How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics

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Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,Vol. 36(2), 171–175 Spring 2000� 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Randall Collins. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 1098 pp. $49.95. ISBN 0-674-81647-1.

Randall Collins is one of America’s great sociological theorists, but his new book,TheSociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, may have succeeded inwriting him out of his own rather considerable reputation.The Sociology of Philosophiesisa book of breathtaking range, offering a provocative theory of intellectual creativity andreputations that challenges the very category of a “great theorist” while solidifying Collins’splace at the forefront of the sociology of ideas and knowledge. Using a world history ofphilosophy as case material, Collins outlines a powerful theoretical framework for the socialscientific analysis of intellectual networks, academic disciplines and the world of ideas itself.Collins’s book will start arguments as well as inspire new research, and it is not difficult topredict the controversies that will emerge.

The Sociology of Philosophiesis practically a recipe for a turf war. Many intellectualhistorians will be shocked at the hubris of Collins’s analysis. Never one prone to thinking innarrow and specialized terms, Collins offers us a global analytic history of philosophicalthinking from the Greeks, Romans, the Enlightenmentphilosophes, the Reformation andMedieval Catholic theology through to the existentialists in the West, as well as dealing ingreat detail with non-Western thought over many centuries in China, India, and Japan. Manyphilosophers will be outraged by Collins’s argument that the concept of a “great philosopher”is a social construction, reflecting the needs of intellectual networks fixated on a competitionfor attention more than on the intrinsic quality of ideas or on a disinterested search for truth.Collins treats many major philosophers with skeptical irreverence, as when he calls F. W. J.Schelling a “niche hog” and refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “personality cult” and broodingover suicide as a claim for status in the intellectual elite. Collins’s book-length attempt toexplain philosophers’ creativity and reputations by social, organizational, and network factorswill ruffle feathers, as when he offers a sociological account of why G. W. F. Hegel made itand Arthur Schopenhauer did not. And intellectuals more generally will find little comfort inCollins’s brutally unsentimental critique of the cult of the intellectual hero. Collins draws apicture of intellectuals as self-interested, calculating status climbers who are as concernedwith gaining eminence and financial security as they are with the various social and intellec-tual movements and causes often associated with what we now call “public intellectuals.”

Collins’s critics have a point. The norms of contemporary intellectual history rightly callfor specialization in specific geographical areas in particular times, allowing for the consul-tation of primary documentary evidence in original languages and the mastery of the relevantliterature. Collins, in contrast, writes a global intellectual history based on secondary sources.Errors of detail are inevitable in this book, as is a sacrifice of depth. And while Collins’sdiscussion of world philosophical ideas is well written and impressive, specialists will havemany interpretations to challenge and nuances to add. These legitimate criticisms of Collins’sbook, however, should not deter us from taking his theory of intellectual creativity and rep-utation very seriously indeed.

Turf wars work both ways. Intellectual historians who work in one area or within a

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textlimited time frame cannot isolate themselves from criticisms of their lack of comparative

perspective. Collins’s analysis raises legitimate questions about what intellectual history lookslike from the angle of centuries and from a global perspective. And philosophers who staketheir own careers on the reputations of the thinkers they study and promote are not the bestsources for evaluating the possible social factors in the work and success of the philosophicalcanon since contemporary academic philosophers can hardly be seen to be disinterested inthese matters. Most importantly, much intellectual history and philosophy largely ignores thevery reasonable and plausible questions about the financial base and status competition ofintellectual life that Collins brings to the forefront of our work. If he overstates his case it isperhaps only to gain our attention, although undoubtedly he would not see it that way eventhough his theory suggests that he should.

Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophiesoffers a powerful theoretical model backed upwith provocative case studies, a package that should transform the ways we think aboutintellectual history. In addition to a breathtaking tour of the sociology of Greek, Chinese,Indian, Japanese, and Medieval Christian thought, Collins offers us fascinating case studiesof the German academic revolution, German idealism, American pragmatism, and Britishanalytic philosophy. When getting to the immediate postwar period, Collins outlines a brilliantaccount of the market-based hybrid nature of the Existentialist movement as novelists poachedon philosophers’ turf in the specific institutional context of French intellectual life. Collinsoffers a provocative and useful theoretical model for thinking about intellectuals and academ-ics grounded in his own powerful neo-Durkheimian and neo-Weberian conflict sociology.

Collins outlines a persuasive challenge to intellectual histories that place individual cre-ative genius at the center of analysis, an approach that tends to treat intellectuals and ideasoutside of their embeddedness in organizations and network chains that span generations. ForCollins, intellectual creativity is a product of networks, not individuals, and cannot be un-derstood outside an analysis of the efforts of thinkers to gain attention, fame, and influencein the constant struggle for eminence that creates innovation within intellectual life. Collinsuses philosophy, the archetypical intellectual role that spans large parts of world history, toillustrate his general theoretical account of intellectuals and the sociology of ideas. Collins’sunique synthesis comes out of his Weberian stress on status conflict and organizational dy-namics, the Durkheimian sociological account of knowledge and focus on social rituals, amilitantly scientific worldview, and a keen eye for the microsocial interactions analyzed socreatively by such sociologists as Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel.

As a backdrop, Collins insists that we bring philosophy back down to earth by high-lighting the economic and organizational realities in particular historical periods that make itpossible for a small group of people to step out of the mundane world that preoccupies mosthuman beings in their struggle for survival and prosperity against nature and other humans.Collins argues that, among the billions of human beings who have lived on the planet, theintellectual community is a tiny subset concerned largely with the creation of abstract knowl-edge decontexualized from the concerns of the political and economic world. Within thisworld a status competition is ubiquitous, as intellectuals struggle to gain the economic securityand the political freedom they need to create new ideas and gain eminence on that basis. ForCollins, creativity comes out of competition for attention that is fought with the “emotionalenergy” and “cultural capital” that philosophers develop as part of their engagement withchains of earlier thinkers and intellectuals.

Most intellectuals must align with religious, political, or economic elites to survive, orthey find alternative sources of social support among sects, radical political movements orlay readers and audiences. For the few who succeed in raising themselves above the mundane

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textconcerns of the world in order to produce abstract thought in the historical periods where

creative thought is possible, their ideas are defeated by intellectual opponents, drowned outby more energetic and/or networked voices, or simply disappear into the footnotes of intel-lectual history. What Collins calls the “law of small numbers” ensures that there is only alimited attention span available at any historical moment for unique schools of thought orintellectual contributions. Intellectuals then struggle to create “coalitions in the mind” as theyrecombine old positions, attack orthodoxies, place themselves in noble genealogies, positionthemselves as loyal followers of more established scholars and traditions, or branch out ontheir own to try to build disciples and a unique theoretical position. Few succeed in this brutalcompetition for attention, as the law of small numbers makes almost all of even the mostenergetic and accomplished thinkers forgotten intellectuals, at least in the long run.

Sociological networks are central to this process. As Collins puts it, “the most notablephilosophers are not organizational isolates but members of chains of teachers and studentswho are themselves known philosophers, and/or of circles of significant contemporary intel-lectuals.” Moreover, it is not an accident, according to Collins, that many intellectuals whoattain fame clustered together before gaining renown. I. H. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, forexample, once lived in the same house before they achieved fame. Small core groups ofthinkers are the sociological core of a process where human energy is channeled into thecompetition for eminence. Thinkers learn not simply ideas but also modes of being an intel-lectual where one learns how to position oneself in the relevant field of endeavors. Interac-tional ritual chains, according to Collins, are microprocesses whereby energy is gathered andintensified in the struggle for intellectual eminence, a creative and competitive dynamic thatgives rise to legions of failed intellectuals as well as new ideas and intellectual sparks. ForCollins, there is a “social causation of creativity” at the level of human beings’ most intimateinteractions, as “the content of new ideas flash into the minds of intellectuals in their creativemoments,” determined not by individual genius but by historical dynamics, organizationalrealities and the “flux of interaction ritual chains.” We must, for Collins, “see through thepersonalities, to dissolve them into the network of processes which have brought them to ourattention as historical figures.”

Heresy, some will say, for Collins will be accused of not taking ideas seriously and forundertaking a corrosive leveling where great thinkers join the rest of us mortals, and philos-ophy is reduced to career strategies and intellectual posturing. This is not a fair criticism ofThe Sociology of Philosophies. Anyone who has read Collins’s writings on credentialism ineducation, on the sociology of the family, on scientific sociology and his numerous theorytextbooks knows that he is an intellectual with a passion for ideas, as well as scholarship.There is, for Collins, a way of thinking about “the social construction of eminence whichdoes justice to the inner processes of intellectual life.” Tracing the sociological origins ofcreative ideas does not diminish great thinkers but puts them in their proper place, linked togenerations of intellectuals before and after them. And philosophy will not end if we uncoverits sociological dynamics, but will always continue as a central element of the noble humaneffort to understand the world and our place in the universe. The central problem with Col-lins’s book lies elsewhere, and is linked, of course, to his own intellectual networks and careerstrategy.

Collins is a sociological extremist. Scholars would perhaps find Collins’s theory morepalatable if he were to argue that his sociological account of creativity and reputations shouldbe supplemented with an analysis of “psychological, individual and other idiosyncratic cir-cumstances.” Collins emphatically rejects this more moderate version of his theory, claimingthat “the particularity of the individual is the particularity of the social path.” Asking the

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textquestion of whether Charles Peirce’s personal and financial irresponsibility played a major

role in his relative intellectual failure in his lifetime, Collins suggests that while these personalflaws may have “multiplied his structural disadvantages,” a “soberer and healthier personprobably would still have failed to achieve recognition.” Collins explains writers’ block asthe psychological consequences of a sociological crunch whereby a thinker’s structural op-portunities for attention have been closed down. And Collins theorizes the famous conflictbetween Sartre and Camus as structurally created by a struggle for eminence where “politicsprovided the occasion for the break,” not the cause of the rupture. Even the most dedicatedof sociologists is likely to think that Collins goes too far.

This sociological extremism makes perfect sense, given the social structure of Collins’sown career strategy. One of the most creative thinkers in sociology, and a student of bothTalcott Parsons and Reinhard Bendix, Collins has links to the core of the discipline and amajor reputation as a theorist. Yet his scientifically oriented sociology is not as trendy asrecent postmodern thought, nor are his general theoretical concerns as central to what mostsociologists do in a discipline increasingly dominated by quantitative researchers concernedwith substantive areas. Given Collins’s incredible range of interests and writing, it was in-evitable that he would stay close to sociological orthodoxy even as he challenges the con-ventional wisdom of psychologists, historians, and, now, philosophers. Collins’s own theorywould suggest that intellectuals doing battle in foreign lands will want to secure their home-land. Collins’s success in this endeavor raises serious questions about his own dismissal ofthe special talents that some people bring to our intellectual life. One could perhaps raiselegitimate questions about the relative low esteem in which Collins seems to hold editors, forthe book’s 1,000 pages can be rough going at times. Nonetheless,The Sociology of Philos-ophiesis worth the effort. The book should give rise to middle-range theories and case studiesthat will test, provide support for, and modify Collins’s very significant intellectual contri-bution to the sociology of ideas. Intellectual historians should take serious account of Collins’sattempt to theorize systematically the status competition and network dynamics that we allexperience living a “life of the mind.”

Reviewed by NNEIL MCLAUGHLIN, assistant professor of sociology, McMaster University,Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4M4, Canada.

Randall Collins comments:

Neil McLaughlin has well captured the theme of the book. I would add only an expla-nation of the logic by which it pushes onward to what he calls an extreme position.

Intellectuals are not necessarily, or even primarily, calculating and egotistical. It is ratherthat the social structure of the attention space allows room for only a small number of posi-tions, and gives attention to those who negate (or sometimes, after a long period of negationsthat proliferates positions beyond the upper limits of the “law of small numbers,” synthesize)others’ positions. If we assume intellectuals are motivated by a disinterested love of truth,the social structure remains the same: They still must work through the networks and thestruggles of the attention space if they want their truth to be known. The very thing thatintellectuals regard as their highest motive and possession—truth—is what gives them war-rant to push themselves forward, sometimes quite aggressively, over others. This process isinescapable, because ideas develop in social networks, not in isolated individuals, and arerecognized as true or at least significant only when institutionalized by the network (eventuallybecoming part of its educational curriculum).

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textIn saying this, I do not deny the referential aspect of truth—knowledge about something.

How could I, without undermining my own argument? My concluding chapter argues thatsocial constructivism is compatible with realism; and I try to show this, via a combination ofCartesian and Meadian arguments: I think, therefore internal conversation exists; languageexists; therefore society exists; therefore the everyday material world of human action exists.This leads to further results, such as the nature of mathematics as real knowledge about formalproperties of human communicative operations. This is my reply for those who are skepticalabout whether sociology of ideas is compatible with the contents and truthfulness of ideas.


Jonathan Andrews et al. (Eds.).The History of Bethlem.London: Routledge, 1997. 768pp. $250.00. ISBN 0-415-01773-4.

This exceptional book spans the seven-century history of Bethlem in over seven hundredpages. The chronicle follows the various incarnations of the institution as it changed localeand character across the centuries, initially as the Priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem from 1247,subsequently as Bethlem at Moorfields, with its monumental fac¸ade in a London wroughtspacious by the Great Fire of 1666. By themid-nineteenth century, the institution hadmigratedout to the working class area of Southwark and subsequently in 1930 to Monks Orchard.Then the changing climate of the twentieth century led to amerger with theMaudsleyHospitalin 1948, and by 1994 with the creation of an NHS trust, to the sad loss of the Bethlem nameitself. The historical backdrop of the rise of London, as a leading world city then center ofthe empire, of the reformation and the Great Fire, through to the development of the modernstate and the role of government in health funding and provision, all feature in the story ofBethlem. Throughout, the continuity of the institution itself is deftly displayed in accountsof the care and cures the staff provided, the medical personalities involved, and the politicsof administration. The authors are at pains to present a balanced account of the availablefactual information and avoid eulogizing the hospital, covering the infamous and contentiousas well as laudable and humanitarian aspects of the institution. The changing attitudes ofsociety to the mentally ill are vividly illustrated in the expose´s of the 1815 Select Committee,including the notorious case of William Norris, and the progressive changes of the earlytwentieth century with the growing emphasis on social environment and rehabilitation. Thelatter were furthered by the establishment of the Joint Hospital, Maudsley and Bethlem inpartnership, with a flourishing research program that has shaped substantial changes in psy-chiatric practice worldwide since the 1960s. Paradoxically, this engine of change has in turnall but broken the thread of institutional approaches to care of the mentally ill, which survivedfrom church to private charity and then state intervention over seven centuries. There is awealth of detail regarding the financing of the institution and the intrigues and policies gov-erning the hospital’s administration. These issues are critical to understanding how Bethlemdid survive for such a long period, and how much the modern health arena has altered thesedynamics.

While reference is made to some personal accounts in this history, the experiences ofthe patients residing in the institution are largely intangible, seen mainly through reports in

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textthe contemporary press or in findings of inquiries. Further insights are imparted to the reader

in around seventy plates and tables in the text, which provide glimpses of the surroundings,patients and staff, and data on length of stay and discharges. The book may be read in itsentirety as an encyclopedic sweep of the history of Bethlem as both venerable institution andmetaphor of madness. Alternatively, the reader interested in a particular period will find thatthe layout of the book facilitates access to the relevant information; the index is comprehen-sive and each chapter is fully referenced. A must-have for the historian of psychiatry.

Reviewed by KKENNETH C. KC. KIRKBY, professor of psychiatry at the University of Tasmania,Hobart, Tasmania 7000, Australia.


Mikula s Teich, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustafsson (Eds.).Nature and Society in HistoricalContext.New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 404 pp. $24.95 (paper). ISBN0-521-49881-3.

Nature and Society in Historical Contextis a collection of articles stemming from gath-erings at Cambridge University in 1991 and at Friiberghs Herrga˚rd near Uppsala in 1993.The 21 chapters range from the very particular (for example, Gerhard Jaritz and VerenaWiniwarter’s discussion of the usefulness of Austrian village records for recovering Renais-sance views of nature of the common people) to the very abstract (such as Kurt Bayertz’sessay on the problems inherent in the program of environmental ethics).

As in most such collections of conference papers, the quality and usefulness of thearticles varies, although they generally are of high quality and interest. The mainly Europeanauthors have written on subjects primarily having to do with Europe and with the history ofideas. Exceptions include pieces on the place of the island of St. Vincent in environmentalhistory (Richard Grove), climate, race, and cultural distinctiveness of the American South(Mart Stewart), and perception of the Western landscape in the nineteenth-century UnitedStates (Gerhard Strohmeier). Ernest Gellner opens the volume with the provocative thesisthat modern liberal society is possible because effective knowledge of nature exists whileeffective knowledge of humans and society does not. Eleven chapters move from Europeanantiquity to the nineteenth century, focusing on Greece and Rome (Jan Janko), Byzantium(Lenos Mavrommatis), Britain (Chris Philo, Peter Burke, Simon Schaffer, and Roy Porter),Austria (Jaritz and Winiwarter), pre-classical economics (Lars Herlitz), Germany (Dietrichvon Engelhardt and Joachim Radkau), and Norway (Nina Witoszek). Six concluding chapterstackle non-national issues: Darwin, anthropologists, and “human nature” (Adam Kuper); ev-olutionary ethics (Paul Lawrence Farber); “nature” and “society” in developmental rhetoric(Bengt-Erik Borgstro¨m); a critique of the use of market mechanisms in environmental policy(Bo Gustafsson); and normative natural philosopher (Bayertz).

The broad range of topics defies easy categorization, and the generally high qualitymakes it difficult to select favorite essays. The volume’s long preparation time for the volumemeans that in the interim several authors, such as Richard Grove and Mart Stewart, havepublished books on the subjects they address here. The book is mainly open to criticism for

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textomission, not commission: Despite the universalistic title, even when discussing theoretical

subjects the authors’ topics are limited to Northwestern Europe and the United States andtheir intellectual concerns. The book also leaves the impression that nature and society interactsolely in the realms of ideas and mentality.

Given these constraints, the chapters in this collection nonetheless form a interesting andoften stimulating introduction to a variety of current scholarly approaches to the relationshipbetween society and nature.

Reviewed by MARK STOLL, assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University, LubbockTX 79409-1013.


The following review was assigned and edited by Jennifer Platt, a member of the editorial board of theJournalof the History of the Behavioral Sciences.

John C. Burnham. How the Idea of Profession Changed the Writing of Medical History.London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1998. 195 pp. $50.00. ISBN0-85484-067-2.

Professionalization is one of the most powerful concepts in the armory of social histo-rians of medicine. Concepts of professional power and studies of professional organizationand mobilization have revolutionized the history of medicine, so that it has attracted theinterest of social scientists and policy-makers and become one of the liveliest and mostrigorous areas of historical study. John Burnham provides an erudite and insightful overviewof the rise of the concept of the medical profession within the history of medicine. His accountis impressively interdisciplinary and international in scope, offering frequent opportunitiesfor comparing European and U.S. styles of sociology and history. The analysis is timely: Thehistories of medicine and science are becoming more historically reflective, and there is areal need for a wide-ranging history of the subject area to facilitate critical debate on pastinitiatives and new directions.

What emerges is a tripartite dialogue of physicians, sociologists, and historians. In thefirst period of the seventeenth to the twentieth century, the physician-historians were con-cerned with individual contributions and the ebb and flow of diseases. Once the history ofmedicine ceased to be a branch of epidemiology, the early twentieth-century agenda of “greatdoctors and great ideas” might be interpreted as legitimating the status of the physician.Paradoxically, concerns with fees, income, and relations with patients were conspicuouslylacking in what was still in Britain and the United States very much an antiquarian pursuit.By the 1930s Burnham discerns more explicitly social issues: Concerns with social epidemi-ology and health care were back on the agenda, and this, with a greater interest in physiciansas professionals, was symptomatic of debates on the organization of medical services. Yetdespite some stirrings among medical reformers in the 1940s (for example, George Rosen’shistorical studies came under the academic mantle of sociology), the new insights from thesociology of the professions were not taken up by historians of medicine. By the 1980s this

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of texthad not only changed, but Burnham argues that historians were offering important correctives

to sociological models.The persistent neglect of the concept of profession by historians of medicine is striking.

A Berlin poor law doctor, Julius Pagel, used history to defend medicine as an elite scientificendeavor, and Burnham is impressed by how his materials on the profession related to con-temporary debates rather than the past. In contrast to Pagel’s defense of bacteriological ex-periments, William Osler developed a critique of modern specialization. This was the rallyingcry of his plea for medical humanism, which was taken up by his prote´ge, Charles Singer,who between 1919 and 1921 was Oxford’s first and last lecturer in the history of biology.

Burnham observes that Rosen’s study of specialization was written under the directionof sociologists in the 1940s, but that Rosen saw the profession as a homogeneous collectivity.He also notes the limitations of Sigerist’s agenda in focusing on social activism rather thanprofessional organization. On the whole, Burnham prefers explanations couched in terms ofanalytical styles rather than politics or expectations of professional power. Archives anddiaries are not drawn on, while publications form the mainstay of the analysis. The use ofarchival sources would have been revealing of the context of seminal texts. To give oneexample, a more politicized analysis of the Austrian refugee Max Neuburger might have beenattempted, and it is certainly worthwhile remarking that while the United States saw the adventof Sigerist and Ackerknecht (renegades from the Leipzig school of Sudhoff), Britain was hostto the two Austrian professors, Neuburger and Isidor Fischer (compiler of a magnificentdictionary of modern medical biography), representing a more cultural than sociological ap-proach to the subject.

Burnham touches on the issue of whether the Nazi order represented deprofessionali-zation; while he notes that this was a complex era, others would see professionalizationpushedto extremes with the physician as a Fu¨hrer figure. One of the most innovative Nazi medicalhistorians, Heinz Zeiss, does not appear in the study: While professor of bacteriology in NaziBerlin, he was regarded as a potential successor to Sigerist. He not only used history forepidemiological ends, but argued in innovative holistic terms that the doctor was a guardianof society and the race. It was in the Third Reich that history of medicine became part of themedical curriculum. The Nazis were well aware of the value of history of medicine in buildingup a nationally minded profession.

Should, then, the idea of a profession be tied more firmly to social agendas? Socialhistory—at least as it emerged in Britain in the mid-1960s—was very much a movementoriented to radical causes. The diversity of social agendas certainly made the Society for theSocial History of Medicine a forum for innovative ideas and approaches, so that the Societyattained a high level of international influence in promoting models of power, gender, andorganization. Burnham sees 1966—rather than work by Rosen in 1962—as a turning point,with the scholarship of Vern Bullough, who applied sociology to medieval medicine. Burn-ham is well informed: indicating that the classicist (and editor ofMedical History) VivianNutton studied sociology at LSE. Yet Rosen has a broader significance in that his view ofsocial history was linked to advancing social medicine. Similarly, in Britain the Carr-Saun-ders/Abel-Smith tradition of history of medicine as part of social administration, rightly high-lighted by Burnham, meant that social history was linked to social policy. As Dorothy Porterhas shown in the silver jubilee issue ofSocial History of Medicine, this involved some crucialissues in professional identity, particularly the challenge to the medical officer of health fromthe sphere of social work. Social history of medicine in the United Kingdom since the 1970shas retained a strong policy orientation—hence the treatment of quite recent issues in serviceprovision, whereas in other contexts, for example, France and Germany, the subject is only

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textjust confronting the Second World War. How the history of medicine became populated by

full-time professionals itself demands a comprehensive study, as the academic battles were(at least in the United Kingdom) hard fought.

One senses that Burnham has drawn on his own wide-ranging immersion in the disciplineto inform his analysis. Certainly, this brings his account to life, and there is a judiciousappreciation of U.S. and Canadian historical contributions, and some nice photos. Yet Burn-ham’s account focuses more on professional organization and identity, as opposed to whatone might loosely describe as professional imperialism—or the medicalization of vastswathes of health and welfare. Here (admittedly from my own experience) I would highlighttwo areas. One is the critical evaluation of the Rockefeller Foundation made by a range ofhistorians drawing on its extraordinarily rich archival holdings. The radical analyses of theFoundation by E. Richard Brown, Howard Berliner, and Donald Fisher have shaped an in-ternational set of debates on the role of modern medical science and public health. Second,the history of eugenics has played a crucial role. From the mid-1970s, historians of eugenicsanalyzed eugenics as professional ideology. The social historian of scienceDonaldMackenziecontributed to a remarkable new wave of social history of health and welfare, and certainlyin the United Kingdom the group around Bob Young was a major force. The technique ofprosopography as applied to the eugenicists offered an important basis for studies of profes-sional identity, networks, and interests. This was a watershed, in that the interpretation ofsocial medicine as benign and enlightened changed to seeing it as coercive and an agenda ofprofessional power and control. Eugenics then became caught up with gender issues, andareas of health and disease such as infant welfare and control of STDs incorporated newthinking on professional power. Burnham notes the significance of analyses of gender-drivenhierarchies of professionals, but such analyses have perhaps deeper historical roots.

While recognizing that the sociology of professions was overschematic, there was alsoa reaction against what seemed the naı¨ve positivism of Singer, who was increasingly drawnto the scientific side of medicine. What was less apparent was Singer’s anti-Nazi stance,which had represented a positive break with the linking of the professions to national interests,as well as accounting for his revulsion from irrationalism. Charles Webster, in a contributionto the Johns Hopkins Festschrift on doctors and patients in the age of Shakespeare, roundlycriticized historians of science and their restricted interests, while arguing for a practitioner-based rather than physician-based model of history. While such a view did not take adequateaccount of the significance of social constructionism, or the sociological critique of profes-sional knowledge from Ludwik Fleck to Michel Foucault, it opened up the subject to takingon board a broad spectrum of practitioners.

In Germany in the 1980s, a movement arose challenging antiquarian scholarship inhistory of medicine institutes. It is fair to suggest that the Swiss economic historian RudolfBraun took an important role; I would add that part of his legacy was the role taken byReinhard Spree in organizing seminal meetings on the social history of medicine at Bielefeld.Yet this was part of a context—the Bielefeld school of sociologically oriented history sup-ported initial meetings on the subject convened by Alfons Labisch and Spree. Here I wouldhighlight the significance of Spree’s contribution of the concept of a market for medical careto the social history of the German medical profession, an issue subsequently taken up byClaudia Huerkamp. Whether the case of German society and academia bears out the reasser-tion of an historical agenda over the social sciences is perhaps questionable, as the newergeneration of historians of medicine have departed from philological obscurantismby learningimportant sociological lessons. Certainly, the old style of chronicling professional greatnessand ideas removed from any meaningful context is extinct. The new generation had to chal-

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textlenge a system of medical history designed to underpin notions of professional achievement,

and (fitting well with Burnham’s notion of eclecticism) to bring a socially informed approachto medicine, promoting critical thinking about medical science, and ethical sanctions on pro-fessional power.

These reflections, I hope, serve to demonstrate the importance of this lucid and pio-neering contribution. The excellent index adds to the usefulness of a work that will serve asboth an introduction to the subject and a critical landmark. However, appearing as the sup-plement to a specialist journal may well mean that only historians of medicine rather thansocial scientists and historians are likely readers, and I hope that some enterprising publisherwill rescue this valuable analysis from its obscure ivory tower by turning it into an accessiblepaperback. For this is an account that has refreshing breadth and broad conceptual agendas,even though in the final analysis I suspect that Burnham has much sympathy with a relativelyautonomous definition of the historian of medicine. This excellent study doesmuch to promotea more reflective and sophisticated approach to studies of professional expertise in the spheresof health and welfare.

Reviewed by PAUL WEINDLING professor in the School of Humanities at Oxford BrookesUniversity, Oxford OX3 OBP, UK.


Allan Ingram (Ed.). Voices of Madness: Four Pamphlets, 1683–1796.Stroud: Alan Sutton,1997. 154 pp. $33.95. ISBN 0-7509-1210-3.

In 1796, William Belcher wrote, “If the publication of my case is dangerous, so islikewise silence.” This book, edited by Allan Ingram, contains four such “dangerous” pam-phlets written by people considered mad. Of these four, only Hannah Allen (1683) sharedthe view of those around her that she was mad, unlike the three men, Alexander Cruden(1739), Samuel Bruckshaw (1774), and Belcher, until after his release. Ingram’s introductionprovides a helpful survey of the social and medical context in which each of these four authorslived and how their writings compare with one another. He especially shows how they usedEnglish to prove that they were “normal” and how their different writing styles reflect ontheir personalities and beliefs. Allen writes about events that are over and done with, thanksto God’s Grace. Cruden’s meticulous daily account and Bruckshaw’s aggressive narrativereflect their determination to be taken seriously by those who consider them deranged. OnlyBelcher suggests he may still be mad, but only because of his experiences in the madhouse,which he entered quite sane.

What is absent in the introduction is a discussion of class and how this influenced theposition of the authors and their ability to write and publish these pamphlets. There couldalso have beenmore by Ingram about the peculiarity of Belcher’s account from the perspectiveof his length of incarceration, 17 years—by far the longest of the confined writers, and yethis pamphlet is the briefest. One gets the impression that writing these pamphlets was emo-tionally exhausting, which may help to explain Belcher’s brevity—it was too much to dealwith. Cruden and Bruckshaw seem driven, if not drained, by a need to have their experiences

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As Ingram notes in his introduction, she was the only one who was not confined; she livedprior to the large-scale creation of the madhouses in which the other three were incarcerated.Allen’s self-loathing also strikingly differentiates her from the three men who, whatever theirtroubles, did not express such angry views toward themselves. The men demanded justice forinjuries done to them by others, while the one woman writes about her internalized self-hatredand the injuries she did, or thought of doing, to herself.

These writings defy simple categorization—protest literature, recovery testimonial,religious inspiration, impact statement. If one common theme emerges, it is the courage ofeach author to publicly tell his or her story, amidst certain stigma for being considered mad,whether the individual writer believed it or not—what Bruckshaw referred to as “the preju-diced censure of the public.” By bringing these pamphlets to light, Ingram’s book is animportant addition to the growing literature of writings by “mad people,” particularly from aperiod when writings by a woman like Hannah Allen are difficult to find. William Belcherwould have been pleased with another publication that helps to break the silence.

Reviewed by GEOFFREY REAUME, Hannah Post-Doctoral Fellow, Institute for the Historyand Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S1K7, Canada.


Julia A. Erickson with Sally A. Steffen. Kiss and Tell: Surveying Sex in the TwentiethCentury.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 270 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-674-50535-2.

This is not a survey of sex but rather a history of surveys of sexual behavior. Whatconstitutes a survey of sexual behavior is a question that is never fully discussed and istherefore not answered in the book. Perhaps it is impossible to answer, but then the claimthat the book is comprehensive is not valid, for I immediately thought of several surveysoffhand that the author missed. Nevertheless the book reports on some 750 surveys undertakenover the past hundred years, many of them not very good. Excluded were studies of attitudestoward sex. She dates the first published sex survey in the United States with the work ofF. S. Brockton, a YMCA professional, who never even used the word sex in his 1898 mailedquestionnaire. His findings, however, were publicized by psychologist G. Stanley Hall, inpart because the findings agreed with his own assumptions. She also seems to think thatAmerican sex surveys developed in isolation, neglecting those that had gone before in Europe,some of which date from early in the nineteenth century.

Erickson’s general survey of the sex surveys before Kinsey is what might be calledahistorical. She gives far too much credit to Max Exner, for example, and not enough toKatherine Bement Davis, perhaps the most influential American in the sex research field inthe first 30 years of the twentieth century. Exner did not help Davis get funding, but rathersought her out because of her contacts with the Rockefeller foundation and later because of

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the sex surveys up to the time of Kinsey. Erickson seems to be unaware of the publishedbibliography (Aberle & Corner, 1953) of such studies, which include surveys she did notinclude. Her research into the pioneering studies was apparently done early in her compilationof data and was not revised with the information from more recent publications.

In spite of such criticisms, however, her major accomplishments should not be over-looked. The listings and summaries of a vast number of surveys and her emphasis on thegrowing statistical sophistication, at least of the better researches, indicates there has beensome progress. The key word is “some,” since she also emphasizes how many of the surveyswere either consciously or unconsciously constructed to get the kind of answers the research-ers wanted to find, and when they did not, they often ignored the contrary data or interpretedit in a more favorable fashion. Her recommendation that sex surveyors acknowledge thatsurveys, at best, produce only a kind of knowing and that the surveyors’ own preconceptionsand fears influence their findings, is one with which all researchers should agree. The influenceof the biases that most past researchers demonstrated, and which appear so obvious in ret-rospective studies, would have been much diminished, if they had realized their own weak-nesses. She also emphasizes that surveys cannot capture the complex negotiations andmeanings involved in decisions to have sex. The book should be required reading for anyonewho would contemplate any survey of sex in the future. It should, however, be supplementedby some of the more recent studies on sex research in general, a subject not well covered inthis book.

REFERENCE

Aberle, S. D., & Corner, G. W. (1953). Twenty-five years of sex research: History of the National Research Councilfor Research in Problems of Sex. Philadelphia: Saunders.

Reviewed by VERN L. BULLOUGH, visiting professor at the University of Southern Cali-fornia.


Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (Eds.).Animal Acts: Configuring the Human inWest-ern History.New York: Routledge, 1997. 258 pp. $69.96 (cloth). $18.99 (paper). ISBN0-415-91610-0 (paper).

This is a collection of essays by, and primarily for, literary scholars on the boundary ofanimal and human nature. The boundary is, of course, at the heart of the history of thebiological, psychological, and human sciences, and these essays, therefore, maywell stimulatereaders of this journal. It is yet another mark of academic divisions that, with the exceptionof two essays, on the well-worn subjects of Descartes’ animal machine and of Diane Fossey’sgorillas, the essays do not address the history of science. (The work of Harriet Ritvo, forexample, with the potential to mediate across disciplinary boundaries, is cited but not used.)

The point is apposite. An acute sensitivity about the subjugated status of animals, thatis, an ethical consciousness, informs the essays. It is therefore a pity that there is no discussion

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how these authors use literary texts and how historians of science might use scientific ones.To an outsider, it is very striking how far the discourse of literary scholars focuses on ethicaland philosophical commentary, to a degree that might provoke comment in, say, social his-tory. This is an observation, not a criticism as, in fact, I found the most interesting chapterto be a discussion of the indecision of the French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, about theanimal–human border.

The editors leave the collection largely to fend for itself. Their project, to show howrepresentation of animals “configures” (p. 2) the human is so catholic, it could, one mightimagine, encompass almost anything. Indeed, there are essays here on topics as diverse asmedieval bestiality, Audubon, Gregor Sampsa, and “The Far Side” cartoons of Gary Larson.(Incidentally, I rather doubt these last have “universal appeal” [p. 231]; but it would add aninteresting social dimension, about which authors remain largely silent, to know.) There is avery significant irresolution running through the book. Earlier chapters make the historicalclaim that belief in an absolute division between beast and human was transgressed—thatbeasts were thought to speak—until modern science imposed once again an absolute bound-ary, reserving reason and language to humankind. Then, in our own age, several authorsassert, we know animals have language. I was rather startled by this assertion, since I thoughtit remained a far more complex and controversial issue than these scholars, who want toexpose humankind’s arrogance, admit. And there is, surely, a certain irony in drawing on thewritings of Parisian intellectuals, whom one cannot imagine not eating meat, to express suchexposure. Other essays tend to imply that the animal–human boundary is a site of recurrenttension, that language about this boundary is of great richness precisely because it is alwaysopen to new configurations.

Reviewed by ROGERSMITH, emeritus reader in history of science, Lancaster University, UK,and consultant, Institute for History of Science and Technology of the Academy of Sciences,103912 Moscow, Russia.


David Park. The Fire Within the Eye. An Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaningof Light. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 337 pp. $16.95 (paper). ISBN0-691-05051-1.

Science writer David Park has produced a popular history of philosophical and scientificspeculation about the nature of light that is informed, charming, and erudite. Ranging fromthe pre-Socratic Greeks to the enigmas of the photon, Park demonstrates his immersion inthe latest and best scholarship in the history of science as well as his acquaintance with theprimary historical sources themselves. Chronological in approach and focused on a successionof famous figures in the history of optics, the book contains excellent illustrations, cleardescriptions, and chatty, practical encouragement for readers to duplicate many of the famousoptical experiments discussed in the book. If Park argues any thesis, it is the familiar one thattheorizing about light has passed out of the realm of philosophical speculation and the search

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study of light is subjected to the discipline of logical analysis, experimental test, and criticalsuspension of judgment about ultimate questions of meaning.

The seventeenth century brings a subtle shift in Park’s narrative exposition. For the pre-seventeenth-century material, Park is deeply concerned to locate speculations about light andvision the larger context of religious and philosophical thought. Thus his book contains long,wonderful, unapologetic digressions on, for example, the metaphysics of Manichaeanism,Aristotelian scientific method, patristic theorizing about the role of light in creation of theworld, and medieval-scholastic light-metaphysics. This attention to the wider intellectual andcultural context does not disappear in the post-1600 coverage but becomes muted. “Light,”he suggests, is captured by the new science, and so the story becomes a more predictableexercise in the history of science. What began as a historical essay on the “nature andmeaningof light” narrows to a discussion of “the nature of light” as interpreted by physical optics.

In one other respect the narration shifts in the seventeenth century. Park’s account reflectsthe well-known fact that before Kepler and Descartes no serious distinction was drawn be-tween light and vision. After them, that distinction forces itself everywhere. The history ofoptics forks into physical optics on the one hand and physiological and psychological opticson the other. As a physicist, Park unhesitatingly follows the former historical track. AlthoughGoethe receives an informed and sympathetic treatment, the book otherwise largely ignoresthe history of visual perception. The Young–Helmholtz theory is presented as the last workin the history of color vision, and no mention is made of the long scientific debates overopponency and its neurophysiological confirmation. The “fire within the eye” becomes the“fire within the spectroscope.”

But if David Park tells only a part of the complex story of light, he narrates that part ina lucid, readable fashion that clarifies without oversimplifying. His work will hold the readeras few other books on the topic do. It is a historical treat.

Reviewed by R. STEVEN TURNER, professor for the history of science at the University ofNew Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick E3B 5A3, Canada.


Robert L. Welsch (Ed.).An American Anthropologist in Melanesia.Honolulu: The Uni-versity of Hawai’i Press, 1998. 2 vols. 968 pp. $125.00. ISBN 0-8248-1644-7.

An American Anthropologist in Melanesiapresents the fascinating story behind one ofthe world’s finest collections of Melanesian material culture. The two-volume set details theactivities of Field Museum anthropologist Albert Buell Lewis and the collections he madeduring the Joseph N. Field South Pacific Expedition from 1909 to 1913. Over the course ofthe four-year expedition, Lewis acquired over 14,000 objects and took more than 1,900 pho-tographs, most of which survive today in Field Museum collections.

Volume One,Field Diaries, is divided into three parts. Part one introduces A. B. Lewis’spersonal background and the setting of the Joseph N. Field South Pacific Expedition. It situatesLewis’s field research as characteristic of what Welsch labels the “expedition period” of

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on regional analysis rather than intensive analysis of any single locale. It was to this end thatLewis’s collections were oriented. The second part is organized into seven sections, eachdedicated to one of Lewis’s field diaries. Each division correlates to specific geographic areascovered by the expedition. These sections are well illustrated with Lewis’s own archivalphotographs as well as with photos from the collections of the museum. In addition to pro-viding insightful annotations to Lewis’s often fragmentary entries, Welsch introduces eachfield diary with a prose description of the particular period and region involved. Part three isa concise history of anthropology prior to World War I, which outlines the academic milieuin which the Joseph N. Field Expedition took place. Particularly interesting is the brief sectiondealing with the rise of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, which situates BronislawMalinow-ski, often cited as the sole father of modern ethnographic fieldwork, into the larger contextof his contemporaries.

Volume Two,Appendixes, demonstrates the enormous editorial and research achieve-ment of this project, making clear the extensive dedication of Welsch and indeed numeroussupporters at Field Museum in Chicago. An impressive “Who WasWho in Melanesia, 1909–1913” section includes biographical information on everyone to whom Lewis referred in hisfield diaries, which is a must-have for any historian of the region. The complete register ofphotographs andmaterial culture that Lewis collected, all clearly indexed by type and location,are especially relevant to those interested in material culture.

An American Anthropologistis a splendid contribution to the growing body of literaturethat aims to contextualize the work of social researchers and the knowledge they produce.Museums in particular have been criticized as vehicles of cultural manipulation presentingideologically charged understandings of the world based on material presented out of context.Welsch’s contribution will allow interpretation of this important museum collection to be farmore reflexive, allowing researchers the opportunity for fresh interpretations based on fullerunderstandings of the conditions of its acquisition and documentation. Until recently, socialscience texts and museum exhibitions have tended to suppress such information so as not torefute the author/curator’s authority nor “contaminate” the presentation of field findings.

An American Anthropologist in Melanesiais of special interest to historians of behavioraland social sciences as it dispels myths of cultural isolates “untouched” by civilization. Lewis’sdiaries clearly attest to both indigenous mobility and agency in Melanesia as well as theinteraction of a vast array of expatriate naturalists, government officers, anthropologists, mer-chants, and others in the same areas. Such interactions continue to go largely undocumentedin traditional ethnography as challenges to the writer’s authority. More generally, these vol-umes make a splendid contribution for Chicago historians, providing another chapter in thebiography of one of the most prominent landmarks, Field Museum, and one of Chicago’smost influential families, the Fields.

Reviewed by TODD S. HARPLE, a research scholar in the Department of Anthropology,Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra,ACT 0200, Australia.

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Jeffrey Wollock. The Noblest Animate Motion: Speech, Physiology and Medicine in Pre-Cartesian Linguistic Thought.Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997. 470 pp. $160.00.ISBN 1-55619-620-2.

We live in a world of languages—painting, electronic discourse, music, cinema. All ofthese, very likely, developed from speech, as speech was among the earliest human attemptsto capture reality. Speech can be defined as everything that is not expressed by language, butdirectly perceived by our senses. In addition to being the original means of communication,speech was the first attempt of the human mind to make abstractions. Today, as we swim inreferences to these abstractions, little realizing that they are not real, but only shadows inPlato’s cave, we tend also to ignore the enormous history of thought devoted to explainingthis basic and perhaps uniquely human trait.

In this work, Jeffrey Wollock seeks to address this oversight. The subtitle of his workis “Speech, physiology and medicine in pre-Cartesian thought.” As he tells us in his lengthyintroduction, however, his goal is to trace the history of what he calls the natural philosophyof linguistic performance and phonetic change to the time of Descartes. To achieve thisessential aim, he finds it necessary to explore several ancillary topics. These include exami-nation of classical, medieval, and early modern theories of anatomy, physiology, and pa-thology, the classification of diseases in the Galenic tradition, the relationship of thisnosological tradition to pre-Harvarian medical practice, and most importantly the influenceof three classical writings, the Hippocratic Aphorisms, the Epidemics, and the AristotelianProblems, on pre-modern discussions of speech and speech pathology.

In the first chapter, Wollock begins his formidable task with the first lines of St. John’sGospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word wasGod,” and asks how the Logos was related to human speech. Augustine, he tells us, explainedthat the vocal word was merely the sign of the internal word, which was analogous to theLogos of the Trinity. Aquinas carried this explanation further by positing that the outer wordthat is perceived by the senses precedes the internal word, even though the latter, since it isboth the efficient and the final cause of speech, is, in fact, prior by nature. Wollock notes thatthese discusssions are filled with natural philosophy and traces their origins to Aristotelianwritings, specificallyDe AnimaandDe Motu Animalium. Apparent lacunae in his argumentare that Augustine knew little Greek and hence was not primarily influenced by Aristotelianwritings, and that the concept of the Logos derived from the Stoics, whose contributionsWollock dismisses with a single mention and a footnote (p. 6, note 10).

Wollock’s further discussion of speech and speech defects focuses on the definitions ofvoice and sound set forth by Aristotle and later emended by Galen. Beginning with theAristotelian definition of voice inOn InterpretationandDe Anima, Wollock then turns toAristotle’s discussions of the organs affecting voice in the biological writings. While notingthat questions arose about these dicta, Wollock forgoes dealing with them (p. 10). TheGalenicdefinitions, he tells us, are designed for use by physicians, but only one passage cited dealswith speech defects. Noting that Aristotle explained speech, as he did all existence, by relatingit to the four causes, Wollock uses the same format to organize his discussion, citing textsdrawn from a variety of commentators. He begins with the purpose of speech, Aristotle’sfinal cause, and the proceeds to the formal, material, and efficient causes, leading us througha dazzling array of authoritative writings from Hippocrates and Galen to Avicenna, Aquinas,Reado Colombo, Matteo Corti, Wilhelm Kamlah, and Paul Lorenzen. The first chapter ends

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of speech from Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente’sDe Locutione et eius Organis(Ven-ice, 1601) and of the lingual muscles from Andreas Vesalius’De Humani Corporis Fabrica(Basle, 1543).

The main body of the work consists of diffuse discussions of speech stimulated byquestions and answers in the Aristotelian Problems and by the Galenic classification of speechdefects and disorders. The investigation of these topics leads Wollock into widely disparatesubjects, including the translation and diffusion of these texts throughout the Middle Agesand the Renaissance (which Wollock defines as the rediscovery of classical antiquity and ofclassical Latin and Greek languages [p. 231]) and commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorismvi 32, a one-sentence axiom associating lisping to excess moisture as evidenced by prolongeddiarrhea. Many of these discussions are interesting and well researched. They direct one intosubjects that, though hardly central to the work’s main theme, afford the reader useful insightsinto the thought of Western medieval and early modern medical philosophers.

A result of his intensive study is Wollock’s impressive bibliography listing manuscripts,primary sources drawn from classical writings through the eighteenth century, and almost 25pages of secondary works. A work of scholarly distinction, this book is not an easy read. Itis unfortunate that it, like so many works on the history of the life sciences today, seems tobe mislabeled. While it has merits as an essay on the Aristotelian point of view regardinglanguage studies, it cannot qualify as a comprehensive history of speech theory.

Reviewed by YNEZ VIOLE O’NEILL, research professor of medical history, Department ofNeurobiology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA 90095-1763.


Mari Jo Buhle. Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 432 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0-674-29868-3.

Judith M. Hughes. Freudian Analysts/Feminist Issues.New Haven: Yale University Press,1999. 240 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0-300-07524-3.

Mari Jo Buhle, Harrison S. Kravis Professor of American Civilization and History atBrown University, inFeminism and Its Discontents, documents the interconnections of twen-tieth-century American feminism with Freudian psychoanalysis as it developed in the UnitedStates and with some of its neo- and post-Freudian lineal descendants, as well as with moredistantly related doctrines and self-appointed critics and popularizers from many professions.The scope of the book is deliberately broad, but excludes the two early Freudian defectors,Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, with their separate systems, as well as themedical and psychiatricconnections, with few exceptions. Buhle views Freudian analysis through a feminist prism,so that popular versions of psychoanalysis are given equal time with professional develop-ments. Moreover, the therapeutic aspects of psychoanalysis are subordinated to the ways inwhich psychoanalysis is used in defining feminine development and psychology.

In her introduction and nine engaging chapters (roughly a section per decade), Buhle

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tions in the two fields, the terms and concepts of which noticeably began to influence Amer-icans around the time of the Clark University Conference of 1909 with which Buhle startsher book, emblematically depicting Sigmund Freud as psychoanalytic mentor and EmmaGoldman as admiring listener. While chronicling the vacillations of feminism, with internalschisms and alliances and feuds with psychoanalysis along the way, Buhle keeps in mindGoldman’s celebration of Freud’s liberating stand on two vital issues: the equal importanceof sexuality to women and men, and the deliberate suppression of female sexual and intel-lectual fulfillment to preserve a patriarchal social structure.

Buhle sketches first-wave feminism and the nineteenth-century background of themove-ment in Europe and the United States in “Feminism, Freudianism, and Female Subjectivity”(chap. 1). Freud and sexologists such as Havelock Ellis are depicted as offering a means forwomen to articulate their desire for self-definition and sexual fulfillment apart from the re-productive aim. “Female feminists” like Ellen Key, who idealized the reproductive function,are contrasted with “human feminists” like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who envisionedwomenas equal working partners with men, ignoring the sexual parameter. With “Dissent in Freud’sRanks” (chap. 2), Buhle reviews Freud’s reluctant engagement with the psychology of femalesexual development and how the women who entered his ranks forced him to say more bycountering his male-oriented theories. The work of Lou Andreas Salome, Karen Horney inparticular, and Melanie Klein backed by Ernest Jones, all from within the movement in the1910s and 1920s, is summarized, along with that of Helene Deutsch, Anna Freud, and otherswho remained closer to Freud’s and Karl Abraham’s formulations.

Shifting to the United States in “Culture and Feminine Personality” (chap. 3), whereEuropean psychoanalysts were arriving in numbers in the early 1930s, Buhle emphasizes theevolution of Karen Horney’s thinking as she adopted a model of human adaptability andrejected biological determinism before turning away from feminist theory in the late 1930s.She also details the anthropological and sociological research of the period that supportedtheories of cultural relativism.

Periods of intense misogyny and antifeminism expressed by journalistic writers stronglysupporting traditional roles for men and women are perhaps more extensively presented thantheir importance to conceptual change deserves. In “Momism and the Flight From Manhood”(chap. 4) and “Ladies in the Dark” (chap. 5), Buhle documents the pressure on women tofind contentment within a patriarchal structure, using the writings of Philip Wylie and othersin the World War II and postwar period. The formulation of ego psychology by Heinz Hart-mann and Erik Erikson, the revival of instinct theory by Karl Menninger, and the push amonganalysts for unity and for promulgating psychoanalysis as a general developmental theory areseen as supporting attempts to make women conform to the traditional norms. Buhle depictsa mid-century multidisciplinary shift toward biological determinism as preceding the 1960smutual hostility between second-wave feminists and psychoanalysis.

“Feminists Versus Freud” (chap. 6) describes the rise of second-wave feminism inspiredby Betty Friedan and diverse leaders of the women’s liberation movement. The author takesnote of the new scientific findings on sexuality, debates over vaginal orgasm and the bound-aries of female sexual pleasure, and the idealization of lesbianism in some quarters. Buhlerecounts in “Feminine Self-in-Relation” (chap. 7) the 1970s rise of women’s studies programsin universities and the beginnings of feminist psychoanalysis, discussing the outstandingcontributions of Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow in the second half of the 1970sand Carol Gilligan in the early 1980s. A shift from sexual to gender studies, mediated by thework of John Money and Robert Stoller, is outlined, including the contributions of analysts

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describing emergence from symbiosis to relative autonomy, to illustrate a growing shift frominstinctual to relational models. In this regard, object relation theories seem sparsely men-tioned in proportion to their influence on contemporary feminist psychoanalysis.

Buhle deals with the history and influence of Critical Theory, particularly that of HerbertMarcuse, at length in “The Crisis in Patriarchal Authority” (chap. 8) as a rationale forwomen’sliberation and the ’60s generation. “In the Age of the Vanishing Subject” (chap. 9) is an finalintricate tour de force describing the remarkable sweep of French Lacanian and post-Lacanianinfluence through the American academic establishment, setting “humanist” (women’s stud-ies) scholars and “theorists” (FemLitCrit feminists) against each other from the mid-1970s tothe mid-1980s. Feminism and psychoanalysis alike became “decentered” as a result.

Judith M. Hughes, professor of history at the University of California, San Diego andclinical associate at the San Diego Psychoanalytic Institute, is a feminist who has evolvedfrom political historian to psycho-historian to psychoanalyst. In her third book on psycho-analysis, she shares her personal theoretical commitments (influenced by British object re-lations theory) and her short-list of psychoanalysts and feminists in the Freudian lineage whoare relevant to building a theory of feminine gender identity. With a historical aspect, thebook dovetails nicely with that of Buhle, focusing and enlarging upon several versions ofgender identity theory introduced briefly in Buhle’s book. Hughes outlines and categorizesfive “lineages“ according to evolutionary or maturational analogies manifest in the work:Helene Deutsch (retrogresson); Erik Erikson and Carol Gilligan (epigenesis); Karen Horney(sexual selection); Robert Stoller and Nancy Chodorow (artificial selection); Melanie Kleinand Judith Hughes herself (natural selection). Hughes ventures to assert the possibility ofmultiple gender identities in an attempt to extend Klein’s narrative, although rejecting majorKleinian assumptions and identifying more fully with Fairbairn and Winnicott. While herhypothesis is plausible, if not seemingly self-evident, her clinical evidence for it is too deriv-ative and speculative to make her argument convincing. No clinical material from her ownexperience is presented, and she seems fully aware that her theoretical gropings and “solder-ing” together of ideas are highly tentative.

These two books have an inviting heuristic, undogmatic quality to them. Both acade-micians are concerned about the future directions of feminism and psychoanalysis at a timewhen, as Buhle relates and reflects: the study of history is being called obsolete; the recon-structions of psychoanalysis are considered by some as at best useful fictional tales; thepsychoanalyst’s particular normative and psychopathological framework is seen as a matterof personal choice rather than fact; and even the reality of the “self ” and of “woman” hasbeen questioned. Buhle provides an excellent, profusely referenced historical explorationaffirming the belief that theory is important, while Hughes illustrates one contemporary his-torically oriented scholar’s quest to make sense of gender identity theory and to extend it.

Reviewed by DORIS B. NAGEL, clinical associate professor of psychiatry, History of Psy-chiatry Section, Weill Medical College, Cornell University, New York NY 10021.

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Arnoldo Rodrigues and Robert V. Levine (Eds.).Reflections on 100 Years of Experi-mental Social Psychology.New York: Basic Books, 1999. 245 pp. $60.00. ISBN0-8133-9086-9.

This book is the product of a conference held at Yosemite National Park in March 1997on the history of experimental social psychology. Contributors include Morton Deutsch, Har-old B. Kelley, Harold B. Gerard, Elliot Aronson, Bertram H. Raven, Philip G. Zimbardo,Leonard Berkowitz, Albert Pepitone, and Robert B. Zajonc; the editors provide preface andafterword.

The authors were given great latitude; some of the contributions are quite revealing ofthe authors (Deutsch, Aronson, Zimbardo, and Gerard) whereas others are conceptual innature (Kelley and Zajonc). As a result, the contributions do not fit together into a coherentnarrative; whatever coherence there is comes from Pepitone’s characterization of a goldenage of experimental social psychology, from the end of World War II until the dominance ofcognitive psychology in the mid-1980s, and from the preface and afterword.

The focus and major contribution of the book is as a contributor’s account of that goldenage of experimental social psychology. Such an experimental social psychology is said toderive from Kurt Lewin, largely through the mediation of Leon Festinger. The field is psy-chological as opposed to sociological, centered in the laboratory, and methodologically rig-orous. Sociological contributions to social psychology are very much absent from the book,as are the contributions of other psychological social psychologists such as Floyd and GordonAllport.

Festinger was, as a number of the authors point out, not in favor of an applied socialpsychology, an aspect of the Lewinian tradition advocated by Ronald Lippitt. Many of thecontributors discuss and want to integrate this aspect of the Lewinian tradition into their ownresearch. Aronson and Zimbardo emphasize the applied aspect of their work; Aronson dis-cusses the very different opinions of Abraham Maslow and Festinger about applied research,and Gerard discusses first turning away from Lippitt to Festinger at the University ofMichiganand then Festinger’s discouraging comment when he (Gerard) turned to applied research tostudy the effect of desegregation on the academic performance of minority students.

The book constitutes a valuable resource for historians of social psychology as well asfor teachers and students of the subject as an insiders’ account of social psychology followingWorld War II. Particularly revealing sections include Aronson’s and Zimbardo’s regardingthe ethics of laboratory research, Gerard on post-World War II sociology at Columbia Uni-versity, and discussions of the Research Center for Group Dynamics by Deutsch and others.

Though valuable as a resource, such insiders’ accounts lack the training, sensitivities,and resources that a historian would bring to bear on the issue. References, for example, areto other insiders’ accounts rather than to the contributions of historians. The contributions byDeutsch and Pepitone do have larger historical aspirations, going back much earlier in thecentury to discuss the development of such an experimental social psychology, and are in-sightful at a number of points. Nevertheless, in their discussion of the fall of the influence ofinstincts in the 1920s, neither discusses or refers to the work of historians on the issue, workthat can illuminate the points they want to make.

The title, alluding to 100 years of experimental social psychology, refers to Triplett’s1898 experiment on social influence. The question, however, remains as to the beginning ofexperimental social psychology. Was it Triplett’s experiment in 1898?Was it Floyd Allport’s

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tributors depict a product of the post-World War II era, corresponding to Pepitone’s goldenage of psychology?

The answer to this question will require much historical reflection. For this reason, it isto be regretted that historians of social psychology were not present at the conference. Itrepresents a lost opportunity to confront the insiders’ knowledge of the contributors with theperspectives and questions of historians. The insiders could have more fully illuminated thatwhich is discussed in the book and addressed questions such as the one above that historiansare raising about the history of social psychology.

Reviewed by SAM PARKOVNICK, Department of Psychology, Dawson College, Montreal,Canada.


Adrian Johns. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making.Chicago: TheUniversity of Chicago Press, 1998. 753 pp. $40.00. ISBN 0-226-40121-9.

As the title of his sprawling, capacious tome suggests, Adrian Johns narrates two, inter-twined stories. The first encompasses a revisionist refutation of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s widelyinfluential reading of early modern “print culture”; the second tenders an account of the“implications of printing for [scientific] knowledge” (p. 41). Johns concentrates primarily onseventeenth-century London, where the social, economic, political, and cultural conflictsamong the print trades, he believes, provided the axial environment for the rise of bothmodernscience and intellectual culture, a world the anchor of which was, and remains (though fading),the book.

Eisenstein’s by now standard account centers on the role of printing in creating the“standardization, dissemination, and fixity” of reliable texts (p. 10), which in turn framed newcultural standards for truth and debate, leading to science and modernity. Johns turns thistechnological determinism on its ear and contends that out of the very unstable and raucousearly modern world arose the stable conventions of learned culture, such as trustworthy au-thorship. Print technology did not determine anything in this world; indeed, the modern ideaof a “printing revolution” itself was a creation of the age as stationers invented their ownhistory in order to validate and assert their authority (p. 374). Johns takes his reader throughthe struggles for control of the printed word emanating from the stationers’ corporately or-ganized crafts (printers, binders, proofreaders), booksellers, the Royal Society and Observa-tory, and publishers like John Streater, who sought through Royal prerogative the legal meansof guaranteeing individual authorship and intellectual property. Texts of uncertain and du-bious authorship, pirated and unreliable editions, bowdlerized translations, hucksterism, po-litical favoritism, competing modes of civility—all these and more provided grist for thistumultuous mill.

For this tale, Johns’s examples are often well chosen, his research fascinating and abun-dant, his insights at times keen (despite a penchant for jargon). Yet in the glissade from themaking of the book to the making of knowledge, he falters dramatically, lapsing into assertion

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textwithout proof. Nowhere does he demonstrate how the content of knowledge in fact derived

from the practices of printing that conveyed it. His closest venture to this problematic junctureoccurs with the claim that in proofreading Flamsteed’s manuscript of celestial observations,Halley changed content by rearranging Flamsteed’s classificatory groupings of recordings andmeasurements. Correct. But what does the fact show? Only that in their well-chronicledrivalry, Halley, Newton, and Flamsteed utilized opportunities provided by available publish-ing practices. This sort of evidence has nothing to do with the book’s “role . . . in theconstitution of knowledge” (p. 623).

Indeed, a book does not constitute knowledge, and never has. We may say that Newton’sF � ma does, within all proper boundary qualifications, of course. But that it appeared in abook published by a pornographer (who possessed a different image of heavenly bodies)bears not a fig on the truth or objectivity or warranted assertability (as philosophers nowadaysput it) of the assertion. Historically, the question of how knowledge comes about remainsexceedingly interesting, and Johns’s emendation to Eisenstein’s account of printing contrib-utes to the story. But both miss the central impact of print technology on knowledge, whichwas quite simply that of catalyzing an information overload of traditional knowledge andclearing the way for new. The more we delve into the intricacies of seventeenth-centuryculture and politics, the more we are amazed that something like modern science was madeat all. But made it was, and the real historical challenge lies in unearthing that story notmerely in the practices—including printing—that led to reliable authorship and the presen-tation of new scientific ideas, but rather in the intellectual processes whereby certain formsof validation or “credit” (symbolic mathematics and controlled experiment, both broadlyconceived) came to count as authoritative in natural knowledge, and by extension in socialknowledge and scientific culture. When the pendulum returns, that account will likely bemore familiar to readers less enthralled than Johns by the current wools of academic fashion.

Reviewed by MICHAEL E. HOBART, professor of history at Bryant College, Smithfield RI02917.


N. Katherine Hayles.How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Liter-ature, and Informatics.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 350 pp. $18.00(paperback). ISBN 0-226-32146-0.

The title of this intriguing book is more ironic than accurate. “We” by no means refersto all of us, but to certain researchers and writers who have applied information theory tohuman behavior. “Became” does not yet apply in a literal sense even to those most involvedin such applications; rather, it meansbegan to think of themselves and/or others as.“Posthu-man” remains a slippery word throughout the book, but it mainly meansexisting as patternsof information.“How” is the title’s most straightforward word: Hayles presents a historicalaccount of information scientists’ evolving concepts of the essence of humanity through halfa century. She seeks to help the rest of us understand such concepts, not so much to make ustrue believers as to warn us about their errors and excesses.

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textAccording to the most extreme versions of such “posthuman” thinking, the essence of

any human’s existence could at least theoretically be downloaded into a computer and trans-mitted across vast distances of space and time. Such concepts of light-speed travel and ef-fective immortality are widespread in recent science fiction, but they have also beenpromulgated by such serious thinkers as Hans Moravec and Christopher Langton. Langton,for example, has asserted that “the ‘logical form’ of an organism can be separated from itsmaterial basis of construction, and that ‘aliveness’ will be found to be a property of the former,not of the latter” (quoted by Hayles, p. 231).

Hayles regards such assumptions, applied to humans, as a threat to “the values of liberalhumanism—a coherent, rational self, the right of that self to autonomy and freedom, and asense of agency linked with a belief in enlightened self-interest” (pp. 85–86). But she is moreconcerned that prevalent posthuman concepts wrongly ignore the influence of “embodiment”on our humanity. Each of us does not merelylive in a body; if we did, we could be extractedand downloaded into a computer with no great loss. Instead, each of usis a body, includingnot only the wetware of our brains but much else that comes from being a uniquely biologicalorganism in a uniquely physical, cultural, and social environment.

One of Hayles’s semiheroes in this book is the neurophysiologist-turned-psychoanalystLawrence Kubie. Kubie tried to persuade the participants in early cybernetics conferencesthat their information-focused models of human nature were highly simplified abstractions of“complex psychological phenomena,” which ignored such basic human attributes as uncon-scious motives and neurotic needs (p. 72). Most conference participants were not persuaded;instead, they grew increasingly uneasy at Kubie’s insistence that being human involves farmore than rational information-processing. Current versions of cognitive and evolutionarypsychology may include the kinds of “hot cognitions” and body-imbedded motives that Ku-bie’s (and Freud’s) arguments foreshadowed. But other mind sciences still often valorize theclean abstractions of computer intelligence analogies.

Hayles writes largely in a critical-theory language that requires close (and sometimesexhausting) attention. She is easier to follow when she discusses the embodied details ofscience fiction novels chosen to illustrate contrasting ways to conceptualize the posthuman.She argues, finally, that a restrained form of posthumanism may be good for us—one inwhich “a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines replaces the liberalhumanist subject’s manifest destiny to dominate and control nature” (p. 288). On this point,her argument needs further development. But her careful explication of the machine-domi-nated fantasies of speculative information scientists may help the rest of us steer a courseaway from the wilder reaches of posthumanism.

Reviewed by ALAN C. ELMS, professor of psychology at the University of California, DavisCA 95616-8686.

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Barry Barnes. The Elements of Social Theory.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.255 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-691-02723-4.

In this engaging, well-written work, Barry Barnes makes a strong case for an interac-tionist approach to sociological theory, critiquing perspectives from rational choice to func-tionalism, and individual theorists such as Ju¨rgen Habermas. Karl Marx and Max Weber areoften foils for his approach, while he advocates a return to Durkheimian themes that groundnorms and knowledge in social interaction. The author in the first half of the book takes upthese critiques, and in the second half he turns to empirical and historical studies of collectiveaction, status groups, class, and bureaucracies.

Barnes focuses on the “basic form” of sociological theory. He states that sociability isthe fundamental fact of human existence, that people are subject to a “mutual susceptibility”expressed in “aligned cognition, shared language and knowledge” (pp. 3–4). For Barnes,interactionism can answer problems of social order and collective action that have long beencenterpieces of social theory.

Much of Barnes’s critique of rational choice theory and functionalism covers familiarterrain for those conversant with these debates, but he writes with a wit and clarity that bringsnew life to these issues. For Barnes, rational choice cannot account for the fact that peopleact collectively. Functionalism fares no better. Rule following is not based on internalizednorms, but involves the skilled understanding of analogies and examples. Norms must bepublicly negotiated, decided on rather than discovered.

Drawing on a wide range of studies, Barnes demonstrates how interactionismcanaccountfor empirical phenomena from status groups to administrative hierarchies and class formation.He convincingly shows that skilled agents acting on the basis of shared but always changingknowledge enact institutional and social change.

Barnes’s critique of Foucault, Habermas, and Giddens are fascinating, though he doesnot devote much space to these thinkers. According to Barnes, Habermas and Giddens, likemany in the classical sociological tradition, reinstate the mythological Enlightenment hubrisof a superior reason associated with modernity versus inferior “traditional” ways of thinking.Foucault continues the Weberian myth of a disciplined, administrative society in which aninstrumental rationality runs unchecked through all institutions. Barnes argues that thesethinkers create myths because they do not see that the meaning of rationality and traditiondepends on social interaction.

Barnes’s interactionist arguments are often convincing. His claim that interactionismsolves all problems can be criticized, of course. While Barnes critiques Habermas’s reificationof instrumental reason, he argues that we live in a social world characterized by “the prolif-eration of technical knowledge, the extraordinary division of mental labour and the ever-growing dependence on special expertise” (p. 111). Barnes does not address where thisfascination with instrumental rationality originates and why it persists, especially given hisview that instrumentality is redefined in ever-new interactions. Further, Barnes takes forgranted the interpreting individual as the basis of interaction, a problematic assumption inthis era of postmodern critiques of the subject.

Yet Barnes’s call for an empirically sensitive sociological theory concerned with simi-larities as well as differences between epochs and cultures should be heeded. This is a must-read for social theorists.

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textReviewed by KENNETH H. TUCKER, JR., associate professor of sociology, Mount Holyoke

College, South Hadley MA 01075.


Lawrie Reznek.Evil or Ill? Justifying the Insanity Defence.New York: Routledge, 1997.329 pp. $24.00. ISBN 0-415-16700-0.

This book contributes to the resolution of the ongoing controversy over the ethical andepistemological problems involved in the application of the medical model to criminal be-havior. It is particularly difficult to untangle the scientific, sociological, and political issuesembedded in the insanity defense. Since the beginning of Anglo-American forensic psychi-atry, the insanity defense has remained a practical issue in both the legal and the medicalprofessions, and a theoretical issue in philosophy, social psychology, and other relevant dis-ciplines, in which some practitioners criticize the power of psychiatric diagnosis to deprivea person of autonomy and civil rights, and others see the idea of diminished responsibility asan excuse for the culpable. The central focus of this book is the concept of excuse.

Lawrie Reznek argues that there is no empirical evidence that can differentiate betweenbehavior that is caused and behavior that is freely chosen. Psychiatry and law are diametricallyopposed in assigning cause: Psychiatric thinkers posit that behavior is caused by the laws ofnature; the assumption of legal thinkers is that behavior is caused by free choice. Neitherpsychiatry nor law have achieved independence from philosophy. In 200 years of Anglo-American law, neither theory has been falsified or revolutionized by replicated empiricalevidence. Reznek necessarily, therefore, turns to philosophic method.

The starting point of the analysis is to determine the essence of an excuse. For this task,Reznek uses a classic Socratic dialectic to arrive at the definitions of excuse on the one hand,and justification on the other. Excuse and justification are conceptually different: An excuseexists when there is something about a person’s mental state that makes him not evil, despitean evil deed. A justification exists when something embedded in the moral circumstances ofthe act shows that the act itself is not evil. An evil character is a person who willfully harmsothers because he or she does not care about them. What makes the person evil is not thedeed, but the intention.

Reznek applies these definitions with precision to the analysis of hypothetical situations,psychiatric diagnoses, and specific cases. He concludes that the only ethical excuses areignorance, compulsion, and automatism. These are moral conditions in which a good personcan do evil. The legitimate purpose of the insanity defense is to protect people of goodcharacter from punishment. Only evil characters deserve to be punished.

Reznek concludes that such judgments do not require the expertise of the psychiatric orlegal professional but can be competently made by the lay juror. But mental status is not soeasily assessed. Reznik accepts that there are varying degrees of insanity, but the law sets aminimum standard that all but the most disturbed are able to meet. The concept of diminishedcapacity, therefore, should be excluded from the law.

Reznik has provided a reassessment of the concepts of legal insanity and the disposition

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textof the insane. This book is an important contribution to enlightened philosophical anthro-

pology.

Reviewed by JJANET COLAIZZI, professor of history and philosophy, Saint Leo College,Tidewater Center VA 23604.


Evelyn L. Forget. The Social Economics of Jean-Baptiste Say: Markets and Virtue.Rou-tledge Studies in the History of Economics. London: Routledge, 1999. 311 pp. $65.00.ISBN 0-415-20308-2.

The search for social stability in France in the wake of the Terror forced French intel-lectuals to question government’s ability to reshape society in order to realize the ideals ofthe Revolution. Rather than lead to the Republic of Virtue, such intervention had only broughtcivil war and the bloodlust of the guillotine. Among the most important responses was thatassociated with a group of thinkers known as theideologues. Drawing on the sensationalistphilosophy of John Locke and E´ tienne Bonnet de Condillac, theideologuessearched to createa science of politics based on the physiological nature of human self-interest, one in whichutilitarian policies promoted the greater good by appealing to the desires of the majority. Awell-ordered body politic, they argued, relied on a feeling of mutual sympathy among indi-viduals inculcated throughmoral education under the tutelage of experts. Although not usuallyconsidered anideologue, the political economist and popularizer of Adam Smith in France,Jean-Baptiste Say, offered in his economic theories a program for organizing the means ofproduction and commercial springs of society that furthered this vision of a rationally orga-nized, nonauthoritarian society. Historically, of course, this vision was not realized. Instead,France came under the sway of Napole´on Bonaparte, whom Say reviled even though herepeatedly tried to enlist Say as a supporter.

Evelyn Forget’s fine book examines Say’s relationship with Enlightenment philosophyin general and the writings of theideologuesin particular, establishing beyond any doubtSay’s indebtedness to both. Where Say parted company from theideologues, however, wasin his ingrained distrust of excessive governmental intervention in people’s lives. In contrastto the almost technocratic impulse found, for example, in the writings of theideologueA.-L.-C. Destutt de Tracy, Say argued for the necessity of entrusting individuals with the powerto decide what was best for themselves and for society as a whole. In works such as theutopian essayOlbie (1800) and his later theoretical treatise, theCours Complet(1828–1829),Say offered a social economics that furthered theideologues’ pedagogical program all thewhile lessening the leading role that government assumed in it. Forget is certainly right topoint to the influence that British political economists had on Say, particularly Adam Smith,although here Say also stopped short of full agreement, especially as concerned Smith’s utterconfidence in spontaneous order. While Say generally agreed with Smith that individual self-interest should be unfettered, he quickly added that it should also be well informed. In histheory of value and understanding of the operation of the market, he did not assume thatindividuals naturally knew what was best for themselves. Say’s was a laissez-faire society

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of texttempered by ameliorative governmental policies that strove to reduce class and income dis-

parities by convincing individuals that it was in their best interest to pursue the self-interestof others. Although still mistrustful of political authorities, Say posited a liberalism thatpreserved an important role for government in promoting the public good. It was, in effect,to become “Big Teacher.”

Forget’s study situates Say’s contributions to early political science in both their propertheoretical and historical contexts. In the process, she certainly makes the case for his im-portance in the early history of continental liberalism as well as his role in spreading theinfluence of British contemporaries, such as David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. I do thinkthat she might have made more of Rousseau’s influence on Say, if only because he is citedso often inOlbie as a source of inspiration. As an added bonus, the study concludes withtranslations of Say’sOlbie, two essays by theideologuesTracy and Pierre-Louis Roederer,as well as a late-life retrospective onOlbieby Say. Well written and subtly argued, this bookcould profitably be assigned to students in any upper-level or graduate courses dealing withthe intellectual or economic history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Reviewed by MMICHAEL WOLFE, professor of history at Pennsylvania State University—Altoona Collge, Altoona PA 16601.


H. C. Erik Midelfort. A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany.Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1999. 438 pp. $55.00. ISBN 0-8047-3334-1.

In the last few decades many topics directly or indirectly related to mental illness havebeen thoroughly investigated, as evidenced by the number of solid publications by acade-micians from the fields of history and the social sciences. This has resulted in a disregard formany unproven cliche´s continuously repeated in the literature and in a better clarification ofmany unclear and erroneous points. Especially significant has been the research carried on inregard to England and France, the two countries which have been viewed as pioneers in therise of modern psychiatry.

At variance with their monarchic centralized regimes, Germany, divided into manylargely independent political entities, each one run by authoritarian rulers, has remained ratherimpervious to the dominant research trend. This goes especially for the Renaissance, marredby religious strife between Catholics and Protestants and by the complexity of different ad-ministrative, legal, and ecclesiastical systems.

It is no wonder that the so-called “age of anxiety” or “age of melancholy” has beenparticularly noticeable in Germany, resulting in considerable difficulty in establishing criteriato differentiate normal from abnormal aspects of the “Renaissance man” in that country.

Among the very few who have attempted to clarify psychological and psychopatholog-ical aspects presented in Renaissance Germany, at the individual and at the social level, isEric Midelfort, a historian at the University of Virginia. For a quarter of a century he hasparticularly investigated the field of witchcraft, beginning with his first valuable endeavor,which appeared in 1972. From then on he has continued his research, as evidenced by a

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textnumber of interesting papers on subjects related in one way or another on subjects pertinent

to mental illness, as well as in a monograph (Midelfort, 1994), all showing rigorous standardsof research.

In the present volume, Midelfort has attempted the ambitious plan of offering a com-prehensive view of madness in Germany from 1480 to 1620. As he himself acknowledgesthat there was then a rich variety of basic metaphors pertinent to irrationality, madness, andmental disorders, and that folly, possession, and melancholia constituted the three images ofmadness, in view of the vastness of this matter, he has clearly delineated the areas of hisinvestigation.

In the first section he has dealt with the popular image of madness, as represented in thecase of the suicidal painter Hugo van der Goes (1440?–1482), and the still obscure massepisodes of dancing mania, attributed to a variety of causes. At the bases of the image wasthe belief in the power of the devil, this strange counterpart of God, tempting, deceiving, andpowerful, but kept in check by divine will, and, on the human side, by exorcism and otherpractices. The several maps pinpointing the location of the areas of most frequent cases ofpossession clearly indicated that this phenomenon was on the rise in both Lutheran andCatholic areas in the late sixteenth century.

In the second section, devoted to Luther and Paracelsus, the preoccupation with sin anddevil was paramount, as indicated by Midelfort’s familiarity with Luther’s extensive literaryoutput. This great reformer did not deny the reality of insanity as a disease and the value ofsupportive and remedial treatment. Yet he attributed its occurrence to sin, resulting in the fallof human beings into unreason.

Likewise, the author is quite knowledgeable about the abstruse and esoteric writings ofParacelsus. He reports and discusses the various passages concerning madness scatteredthroughout his many writings. Midelfort advocates the view that Paracelsus shifted his mi-crocosmic concepts of human nature from a triadic (earthly, astral, and divine; or, body, spirit,and soul) to a diadic (body and soul) framework, in the attempt to explain and justify hiscontradictions concerning madness. Possibly, some readers may question this dual interpre-tation of Paracelsus’ approach to madness as overstretched.

The third section, on academic “psychiatry,” is, in the opinion of this reviewer, ratherrapidly sketched. The work pertinent to mental illness by several physicians is briefly men-tioned. This may be explainable in view, on the one side, of their lack of originality; or, onthe other side, on the extensive literature already available, as in the case of the divine RobertBurton. Credit is given to the Swiss physician Felix Platter (1536–1614) for his lively clinicalreports; but Midelfort overlooks Platter’s importance in formulating a new classification ofmental disorders, including some symptoms described under obsolete terms and roughlycorresponding to the modern concept of neuroses (in which he gained experience through hisprivate practice among affluent citizens of Basel), the first important nosological contributionto psychopathology.

In the following section, on witchcraft and the melancholic interpretation of the insanitydefense, the central personage is Johann Weyer. Midelfort shows considerable competencein dealing with the sources, influences, and insights of this great man who only recently hasbeen receiving proper recognition. The issue concerning the women accused of witchcraft asdeluded by the devil or affected by bodily dysfunction, or a combination of both, is practicallyinsoluble, and, therefore, a detailed discussion is avoided; yet Weyer’s inconsistencies inregard to the power of the devil are rightly pointed out. Aside from his sound judgment inhandling clinical matters, the author emphasizes the considerable value of Weyer’s legalstance.

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textIn essence, for Weyer, witchcraft was an impossible crime on various counts: the contract

between the devil and the gullible women was invalid, and the extranatural deeds attributedto them (such as attending the sabbat, causing calamities, and so forth) were absurd; thus thedeath penalty was unjustified.

Here Midelfort impresses as conversant with the medico-legal tradition—stemmingfrom Roman law—as represented from the Middle Ages on by a number of outstandingjurists. Among these latter stands out the medico-legal expert Paolo Zacchia (1584–1659),for whom the foundation of the insanity defense had to be based on the differentiation betweenmelancholia and furor: an acknowledgment of Weyer’s pioneering insistence that the role ofthe physician is essential in assessing the mental status of those accused of witchcraft. Thiswas the beginning of a trend followed from then on, competently discussed by Midelfort.

The last three sections of the book deal respectively with the image and social reality ofthe court fools (some of whom are described in detail); the pilgrimage of madmen in searchof reason to a number of well known religious locations (monasteries, shrines, and so forth),for which statistical data are offered; and a thorough description of two mental hospitals, oneunder Protestant, another under Catholic auspices (correlated by various tables), based onarchival research.

In essence, this book is a very significant contribution to a neglected and complex epochof the history of mental diseases. The author’s effort in pursuing research of the most rigoroustype on some basic areas pertinent to mental illness is encomiable, as evidenced by the listof primary sources painstakingly consulted and by the extensive bibliographical references.He has succeeded in clarifying a number of key issues in regard to the important topicsselected. All those interested in the history of madness in the Renaissance—academicians,clinicians, and others—should be grateful to Midelfort for his superb achievement.

REFERENCES

Midelfort, E. (1972). Witch hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684: The social and intellectual foundations.Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Midelfort, E. (1994). Mad princes in Renaissance Germany. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.

Reviewed by GEORGE MORA, research affiliate, section of the History of Medicine, YaleUniversity, New Haven CT 06520.


Else Frenkel-Brunswik. Studien zur autoritaren Personlichkeit: Ausgewahlte Schriften.(D. Paier, Ed.; B. F. Malle, Trans.). Graz–Wien: Nausner & Nausner, 1996. 328 pp.ISBN 3-901 402-04-7.

At mid-century, Else Frenkel-Brunswik (1908–1958) became famous as one of the fourauthors ofThe Authoritarian Personality, who had agreed to arrange their names in alpha-betical order. But if Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno had not, some time earlier, reduced thefirst half of his surname to the innocuous initial W., future book citations might have read“by Frenkel-Brunswik et al.” Instead, the usual attribution to “Adorno et al. (1950)” made

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textthe little-known Critical Theorist a major figure in social psychology. As it was, Frenkel-

Brunswik’s name, associated mainly with her concept of “intolerance of ambiguity,” disap-peared from view fairly quickly after her premature death.

Now, a number of her writings have been translated into German and published in bookform, introduced by a biography written by sociologist Dietmar Paier as part of an Austrianproject on “Wissenstransfer durch erzwungene Emigration” [knowledge transfer throughforced emigration].

Frenkel-Brunswik spent her adult life at two crossroads of ideas: first, in pre-Nazi Vi-enna, as a student of academic psychology and assistant to Karl and Charlotte Buehler whilealso exposed to the city’s other major intellectual currents, the Vienna Circle and psycho-analysis; subsequently, after her emigration, in Berkeley as a research associate in psychology,with tangential involvement with the Unity of Science movement, on the one hand, and theCritical Theorists, on the other. As the introduction states, Frenkel-Brunswik’s life storyexemplifies the trajectory of “scientifc emigrants,” not simply absorbing and assimilating tothe new context but demonstrating a “constructivist reorientation” that produced a novelsynthesis of substantive and methodological ideas brought from Vienna with state-of-the-artconceptions in her new homeland. In her career, she was less successful unfortunately,stalled—as the wife of Berkeley professor Egon Brunswik—at the level of research associateby the university’s anti-nepotism rule.

Considering American psychology of this period, I wonder, although Paier does notmention it, if her failure to produce any “hard-headed” experiments in addition to her obser-vational, clinical interview and questionnaire studies did not play some role in her diminishingreputation after the bloom had worn offThe Authoritarian Personality. But apparently theempirical methods she had learned when working on Charlotte Buehler’sLebenspsychologieprojects—a pioneering version of life span psychology—had not included experimentaltraining. Her writings presented in this book mention experiments only in passing. Insteadthey deal mostly with the interview and questionnaire material from theAuthoritarian Per-sonality research and her parallel study of social discrimination in children. Some of themdiscuss theoretical issues of political behavior and the problem of values in science, emergingfrom the Berkeley projects. Not surprisingly, the articles contain a fair amount of repetition.The other major theme involves Frenkel-Brunswik’s views of psychoanalysis, somewhatsceptical ones at first—not surprising in view of the Buehlers’ hostility to it. But later shedefended it against American operationism and justified psychoanalytic theorizing as at leastin part approximating the conditions of logical empiricism. To make Frenkel-Brunswik’swork accessible to the German-reading public, as part of the projected “Library of [Austrian]Emigrant Social Scientists,” is a commendable undertaking, and the well-documented bio-graphical information provided in the introduction should be of great value to historianseverywhere.

REFERENCE

Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. NewYork: Harper.

Reviewed by FRANZ SAMELSON, professor emeritus of psychology, Kansas StateUniversity,Manhattan KS 66506.

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Thomas F. Gieryn.Cultural Boundaries of Science.Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1999. $21.00 (paper). ISBN 0-226-29262-2.

Ronald N. Giere. Science Without Laws.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.$25.00 (paper). ISBN 0-226-29208-8 (cloth).

A sociologist and a philosopher, who are participants in the multidisciplinary field ofScience Studies, make their contributions to the Science Wars with these separate collectionsof essays. Gieryn’s volume is more directly related to the interests of readers of this journal,so I examine it first.

The line demarcating science from nonscience is not fixed, claims Gieryn, but is con-stantly negotiated by actors in a culture. The cognitive authority devolving on scientific claimsis not due to prior factors such as adherence to scientific method or the credentials of theresearchers. The line is constructed “downstream” by those who wish to use the claims or toreject them. Differentiating genuine science from other activities (religion, engineering,magic, foolishness) is a matter of constructing boundaries, of drawing a cultural map.

It is analytically presumptuous to think that people and organizations in society at largepossess an understanding of science fixed clearly by actual practices in the lab, or byscholarly tries at demarcation, or by idealized reminiscences. Epistemic authority isdecided downstream from all that, as claims float through layers of cartographic inter-pretations where credibility is attached or removed. (p. 27)

Just as science itself is engaged in drawing maps of a world out there, so too are scientistsengaged in drawing boundaries between genuine science and other cultural activities. All thistalk about maps reminds us that maps are drawn to serve a purpose. Maps are evaluated interms of how well they serve the purposes for which they were drawn in the first place. Thus,in cultural conflicts about the boundaries of science one should always ask whose interestsare served by drawing the line one place or another.

Gieryn attempts to ground his claims through five quite different historical episodes. Ofmost interest to readers of this journal is Chapter Two, “Congress DemarcatesNatural Scienceand Social Science (Twice),” where the question whether or not behavioral sciences aresciences falling under the National Science Foundation is answered (twice) in the politicalarena of Congress. Another illuminating study is the first chapter, illustrating how the nine-teenth century scientist-essayist John Tyndall simultaneously drew the line between scienceand religion on the grounds that science was practical, and between science and engineeringon the grounds that science was intellectually satisfying (as well as having practical conse-quences). Other chapters examine the “cold fusion” controversy originating from the Uni-versity of Utah in 1989, the competition for the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at theUniversity of Edinburgh in 1836 (where the science of Phrenology was a prominent issue),and finally, the composting practices of the agronomists Howard and Gabrielle Howard inthe early twentieth century, which blended traditional science with native practices.

In his epilogue Gieryn points out how the science wars are about constructing boundariesto decide who best represents science, practicing scientists or practitioners of science studies.Notice this is a second-order question. On the first level, scientists compete for the legitimacyof their representations of nature (or society). On this second level, different groups competefor the legitimacy of their representations of science in the world of culture or social activities.

202 BOOK REVIEWS


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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textGieryn’s volume is highly recommended to either observers or participants in theScience

Wars, or those who have become tired of the search for the defining characteristics of sci-ence—a search that has stretched from Francis Bacon and Rene´ Descartes through LogicalPositivism and Karl Popper to Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos.

Giere’sScience Without Lawsis a collection of essays grouped under three Perspectives:on science studies, on science, and on philosophy of science. There is a not unexpectedoverlapping and repetitiveness among the essays, and some are specific responses to otherauthors, so those unfamiliar with current literature in philosophy of science may have somedifficulty in appreciating the point of the essay. Still, those readers whose experience withphilosophy of science dates back to college days will find this a refreshing new approach,which Giere calls “Naturalized Philosophy of Science.”

Giere, too, uses the image of a map to characterize scientific representing. (Both Gierynand Giere were colleagues at Indiana a few years ago.) A map is neither true nor false; it isaccurate or useful for some specified purpose. Hence Giere claims that science does not somuch search for true laws but rather tries to devise useful maps or explanatory models of thephenomena at issue. That is to say, Giere rejects the representation of science as a collectionof theoretical statements connected to observation statements through some sort of logicalsystem. Incidentally, in Chapter Eleven, Giere traces the rise of philosophy of science as anacademic discipline in America. The brief history of this academic discipline helps one toappreciate the cultural situatedness of what has often appeared as the disinterested logicaldiscoveries of philosophers.

Giere still views the growth of science as the emergence of a consensus from individualdecision makers who decide on idiosyncratic satisficing principles. As a philosopher he isstill trying to find a unitary model accounting for scientific growth. Another criticism of thebook is that it betrays Giere’s beginnings as a physics student; physics appears to be theprimary source of examples. And, finally, I find too much emphasis on the search for expla-nations. Just surveying the activities of most scientists most of the time, I find them collectingfacts or making measurements. What is the process (is there only one) by which publishedfactual claims are accepted into the corpus of scientific knowledge?

As mentioned above, this is a good book for an introduction to a current post-Kuhnianphilosophy of science that utilizes some of the insights and tools of cognitive science.

Reviewed byMORTON L. SSCHAGRIN, professor of philosophy and history of scienceemeritusat SUNY College at Fredonia, Fredonia NY 14063.

How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics

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