Berger - Social Scientists For Social Justice - Making The Case Against Segregation PDF

Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(3), 299300 Summer 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).
DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10146 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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Thomas C. Dalton. Becoming John Dewey: Dilemmas of a Philosopher and Naturalist. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. 377 pp. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-25334082-9. Once upon a time, philosophical naturalism was a robust pan-discipline enterprise. Its advocates promoted the method of empirical science in an all-out battle for the new twentieth century against entrenched theological and conservative forces. In America, the battle started late but proved to be decisive. The early champions of naturalism, like Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and W. K. Clifford, were British; America had slumbered in idealistic dreams for an extra generation. Not until Deweys generation, born around the time of the Civil War and its aftermath, would naturalism nd its footing in academia. Ironically, the acknowledged leader of American naturalism started out as a Hegelian idealist. John Deweys respect for the natural and social sciences took him places where idealism could not go, but he never forgot its snares and seductions. Even while the succeeding generation raised the banner of realism during the rst two decades of the twentieth century, Dewey saw well how this realistic movement was still trapped in dualistic Cartesian premises about consciousness, selfawareness, and agency. Deweys naturalism went deeper and spread its roots wider than any other of that era, precisely because his philosophy worked in tandem with, and took much inspiration from, many of the major developments in the social and biological sciences. This once-upon-a-time story has a sad ending: the last 50 years forgot Dewey and abandoned robust naturalism. Philosophy settled for a thin eliminative materialism and individualistic epistemology that largely ignored the sciences, mitigated only by a recent urry of interest in cognitive science. The story of the origin and maturation of Deweys philosophical naturalism deserves to be told, and not just because of Deweys deserved stature. The tale would teach us how philosophy could be again how philosophy could rejoin cooperative efforts with the sciences. No scholar, until now, has attempted an account of Dewey so that such cooperative achievements are displayed in due proportion. Dalton has accomplished a tremendous feat of research and exposition, indebting not just scholars of pragmatism but also those intrigued by interrelationships among philosophy, behavioral psychology, neuropsychology, physics, sociology, education, and politics. Utilizing the vast resources of the Center for Dewey Studies and its editions of his writings and correspondence, Dalton painstakingly uncovers the numerous connections Dewey made with scholars across physics, psychology, neurology, and education, including Niels Bohr, Myrtle McGraw, Lawrence Frank, and many more scientists who could supply Dewey with news of cutting-edge research. But Dewey was no latecomer to science. Daltons tale starts with Deweys early years advancing functional psychology with James Angell and George Mead. Dewey grasped the many dilemmas confronting a naturalistic philosophy, chief among them the most intractable problems of human reason and consciousness. By forging strong supports between the study of the brains development and functioning and the study of the psychological processes essential to intelligence, Dewey constructed a viable pragmatism opposed to both dualism and reductionism. Humans are neither rational spirits trapped in material bodies nor mechanical automatons following out preprogrammed instructions: we are adaptive manipulators of our environment who improve our problem solving skills to advance culture. That this view is no surprise to scholars in the 299
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behavioral sciences today only highlights Deweys impact; yet his revolutionary synthesis of so many elds can still awe and inspire further generations. Daltons work stands on its own as an comprehensive introduction to Dewey, the pragmatism he championed, and the robust naturalism that once ourished in America. This book is a marvelous accomplishment in intellectual history, destined to be required reading for anyone investigating the rise and destiny of naturalism. Reviewed by JOHN R. SHOOK, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(3), 300301 Summer 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10135 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Deborah Blum. Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002. 336 pp. $26.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-7382-0278-9. This book is a cross between a biography of Harry F. Harlow and a history of the study of love in experimental psychology. Blums title stems from frequent errors on mail arriving at the Harlows laboratory address: 600 N. Park. Harlow was the University of Wisconsin comparative psychologist who is best known for his research on the affectional systems and the effects of isolation on social interactions in rhesus monkeys. He was a complex man who is regarded both positively, for his impact on comparative psychology and childcare in humans, and negatively, by many who regard his research as inhumane. Harlows tendencies toward colorful language and provocation of those with whom he disagreed made him especially controversial. Blum admits to having written a selective, rather than a comprehensive, biography of Harlow. She focuses on his work on mother-young affection while downplaying Harlows important work in the comparative psychology of learning and virtually ignoring his studies in physiological psychology. Error-factor theory is neglected. Her treatment of Harlow is generally accurate and insightful; hers is a sensitive, and sometimes moving, portrayal of this complex man. Blum follows Harlow from his origins in southeastern Iowa through his Stanford education to the Wisconsin campus. She deftly interweaves Harlows complex personal life with his research and shows how interrelated the two were. This comes to a climax in the brilliant and moving Chapter 8 where Harlows research on the most severe aspects of isolation in monkeys are interwoven with his wifes death and his own depression. The book is beautifully written, with prose that ows like that of few academicians. Thus, Lake Mendota dances with wind-rufed wavelets of light (p. 61). However, seemingly because Harlow often used terms that were taboo in the science of his time, Blum takes license to write so loosely as to be questionable in our own time. We nd a discussion of a survival instinct (p. 195) and learn of a study of whether food or water was more likely to inspire a rat to escape (p. 20). Rats not given early handling seemed perpetually tuned to the anxiety channel in their brains. The early-stressed rats, by contrast, seemed to be listening in on the easy rock channel (p. 181). Blum tries to place Harlows research in its proper context but she is often less successful as she strays from Harlow per se into wider horizons. For example, John B. Watson did not
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say that babies feel only fear, rage, and love, but rather that they were the three unlearned behavioral reactions (cf. p. 43). In her discussion of Watson, Thorndike, and Pavlov, Blum fails to distinguish between the procedures used in classical and instrumental conditioning. Konrad Lorenzs Nobel Prize was not awarded for his work with imprinting (cf. p. 168). It is not true that Pavlov refused to speculate about what might be happening in the dogs brains (p. 71). As a result of focusing on one scientist, Blum often portrays him as the lone knight battling the bastions of ignorance. She fails to recognize that there were others beyond the few whom she acknowledges. Others during the 1930s advocated cognitive approaches in animal learning. Researchers at the Yerkes Laboratories studied contact comfort, learning to learn, and the sometimes deleterious effects of food motivation on problem solving before or at about the same time as Harlow. Harlows genius was not so much in being there rst as in elaborating on the basic phenomena, nding meaning in the results, and in presenting them in ways that took on major signicance. Overall, the book reads well, has an excellent coherence, and tells a balanced and sensitive story of much of Harlows troubled life and work. The author did not set out to write a historical treatise or comprehensive biography but succeeded in the task she set in providing a highly accessible telling of the story of the man and his work. Reviewed by DONALD A. DEWSBURY, Professor of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611.
David Wright. Mental Disability in Victorian England: The Earlswood Asylum 1847 1901. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. 244 pp. $65.00 (cloth) ISBN 0-19-924639-4. Mathew Thomson. The Problem of Mental Deciency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain c.1870 1959. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 351 pp. $98.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-19-820692-4. These two recent volumes in the Oxford Historical Monographs series provide complementary evidence that the history of intellectual disability in England, until recently a marginal area of study, has reached an impressive new state of development. Both of these works thoroughly demolish widely believed, yet overly simplistic, views about institutions and social policy. David Wright shows that nineteenth-century British asylums for persons identied as idiots were not custodial dumping grounds run by untrained, incompetent, and neglectful staff. Focusing primarily on the twentieth century, Matthew Thomson demonstrates that the development of state policy toward the intellectually disabled in Britain, even during the period of in which they were deemed a menace, was the outcome of complex political dynamics. He shows that the role of the eugenics movement has been greatly exaggerated in earlier accounts. Wrights is a fascinating and wholly convincing narrative from below of Earlswood, the rst idiot asylum in the British Isles. His analysis was made possible through the
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remarkable construction of a database linking the Earlswood admission registry for over 2,000 patients and Earlswood staff and donor databases, with census records from England and Wales. He was thus able to study the relationship between family context and the decision to place a family member in the asylum, as well as the social standing and motivations of donors to the institution and those who worked there. Wright found that a continuum of care options for the mentally disabled existed in nineteenth-century Britain, the most important of which was the nuclear family, the rise of asylums notwithstanding. Families did not permanently dump unwanted members in institutions, but strategically used them as resources to cope with periods of family crisis. Earlswood patients, drawn from all British social classes were usually elected to Earlswood for only ve-year periods of connement after which they frequently returned to the community. Work in asylums, rather than being employment of last resort, provided a career ladder for lower-class British women. They advanced, through training and experience, from entrylevel work as maids, to become attendants and nally nurses. Contrary to what has been written earlier, the turnover rate at institutions was not due to low status and pay for these positions, but to a competitive market for the skilled workers trained there. In contrast to Wrights work, Thomsons comprehensive, seminal study of the politics of mental deciency legislation in England and Wales is a multilevel analysis that is primarily concerned with the period between the passage of the Mental Deciency Act of 1913 and the National Health Service Act in 1946. Thomson focuses not only on the political role of parliamentary leaders, parties, and central and local governments, but also on charitable and professional organizations. All of these interacted to develop a policy of segregation for the mentally disabled that would not have been tolerated for any other group. Thomson refutes those who have described this as the antidemocratic victory of an emerging eugenic movement aimed at expanding social control over those it deemed undesirable and unt. In fact, the eugenics movement had so little inuence on the development of policy that its linkage to various positions was often a hindrance rather than benet in the process of coalescing support. How then to explain the adoption of harsh, authoritarian, mental-deciency policy? Thomson moves the focus away from the rise of the eugenics movement to, instead, Englands adjustment to democracy occasioned by the expansion of suffrage during the same period. The reduction of the rights of the mentally disabled was paradoxically related to the intensity of the contemporary focus on the entitlements of citizens in a democracy. Because the mentally disabled were seen as incapable of properly exercising their democratic rights, it became acceptable state policy in the welfare state to exclude and segregate them. In this way, the establishment of a clear boundary between democratically entitled citizens and intellectually disabled others served to ground some of the electricity generated in a patriarchal and class-conscious society when voting rights were granted to women and the lower classes. In a similar manner, nineteenth-century degenerationists exclusion of the same mentally defective victims (as well as of nonwhite races) from the corpus of civilized humanity had served to alleviate anxieties raised by the news that human beings were part of the animal kingdom. Reviewed by STEVEN A. GELB, Professor of Education, University of San Diego, San Diego, CA 92110.
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W. B. Turner. A Genealogy of Queer Theory. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000. 256 pp. $22.95 (paper). ISBN 1-56639-786-3. Turner, a historian of ideas, describes the emergence and contemporary relevance of queer theory. He invites the reader to think about this body of work as oppositional. Queer theorists are concerned primarily with elaborating the problems with existing intellectual and political modes, especially by studying how those modes function, while leaving as open as possible the question of what should replace them (p. 10). Drawing on postmodern philosophy in an explanation of queer theory, Turners work presents a historical analysis of the variability of gender and sexuality. The author articulates the political imperative behind a queer reading of identity consistently throughout the book. Using the historical work of Halperin as one example, Turner argues, when nineteenth-century psychologists dened the term homosexuality, they had the capacity, on the basis of that denition, to inuence their patients lives in profound and often unpleasant (not to say violent) ways (p. 76). Sexuality has historically provided the justication for the practices of creating subjects and managing populations. In response to this history, queer theory represents a set of ideas and practices that have been used toward queer liberatory ends. Grounded in the work of Michel Foucault, the rst chapter of the book exposes the magnitude of Foucaults inuence on the development of queer theory. Indeed, the form of inquiry used in Turners work, genealogy, is a Foucaultian method dened as a historicized reading of categories that begins with the refusal to accept the naturalness or inevitability of those categories (p. 32). Genealogies are considered antiscientic to the extent that, while not being opposed to scientic methods, contents, or concepts per se, they are fundamentally working against the centralization of powers within institutions and against the functions of scientic discourses in our society. The project of queer theory has been inuenced by Foucaults critique of a blind trust in rationality. Foucault rejected the idea that, through the acquisition of information, the true story of oppressed people could be told, and therefore contribute to their emancipation. In his view, this acquisition of information was a process through which people became more bound to static notions of identity. Turner, himself a gay male historian, offers an overview of the history of sexuality as told by gay male historians. In this second chapter, two key ideas are described as having been of particular importance: the debate over essentialism versus social constructionism as theoretical frameworks for understanding sexuality; and the search for the beginning of gay male identity. What queer theory has contributed to this domain of inquiry has been the idea of a radical historical variability in the categories of sexual identity. The relationship between feminist theory and queer theory is discussed in the third chapter. In line with queer theory, feminist scholarship has illustrated that no single theory or set of theories can explain all forms of oppression. Teresa de Lauretis found in lesbian desire and psychoanalytic theory possibilities for female agency, both social and sexual, that no other theory in our culture has been able to articulate. Eve Sedgwick described particular ways of reading and interpreting that have been crucial for queer survival her concept of reading against the grain has been central to queer theory. Judith Butler looked to the processes that helped constitute experience rather than experience itself as a resource for critical theo-
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rizing. Lauretis, Sedgwick, and Butler are the theorists that have been most associated with the development of queer theory. Chapters four and ve present the works of particular queer theorists. Their use of language as their point of entry into altering/broadening experience is explained by the suggestion that we are able to describe/understand experience only through language. Chapter ve is an example of reading against the grain, of reading historical and legal texts as literary forms. Describing a particular court case related to sodomy in Georgia, Turner argues, the scholarly production that resulted from the appearance of a Georgia sodomite in King Henrys court reected a fascination with representations of sexuality and the paranoia that those representations can produce (p. 148). Turner grounds his work in linguistic and theoretical abstractions on the one hand, and in practical political analyses of current events (e.g., hate crimes) on the other. He acknowledges the tensions involved in working in these realms by suggesting that, queer theorists themselves worry that queer theory may become little more than self-deluded, apolitical wordsmithery (p. 141). Queerness is a failure to live up to expectations; it is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant (p. 134). As such, Turners book seemed to have been written using a queer theoretical approach. The language was at times difcult to access from outside the canons of queer theory. The mixture of current events described in a journalistic style and in-depth analyses of the subtleties various authors have contributed to queer theory, was both unexpected and unusual. Reviewed by STEPHANIE AUSTIN, History and Theory of Psychology Programme, York University, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3.
John P. Jackson, Jr. Social Scientists for Social Justice: Making the Case Against Segregation. New York and London: New York University Press, 2001. 291 pp. $40.00. ISBN 0-8147-4266-1 John Jacksons work breaks new ground with regard to the development of the plaintiffs use of a damage argument in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the genesis of the Social Science Brief, legal conventions and the criticism of social science witnesses, conditions of effectiveness of social science witnesses, and the tensions between social scientists and advocates within an advocacy organization. The book is, in my view, important to all social scientists and historians interested in the Brown decision, and/or interested in the role of social scientists as advocates in legal settings. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDEF) did not make a full use of a damage argument until the cases that were united in Brown. Jackson contributes the nest discussion I have seen of the evolution of the Funds arguments in the 1946 1951 period, the process of its partial adoption of a damage argument, and its use of the argument through the various stages of the cases united in Brown. Jackson has done extensive archival work, which illuminates the drafting and nal ver-
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sion of the Social Science Statement on The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation that the LDEF submitted as an appendix to their briefs. He shows that, in the course of revision, it became less an overt advocacy statement and more an objective statement of social science ndings. Jackson has a ne understanding of how trials work, and what the rules and expectations of expert witnesses are. The frequent criticism that the social scientists went beyond the data is, he shows, on the one hand a caricature of what they actually said, and, on the other, invalid, because the legal practice is that an expert witness is not only permitted but encouraged to state a professional opinion. Jackson believes that social scientists can only be effective in legal situations through the use of a posture and a language that is objective and not moralistic. Social scientists may wish to act in this way anyway, in order to maintain their standing as scientists with their colleagues. But, he argues, it is also necessary in order for them to be effective in the legal setting. Jackson surveys much of the criticism of the Brown decision and the role played by social scientists in it, both immediately after Brown and more recently. He shows, with great care and insight, that they do not hold. He has also studied in detail the vicissitudes of the attempt of social scientists to work within the American Jewish Congress through the Commission on Community Interrelations (CCI). He shows that the timing demands of an advocacy organization for swift research results conict with the much slower pace of most social science research. Eventually, most of the social psychologists left CCI. I do have some concerns about, and disagreements with, the book. Jacksons historical work is marred by the tendency to take the work of one or two people and reify it as the work of psychology or social science. Desirous of being able to claim that his work exemplies the war and postwar developments of signicant portions of social psychology, or even social science, Jackson is unable to distinguish, for example, between the idiosyncratic or marginal efforts of an Alfred McClung Lee or a Kenneth Clark in studying race riots during World War II, and the main thrust of the majority of social scientists working in the areas of prejudice and race relations. Desiring to come to broad conclusions, Jackson sometimes feels able to dene historical necessities, where I see only different people working in different ways and towards different goals. Jackson argues that when social scientists rejected anthropological/biological racism and adopted a cultural approach to issues of racial antagonism, psychologists (as opposed to some sociologists) then argued that racial antagonism represented an irrational psychological prejudice. Having dened the issue as prejudice, psychologists were then required, he believes, to show how this prejudice was learned, and how people then came to their racial identities. Thus Jackson wants to dene the work of Mamie and Kenneth Clark, and a very few others, on how African-American children develop their racial identities and relate to whiteness, as the necessary action of social science as a whole. He does not notice, therefore, how little actual work there was on this topic. The vast bulk of psychological research on race prejudice and the alleviation of racial prejudice was focused, rather, on the issue of the contact hypothesis: that racial contact in situations of equal status interaction on a problem of common interest would produce an alleviation of racial prejudice. Finally, I wish that Jackson had placed social scientists move towards a more objective stance in the period 1950 1955 within the context of the developing Cold War and antiCommunist Congressional and FBI efforts. He notes that, in the late 1940s, psychologists were loud in claiming their desire to be social engineers, but by the mid-1950s they were
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downplaying such rhetoric and seeking recourse in their objectivity. While he quotes a Saturday Evening Post editorial praising the Brown decision but faulting the social scientists for their socialist tendencies, he makes nothing of the signicance of such a charge and how social scientists responded to it. This was a time when the FBI objected to both Ralph Bunche and Otto Klineberg being granted passports on the grounds of their politics. Reviewed by STEPHEN D. BERGER, Professor of Human Services, Springeld College, Manchester, NH 03101-1151. The author comments: I thank Professor Berger for his careful and thoughtful review of my work. While I am gratied that he nds strengths in the book, he does nd three faults. First, he believes I move too easily from a few idiosyncratic or marginal gures such as Alfred McClung Lee to claims about the social scientic community as a whole. On the contrary, I show that the ideas that were used by social scientists in the Brown decision were reected in such mainstream works as Gordon Allports The Nature of Prejudice (1954) and Gunnar Myrdals An American Dilemma (1944). These ideas were hardly idiosyncratic or marginal. Second, Berger writes that I claim that there was a historical necessity to the scientic turn toward the study of race prejudice. I nd no such claim in the book and I grant that the turn to the study of race prejudice was a contingent effect of the rejection of racial essentialism. However, granting the contingency of this event does not mean that it did not occur in the manner I described. I will leave to readers to judge if I claim that this was a necessity as Berger claims I do. Third, Berger wishes I had placed social scientists activities more rmly in their Cold War context. I agree with Berger that such a discussion would have added important insights and, if I could do it all over again, I would take this very sound advice. JOHN P. JACKSON, Jr., Department of Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder CO, 80309-0270.
John H. Zammito. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 576 pp. $68.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-97858-3. $29.00 (paper). ISBN: 0-226-97859-1. Andrew Zimmerman. Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 364 pp. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN: 0-226-98341-2. $25.00 (paper). ISBN: 0-226-98342-0. Despite the impressive growth of scholarship in the history of anthropology during recent years, the contribution and place of Germans in anthropological discourse has often been
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obscured by the dominance of the Anglo-American tradition. The two works reviewed here recover the complexity of German anthropological thought in its own right, vastly deepening our understanding of the forces that shaped German anthropology in two distinct eras. In the process, the authors provide two competing narratives about the origins of anthropology in Germany. John Zammitos innovative study locates the disciplinary calving of anthropology from philosophy in Germanys late enlightenment. The creation of a new disciplinary consciousness occurred, according to Zammito, in the relationship and eventual split between Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried von Herder. In the earliest stages of its formulation in the late eighteenth century, anthropology represented the crystallization of intellectual impulses directed against the speculative metaphysics of the academy and toward the empirical observation of humankind. Zammitos main argument is that the precritical Kant of the 1760s was deeply inuential in the emergence of anthropology as a discourse, but as it was reformulated and channeled through his student, Herder. Through Kants courses and early writings, Herder absorbed his teachers interest in a metaphysical science of man based on experience and observation. In the 1770s, as he embarked on his monumental critical philosophy, Kant rejected this earlier direction and came into conict with his former student. Herders mature vision of anthropology as an a posteriori empirical science of human nature was unappealing to the Kant of the critical period, but Zammito nds the roots of those very ideas in Kants own classes and writings of the 1760s. The author adroitly places the precritical Kant in context by charting the inuence of both Ko nigsberg social life and Enlightenment thought on the young philosopher. Using Herders lecture notes and other previously unmined sources, the author makes a circumstantial but convincing case that Kant was a proponent, rather than an enemy, of Popularphilosophie, the attempt in the 1760s to reorient philosophy away from metaphysics and toward wider ethical and sociopolitical engagement. Zammito characterizes this period in Kants life as one of experimentation with new forms of identity and . . . ultimate disappointment with them (p. 84). Contradicting the received image of Kant as a dull impersonality, this account presents readers with an altogether different Kant, the gallant Magister of the early 1760s who enjoyed the company of women and socialized until he ventured home so drunk that he could not nd his way to the street where he lived (p. 101). Engaged in society and desirous of a philosophy of the world, this early Kant took a number of steps in his teaching and early works toward constituting a down-to-earth empirical philosophy of humankind a kind of anthropology with an emphasis on experience and observation. Kants interest in anthropology did not last. As he rededicated himself to academic philosophy after his critical turn in the 1770s, Kant sought to subordinate the emerging discipline to metaphysics. Herder, however, continued to take inspiration from Kants earlier example. In a wildly ambitious move, Herder followed through on the epistemological liberalization presaged by Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers by constructing anthropology as a popular, empirical science of human nature, a natural history of peoples that sought to explain the totality of human experience. This crucial breakthrough receives only one tantalizing chapter in Zammitos narrative. Ultimately, this book is about Kant, despite the centrality of Herders ideas to the overall argument. What emerges from Zammitos account is a compelling rereading of the precritical Kant as a dissident and even a transformer (p. 5) and a version of Herder as the father of the modern social sciences, a vastly more inuential and creative eighteenth-century gure than previously acknowledged. As a history of philosophy, this book is a major contribution, masterful in its breadth and power of argument. It is perhaps little wonder that, for the historian
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of anthropology, however, it disappoints in small ways. Zammito naturally focuses on philosophical questions in his account, but his emphasis means that the ideas considered foundational and controversial in modern anthropology, such as Herders supposedly relativistic notion of culture (Volksgeist), receive comparatively little attention. What Zammito demonstrates convincingly is that despite the eventual victory of Kants critical philosophy in the German Enlightenment, the popular philosophy of the late eighteenth century had a lasting impact in constituting the social sciences in Germany. While Zammito addresses the earliest glimmerings of German anthropological discourse, Andrew Zimmermans provocative book examines the contours of German anthropology in the late nineteenth century, the heyday of the new imperialism. Zimmerman questions the historiographical trend, of which Zammito is part, that locates the origins of anthropology in the tradition of German humanism stretching back to Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Instead, he argues that the anthropology of imperial Germany emerged as a deliberate rebuke to humanist understandings of the world and offered a consciously anti-humanist form of knowledge in its place. The humanist approach that dominated the German academy in the nineteenth century was based on the analysis of canonical texts as a means of studying the human self, a category implicitly understood as European. Zimmerman argues that as imperial contacts intensied in the late nineteenth century, the Eurocentric focus of the German humanities became increasingly difcult to justify. The author maintains that into this crisis of humanism stepped anthropologists, who claimed to offer a superior alternative: an objective, empirical approach to humanity that incorporated non-Europeans, drew on the power of natural science, and confronted the elitism of the humanities. In Zimmermans account, anthropological anti-humanism was mainly a reaction against the reigning historicism of the academy in the tradition of Ranke and Hegel. By seeking to apply natural scientic methods to the questions of the humanities, anthropologists sought to avoid the subjectivity of humanist historical narratives. Absolutely central to the rejection of humanism, Zimmerman argues, was the idea that anthropology should focus not on cultured peoples (Kulturvo lker) like Europeans, but rather on so-called natural peoples or Naturvo lker, human groups supposedly lacking in history and culture. In these peoples, scientists believed that they could apprehend human nature more directly, unobscured by the masks of culture and the complications of historical development (p. 3). According to Zimmerman, anthropologists like Adolf Bastian and Rudolf Virchow thus considered the objects and bodies, rather than the languages or cultural practices, of natural peoples as the objective sources of data for a new, anti-humanist science of humankind. Bastian purposely eschewed narrative in his writings and museum work, counting on ethnographic objects to speak for themselves within his freshly built Berlin Ethnological Museum. Similarly, the skull became the quintessential anthropological object, a physical artifact unsullied by culture or history that scientists analyzed using methods like measurement that differed fundamentally from the humanities. In Zimmermans view, clear lines of continuity connect the antihumanist practices and ideologies of late-nineteenth-century German anthropology to the racial science of the Nazi period. The author is at his best when exploring the complex ways in which anthropology interacted with imperialism and mass culture, wider contexts that other historians have ignored or conceived in narrow terms. Unlike the solitary humanist in his library, anthropologists like Virchow and Felix von Luschan often found the subjects for their biological and ethnological inquiries in the popular spectacles of the urban metropolis, particularly the traveling freak shows and ethnographic performances (or Vo lkerschauen) that passed through Berlin. Zimmerman persuasively argues that the result was a democratization of the sources and loca-
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tions of scientic knowledge (p. 4). In the process, however, the performers in ethnographic displays often disrupted the very categories and assumptions upon which anthropologists depended, either by actively refusing to be represented in traditional dress or by insisting on their status as diplomatic emissaries from their peoples. Zimmerman also demonstrates how the artifacts and body parts that supposedly spoke for themselves as evidence of ahistorical, natural humans were actually enmeshed in the global political economy and the history of imperialist expansion, since they reached anthropologists as the result of imperial wars, colonial exchange, and the coercion of the German authorities. The book renders a convincing portrait of German imperial anthropology as the product of colonial interaction, as an enterprise containing voices of both colonizer and colonized (p. 8). Zimmermans book will surely take its place as a fundamental work in the eld. His innovative rereading of German anthropology though the lens of anti-humanism is an entirely new contribution with intriguing implications. The argument, however, is not without its aws. One central problem is that the author tends to oversimplify the categories of natural and cultured peoples to suit his needs. In Bastians formulation, Naturvo lker were not fundamentally lacking in history, but rather human groups that did not possess a written or recorded history. Moreover, Zimmerman tends toward teleology. He nds the self-conscious liberalism of German anthropology only in the organizational structure of the discipline rather than in the actual content of the science itself. This view ignores the rejection of racial hierarchies by Virchow and his contemporaries, their similar disavowal of Germanic and Aryan racial theories, and the continued (if often contradictory) insistence of anthropologists on the unity of humankind. It is important to acknowledge that Rudolf Virchows anthropology of the 1870s differed in fundamental ways from the science of a Nazi anthropologist like Eugen Fischer. Nevertheless, this book will take its place alongside Zammitos as a major contribution in the history of German anthropology. Reviewed by ANDREW EVANS, Visiting Assistant Professor of History, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY 12561.
Myles W. Jackson. Spectrum of Belief: Joseph von Fraunhofer and the Craft of Precision Optics. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2000. x 284 pp. $35.00 (paper). ISBN 0-262-10084-3. One of the comparatively neglected areas in modern history of science is the development of materials and how this in turn affected the practice of science. Questions such as what sort of wires and batteries did Michael Faraday use, and how did changes in metal technology allow the steam engine to be improved on are only just beginning to impinge on the consciousness of historians. So far as optical glass is concerned, Jacksons book excellently lls this gap. Optical glass is used in a wide range of products and occupations ranging from telescopes (astronomy and the military), microscopes (biology), binoculars (the military and ornithologists), Fresnel lenses (lighthouses), spectacles (almost everyone eventually) and so on. Thus the supply of
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good quality optical glass, preferably on a large scale, is important to a number of key communities within any industrial society for industrial, trade, scientic, and strategic purposes, to name but four. The problem, however, is that the manufacture of high-quality optical glass is exceedingly difcult, requiring personnel highly skilled in a number of techniques. Jackson tells how a method of producing such glass was developed by the Swiss bell-maker Pierre Guinand and perfected by the Bavarian instrument maker Joseph Fraunhofer in the early nineteenth century at the Optical Institute in Benedicktbeuern a recently secularized monastery. In what might have been a weak argument, Jackson makes a convincing case that this theological architectural space, together with the employment of former monks in the Institute, was a crucial factor in Fraunhofers success in manufacturing optical glass. Fraunhofers emulation of Benedictine ideology extended to delimiting very clearly what was private knowledge and what could be made freely available. Thus when John Herschel visited in 1824, Fraunhofer was quite happy to show him how the dark lines of the solar spectrum that he had discovered inter alia could be used to calibrate lenses, but refused to let Herschel have access to the glass house on which he commented, it is a pity that he makes a secret of his glass-making (p. 125). The British, and to a lesser degree the French, responses to this secrecy forms a major part of Jacksons analysis as he demonstrates clearly that there was more to glass making than could be communicated by language. As he admits, even with access to Fraunhofers notes, the historian today cannot reconstruct many of Fraunhofers processes. The existence of such tacit knowledge was not recognised in the early nineteenth century and Fraunhofers secrecy certainly offended Herschels scientic ideology. The chief British reaction to Fraunhofers work was the establishment, at the suggestion of Humphry Davy (whose role Jackson otherwise ignores), of a joint committee of the Royal Society and Board of Longitude to reverse engineer Fraunhofers glass. The ultimate failure to duplicate Fraunhofers work was explained away by some of the main protagonists Herschel, Charles Babbage, David Brewster in terms of their views on the nature of science. However, the person on whom the bulk of the British work fell was Faraday. Unlike the others, he changed his mind about the practicality of the project. Originally he agreed that it should be possible to reproduce Fraunhofers glass, but after working much of the latter half of the 1820s on the project, he came to the conclusion that to do this successfully would require artisanal knowledge that was probably uncommunicable. What is especially interesting, and what Jackson does not really do full justice to, is to recollect that Faraday was the son of a blacksmith and had himself served a seven-year apprenticeship as a book binder, so he would have been fully aware of what constituted artisanal knowledge. Indeed, he probably began by thinking that he was tackling a scientic problem, but concluded that it was in fact an artisanal one. In Jacksons discussion of Faradays work, there are two serious misprints: on p. 160, in a quotation, waved should be named; and note 70 on p. 250 refers to the nonexistent Royal Science Museum rather than the Royal Institution which holds the samples of Faradays glass discussed there. The book closes with a fascinating discussion of how Fraunhofers reputation was deployed in Germany in the late nineteenth century to secure state funding for science, especially for the making of glass. This story is an excellent anecdote to progressivist accounts of science. In this example, at least, we have a case where scientic knowledge regressed and arguably it was not until the twentieth century that it became possible, once again, to manufacture glass of Fraunhofers quality and, as Jackson reminds us, even today this is not simply formulaic.
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In conclusion, Jacksons book represents contemporary history of science at its best, writing clearly and engagingly about an important, yet understudied, topic, drawing on modern historiographical insights to show how much there is learn about the work of even well known gures. Reviewed by FRANK A. J. L. JAMES, Reader in History of Science, Royal Institution, London, W1S 4BS England.
Michael Hagner (Ed.). Ecce Cortex: Beitra ge zur Geschichte des modernen Gehirns [Contributions to the history of the modern brain]. Go ttingen: Wallenstein Verlag, 1999. 352 pp. 24.00 (paper). ISBN 3-89244-360-2. Upon reading Ecce Cortex, I was reminded of a performance by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra playing a concert by the modern composer Luigi Nono. With this performance, the orchestra was spread out in Berlins concert hall, the Philharmonie, with the audience surrounding the stage on all sides. In addition to this unusual conguration of the concert hall itself, Nonos compositional style divided the orchestra into small groups, which were distributed throughout the hall. I vividly remember one group of musicians percussion, strings, and brass positioned in a space close to my seat in the upper ranks. During the performance my gaze traveled with the sound pattern, as it moved through the concert hall, at various times involving my group of musicians. Reading the edited volume, Ecce Cortex, mirrored this concert experience, in that it invoked the same sense of being a continual traveler through a contained space, here, the modern brain. At various times, the Contributions to the History of the Modern Brain, the volumes subtitle, centrally involved issues in the history of psychology and cognitive science, my academic home; at other times, philosophy, anthropology, literary studies, psychoanalysis, the history of medicine, psychiatry, and neuroscience played their parts. In the editors words (and in my translation from the German text), the brain and the cortex, in particular, was the ideal organ, in which cultural and symbolic values could be inscribed (p. 17). A contained space but not bounded by the skull, the modern brain, as a body of resonance, propagated the modern melodies called reason and drives, morality and hedonism, autonomy and automatism, and progression and degeneration (p. 17). From this musical analogy, I read a question of daring scope, namely: what place does the brain, as a research object, assume in modernity and its representations of the human condition by the sciences, the arts, and philosophy? The presented answers were intellectually engaging and in some instances did not fail to strike an emotional chord with me, as when Doris Kaufmann in her contribution detailed the eugenics-like interpretation of war-related neuroses in and after WWI. Programmatically, the volume intends to not only speak to those with an eye on culture but, more generally, to support the thesis that the cultural history of the modern brain carries much greater signicance for the understanding of recent developments in the behavioral and brain sciences than is currently appreciated. In this way, the project Ecce Cortex is offering its intended audience opportunities to listen in a novel, differing fashion.
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Listening to Nonos composition this one evening in the Philharmonie in Berlin, still stands out for me as model for such opportunity and also its demand. Of the 11 chapters in this volume, three address developments in the second half of the twentieth century in cognitive science (Simon Shaffer), in philosophy (Henning Schmidgen), and in anthropology and linguistics (J. Andrew Mendelsohn). The remaining chapters detail developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the notable exception of Helmut Mueller-Sievers chapter on Georg Bu chner. Bu chner, the German playwright, scientist, and revolutionary, was compelled to move the study of the anatomy of the brain and of the human condition beyond the distinction of description and interpretation. From chapter one on Georg Bu chners rhetoric to chapter eleven on Gilles Deleuzes philosophy (by Schmidgen), this volume resounds the modern brain, from the evidently inspiring sounds of Chopins music (in a chapter by Sven Dierig) to the silent but vibrant world of microorganisms (in a chapter by Cornelius Borck). I hope for additional opportunities to listen in. Reviewed by ELKE KURZ-MILCKE, Research Scientist, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280.
C. Hartnack. Psychoanalysis in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001. 252 pp. $35.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-19-564542-1. Psychoanalysis in Colonial India is a rich and complicated volume that is at the same time thought provoking, awed, and problematic. A strength of the volume lies in the way in which the author has assembled the characters for the story. Owen Berkeley-Hill was a senior medical ofcer in British India and superintendent of the agship colonial psychiatric institution in Ranchi. Yet he aunted the conventions of the period by marrying an Indian woman and by writing an autobiography that detailed his extramarital affairs. Female patients were found in his bed, he handed rope to an inmate that threatened suicide and a gun to another that had been incarcerated for shooting a comrade. He pioneered the use of psychoanalysis in the psychiatric system established by the colonial government in India. Claude Dangar Daly was the grandson of a General of the Indian Army, who lied about his age in order to ght in the Boer War and who suffered a nervous breakdown during WWI. He became fascinated by the experimental techniques used to treat him and devoted much of the rest of his life to psychoanalysis. Girindrasekhar Bose was a member of the Anglicized Bengali elite who grew up in the unrest of turn of the century Calcutta. He was carried to school on a palanquin, confessed that he was an obsessive-compulsive, and exchanged views with such gures as Gandhi and Freud. He was a founding member of the Indian Psycho-Analytical Society and went on to develop ideas that signicantly indigenized Freuds theories and systems. Another convincing feature of the book is Hartnacks central thesis, that both British and Indian psychoanalysts in India used the idiom of Freuds systems to express political ideas about colonialism. The evidence she produces for this is sound and compelling. Yet much about the book is less well founded and lacks that analytical clout. She fails to reread
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or historicize Boses case vignettes in the same way as she does for those of Berkeley-Hill. The latters interpretation of his patient is therefore presented as an exercise in imposing a colonial silence on a white male that threatened to go native. This is plausible and important, but the same methodology, of reading against the grain, is not adopted with the interpretations of Bose. As such, the reader leaves with the impression that Bose lacked a politics in analyzing his patients. Taken together, this condemns the British, depoliticizes the Indians, and exonerates Freudian techniques, the implication being that if done correctly these can produce pure results. This hints at the most serious shortcoming of the book. Where the political agenda of Bose is discussed, it is that of anticolonial independence and it is discerned in his theoretical writing rather than in his case vignettes. Hartnacks book contains no discussion of Bhargavi Davars assertion that Hindu doctors have manipulated and adapted the language and techniques of psychology and psychoanalysis to develop a system that reinforces the subordinate position of women in their society. This is particularly pertinent in considering Hartnacks book as she lauds the work of Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Kakar, two of the writers singled out by Davar for their careful reconstruction of Hindu patriarchy in the language of modern psychology. Hartnack only considers gender as a factor in the work of British doctors, and so her failure to address Davars arguments, and indeed her broader failure to place the work of the Indian writers in a political context other than colonialism, is a fundamental aw and a limitation on the usefulness of the book. That she has not read Davar (1999) is symptomatic of a wider problem with the volume that lies in the relative lack of research completed. Apart from a couple of cursory references to the publications of Waltraud Ernst and Jock McCulloch, she has failed to read any of the comparative literature on colonialism and medicine, colonialism and psychiatry, or indeed on psychiatry in India. This leads her to make a set of very na ve and misleading statements about the psychiatric system as it had developed in India before the 1920s, which, after all, merits investigation as the context for Berkeley-Hills career. Her reliance on readily available published sources means that she has entirely missed the archives of the psychiatric system in India, which are extensive, and she has even failed to consult the annual reports published from these hospitals. Her decision to focus solely on members of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society makes the title of the book misleading and prompts the question of what other histories of psychoanalysis in India could be written; such articles as Dreams: The Content of Sleep by S. K. Mathur, tucked away in obscure publications like the Agra Medical College Journal (Mathur, 1948), suggest that psychoanalysis in south Asia has an intriguing history outside of the circles of organized groups and ordained societies which is entirely neglected in this study. These limits on the extent of the research and reading in the volume might be explained if this was a book rushed to press or the rst effort of a junior academic, but Hartnack has written on this subject for over 20 years and has studied in India. Incomplete and awed, this is nevertheless a stimulating contribution to the growing range of studies of the behavioral sciences in south Asia and in colonial contexts and will hopefully act as a catalyst for further research into a fascinating area. REFERENCES
Davar, B. V. (1999). Indian psychoanalysis, patriarchy and hinduism. Anthropology and Medicine 6, 2, 173 193. Mathur, S. K. (1948). Dreams: The content of sleep. Agra Medical College Journal, 12(1).
Reviewed by JAMES H. MILLS, Department of History, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland G1 1XQ.
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Sylvia T. Wargon. Demography in Canada in the Twentieth Century. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002. xiv 327 pp. 74.50. ISBN 0-7748-0818-7. This book describes itself as a social and institutional account of the evolution of demography in Canada, rather than a history of demographic thought, although specic demographic topics and ideas are quite often mentioned in it. It is an insiders book, in that Sylvia Wargon herself worked in Canadian demography for many years, but it is certainly not just a book of reminiscences; it reects an enormous labor of collection of detailed data, starting with a period long before her involvement. Her work was for Statistics Canada, the central governmental statistical bureau, and this gives a useful perspective; it is refreshing to read a history of an area of the social sciences which is not written purely from a university point of view, and takes into account relevant research wherever it was conducted. That is, of course, particularly important in an area such as demography, where the boundaries between academia and government have been eminently permeable, with much intellectual and personal trafc across them. Wargon offers convincing reasons why we should be interested in the Canadian case. (For further reasons, see the Spring 2002 issue of The American Sociologist on Canadian sociology.) Canada has an exceptional stock of systematic population data, dating back almost 400 years (though it is not made clear how this came about), and Canadian circumstances have led to the development of a number of innovations and areas of intellectual specialization. The language division between French and English has been of special importance, and it is not by chance that francophone demography has been highly developed, since French Canada has felt its cultural survival threatened by its minority status within Canada. This division has also affected intellectual styles, with Quebec facing towards France while English Canada has faced towards the USA and Britain. Wargon documents how this affected patterns of training, especially in the earlier period when doctoral opportunities were not available within Canada, and of recruitment to ll vacancies when university expansion created demand that the local labor market could not satisfy. She shows how this led to what were initially parallel disciplines that hardly met, but which have now, in response to the rising demand for French to be given equal weight nationally, converged and developed a much more shared intellectual culture; federal bodies such as Statistics Canada have played a role in this by providing other-language training for their employees. Meanwhile, too, Canadas traditional ethnic divisions have been made less relevant with the great expansion of immigration from nontraditional areas. The structure and style of the book, however, mean that full advantage has not been taken of the opportunities the material offered. Between introduction and conclusion there are, after initial chapters on the earlier period, chapters that deal in turn with demography outside and inside the universities, up to and after 1970. These provide a great deal of detailed information, much of it essentially in the form of lists. Departments and bureaus are mentioned in turn, and almost every individual gets a thumbnail-sketch c.v. even if no use is made of the items covered in it and the person is not mentioned again. (If they are, some of the earlier material is often repeated.) Greater emphasis on analytical themes would have been useful. Little attempt is made to summarize or to elicit patterns; for instance, gender is mentioned as a factor, but no gures are provided of numbers of men and women at different stages, nor is the possibility that they might have done work of different kinds explored; some work is
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mentioned as inuential, or as isolated from other work, but citation study is not used to explore this. Perhaps it is not reasonable to ask for a more sociological style of work, but a study of cohorts of demographers, relating cohort effects to broad patterns of historical societal change, could have been fascinating! The emphasis on individuals seems to work quite well for the period when they were few, and their idiosyncrasies could make a real difference, but later one really misses what more analytical summaries, and attempts at theoretical explanation, could have provided. This book, thus, describes a case which is richly suggestive about some of the ways in which national social sciences may be inuenced by broad historical circumstances and so come to develop in distinctive ways, but few of those not directly interested in the work settings and individuals described will want to attend to the level of detail offered about them. Reviewed by JENNIFER PLATT, Professor of Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9SN, England.
Eva S. Moskowitz. In Therapy We Trust: Americas Obsession with Self-Fulllment. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 358 pp. $34.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8018-6403-8. How did the emphasis on psychological well-being, self-esteem, and self-fulllment become so pervasive in American life? How has it been possible that the principles of psychotherapy are widely seen as appropriate to address a wide variety of personal and social ills that once were considered to be moral, political, or economic in nature? In her engaging and well-written study, Moskowitz argues that Americans have, without any reservations, embraced the therapeutic gospel, which states that happiness should be our supreme goal, that all our problems are ultimately psychological in nature, and that they can be resolved with psychological techniques. She provides numerous examples of this faith in the therapeutic, ranging from the popularity of self-help books, sensitivity training, twelve-step programs, meditation tapes, and personal confessions during talk shows. In her book, Moskowitz aims to analyze Americas unwavering embrace of the therapeutic gospel, trace its historical roots, and to provide a critique of it. She covers, among many other topics, New Thought, social case work, marriage counseling, the involvement of psychologists and psychiatrists in World War II, the roots of the social protest movements in the 1960s in humanistic psychology, and self-help groups and talk shows during the 1990s. Using many humorous examples, she pokes fun at the often exaggerated and ludicrous claims of the psychological gurus who have operated so successfully in American society. In her study, Moskowitz generally treats the therapeutic gospel as an ahistorical and monolithic force. The friendly visitors to the poor of the benevolent societies in the 1890s, for instance, are described as concerned with the neurotic conicts and the self-esteem of their charges, although an emphasis on the former did not become prevalent until the 1920s and an interest in the latter is of an even later date. Moreover, when marriage counselors and hippies use psychological phrases, one suspects that the therapeutic gospel contains numerous
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and often incompatible approaches. The myriad rivalries among social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists are also absent. Most of the time, the author is concerned with a variety of popular psychologies, rather than with the development of academic disciplines, which leaves the complex and dynamic relationship between both unexamined. When discussing prison reform and child guidance clinics, Moskowitz emphasizes that the enormous successes claimed by psychiatrists and psychologists were excessive. The resistance among other professionals (lawyers, physicians), and the recipients of their ministrations (the poor, juvenile delinquents, prisoners), was often persistent and unremitting, blocking the forays of the psychotherapists at many turns. In these cases, the triumph of the therapeutic appears to exist only in the eyes of self-congratulatory psychologists and psychiatrists. How, then, do these cases demonstrate the pernicious success of the therapeutic gospel in colonizing American society? In other chapters, Moskowitz gleefully describes the most ridiculous, grandiose, and overstated psychotherapeutic attempts to alleviating societys ills. These examples are, without exception, humorous and quite successful in criticizing the hollow ambitions of the representatives of the psychological gospel. Again, they leave the reader wondering how they could possibly have appeared convincing in the past. The strength of this book lies in the varied and detailed case histories, many of which contain elements that have not been investigated extensively before. Sporadically, the author provides suggestions as to what could explain the spectacular success of the therapeutic gospel in American society. Consequently, this study offers few new insights to the already expansive literature on the history of psychotherapy in North America. This does diminish the value of the work as a critique of a self-obsessed, narcissistic, and psychological culture characteristic of North America, in which the greater good, public life, and community values are increasingly lost. In addition, the many case histories demonstrate the importance of a social and cultural history of psychology in American life. Reviewed by HANS POLS, Lecturer, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.
Jacques Szaluta. Psychohistory. Theory and Practice. (American University Studies, Series XIX General Literature Vol. 30). Peter Lang: New York, Washington, Baltimore, Boston, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, 1999 X 286 pp. $32.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8204-4967-9. In German historiography, psychohistory is met with reserve, to say the least. So, to a reader from this cultural background, like me, a monograph dealing with this approach may at once be welcomed and read with skeptical eyes. The author, who has widely published on psychoanalysis and psychohistory, holds that psychohistory opens up a new era in historical studies (p. 240); moreover it is revolutionizing the study of history today. Grounded on psychoanalysis, and a scientic discipline concerned with mental functioning (p. 2, emphasis added), it supposedly will make possible a much deeper insight into the motives of the behavior of individuals and even groups.
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Szaluta starts with a denition of psychohistory (application of psychoanalysis to the study of the past), then he addresses Freuds biography and theory. Freud himself, Szaluta holds, can be seen as one of the rst writers in the eld. The following chapter deals with the critics of psychohistory and psychoanalysis as well. Especially the ever repeated assertion that psychoanalysis is far from being scientic (whatever scientic may mean, the author gives no denition) is discussed. In describing post-Freudian approaches Szaluta rst examines the work of Erikson with his notorious Young Man Luther, one of the founding gures of the eld, later criticized because of his vague notion of identity. Other critics of psychohistory hold that psychoanalysis is too much concerned with id issues and irrationality. Ego functions as realized in historical events are, according to these authors, underestimated. So Szaluta sketches Ego psychology, especially depicting Hartmanns conceptions, then goes on to British object relations school, French contributors, and last not least Kohuts self psychology. On dealing with the practice of psychohistory, Szaluta describes the main issues so far addressed. Not surprisingly, psychobiographical research has been done, but also studies on group dynamics, childhood, and the family were published. Without any doubt, Szaluta has written a well-informed survey on the evolution of psychoanalytical approaches to history, especially for a readership not yet well acquainted with the eld. But how does he deal with some of the important problems psychohistory is confronted with? To name but a few: Is psychoanalysis to be seen as a corpus of everlasting truths? What kind of science is psychoanalysis? Is there an invariable nature of man, so that human behavior is the same over centuries? What are the (possible?) relations to other approaches, say, French mentalite s, Marxist or Weberian inspired social history, Italian microstoria or new cultural history? Can all phenomena be related (reduced?) to conicts of Id, Ego, and Superego? What about economical, social or political institutions? (E.g., will mass psychology be enough to explain class structure?). To be sure, Szaluta intended to write on a specialized eld of historical research, not on these topics, but according to my taste (surely based on my above mentioned cultural background or even restrictedness) he too often suggests that psychohistory provides the fundamental principles of the science of history and all explanations have to emerge out of this source. So his assertions follow the often-criticized reductionist approach. Perhaps it might be more useful seeing psychoanalytical notions as tools to understand some things better not the whole of history. Not only historians should know more about psychoanalysis/psychohistory but psychoanalysts as well should know more about, say, social history or microstoria. Some of the practice dealt with by Szaluta shows that psychohistorians think of history in terms of nineteenth-century German historicism. Apart from these (old) objections: everyone who wants to know more about one new methodological approach will learn much in this volume. Reviewed by KAI SAMMET, Institute for the History of Medicine, University of Hamburg, Germany.
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Robert W. Rieber and David K. Robinson (Eds.). Wilhelm Wundt in History: The Making of a Scientic Psychology. New York: Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, 2001. 302 pp. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-306-46599-X. Anthologized collections do not often result in a second edition, but this book is, in effect, the second edition of an earlier collection edited by Rieber (1980) under a slightly different title. The earlier book capped an intense period of scholarship on Wundt, a period that marked the emergence of a new history of psychology. The present book allows an opportunity to assess how Wundt scholarship has fared in the intervening quarter-century. Only two chapters have been carried over from the earlier book with no or minimal changes: a long and important chapter, Wundt before Leipzig by the late Solomon Diamond, and Riebers chapter on Wundts inuence on American psychologists. Diamonds chapter, especially, will seem almost an old friend for those who recall the mid-1970s attempts to rethink Wundt and to rescue him from the (dare I say boring?) misinterpretations to which his work had been subject. With hindsight, we realize that Diamond was one of the few scholars in the mid-1970s who was explicitly critical of Wundt, his argument being that Wundts early attempts to establish his name in the established discipline of physiology reected bad research, poor judgment, and a decided tendency to appropriate the ideas of others as his own. Unfortunately, Diamond himself never carried the argument to Wundts later career (after the move to Leipzig), and, in fact, few have pursued the interesting questions raised by Diamonds paper. Reading it again after all these years is a reminder that much remains to be done. Diamonds stance on Wundt was unusual in the 1970s, but only for being negative, not for being evaluative Wundt does seem to inspire scholars to choose sides! In the present collection, a very positive stance is reected in a new chapter by Art Blumenthal, which includes an insightful analysis of Wundts concept of consciousness. But we also have a new chapter by the late Edward J. Haupt, in which the status and rigor of Wundts Leipzig lab is challenged, especially by comparison to that of Mueller at Goettingen. The chapter is rich in detail, and it is sad to realize that Haupts ongoing biography of Mueller will remain unnished. Kurt Danziger provides two chapters in this volume; one is a relatively slight revision of his contribution to the earlier volume, an astute analysis of Wundts concepts of drive, apperception, and volition. The other is new, and represents an important attempt to characterize some of the principal intellectual currents of Wundts system. Danziger sees Wundt as attempting to steer between a variety of too-easy solutions to the difcult problems of psychology. On this view, Wundt is necessarily a hard and complex gure to come to grips with. Danzigers careful account reminds us of the need to move past the choosing of sides, in order to understand the complexity of the issues. David Robinson provides an extensive survey of the use of reaction time methods, surveying not just Wundts use, but earlier and later uses as well. This important and wideranging survey puts into perspective a number of more narrowly focused studies by other scholars, and makes clear just how pervasive the methodology was, and not merely in Wundts lab. Like Danzigers, Robinsons paper is characterized by balance and relevance; like Diamonds, it is a reminder of how much remains to be done. Two chapters round out the book; the rst is a brief report by Miki Takasuna, detailing
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how Wundts personal library (over 6000 books and 9000 reprints!) was acquired by a university in Japan. It is a fascinating story, and one hopes this chapter will lead to further exploration of the riches that must be hidden within the library. Finally, Eleonore Wundts 1927 bibliography of her fathers writings is reprinted, slightly edited by Robinson. This will be useful, but one could wish it had been reconciled with the three other published bibliographies of Wundt. Finally, there is a name index and a subject index, the latter too brief to be of much use. In all, then, this is an interesting collection, with sufcient new material to justify its acquisition by libraries and scholars, even those that possess the earlier book. REFERENCES
Rieber, R. W. (Ed.) (1980). Wilhelm Wundt and the making of a scientic psychology. New York: Plenum Press.
Reviewed by RYAN D. TWENEY, Professor of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH 43403.
Nicholas Wade. Destined for Distinguished Oblivion: The Scientic Vision of William Charles Wells. Dordrecht and New York: Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, 2002. 310 pp. $95.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-306-47385-2. One hopes that Nicholas Wades book will confound its title and lift the distinguished oblivion from W. C. Wells work on vision, which deserves a far more prominent place in the history of psychology. Reprinted in this volume is Wells Essay on Single Vision (1792), which will be of great interest to vision scientists and, not least, to historians seeking paradigms of truly Sherlockian observation and reasoning. Among his other contributions, Wells advanced principles of cyclopean visual direction, obtained by combining the directions of sight of each eye singly. The cyclopean eye sees in a direction not given to either eye alone an observation often attributed to Ewald Hering. For Wells, single vision was facilitated by placing similar images in the axis of sight of each eye or in corresponding directions and thus in which the agreement of directional information played a major part in stereoscopic fusion (Wheatstones demonstration of depth relief through retinal disparity was yet to come). Wells also knew, far ahead of his contemporaries, that the visual system distinguished between a voluntary sweep of the eyes over the visual eld, a sweep of images of moving objects over the eyes, and suppressed involuntary motions of the eyes to xate in place static objects and compensate for a moving head. In the last case, Wells demonstrated rotational and torsional nystagmus (clockwork back and forth and rolling motions) even in a dark room without other visual cues present a point on which he corrected Charles Darwins grandfather, Erasmus. Wells knew that the rolling of a ship could be detected even in a closed cabin, and deduced an innate sense of orientation with respect to gravity. Thus, in effect, he
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hypothesized the unknown vestibular sense and its relation to the involuntary eye movements, later localized by Mach, Breuer, and Brown to the semicircular canals. On the subject of Charles Darwin himself, a second essay reprinted in this book, Account of a Female of the White Race of Mankind . . . (1818) contains Wells theorizing on aspects of natural selection, cited at length by Darwin in the Origin of Species (beginning with the sixth edition). Wells other historically acknowledged contribution to science (not reprinted in this volume) was the rst correct explanation of dew by the nocturnal radiation of heat away from the earth, another model of scientic reasoning. Recently, Hiroshi Ono and A. P. Mapp have worked to integrate Wells laws of visual direction into contemporary vision science, with some resistance (see Ono & Mapp, 1995; Grind, Erkelens, & Laan, 1995). Wade, however, rehabilitates Wells by revising the history of vision to t in his forgotten contributions, including him in the history alongside, and in advance of, Helmholtz, Mach, Hering, and others. Some of Wades one-liner claims for Wells priority should be expanded, as probably not every visual historian will accept them prima facie. But as a distinguished historian himself, Wade is in an excellent position to make good on these claims in future work.
REFERENCES
Ono, H., & Mapp, A. P. (1995). A restatement and modication of Wells-Hering laws of visual direction. Perception, 24, 237 252. Van de Grind, W., Erkelens, C. J., & Laan, A. C. (1995) Binocular correspondence and visual direction. Perception, 24, 215 235.
Reviewed by ERIK C. BANKS, New York, NY.
Harry Heft. Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William Jamess Radical Empiricism. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001. $89.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8058-2350-6. As a widely respected perceptual researcher, James Gibson (1904 1979) objected to the paradoxical status of psychology as the science of the unscientic the study of a subject traditional science had resolutely excluded from the objective world. As he once put it: psychologists seem to feel, many of them, that all we need to do is consolidate our scientic gains. . . . these gains seem to me puny, and scientic psychology seems to me ill-founded. At any time the whole psychological apple cart might be upset (Gibson, 1967, p. 21). Gibson sought to establish an alternative ecological approach to psychology that would avoid the many dualisms that trouble not only psychology but many of the other human sciences. Harry Hefts Ecological Psychology in Context is not the rst book to put Gibson into wider historical context (see Lombardo, 1987; Reed, 1988). It is the rst to argue for a specic intellectual connection between Gibsons revolt against dualisms and the radical empiricism
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of William James. Edwin B. Holt was the obvious go-between. Holt had not only taught and inspired Gibson, but, in turn, had also been a devoted student of William James. The similarities between radical empiricism and Gibsons ecological approach are impressive, such as the insistence on the possibility of direct contact between knower and known, their reciprocity, and an acknowledgement of a role for conceptual knowledge though as the consolidation, rather than replacement, of immediate experience. But do such similarities count as continuities? Unfortunately, Gibson himself made very few references to James or Holt in his writings, but then he took remarkably little care to record his intellectual debts, e.g., to Harvey Carr (1935) in relation to his ground theory, and to T. A. Ryan (1938), his colleague at Cornell, regarding affordances. Nevertheless, Gibsons failure to identify his work with the project of radical empiricism does raise questions about alternative inuences: Gestaltism, pragmatism, systems thinking, even Machian monism (Ernst Machs well-known illustration of the visible self appears in each of Gibsons books). As Heft reveals, Gibson was also very enthusiastic about the work of Merleau-Ponty, and there are indeed some intriguing (and unexplained) convergences. Last, but hardly least, there is the Darwinian emphasis on the co-ordination of animal and environment, and hence the impossibility of considering psychical life as an individual, isolated thing developing in a vacuum (Dewey, 1884, p. 285). In arguing for the central place of radical empiricism in the development of Gibsons thought, Heft does not attempt to exclude these other possible inuences. Far from it. For example, he devotes a very informative chapter to Gibsons links with Gestalt psychology. Not only did Gibson have close contacts with Koffka and Heider, but was also attracted to Lewins eld theory approach. But more could have been said about conicts between these different inuences, including the two Jamesian inuences, radical empiricism, and pragmatism. Heft relates both of these to the wider Darwinian framework of Jamess thought, yet pragmatism emphasizes action, whereas radical empiricism does not seem to take us far from the standard, perceptual model of knowing. Interestingly, when Heft addresses the muchdebated question of whether affordances are dependent or independent of animals, he frames this issue (as did Gibson) in terms of the animal as a perceiver or observer, rather than an agent. A further very important feature of this book is the comparison Heft presents of the ecological psychologies of Gibson and Roger Barker. As Heft explains, Barker not only arrived at a position very similar to Gibsons, but in some respects went further by introducing the supra-individual concept of behavior settings, yet without the benet of the JamesianHoltian legacy. There have been a few attempts at such a comparison but none so extensive and beneting from the degree of knowledge that Heft has of both these gures. I can warmly recommend this book for its searching account of Gibsons historical signicance, and the implications of his work for the human sciences. In this richly informative book, Heft brings out a fundamental connection between two of psychologys most signicant dissidents, William James and James Gibson, not just in their critique of traditional psychology but in their hope for a non-dualist, non-scientistic, new science. REFERENCES
Carr, H. A. (1935). An introduction to space perception. New York: Longmans, Green. Dewey, J. (1884). The new psychology. Andover Review, 2, 278 289. Gibson, J. J. (1967). Autobiography. In E. G. Boring & G. Linzey (Eds.), A history of psychology in autobiography, Vol. 5 (pp. 127 143). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Lombardo, T. J. (1987). The reciprocity of perceiver and environment. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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BOOK REVIEWS
Reed, E. S. (1988). James J. Gibson and the psychology of perception. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ryan, T. A. (1938). Dynamic, physiognomic, and other neglected properties of perceived objects: A new approach to comprehending. American Journal of Psychology, 51, 629 650.
Reviewed by ALAN COSTALL, Professor of Theoretical Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, UK.
David Salsburg. The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 2001. 340 pp. $23.95 (hardcover). ISBN 0-7167-4106-7. Alain Desrosie ` res (translated by Camille Naish). The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. London: Harvard University Press, 2002. 368 pp. $19.95 (paperback). ISBN 0-674-00969-X. Entertaining, enlightening, and engaging, mathematician David Salsburg presents both an historical account of the statistical revolution, and a brief survey of his views and experiences in the eld of statistical science. The book is a pleasant read and appeals to both the novice and the veteran statistician. For the newcomer, the volume provides an introduction to the foundation of modern statistical methods. For the seasoned statistician, the piece is an enjoyable journey through one individuals perspective in the eld of statistics. A unique feature of the book is Salsburgs recounting of his own personal encounters with statistical innovators such as John Tukey and Jerzy Neyman. This element makes the text less of a study in statistics and more of an easy and light afternoon read. He gives a too often neglected account of the role of women in the statistical revolution, devoting a chapter to notable women such as Gertrude Cox and Janet Norwood. In the chapter, he notes that while the majority of women in early twentieth-century statistical work were called by the name computers whose role it was to make laborious computations, pioneers such as Cox helped pave the way for women in the statistical revolution. In telling her story, Salsburg provides a telling quote on how she was referred in 1940 to head a statistical laboratory at North Carolina State University at Raleigh. George W. Snedecor, providing a list of available statisticians to Frank Graham, added in his letter: These are the ten best men I can think of. But, if you want the best person, I would recommend Gertrude Cox (p. 200). Perhaps the most appealing part of this book is Salsburgs overview of over a century of statistical evolution in a relatively short text. While the treatment of topics is not in depth, it is sufcient to whet the readers appetite to read further into the history of statistics. Although not up to such texts as Porter (1986) and Stigler (1986) in terms of historical scholarship, Salsburgs text is a worthwhile read for virtually anyone with an interest or a curiosity about statistics. The book by Alain Desrosie ` res provides a much deeper and more scholarly account of how the expanse of the statistical revolution paralleled that of the social political world. As the title suggests, this book is primarily an exposition on the history of statistics from a social and political standpoint, not a mathematical one. The book centers on the role of statistics in
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government, affording much attention to the social contexts in which statistical concepts arose. Through a survey of the political and state inuences in France, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, the author highlights how the very word statistics is historically open to continental interpretation. This book should prove to be an enjoyable and informative read for anyone wanting to expand their knowledge of the social and political inuences giving rise to the implementation and advance of statistical methods. The book is suitable for both the historian and the statistician. The historian will undoubtedly appreciate the abundance of historical information, and at the same time be grateful that the author, for the most part, brushes aside mathematical technicalities. Although much of the book is centered on historical events rather than purely statistical issues, the author does occasionally challenge the reader to think critically about basic assumptions that underlay statistical methods. For instance, in chapter 9, Modeling and Adjusting, Desrosie ` res offers diverse interpretations on the nature of residuals, and briey discusses the philosophical assumptions supporting each view. Discussions such as this, dispersed throughout the book, serve to remind the reader of the deep theoretical debates that have existed in statistics, and that continue to exist, regardless of the mathematical rigor beneath the statistical results. This is useful for the modern statistician who may not readily appreciate the theoretical and philosophical foundations on which his/her statistical trade rests. Desrosie ` res treatment of Quetelet is extensive. He contrasts Quetelets interest in the average man to the statistical goals of Francis Galton in which the superior man (in terms of intelligence) was of primary interest. The authors treatment of econometric models is also quite good and is welcome coverage for inclusion in a social study of statistics. In noting how the problem of supply and demand helped to give rise to the popular simultaneous equations models found today not only in economics, but across the social sciences, the author emphasizes the role of practical applications in the evolution of statistical method. Although of two different genres, it is in the casting of statistical history as a social subject rather than a quantitative one that the texts of Salsburg and Desrosie ` res can be said to cross paths. The lesson that a true understanding of the history of statistics can only be achieved through a study of the social context in which it evolved is taught, and taught well, by both books. REFERENCES
Porter, T. M. (1986). The rise of statistical thinking 1820 1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stigler, S. M. (1986). The history of statistics: The measurement of uncertainty before 1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Reviewed by DANIEL J. DENIS, York University, Toronto, ON.

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Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(3), 299300 Summer 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).

DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10146 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Reviewed by ERIK C. BANKS, New York, NY.

Reviewed by DANIEL J. DENIS, York University, Toronto, ON.

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