ECR Prize, Interviews

Interview: Ohad Reiss Sorokin on Alfred Binet, ‘intelligence’ and failed experiments

HHS Contributor

"a failed experiment can teach us sometimes more than a successful one, especially if the experimenter reflects on the failure, then he can explain to us what he was looking for, he can explain what he didn’t get with the results."

Ohad Reiss Sorokin, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia who recently completed a PhD at Princeton University. He received a commendation in this year's History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for his essay ‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)’. We spoke to him about his interest in Binet and other research. History of the Human Sciences: First of all, I wonder if you could briefly introduce your broad research interests, including your PhD project “‘I [Suffer] Unfortunately from Intellectual Hunger’: The Geistkreis, Desire for Knowledge, and the Transformation of Intellectual Life in the Twentieth Century”? Ohad Reiss Sorokin: I wrote this essay a few years ago before I started working on my dissertation. The only thing that ties them together is that the dissertation is also a history of the human sciences but from a very different perspective. My dissertation deals with the

‘Geistkreis’, which was an intellectual circle that was active in Vienna between and 1921 and 1938. It was a meeting place of young philosophers, economists, lawyers, sociologists, psychologists, and art historians. What I argue in the dissertation is that they created this Geistkreis, in order to combat the reigning intellectual environment of Vienna at the time, which is known to be the “mandarin” culture. They tried to create a more open discussion culture that does the human sciences in a way that is not subjugated to the natural sciences, on the other hand, and is not completely metaphysical and out of touch with the empirical evidence, on the other. HHS: Now to move on to your essay, ‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)’: who was Alfred Binet, for what is he most famous and how does your article on his work depart from the existing scholarship? ORS: Binet is a very very famous figure…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize

Interview: ECR Prize 2022 winner Harry Parker on the regional survey movement

HHS Contributor

Harry Parker (University of Cambridge) is this year’s winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and winning essay 'The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th century Britain'. Congratulations to Harry whose essay will be published in full in a future issue of the journal. History of the Human Sciences: First of all, I wonder if you could briefly introduce your PhD project ‘Popular auto-ethnography in Britain, c. 1870-1940’ and describe how this essay relates to that larger project? Harry Parker: The essay comes from what I think is probably going to be the third chapter of the thesis, which broadly looks at various attempts within the human sciences across the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to turn the anthropological gaze inwards. I do that through looking at a series of surveying projects across the periods that enrolled non-specialists to become observers of their own culture. I begin in the

19th century, when anthropology in particular was more oriented towards the question of the origins and the composition of the national community. I look at one of the first large scale projects to try and attempt this, which was known as the ethnographic survey of the United Kingdom. As a component of that I’m particularly interested in folklore collection, which  was a major part of that project. I then look at the photographic survey movement, which was running more or less at the same time (around the 1890s). And then I jump ahead a bit to the interwar period to look at regional surveys, which seemed to absorb much of the energies that those earlier projects set loose. The other case studies are also focused on the interwar period and look at early attempts to do community studies. So that's the ‘auto-ethnography’ bit. The ‘popular’ bit comes from my training (if you can call it that) as…

Book Reviews

Review: Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory

HHS Contributor

"Love’s book... raises pertinent and disconcerting questions about why queer theorists and social psychologists have been so drawn to affect as a meta-theory for the past twenty years despite their very different political commitments."

Michael Pettit, York University, Toronto Heather Love, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021) In Underdogs, Heather Love offers a densely argued, at times counterintuitive, and yet highly persuasive rereading of how her own field of queer theory relates to its own intellectual past. Love argues queer theory, despite its professed deep historicism, is in denial about its own history, much to its detriment when it comes to making both theoretical and political interventions. She offers Underdogs as something of a remedy to this collective amnesia. In her telling, queer theory as an anti-humanist humanities field is predicated on the notion of rupture: its leading practitioners see it as a field with neither a true academic parent nor a comfortable disciplinary home. Queer theory (and theorists) always stands alone, outside, without friend, kin, or even community. Love identifies this widespread sensibility with the field’s proximate roots in the radical oppositional politics of gay liberation, the women’s health

movement, and especially 1980s AIDS activism. In this political crucible, the field disavowed any kinship with earlier social scientific, “empirical,” studies of sexuality (whether of the human animal or other species). Most importantly for Love’s story, queer theory denied its debts to mid-century, observational, qualitative, microanalyses of social interaction. Yet these sociologists of deviance profoundly informed how queer theorists understood both (social) normativity and their own outsider status as intellectuals. Her book seeks to excavate these lost linkages to challenge and enrich contemporary queer theory. If Underdogs pivots around making uncomfortable kinship between deviance studies and queer theory, Love astutely traces how these two fields operate with very different politics of representation. Contemporary queer theory is predicated on the disruption of all norms and foundations. A profound, skeptical destabilization of all received notions is the field’s primary political intervention. In contrast, mid-century sociologists of deviance sought to uplift alternative forms of social life by making them legible. They…

Book Reviews

Review: Evolution of Desire

HHS Contributor

"Haven offers a panoramic view of Girard’s impressive career and his bold and influential ideas. But, knowing more about his life, are we expected to understand these ideas any differently?"

Cynthia L. Haven, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018) Michael C. Behrent, Appalachian State University “How is a philosophy embodied in the man who espouses it? … How does a man’s being—the sum of his knowledge, experience, and will—‘prove’ his knowledge? Can we ever devise a philosophy, even a theory, wholly apart from who we are, and what we must justify?” (144). These are the questions that drive Cynthia L. Haven’s engaging biography of René Girard (1923-2015), the French scholar whose influential studies of mimetic behaviour, violence, and scapegoating proposed a complete reinterpretation of religion and a comprehensive theory of human nature and society. The nexus between thought and life promises to be a particularly fruitful vantage point for assessing Girard’s thought: unlike so many of his generation, particularly in his home discipline of literary studies, Girard’s interest was not in how texts “functioned,” but in what they described. “I’ve always been a realist,” he

once asserted. “I have always believed in the outside world and in the possibility of knowledge of it” (127). Drawing, perhaps, on this claim, Haven reconsiders Girard’s thought from the standpoint of its interaction with the “outside world” that shaped it. Haven’s book is not a conventional biography, objectively recounting its subject’s life history. It is, rather, a whimsical exploration of Girardian thought, a play in which René Girard is the leading but by no means solitary actor, and in which the biographical narrative is interwoven with more chronologically disparate episodes. Haven, moreover, incorporates herself into the story, using her relationship with Girard, as well as his family and friends, to explore his character and trace the multiple ramifications of his thought. Though undoubtedly biographical, the precise subject of her book is difficult to pin down. It is not, strictly speaking, an intellectual biography, rigorously focused on the conception and development of Girard’s most distinctive ideas.…

Book Reviews

Review: The Maternalists

HHS Contributor

"The relationship between mothering and the human sciences in the twentieth century – in which Mother features as Origin Story and Causal Principle – is hugely complex..."

Shaul Bar-Haim, The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood and the British Welfare State (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) ISBN 9780812253153 Katie Joice During the last two years, we have had ample opportunity to reflect on the capacity of the state to care for its population: to warn us of imminent harm, to nurse us back to health when danger strikes, and to show compassion when the worst happens. As Shaul Bar-Haim skilfully outlines in his introduction to The Maternalists, for several generations,ever since Margaret Thatcher began to shift responsibility for the care of the vulnerable and dependent back onto the family, 'the nanny state' has become an epithet of right-wing scorn. Those who mourn the unravelling of the post-war settlement may be hoping that the collective suffering of the pandemic has exposed the need for a more interventionist, 'motherly' politics, one which fully compensates for human frailty. Bar-Haim's study of maternally-minded psychoanalysts, and their influence on post-war social policy, is

therefore a timely one, in which questions of theoretical inheritance open onto a series of urgent debates about our own historical moment. Bar-Haim's story begins in Budapest during the 1920s, where Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud's protegées, advocated a radically new style of analysis. Ferenczi was the yin to Freud's yang, or as Jung, another of Freud's rebellious students, might have put it, the anima to his animus. Whereas Freud practiced with cool, paternalist detachment, Ferenczi fostered affection, mutuality, and intuition in his clinical relationships. He encouraged patients to revisit the traumatic experiences of earliest childhood, and famously cradled them in his arms, claiming that there was 'progression in regression'. By shifting the analytic focus away from the Oedipus conflict and phallocentrism towards the sensuous bond between mother and infant, Ferenczi opened up new terrain for analysts of an egalitarian, emancipatory bent. Infancy was characterised here both by vulnerability to trauma and an original psychic freedom, a halcyon period before…

Book Reviews

Review: Social Science for What?

HHS Contributor

Mark Solovey, Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the ‘Other Sciences’ at the National Science Foundation (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2020). 398 pp. $50.00 (pb). ISBN: 978-0-262-53905-0. Lucian Bessmer, Harvard University Social Science for What? is a remarkably detailed history of the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1945 to the late 1980s that makes a compelling case for the influence of the Foundation on American social science. Those familiar with author Mark Solovey’s Shaky Foundations will recognize the care that he has put into presenting an account built on rich archival materials to “follow the money” in order to show the impact of what he calls the “politics-patronage-social science nexus” (10-12). Where Shaky Foundations examined how the Ford Foundation, the U.S. military, and the NSF shaped the social sciences, Social Science for What? delves deeper into the NSF in an attempt to address a gap Solovey identifies in the literature: the role of civilian agencies as patrons of social

science. This in itself makes this book an important contribution to the large body of work on Cold War scientific patronage, which generally focuses on the relationships between science, the military, and intelligence agencies. But the more ambitious claim of Social Science for What? is that the NSF played a significant part in positioning the human sciences as participants in the “unified scientific enterprise” (12). Solovey argues that mimicking the methods and epistemic justification of the natural sciences may have enabled the social sciences to carve out a tiny redoubt in the NSF, but ultimately it created barriers to their health and development, disincentivizing the most beneficial aspects of these fields. The book’s ten chapters offer a roughly chronological investigation of how stakeholders of the social sciences, both inside and outside of the NSF, sought to legitimize a collection of fields that were treated with skepticism at best and as a menace to American society at worst. Solovey…

Book Reviews

Review: The Sense of Movement

HHS Contributor

"Overall, The Sense of Movement is a key contribution not only to understand the sense of movement but also as a general reflection on the senses more broadly."

Roger Smith: The Sense of Movement. An Intellectual History (London: Process Press, 2019) Sonsoles Hernández Barbosa, University of the Balearic Islands  The Sense of Movement addresses bodily perceptions of movement over the last four centuries. The work begins by presenting philosophical debates about movement as a vital force which emerged in parallel with the birth of modern science in the seventeenth century, linking these with modern notions about the operation of the human brain. As the author points out, the study of movement and its conceptualisation involves setting up a dialogue between current and past understandings of the sense of movement. Although The Sense of Movement begins with these reflections about the operation of the world of the senses connected with the scientific revolution in the seventeenth-century, some of its arguments reach back much further in time, specifically to the Aristotelian classification of the five senses. The very use of the expression ‘sense of movement’ implies a direct confrontation with

the Aristotelian philosophical tenet, which held that movement could only be understood in relation to the sense of touch. Indeed, the extent to which we can refer to a sense of movement that is independent from touch is one of the main issues addressed by the book. Many of the historical difficulties raised by this issue are to do with the fact that the sense of movement and that of touch cannot be pinned down to a specific organ, insofar as the skin covers the whole body. Today, however, a conceptualisation of the senses that goes beyond the five traditional senses, including the perception of pain, temperature and even time, is widely accepted.[1] Smith, whose areas of specialisation straddle the fields of philosophy and the history of science, argues that it was around 1800 that philosophy began to address the issue of human movement, when muscular motion was first recognised as a specific sense, distinct from touch. Charles Bell, who…

Book Reviews

Review: Closing the Asylum

HHS Contributor

"While sharply critical of the way deinstitutionalisation has played out in practice, Barham has remained neither nostalgic for the asylum nor pessimistic about the prospects for more progressive services in the future."

Peter Barham, Closing the Asylum: The Mental Patient in Modern Society (London: Process Press, 2020) Steffan Blayney, University of Sheffield When the first edition of Peter Barham’s Closing the Asylum was published in 1992, it attempted to describe the historical underpinnings of a protracted upheaval in mental health provision which was still very much ongoing. While the dismantling of the Victorian asylum system had been the professed aim of successive British governments dating back at least to the 1959 Mental Health Act – and while the overall asylum population had been declining steadily since its peak in 1954 – still in the early 1990s deinstitutionalisation remained an unfinished project. By the time of the book’s second edition in 1997, with the majority of hospitals open a decade previously now closed, this seemed harder to argue, yet by this point characterisations of ‘care in the community’ as a failure were already becoming mainstream. This new edition, published

in 2020, arrives in the wake of the 2018 Independent Review of the Mental Health Act amidst ongoing debates about the extent of coercion and legal compulsion within the mental health system. Barham’s original text, reissued here with a new prologue and preface, situated twentieth-century debates over deinstitutionalisation within the longer history of how modern societies have dealt with the ‘problem of insanity’. This has always been a social question at least as much as it has been a medical one. In nineteenth-century Britain, and particularly after the New Poor Law of 1834, the public asylum emerged – alongside the workhouse and the prison – as a means to deal with surplus populations produced by industrialisation. Idealistically imagined by their founders as spaces of care and rehabilitation, the Victorian asylums quickly became little more than overcrowded repositories for incurables and undesirables. The segregation of the mad was given legitimacy by an emerging psychiatric profession whose own optimism about the possibility of cure quickly ceded…

Book Reviews

Review: On the Heels of Ignorance

HHS Contributor

Owen Whooley, On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019), ISBN: 9780226616384 Ahlam Rahal, McGill University, Montreal Positioning himself in psychiatric knowledge as a researcher, Owen Whooley starts On the Heels of Ignorance by describing memories from his childhood, which planted the seeds that grew into his writing about psychiatric ignorance. As the son of a man with a mental illness, young Whooley had daily experienced questions related to his father’s mental health problems. His attempts to understand his father’s depression and drug addiction had always been surrounded by ignorance, uncertainty, and inscrutability. As the author explains, both he and mental health professionals failed to grasp his father’s inner world or to define clearly the characteristics of his mental illness. This experience impacted Whooley’s thoughts and provided the impetus to study historical ignorance within psychiatric knowledge.  Unlike earlier scholars, who critically investigated the profession of psychiatry and the sociopolitical interests

that underlie health professions (e.g., Foucault, 1976; Fromm, 1955), Whooley investigates both challenges in psychiatric knowledge and power interests that proliferate within the psychiatric field. The biggest challenge, according to Whooley, is ignorance, which hampers our grasp of mental illness.  Ignorance, Whooley argues, is related to two self-reinforcing dimensions: ontology and epistemology. The ontological dimension refers to descriptions, causes, and the nature of “insanity”; whereas epistemology involves the assumptions, investigations, and inquiry approaches that grasp the essence of the mental illness. Whooley argues that the multiple definitions of the nature of the mental illness that psychiatry has offered throughout history have influenced the investigation of mental illness, and therefore, created incoherent psychiatric knowledge. Explaining these attempts to redefine and reinvent psychiatric identity, Whooley suggests that psychiatry has aimed to maintain its prestigious position, professional authority, and social control over the population and other health fields through the recreation of its discourse. Through writing this book, the author attempts to…

Calls for submission, News

History of the Human Sciences – Early Career Prize, 2021-22

The Editors

History of the Human Sciences – the international journal of peer-reviewed research, which provides the leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognise a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply. Guidelines for the Award Scholars who wish to be considered for the award are asked to submit

an up-to-date two-page CV (including a statement that confirms eligibility for the award) and an essay that is a maximum of 12,000 words long (including notes and references). The essay should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere, based on original research, written in English, and follow History of the Human Science’s style guide. Scholars are advised to read the journal’s description of its aims and scope, as well as its submission guidelines. Entries will be judged by a panel drawn from the journal’s editorial team and board. They will identify the essay that best fits the journal’s aims and scope. Eligibility Scholars of any nationality who have either not yet been awarded a PhD or are no more than five years from its award are welcome to apply. The judging panel will use the definition of “active years”, with time away from academia for parental leave, health problems, or other relevant reasons being disregarded in the calculation.…