authors argue with David C. Lindberg’s (and others’) use of the name “optics” for this
discipline to little purpose. All scholars involved know that “optics” is a convenient and more
modern (or ancient) label. And all know that the major work of Alhazen in Latin translation
is De aspectibus, which intends a concern with vision, just as do the Latin versions of Eu-
clidean tracts entitled De visu, also available in the thirteenth century, not to mention the De
oculis of Hunayn ibn Ishaq, translated in the eleventh century, and so forth. At the same time,
the relevant texts of Euclid and Alhazen are mostly filled with straightforward geometrical
optics, and the discipline of geometrical perspectiva, found a place in medieval universities
because of its very Aristotelian categorization as a discipline between physics and mathe-
matics, different from but using each of these in some way.
The whole idea of a causal connection between Dionysian light mysticism (highly over-
rated in the book) and specifically Franciscan studies of vision and light is peculiar. Only
two Franciscans, Roger Bacon and John Pecham, are cited. Closely associated were Robert
Grosseteste and perhaps Witelo. Pecham’s work remained a university textbook for centuries; short
it was much influenced by the works of Hunayn and Alhazen, not by Dionysius. Unfortu- standard
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nately, probably the most original study of light by a friar was the De iride (On the Rainbow) Base of text
by Theodoric of Freiburg, a Dominican, at the request of the Master General of the Order, in
1304. French and Cunningham omit mention of this work, perhaps because it is not quite in
the thirteenth century! The reasons for composition of scientific (natural philosophical) works
on vision and light by Franciscans are not demonstrable in any general way. The content, the
method, and the goals have everything to do with the preexisting (Greco-Arabic) works on
the subject available in translation and nothing — at least, nothing demonstrable — to do with
Dionysius the Areopagite. A discipline is established by a tradition of texts and teaching, not
by flights of enthusiasm in the prefaces or dedicatory letters for texts.
Before Science has an appropriate audience in those unaware that medieval friars con-
tributed to the development of natural philosophy. The book also provides interesting infor-
mation on some intellectual interests of some early Dominicans and Franciscans. The authors’
thesis on the history of natural philosophy is too broad and so not acceptable.
Reviewed by BRUCE EASTWOOD, professor of history at the University of Kentucky, Lex-
ington, KY 40605 – 0027.
Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett (Eds). Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Ar-
chaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 329 pp. $64.95 (cloth)
$22.95 (paper). ISBN 0521-48065-5.
Most archeologists have delicately ignored the often uncomfortable relationship between
the past as politics and the past as science. Kohl and Fawcett’s edited volume provides a
timely review of abuses of the relationship between nationalism and archaeology, while ac-
cepting the reality that there will always be a close, and sometimes highly productive, inter-
section between these two worlds. Thirteen case studies from Europe and Asia stress two
points. First, archeological interpretation of the past is a form of narrative, which, by the
nature of the evidence, is both a scientific and political/literary enterprise. Second, archeo-
logical reconstructions of the past must adhere to scholarly standards of logic and evidence.
And, as David Anthony forcefully argues in an elegant deconstruction of Nazi and ecofeminist
prehistories, if we abandon those standards, we have no right to debunk special interest
historical narratives that promote “bigotry, nationalism, and chicanery” (88). He also warns
that archeological data for exploring ancient symbolic systems are often weak when compared
with historical linguistics.
Six essays discuss Western European issues, ranging from concepts of the barbarian and
the civilized to pervasive Nazi ideology. Four chapters survey the complex histories of na-
tionalism and archeology in southeastern Europe, Russia, and the Caucasus region. Timothy
Kaiser shows how the past has become a prize in the Balkans. We enter a world where
construction and ownership of a real or imagined past and its monuments serves as a vital
political resource. The surveys of Soviet and Russian archeology by Victor A. Shnirelman
and E. W. Chernykh offer a rare inside view of scientists who have navigated the treacherous short
shoals of political ideology and theoretical correctness. Philip L. Kohl and Gocha R. Tsetskh- standard
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ladze, writing on the Caucasus area, caution against the dangerous postprocessualist habit of Base of text
giving equal time to different interpretations of the past, including those advocated by special
interests in favor of more cosmopolitan approaches based on universal cultural heritage. Of
the four Asian chapters, those on Chinese archaeology by Enzheng Tong and Lothar von
Falkenhausen are particularly informative. The authors offer perceptive and important anal-
yses of the subtle and not-so-subtle interplays between nationalism, science, and regional
interests that will fascinate Western readers.
Two important summaries round off the book. Neil Silberman’s eloquent essay on the
poetics and politics of archeological narrative, like Bruce Trigger’s contribution in the final
chapter, warns that archeologists must become aware of the full complexity of the ideological
and political associations of their discipline. His Near Eastern examples add welcome diver-
sity. Archeology in its more sophisticated iterations has helped forge legitimate national
identities and has assisted in combatting racism and colonialism. But archeology married to
political ideologies has killed millions of people and brought untold suffering to many others.
As archeologists, we bear a heavy moral responsibility to conduct ethical and rigorous science.
If we do not, the price in human hardship will be very high. Every archeologist should take
the lessons of this important book to heart. One only regrets the cost considerations that
prevented the inclusion of Africa, the Americas, and the Near East. These regions also offer
rich perspectives on one of the most daunting challenges to contemporary archaeology.
Reviewed by BRIAN FAGAN, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, Santa Barbara CA 93106.
Bruce Kuklick and D. G. Hart, Eds. Religious Advocacy and American History. Grand
Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1997. 233 pp. $24.00 (paper). ISBN 0-8028-
4260-7.
This timely collection offers twelve essays on a range of topics loosely gathered under
the rubric of “religious advocacy.” Authors such as George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Grant
Wacker — a respected triumvirate of evangelical scholars within the historical profession —
and Eugene Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Murray Murphey, Catherine Albanese, and
Paul Boyer offer short essays in three general areas: “Christian Faith and Historical Knowl-
edge,” “Advocacy and the Politics of the Academy,” and “Advocacy in the Writing of Re-
ligious History.” The essayists to take strikingly different points of view on the proper place
of religion in academia, of advocacy in scholarship, and of scholarship in personal life. The
collection itself advocates no position on these matters: the editors occupy diametrically
opposed stances, as do many of the authors. A witty and insightful afterword by Leo Ribuffo
brings some order to the chaos of conflicting standpoints. But the editors were wise to leave
the conflicts exposed so clearly to view and to resist premature resolution.
The collection answers few questions, but the authors accurately reflect the divided mind
of the historical profession on two critical issues: (1) the propriety of introducing or owning short
up to particularist perspectives in the putatively cosmopolitan, universalist enterprise of schol- standard
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arship, and (2) the special problem posed by “supernaturalist” religious belief in the deeply Base of text
“naturalist” atmosphere of university research and teaching. Supernaturalists increasingly ar-
gue that with the collapse of the old Enlightenment dream of dispassionate neutrality in the
pursuit of truth, religious belief should be no more distrusted in the academy than other
“parochial” vantage points represented, for example, by feminists or by ethnic or racial
groups. If “identity” scholarship is acceptable in any domain, it ought to be accepted in the
case of religious belief.
Surely if religious believers produce good critical scholarship, they should be warmly
greeted by their professional colleagues. But religious believers, like “identity” advocates in
any realm, must demonstrate their command of critical method and argument, and defend
common standards of professional judgment. If scholars come to abandon a common culture
of argument and judgment — indeed, if they give up the idea of a common professional
“identity” as critically minded researchers — professions and universities will cease to exist
as truth-seeking enterprises worth gaining admittance to in the first place. Advocates, religious
or not, desperately need to preserve the ideal of scholarly community: not so that they can
be weaned away from their personal beliefs, but so that, provoked by alternative viewpoints,
they can bring out the full richness of their own tradition. Advocates need a double identity —
“cosmopolitan” as well as “local” — if they are to keep their local one vital, supple, “true.”
Pluralism should be the governing doctrine and ringing slogan of professions and universities
not because it means the acceptance of every viewpoint, but because it means the criticism
of every viewpoint, including one’s own.
Reviewed by RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX, professor of history at Boston University, Boston,
MA 02215.
Eugene Taylor. William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996. 215 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0-691-001136-2.
Historians of psychology have generally praised William James for introducing the new
scientific psychology to the United States in 1875 and for opening the first American psy-
chological laboratory that same year. In addition, he is lauded for publishing The Principles
of Psychology, a plea for experimentation within the discipline, in 1890. These same historians
often continue to relate that after 1890, James lost all interest in psychology and turned
towards philosophy, religion, and mysticism. Eugene Taylor turns this view upside down.
According to him, the seemingly positivist James of the Principles was an exception in
James’s life-long and evolving interest in psychology. After 1890 James continued his in-
vestigations into human consciousness along the same lines as he had followed since the
beginning of his career. According to Taylor, psychologists advocating a narrowly experi-
mental, laboratory-based style of psychological research have successfully written James out
of the history of psychology, burying with James the possibility for a broad and pluralistic
psychology focusing on the human personality. short
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imaginatively using a wide variety of sources. According to him, James was inspired by the Base of text
French tradition of experimental psychopathology, associated with Jean-Martin Charcot,
Pierre Janet, and Hyppolyte Bernheim, rather than by the German experimental tradition often
ascribed to Wilhelm Wundt. James was interested in exceptional states of consciousness as
they appear in dissociation, in hysteria, and in hypnotic and trance states as well as in mediums
and faith-healers. James and his colleagues at Harvard, among them James Jackson Putnam,
Morton Prince, and Josiah Royce, intended to shed light on the subliminal states of con-
sciousness. James was particularly interested in psychical research during his whole career.
It is true that he developed his philosophies of radical empiricism and pragmatism after 1890.
According to Taylor, he did so only to buttress the type of psychological research that became
increasingly discredited by his colleagues. It is therefore a mistake to evaluate James’s phil-
osophical theories without investigating their intended repercussions for psychological re-
search.
Taylor’s is a history of lost possibilities within psychology. He provides a rich and
detailed account of a once viable and thriving research tradition within American psychology
that was overshadowed by experimental psychology, in particular behaviorism, later on. Tay-
lor offers his historical account as an effort to correct the historical record and in the confi-
dence that a more pluralistic, person-oriented psychology can be realized.
Reviewed by HANS POLS, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of the History of Science
at Harvard University, Cambridge MA.
Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog, Eds. Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural
History of Emotional Life in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. 329
pp. $40.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-300-06809-3. $18.00 (paper). ISBN 0-300-07006-3.
This stimulating collection focuses on explaining what the increasing fascination with
psychological emphases has been in American culture, and in some cases why the fascination
developed. The book is not a systematic survey, even in terms of specific topics: we get
portraiture at one point, music at another, with no real indication of change over time in most
subject areas. Some recurrent attention is devoted to psychological presentations of women,
from Louisa May Alcott’s evocation of moodiness as an attempt to complicate any sense that
women should always be cheerful, to a discussion of the role of Oprah Winfrey and the
intricate implications of public self-revelation.
The linchpin, however, is more general: exploring why the frameworks of psychology,
and particularly psychoanalysis, took root so strongly amid members of the American middle
class (and sometimes beyond) and what some of the principal manifestations have been. In
turn, this emphasis is seen as central to the history of American emotions. While one might
quibble with the casual assumptions of homogeneity between psychologizing and emotional
styles, there is no question that important findings and insights emerge.
The essays are divided into several roughly chronological categories, after two intro- short
ductory offerings that among other things provide a rich bibliography and conceptual arsenal. standard
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Three essays treat the emergence of new emphases on emotional issues and presentations in Base of text
the nineteenth century. Then two, frankly rather randomly paired, discuss psychological
themes in Thomas Eakins’ art and the emergence of popularized psychological books and
plays in the 1920s and 1930s. A third main section offers two important essays on institu-
tionalizing psychology. One discusses the emergence of academic psychology and the at-
tendant survey textbook. Catherine Lutz then analyzes the military expropriation of the
subject, and the popularization of vital concepts such as brainwashing, with its wide-ranging
use in the idea of social control, during the Cold War. Finally, two essays treat aspects of
mass culture in the twentieth century that link to psychological issues, specifically jazz/jazz
criticism and the talk show.
Most of the essays are splendid in themselves. Slightly laggard, in my opinion, is the
treatment of renderings of boyhood and boys’ literature in the nineteenth century, which works
intelligently to position the subject within well-established historiography but fails to advance
the cause greatly. The nuanced presentation of Eakins’ art is excellent, as is the analysis of
the common tendencies of white critics to “psychologize” African-American jazz in ways far
different from the intentions of practitioners — but congenial to motifs in the dominant white
culture. The treatment of psychology courses and texts emphasizes the prominence of mech-
anistic theories of emotion, initially spurred by William James, but with some counterthemes
as well, while the assessment of military expropriation of psychology is dazzling. An impor-
tant article, by co-editor Joel Pfister, lays out popularized treatments and indeed glamoriza-
tions of neuroses. In virtually all of the essays, the authors show much about how a
psychological culture emerged and how it connected to endeavors in literature and the arts.
Recurrently, the authors, and certainly the editors, also wish to connect these develop-
ments to society at large, or at least to the American middle class. Here, success is more
checkered. Recurrent statements of causation appear. John Demos finds the basis for the rapid
popularity of psychoanalytic theories in the early twentieth century, in the privatization of
the family in the later nineteenth century, which prepared the ground for interest in explo-
rations of interior emotion. But he offers plausibility, not direct connections; and other, or
additional, causation is not explored. Joel Pfister links his intriguing treatment of populari-
zations of psychology to a need to emphasize personal emotional space as an antidote to
American corporate anonymity in the 1920s and 1930s. He also discusses the relationship of
female-centered psychological imagery to exploitations of sexuality. These are certainly
promising ventures, as is his invocation of institutional might in the discussion of the Cold-
War military, but they all remain unsystematic.
A number of essays discuss the cultural manifestations of the emotional life without
significant connections to a wider context — the case, for example, with the otherwise excel-
lent treatment of Alcott and moodiness, or Eakins’ art (indeed, the frequent rejections of
Eakins’ emotion-laden portraits by bourgeois subjects suggest some complexities that beg for
further exploration). A few linkages, in exploring for example what Oprah’s pattern of self-
revelation means in the larger culture, are imaginative but rest at the level of assertion. It is
difficult to connect culture to society, and, on the whole, the authors center their claims on
the cultural side. They invoke the middle class, or even Americans in general, but mostly the
empirical focus is on cultural productions, not what gave rise to them (save, in Eakin’s case,
in a brief biographical aside).
Audience, in fact, is rarely specified precisely, again in part because the array of sources
is somewhat limited. We thus learn of what psychology texts stressed, but not of impact on
students. Even the opportunity to assess the size and fluctuations of subscriptions to psy- short
chology courses is not utilized beyond references to primarily middle- and upper-middle- standard
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class student bodies. Few essays, aside from the introduction and the excellent treatment of Base of text
interwar popularizations, plus the boyhood article, grapple much with other scholarly findings
about emotional styles and standards in the period, which again limits any exploration of
ramifications. Finally, there are yawning gaps, such as the role of disciplinary psychologists
and psychological assumptions in the workplace, where available scholarly treatment could
at least have been attached to some of the topics that are explored.
Yet, despite limitations, the volume is a welcome, dynamic addition to the increasing
variety of approaches available for the history of emotion. If the cultural history portion of
the title gains more emphasis than actual emotional life, the book nevertheless contains im-
portant statements about the context, dissemination, and utilization of psychology in the
United States. The connection with a broader set of needs concerning interior life and personal
feelings is well established. The exploration of how other agencies, including the state, could
play on the resultant vulnerabilities, both personal and cultural, is another extension that
deserves serious attention.
Reviewed by PETER N. STEARNS, dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890.
Jennifer Platt. A History of Sociological Research Methods in America, 1920 – 1960. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 333 pp. $64.95. ISBN 0-521-44173-0.
There is much to like in this book. Jennifer Platt writes well and has a good grasp of
her subject matter. She is also not beyond making the occasional joke in this otherwise tightly-
packed volume. For example, in reviewing who was available from among the long list of
sociologists she wished to interview, she “wondered if those left alive were not a skewed
sample, biased against more quantitative styles.” She then put this possibility to a “respondent
who had seen the anti-positivist light, his face lit up and he said yes, of course, qualitative
methods are life enhancing!” Nevertheless, Platt did not attempt “a systematic check of this
interesting hypothesis.” (p. 9.)
Platt claims that the study of the history of sociology has usually been undertaken from
the point of view of the history of the subject matter of the studies or the history of theory.
Infrequently has the history of sociology dealt with practical research methods. An exception
might be my own effort in Feminist Methods in Social Research (Oxford, 1992), which tried
to document the predecessors of each method discussed. She thus suggests that her approach
is novel, and she deserves praise for this unusual undertaking.
Platt’s methods are triangulated, but primarily qualitative, i.e., archival and interview-
based, rather than statistical, such as a study based on citation counts. Thus, one could say
that there is a built-in bias against quantitative methods in this book. Or, one could say that
this is a work of history, using historical methods, and is largely descriptive of the works
considered. There are more than 60 interviewees listed in her appendix and four pages of short
archival references, in addition to her lengthy bibliography. This extensive bibliography re- standard
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flects an exhaustive approach to her subject that includes the latest feminist explorations of Base of text
early forerunners of the Chicago School and others.
Because of her attention to Mary Jo Deegan’s work that demonstrates the significance
of the Hull House group, I was surprised that Platt nevertheless chose 1920 as her starting
point, “when university sociologists started to carry out empirical research and to write about
research methods” (p. 2). As she is aware, there has been documentation of the methodolog-
ically pathbreaking work of women sociologists between 1880 – 1920.
Platt does not attempt “a complete narrative history” but rather “draws on narrative
materials in relation to key thematic issues.” Because much work has already been done on
the history of the survey, Platt focuses instead on “topics relatively neglected by other writers:
the interwar ‘case study method,’ the intellectual circle of George Lundberg, and foundations
other than the Rockefeller ones.” (p. 5)
She begins with an overview of the types of methodological writing done during this
period and “the circumstances under which it was produced . . . ” She also discusses the
relation between theory and practice, as regards methods, and the impact of reciprocal influ-
ences between funding agencies and the funded. She is particularly innovative in pointing
out the significance of selected origin myths. Her tables, footnotes, and quotations are as
useful as her interpretations of these materials. Finally, Platt helps enhance understanding of
the way that social structures of academic life, the subject matter of chapter 6, have an impact
on the way research is done. The overall conclusion one draws from this volume is that the
book is not only a study of the history of sociological research methods in America, but it is
an excellent piece of sociological research itself.
Reviewed by: SHULAMIT REINHARZ, professor of sociology at Brandeis University, Wal-
tham MA 02254-9110.
Professor Platt comments:
There are only two points on which I would like to comment.

First, I should be sorry if the reviewer’s necessarily compressed mode of expression led
the reader to think that my book neglected quantitative methods, whether in the topics it
covers or in its own methods, or that, if “descriptive” is contrasted (in the classic textbook
antithesis) with “explanation,” I did not discuss explanations. In my own methods, I quantified
wherever it seemed appropriate to the issue and the data permitted (for example, the increase
in the numbers of graduate courses in methods offered at universities, the number of funded
and unfunded research articles which used quantitative methods). But, as she rightly says, I
was often dealing with particular historical instances to which quantification had no appli-
cation. In every main chapter, I give some attention to the explanation of the phenomena
discussed there and, indeed, most of the chapter titles refer to factors [research funding,
theory . . . ] potentially explanatory of some aspect of research method.
Second, I take her point about the important work of women sociologists done before
1920; however, the remit I chose, which started from explicitly methodological writing within
sociology, in effect ruled out anything before 1920. The interesting issue of the relation of
theory and practice is raised, here as elsewhere, when so much of actual practice may not
have been theorized. There are, of course, as I know she is well aware, also associated
problems about what should be counted as “sociology,” and I have indeed written a little
about those. No historian can cover everything — or even everything relevant! — but the short
choice of boundaries to the topic always has implications of which we do well to be aware, standard
and she has drawn attention to one of them in my work. long
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Stephen J. Stein, Ed. Jonathan Edwards’s Writings; Text, Context, Interpretation. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 219 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-253-33082-3.
This volume of essays is a product of the burgeoning interest in the life, thought and
influence of Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758) among contemporary American historians — an
interest owing in part to the continuing efforts of the Yale edition of the works of Jonathan
Edwards to make accessible his vast corpus of manuscript sermons and private notebooks.
This volume joins two other fine collections of recent scholarship situating Edwards in his
American context.1
Jonathan Edwards was many things — pastor, theologian, philosopher — but his contri-
butions as a religious psychologist dominate many of these essays, through sustained attention
to two of his major writings, Religious Affections and The Nature of True Virtue2 Editor
Stephen Stein summarizes something of a present scholarly consensus on Edwards’s legacy
when he suggests that “these two writings, more than any others, represent the quintessential
Edwards” (xvii).
Originally presented as papers at a 1994 conference on Edwards in Bloomington, Indi-
ana, these twelve essays are grouped to reflect three aspects of current scholarship on Edwards.
The first section of the book highlights work on Edwards’s unpublished manuscripts, work
that nuances and in some instances challenges traditional interpretations of his thought. Gerald
McDermott, for example, argues from Edwards’ private notebooks, the Miscellanies, that his
diatribes against Islam were ultimately aimed at foes closer to home, the deists. The focus of
the second section is on the relationship between Jonathan Edwards and other major religious
and philosophical figures such as Edwards’ grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, and his philo-
sophical contemporary George Berkeley. Of special note is Wayne Proudfoot’s provocative
comparison of Edwards’ Religious Affections and William James’s Varieties of Religious
Experience. Proudfoot argues that Edwards’ account of religious experience, emphasizing
moral self-scrutiny, is the more sophisticated of the two and should be the model for the
contemporary study of religious experience. The third section takes up the ongoing debate
on the nature and constituency of the Edwardsian tradition. Here Douglas A. Sweeney per-
suasively insists on Nathaniel William Taylor’s right to bear the Edwardsian mantle by going
beyond a narrow doctrinal construal of the tradition to a broader notion of “an Edwardsian
enculturation of Calvinist New England” (143), drawing on the linguistic analysis of political
historians like Gordon Wood and David Hollinger.
Readers without a special interest in Jonathan Edwards will find some of the conversation
rarefied. But this volume opens up new windows, not only on previously neglected texts of
Jonathan Edwards, but on the larger cultural functions and effects of those texts.
NOTES
1. Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout, Eds. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988); Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture Barbara
B. Oberg and Harry S. Stout, Eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
2. The Works of Jonathan Edwards Perry Miller, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959): vol. 2, Treatise
concerning Religious Affections, Ed. by John Smith. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, John Smith, Ed. (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989): vol. 8, Ethical Writings, Ed. by Paul Ramsey, pp. 537– 627.
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Reviewed by AMY PLANTINGA PAUW, HENRY P. MOBLEY Associate Professor of Doctrinal standard
Theology at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, Louisville KY. long
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William R. Everdell. The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century

Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 501 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-
22622480-5.
Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush, Eds. Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project
and the Culture of Modernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. 449 pp.
$18.95 (paper). ISBN 0-80472486-5.
In recent years, a flurry of books has appeared, treating modernism as a multi-faceted

culture which emerged in the late nineteenth century and embraced all forms of social thought.
This is partly a response to postmodern scholars’ indictment of modernism as positivistic,
technocentric, characterized by notions of linear progress and absolute truth, and given to
offering “totalizing” interpretations of human society, past and present. Different in focus,
structure, and even with respect to the audiences they address, William Everdell’s The First
Moderns, and Prehistories of the Future, a collection of essays edited by Elazar Barkan and
Ronald Bush, challenge these assumptions.
Writing for a general audience, and tracing developments in the West between the early
1870s and World War I, Everdell presents chronologically arranged mini-biographies of “gen-
iuses” (individuals whom he defines as able to think new thoughts and communicate them),
whose work in mathematics, science, the creative arts, and social and behavioral thought was
connected by a recognition of discontinuity, in sharp contrast with the evolutionary seam-
lessness of nineteenth-century thought. Everdell sees modernism as a culture characterized
by rejection of the notion that things can be seen steadily and whole from a privileged
viewpoint — and in favor of multiple perspectivalism, subjectivity, and self-reference. The
First Moderns shows that as objectivity collapsed, in fields as diverse as philosophy, literature,
politics, psychology, and physics, all objects of knowledge came to be seen as discrete,
atomistic, and discontinuous.
The first breach came in mathematics, as Georg Cantor, Richard Dedekind, and Gottlob
Frege focused on what it meant to be in between, what were numbers, what was counting,
and what was order. Other portrayals of discontinuous reality included Ludwig Boltzman and
J. Willard Gibbs’ work in thermodynamics, Eadweard Muybridge and Jules-Etienne Marey’s
stop-motion photography, Emile Bernard and Paul Gaugin’s color-plane “cloisonism,” and
Georges Seurat and Paul Signac’s “divisionism.” The dots in Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on
the Island of Grande Jatte” (1885) made it the age’s most celebrated painting, Everdell con-
tends, because it was evident that while it was a harmonious whole, the painting was con-
structed with thousands of separate parts. It thereby suggested that the phenomenal world
itself was divided into parts, continuity was an illusion, and atoms the only reality. Histologist
Santiago Ramon Y Cabal’s exhibit of stained, thin slices of the brain of the embryo of a small
bird, which highlighted separate nerve cells against a complex background, illustrated the
same kind of atomism. And Sigmund Freud’s psychology divided the mind against itself,
making “objectivity” a wish that could be fulfilled only in dreams. In quantum theory, the
continuity of everything — energy, matter, motion, space and time — was questioned. Even
the concentration camp, which sorted one group of people out from another, was modernist,
based upon the era’s hardening ideas about biological inheritance. In an intriguing chapter,
Everdell examines the concentration camp’s invention by Spanish army officer and Captain- short
General of the colony of Cuba, Valeriano Weyler Y Nicolau, who wanted to separate rebels standard
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Well written and engaging, The First Moderns brings together themes that have been Base of text
explored by Stephen Kern, Frederick Karl, Modris Eksteins, and Richard Terdiman. With it,
Everdell has thrown down the gauntlet to the historical profession as well as postmodernists.
While modernist ideas about discontinuity have affected the writing of history, particularly
the argument that those inside a certain episteme can never step outside it, Everdell strives
to demonstrate that there is still worth in narratives, in biographies of geniuses, and in the
kind of history that told us how we got to the things we value.
An interdisciplinary collection of essays by specialists in many fields, Prehistories of
the Future also challenges claims that modernism has been transcended and that the world
now lives in a more plural “postmodern” culture. Sixteen essays illustrate that Western fas-
cination with “the primitive” is inseparable from modernism and, like modernism, has shaped
a multitude of discourses. This is not a new argument — Daniel Singal and Marianna Tor-
govnick, among others, have similarly linked primitivism to modernism (though Torgovnick,
a literary scholar, is taken to task here by Marjorie Perloff for her lack of attention to history).
In focusing their attention on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however,
contributors to this volume highlight an earlier interest in primitivism.
The essays reinforce the editors’ assertion that primitivism was a means by which think-
ers in the West used the non-Western world to contemplate the future of the West. Barkan
and Bush explain that primitivism was a Western construction, invented in late nineteenth-
century arguments about human society, in which “darkness” served as a projection of Eu-
ropean social concerns about impending cultural change. Primitivism thus not only supplied
the “Other” against whom Victorian society defined itself but was attractive to modernists
because of its seeming impermeability to explanation.
Here again, then, is a definition of modernism that highlights modernists’ rejection of
causal explanation and the inheritance of science. The connection between this modernist
stance and fascination with the primitive is made explicit by Frank Kermode, who shows that
in their recognition of the weakness of empirical investigation, philosophers such as Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, F. H. Bradley, and William James came to
value indistinctness. Modernists were drawn to the primitive, he argues, precisely because it
was not explanatory but baffling, inexplicit, seemingly alien and indifferent to Western con-
cerns. Western thinkers felt compelled to interpret the primitive nonetheless, and this bred
the kind of culture in which thinkers took an interest in psychoanalysis as a means of exposing
the power of “primitive” images of the “real” past of the world.
Although not even in quality, the essays cover much ground, showing how ethnographic
material affected social theory, gender construction, classical scholarship, literature, dance,
art, and travel photography. This journal’s readers are likely to be most interested in exami-
nations of how European writers associated the violence of crowds with representations of
the exotic, and “primitivism” with the “savage” urban poor, the role of ritual observance in
Durkheim’s work, and the influence of modernist contradictions on Franz Boas. Also signif-
icant are those essays that explore the impact of photographs and artifacts of so-called “prim-
itive” societies upon the newly professionalizing social sciences. Anthropology was the prime
example, but primitivism caused some revamping of classical scholarship, social theory, psy-
chology, and medicine. As Elazar Barkan points out, not only Freud but several generations
of psychological and medical writers had their worlds turned upside down by the comparison
of Western norms of rationality, behavior, and sexuality with those of non-Western counter-
parts.
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Reviewed by MARLENE SHORE, Associate professor of history and humanities, York Uni-
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Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Briefe: Band I 1910 – 1918. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1995. 546 pp. ISBN 3-518-58217-8.
For those unfamiliar with the German social critic Walter Benjamin, Volume One of his
collected letters may be approached in the light of his affiliation with the Institute for Social
Research. The Institute sought to rescue the dialectical method of Marx from the petrifying
effects of Communist orthodoxy, using dialectics instead as a means of analyzing contem-
porary historical change. While Institute members initially believed in the Marxist unity of
theory and practice, their faith gradually gave way in the 1930s to pessimism about the
prospects for real changes in the direction of social freedom.
Benjamin’s relations with the Institute began at a time before its break with Marxism.
At the heart of his analyses of culture was his fascination with language, the exegesis of
which, he believed, revealed a higher reality. Benjamin’s preoccupation with language inter-
acted with his interests in Jewish mysticism, the Cabala, and the Talmud, all of which he
studied. These theological passions, already visible in his early correspondence (spanning his
eighteenth through his twenty-fifth years), created tensions between Benjamin and the secular
Theodor Adorno. Differences notwithstanding, Benjamin shared an essential affinity with
Institute members — a concern with the deep social character of cultural phenomena and the
decadence resulting from the mass commercialization of art.
Benjamin’s letters will be of interest to students of the Institute, as they contain in embryo
many of the insights he developed in his work with it. For those interested in his life, the
letters offer a unique biographical perspective on Benjamin, from his involvement with Gustav
Wyneken’s Youth Movement and his fascination with Zionism to his disenchantment with
Kant and his absorption in Jewish mysticism. Cultural critics may be astonished at the relig-
ious tenor of Benjamin’s letters, reflecting a quest for spirituality much at odds with the
tough-minded secularism of other Institute members.
Reviewed by MICHAEL BRYANT, a doctoral student in Modern European History at the Ohio
State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210.
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JHBS — WILEY RIGHT BATCH

Professor Chartier comments:

This work is nothing less than a comprehensive reinterpretation of the transformation of

Laurence D. Smith and William R. Woodward Eds. B. F. Skinner and Behaviorism in

Two highly respected historians of psychology, Laurence D. Smith and William R.

Reviewed by ANDREW S. WINSTON, professor of psychology at the University of Guelph,

Professors Smith and Woodward comment:

Dr. Forrester comments:

Reviewed by LUCIANO MECACCI, head of the department of psychology at the Università

Mikolaj Kruszewski. Writings in General Linguistics. Konrad Koerner, Ed. Amsterdam/

This handsomely presented volume of Writings in General Linguistics by the nineteenth-

Benjamin Rush is one of the most controversial figures in nineteenth-century American

Reviewed by BRENT D. SLIFE, professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, Provo,

Lorne Falkenstein. Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic.

Professor Falkenstein comments:

Carl F. Graumann and Kenneth J. Gergen, Eds. Historical Dimensions of Psychological

Reviewed by GRAHAM RICHARDS, Centre for the History of Psychology, Department of

Professor Platt comments:

There are only two points on which I would like to comment.

William R. Everdell. The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century

In recent years, a flurry of books has appeared, treating modernism as a multi-faceted

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