Book Reviews

Review: Psychedelic Prophets

HHS Contributor

'“Psychedelic”... captured their idea that the consciousness altering experience of psychedelic drugs was no mental aberration but instead facilitated a widening of the doors of perception, an opening up of the self and the possibility of furthering human potential beyond the limits of everyday consciousness.'

Review: Paul Bisbee, Cynthia Carson, Erika Dyck, Patrick Farrell, James Sexton, and James W. Spisak (eds.), Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, 2018) lxxix and 644 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7735-5506-8 Charlie Williams, Queen Mary University of London Humphrey Osmond is best known as the man who turned Aldous Huxley on to mescaline in 1953. Following a brief correspondence, Huxley invited Osmond, a psychiatrist based in Saskatchewan, Canada to come and stay with him and his wife in Los Angeles. In another letter, he suggested that Osmond might bring some mescaline. Huxley’s mescaline trip was described in detail in The Doors of Perception (1954), a book which would introduce countless psychic wanderers to the powerful subjective experience of mescaline and the ‘labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity’ discovered in the folds of Huxley’s grey flannel trousers. Their meeting in California was also the beginning of a close friendship, now captured in this

recent edited collection of their correspondence, Psychedelic Prophets. As a preface to the collection tells us, both men were prodigious letter writers. Huxley is estimated to have written 10,000 letters in his lifetime. Osmond, was both an ardent letter writer and a meticulous archivist, keeping copies of both sides of the transaction. Thus, the volume is said to represent a complete set of their correspondence (apart from one or more missing pages from a letter written by Osmond on April 30, 1956). Consisting of over 275 letters, Psychedelic Prophets begins formally, with a letter addressed to “Dear Mr Huxley” on March 31, 1953 and ends ten years later with tones of much deeper affection – “My Dear Aldous” – one month prior to Huxley’s death on November 22, 1963. Their discussions follow the arc of a close friendship and a rich intellectual connection, taking deep dives into questions of psychopharmacology, schizophrenia, parapsychology, mysticism, cybernetics, Jungian psychology and psychoanalysis, alongside never-ending intrigue about the effects…

Book Reviews

Review: A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume & the Rise of Capitalism

HHS Contributor

Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind, A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume & the Rise of Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 316pp. $45.00. ISBN: 9780226597447by Tyson Leuchter, King's College London Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind announce their intentions in the title: David Hume, a “philosopher’s economist” and not “an economist’s philosopher.” Hume has long enjoyed a towering reputation in fields ranging from ethics to political theory to metaphysics to epistemology. While his economic thought, particularly on monetary matters, has been studied, until now there has been no full-length, English-language work on his economic doctrines as a whole (16).[1] Schabas and Wennerlind, both leading scholars in the history of economic thought, seek to redress this oversight in A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume & the Rise of Capitalism. Their aim is to “restore the sense in which Hume’s life and writings form an integral whole centered on economics, broadly construed, as a unifying thread” (6). Rather than a philosophical giant with brilliant, but piecemeal insights into

economics, for Schabas and Wennerlind Hume is equally a thoroughgoing economist, whose doctrines were developed in tandem with his philosophical dispositions. In this interpretation, Hume’s thought on the specie-flow mechanism – the means by which international specie circulation might, in the long run, smooth out trade imbalances – must therefore be thought together with his empiricist epistemology. The result is an effective reconstruction of Hume’s cosmopolitan economic vision. The authors’ task is in some ways archaeological. The bulk of Hume’s economic thought resides in his Political Discourses (1752), later collected in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-77). But, Schabas and Wennerlind suggest, focusing solely on these works gives an incomplete picture of the expansiveness of Hume’s economic thought, as well as its connection to the rest of his philosophical oeuvre. Hume’s works must be mined deeply and assembled into a coherent form for his economic doctrine to fully come to light. Schabas and Wennerlind thus examine the Political…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize, Interviews

Interview: Erik Baker on entrepreneurs, libertarians, ‘philanthrocapitalists’ and the Santa Fe Institute

HHS Contributor

"This exodus from the established world of government labs and universities is reconceptualized as a form of entrepreneurship: the scientists are striking out for themselves and they have their own new creative ventures that they're really committed to and they're going to work hard to get them off the ground."

Erik Baker (Harvard University) received a commendation in this year's History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and his commended essay ‘The Ultimate Think Tank: The Rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian’. HHS: First of all, congratulations on your commendation in the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize, for your essay ‘The Ultimate Think Tank’. To begin with, could you briefly introduce your dissertation on ‘The Entrepreneurial Work Ethic: Creativity, Leadership, and the Sciences of Labor Discipline in the United States’ and explain how this article fits into that project? Erik Baker: Thanks and thanks again to the editors of HHS for the commendation - it's a real honour and thank you for taking the time to share this work. My broader dissertation project is about the history of what I call ‘entrepreneurial management.’ That strikes some people as a contradiction in terms. Typically we think of management and managers

as faceless, gray-suited technocrat types, and we tend to think of entrepreneurs as really dynamic with innovative startups etc. But the cultural figures who typify the entrepreneur category are themselves also bosses. If you think of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, these are people who are icons of entrepreneurship, but they're also executives who command increasingly large armies of employees. What I show is that since the early 20th century, management theorists have been interested in capturing this mystique that surrounds the entrepreneur, which seems to allow entrepreneurs to command attention, loyalty and legitimacy in a way that other kinds of managers don't. And they’ve sought to propagate that entrepreneurial spirit among the managerial ranks more broadly. The result, in the United States economy, is what I call ‘the entrepreneurial work ethic’. This comes from the claim that what makes entrepreneurs effective bosses is the fact that they themselves are committed to a creative project that energizes the…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize, Interviews

Interview: Liana Glew on psychiatric paperwork

HHS Contributor

"We can't answer the questions about how bureaucracy operates without answering questions about the effects on people's lived experiences."

Liana Glew is this year’s co-winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to her about her research and her winning essay ‘Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history’. HHS: First of all, congratulations on winning the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for your essay ‘Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history’. To begin I wonder if you could briefly introduce and summarise your essay and say a little about what inspired you to write it. Liana Glew: Thank you for the honour of the prize. The essay examines paperwork from US psychiatric hospitals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My purpose in this examination is to develop methods of reading that center patient agency and disability identity. The inspirations for piece were twofold. Firstly, it was inspired by a trip to the Oregon State Archives where they've done a really beautiful and careful job archiving this challenging history.

That's where a lot of the the material comes from. Second, it was inspired by a graduate seminar taught by Ebony Coletu, which is where I first started thinking critically about bureaucracy and paperwork. HHS: Before I ask more about the piece itself I wonder if you could briefly talk about your PhD thesis project and how this article relates to your research more broadly? LG: The article represents the third chapter of the dissertation, edited to stand on its own. Each chapter covers one genre of text about life inside asylums in the 19th and 20th century. So the first chapter is about fiction, the second about memoir-exposes which is a sort of hybrid genre that I've identified to talk about the journalistic and memoir pieces coming out around that time about life in an asylum. This third chapter covers the same paperwork material as this essay, then the fourth chapter is on archival patient writing.…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize, Interviews

Interview: What do we want? Simon Torracinta on Edward Tolman’s drive theory of wants

HHS Contributor

"Although Tolman was sincerely committed to behaviourism as an epistemological framework, he was consistently drawn to phenomena – cognition, purpose, desire – that pushed against the limits of that framework, which produces some really fascinating tensions."

Simon Torracinta, PhD candidate in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale, is this year's co-winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and his winning essay ‘Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants’. HHS: To begin I wonder if you could briefly introduce Edward Tolman and say a little about what inspired you to write about him?   ST: Edward Tolman was an American psychologist who worked mostly in the 1920s to 1950s, and spent most of his career at the University of Berkeley (their psychology building was named ‘Tolman Hall’ in his honour until it was demolished in 2019). He was a member of the so-called ‘neo-behaviourist’ generation, the cohort of psychologists, with figures like Clark Hull and B.F. Skinner, who took up the banner of behaviourism in the middle of the 20th century. They developed it into a robust research framework and succeeded in

making it the dominant experimental paradigm – especially in the United States –  for several decades. I was initially drawn to Tolman’s work because of his particularly explicit theorization of drives. But I was surprised to find that, although he was one of the most influential psychologists of his day and he’s still cited in neuroscience research today, he has mostly been neglected by historians, besides the excellent biography by psychologist David Carroll. But as I hope readers of the article will see, much of his work speaks to core concerns in the history of the human sciences. Although Tolman was sincerely committed to behaviourism as an epistemological framework, he was consistently drawn to phenomena – cognition, purpose, desire – that pushed against the limits of that framework, which produces some really fascinating tensions. HHS: Before I ask more about the article itself, I wonder if you could briefly talk about your PhD thesis project and how this article relates…

Book Reviews

Review: Reproduction

HHS Contributor

"when and where did ‘generation’ and ‘reproduction’ begin and end, what did people mean when they talked in these terms, and how and why were their beliefs and actions like or unlike those that went before and came after?"

Reproduction: Antiquity to the present day, edited by Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming and Lauren Kassell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018) pp. 730. $125.00. Caroline Rusterholz, Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge Reproduction Antiquity to the present day is a massive, interdisciplinary and highly ambitious publication featuring 44 chapters, 40 exhibits – each consisting of a short essay focused on an image and artefact - and about 70 authors from different fields including history, demography, sociology, history of art, philosophy and theology, among others. Edited by Professor of History of Science and Medicine Nick Hopwood, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History Rebecca Flemming and Professor of History of Science and Medicine Lauren Kassel, all based at Cambridge University, this impressive collaboration reassesses the history of reproduction from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the twenty-first century from a Western perspective. The volume results from the work of Cambridge’s Generation to Reproduction Group, an interdisciplinary project led

by Cambridge historians of medicine and biology, funded by the Wellcome Trust, which started in 2004. This group of researchers have organised a wide range of seminars, reading groups and workshops, and one of these workshops provided the impetus for this ground-breaking volume. The collection is beautifully illustrated and highly accessible. The coherence of the volume lies in its sustained focus on a set of key questions: when and where did ‘generation’ and ‘reproduction’ begin and end, what did people mean when they talked in these terms, and how and why were their beliefs and actions like or unlike those that went before and came after? (17) This volume traces the transition from generation to reproduction and focuses on the Mediterranean, Western Europe, North America and their empires. It dates this change in terminology to the mid-eighteenth century.  Generation, a ‘looser framework for discussing procreation and descent’ (4), appeared in written productions when authors drew on different ancient discourses in philosophy, medicine and agriculture…

Book Reviews

Review: Chimpanzee Culture Wars

HHS Contributor

"...we should by all means be more human about nature, preserving biodiversity and slowing climate change, but... we should also try to be more chimp about culture"

Nicolas Langlitz, Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature Alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists. Princeton: University Press, 2020; 352pp; Paperback: £22.00. ISBN: 9780691204284 Alfred Freeborn, Humboldt University The founding figures of science studies told us that we have never been modern (Latour, 1993), that we have never really been cultural agents independent from the natural world but have moved in a web of nature-culture hybrids. Nor indeed have we ever been human (Haraway, 2008), but exist on a continuum with our animal kin. How then are we to understand the exceptional destruction of biodiversity and climatic change that humans alone seem to be causing? This is one of the central questions Nicolas Langlitz poses in his journey alongside people who study chimps in order to understand why it ended up that we are interested in them. Chimpanzee Culture Wars asks what is at stake in understanding the limits of the “anthropo” in the Anthropocene and

uses the disciplinary matrices of primatology, anthropology, psychology and science studies to explore this question. So far, the book has only been reviewed by primatologists, one of whom is a central protagonist in the book: these reviews look at the book as a commentary on primatology (Nakamura, 2020; McGrew, 2021). This review, in contrast, will show the reviewer looking at Langlitz looking at primatologists looking at chimps. I met Langlitz at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton while he was completing this book. We had met because of a shared interest in the work of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998). I was on a research trip to the States and he had kindly invited me to lunch at the Institute. Langlitz originally studied medicine in Berlin before shape-shifting into a medical anthropologist in California, writing a book about neuroscientists studying psychedelics (Langlitz, 2012) and becoming associate professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York. After lunch he suggested…

ECR Prize, News

History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize – winners!

HHS Contributor

Congratulations to the joint winners of this year's Early Career Prize, Liana Glew (Penn State) for the essay 'Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history' and Simon Torracinta (Yale) for the essay 'Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants'. Congratulations also to Erik Baker (Harvard) who received a commendation for the essay 'The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa

Fe Institute Libertarian'. All three scholars will be invited to submit their pieces for publication in the journal and will be interviewed about their work for the website soon. Thank you to everyone who submitted essays for consideration for the prize - the editors were very impressed by the high quality of submissions and inspired by the new research early career scholars are currently conducting.

Book Reviews

Review: ‘Aṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East

HHS Contributor

"ʿAsfuriyyeh is a rich, original, deeply researched, and often moving work."

Chris Sandal-Wilson, University of East Anglia Joelle M. Abi-Rached, ʿAṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020) In 1982, after more than eight decades of operation, the Lebanon Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders officially closed its doors. Seven years into the Lebanese civil war, as hospital employees – who had braved bullets and shells to continue providing counselling to the increasingly anxious population outside the hospital’s walls during the war – desperately sought to overturn the decision to close and to secure the salaries they were owed, the archives of the hospital were abandoned. It was through the initiative of Hilda Nassar, director (until 2013) of the Saab Medical Library at the American University of Beirut, and the work of the archivist Linda Sadaka that the archive of this remarkable institution was saved, as Joelle Abi-Rached tells us at the start of the equally remarkable history that

she has woven out of both this and an impressive number of other archives. ʿAsfuriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East traces the rise and fall of an institution which started out life as the Lebanon Hospital for the Insane in the twilight years of the nineteenth century, became the Lebanon Hospital for Mental Diseases in 1915, the Lebanon Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders in 1950, and was in throes of a further transformation, this time into the Lebanon Psychiatric Institute in 1976, when war intervened. The hospital’s many names might be taken as indexing how the history of psychiatry unfolded in Lebanon across these decades, as the institution developed from a home for forsaken, impoverished, often chronic cases into the central node in a network of outpatient clinics which aimed to bring mental hygiene to the masses. But the hospital could never shake off another name, derived from its original location to the east of…

Interviews

Normality – interview with Peter Cryle

HHS Contributor

"In the end we realised, you can't just make the normal into the name of everything hateful and everything that's to be avoided, scorned or deconstructed. There are things about the normal that are enabling and that are functional and that we can't and shouldn't reject."

The current special issue of the History of the Human Sciences is a collection of essays on Normality, edited by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, which responds to their co-written book Normality: A Critical Genealogy, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017. We discussed the genesis and contents of the special issue with its co-editor Professor Peter Cryle, University of Queensland. HHS: Before asking you more about the special issue, could you briefly introduce your jointly authored book, Normality: A Critical Genealogy, which was published by Chicago University Press in 2017? Peter Cryle: Quite often when people are doing research they start off with something that's a bit of an irritant, something that annoys them and which they wish they could resolve. For me and my friend and colleague Elizabeth Stevens ‘normality’ was a major irritant. We thought the idea was extraordinarily widespread but very poorly analyzed and that it involved all kinds of contradictions. We had

two main options: one was to stop complaining and ignore it, and the other was to try to do the kinds of things that cultural and intellectual historians can do in these circumstances, which is to have a look more closely at this rather messy thematic monster to see if we could nail some things down about it. That's a way, if you like, for intellectuals to fight back against intellectual messiness. That was our main thought and then we had to go and look for the normal wherever we could find it and make a history out of that. The two of us worked on it in parallel for about eight years, so we knew at the end we would have a book that would hold together, but we also knew that there were many places that we could have gone to and that there was much more for us to learn about those places. That was the way in…