Review: Psychedelic Prophets

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 of psychedelic drugs. The letters also feature their impressions of numerous notable figures they encountered over this period, including Timothy Leary, Norbert Wiener, Abram Hoffer and Gerald Heard.  

The most famous moment contained within this correspondence involved a question raised by Osmond about what to label psychoactive pharmaceuticals such as mescaline. In a letter dated March 15, 1956 Osmond wrote that he felt the widely used term “psychotomimetic” (psychotic mimicry) did not do justice to the full range of experiences these drugs could produce. Various candidates for an alternative were put forward including “psychophrenics”, “psycholytics” and the accurate yet clunky “euleutheropsychics” (260-263). Huxley was keen on phanerothyme (soul revealing) and signed off his letter with a short rhyme: “To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gramme of phanerothyme” (266). But they eventually settled on Osmond’s suggestion “psychedelic”, combining “psyche” – the Greek for “mind” – and “delos” – meaning “to manifest” or “bring to light”. Osmond even penned his own ditty: “To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of PSYCHEDELIC” (267).

It was certainly an artful piece of branding. “Psychedelic” met their criterion of having a clear meaning, being easy to pronounce and being unlike any other name. It 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. It was an idea that would not only shape early approaches to psychedelic therapy, but also carry through to popular culture as LSD became a symbol of rebellion and cultural change in the 1960s. More recently, Nicholas Langlitz has shown how the idea derived from Huxley and Osmond that psychedelics remove some kind of vestigial filter on the mind or brain remains influential in psychedelic culture and research today, despite conflicting neurophysiological evidence (2012, 125-127).  

In the last two decades proponents of psychedelics have championed a so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’ (Sessa, 2012). Strict regulations that all but put an end to legitimate research in the 1960s have been cautiously lifted and psychedelic drugs are once again being touted for their potential to treat various common and chronic mental conditions. This resurgent biomedical interest has also been accompanied by a wave of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, much of which has shown how difficult it is to decouple contemporary psychedelic research from its turbulent history (Dyck, 2008; Richert, 2019; Evans, 2017; Langlitz, 2012; Hartogsohn, 2020).. Despite remarkable progress in the decriminalisation of psychedelics for clinical use, Ericka Dyck, an editor of Psychedelic Prophets, points out that the latest phase of psychedelic research shares much in common with its historical beginnings – ‘enthusiasm and awe, and hyperbolic claims about the drug’s potential impact on a wide range of medical concerns’ (2017).  Navigating this hyperbole, Dyck suggests, requires attention to the same fault lines and epistemological problems that psychedelic research has tripped up on in the past. In Britain today, ketamine therapy for depression is available on the NHS and advocates hope that psilocybin, MDMA and LSD will all be added to the roster of widely prescribed pharmaceutical therapies within the next five to ten years. But the popularity of microdosing, retreats and informal encounters with psychedelics also show that self-medication and experimentation are how the majority experience these drugs, suggesting that psychedelic therapy will continue to traverse the boundaries of the medical establishment even as these drugs become part of more orthodox therapeutic interventions.   

Other scholarship has focused on the question of how cultural meanings of psychedelic drugs influence how an experience plays out in a lab, clinic or recreational setting. During the first wave of psychedelic research both Osmond and Huxley were well aware that the psychedelic experience was influenced by social and environmental factors often referred to as ‘set’ and ‘setting’. Set may be understood as any factor that an individual brings to the experience, including their personality, motives, previous knowledge or experience, mood and preparation. Setting refers to both the physical and social environment in which the experience takes place. More recently, researchers have referred to set and setting under the more general umbrella term “context” (Carhart-Harris et al, 2018). If context is key to the effectiveness of psychedelics in therapy so is an understanding of the history of ideas that surround them. In his account of post war LSD research, Ido Hartogsohn argues that the principles of set and setting may be applied historically to understand the ‘psychosocial construction’ of drug effects through an examination of the complex interactions between psychopharmacological effects and broader socio-cultural factors shaping drug experience (2020; see also 2017). Hartogsohn (2017), for example, suggests that early 1950s experiments which studied psychedelics under the pretext of inducing psychosis were far more likely to foster negative experiences and instigate ‘the very responses they expected to find’. Many of the epistemological challenges encountered by psychedelic researchers, including set and setting, are dealt with in Langlitz’ Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research Since the Decade of the Brain (2012). Langlitz suggests that the age of psychedelic research offers a unique opportunity for empirical research scientists to apply the kinds of approaches associated with the medical humanities and science studies scholarship.  

Much of the history of psychedelics, particularly those that incorporate a more diverse understanding of the actors, places and cultures that have lent psychedelics their meaning is still to be written. But between 1956 and 1963 Osmond and Huxley found themselves in a unique position, with access to many newly synthesised or recently “discovered” psychoactive substances and amongst a network of influential intellectuals interested in how these drugs could reshape not only therapy but society more broadly. Their history as well as that of psychedelic research is mapped out in the comprehensive introduction and epilogue to Psychedelic Prophets. But for historians, scientists or anyone else interested in delving deeper into the foundational ideas that have driven psychedelic culture, this huge volume of Huxley and Osmond’s correspondence contains rich pickings.  

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

Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind, A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume & the Rise of Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 316pp. $45.00. ISBN: 9780226597447

by 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 Discourses, but also find significant economic theory in more unexpected places, such as Hume’s youthful (and, much to his disappointment, far from sensationally received) tome on epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), as well as in its later reworkings as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). Hume’s bestselling The History of England (1754-62), they find, contains significant material on economic topics, as does his posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779). What emerges, Schabas and Wennerlind argue, is a particular kind of economic thought, attentive both to the quantitative implications of economic growth, but also to the moral dimensions of global economic transformations. Hume, in this view, uncannily anticipated recent developments in economics, such as the behavioral turn and the dramatic increase in attention to distributional issues and inequality, inspired by figures such as John Rawls and Thomas Piketty; such “ethical and behavioral foundations” to economics, the authors claim, were strikingly absent for much of the twentieth century (5). Hume thus becomes a sort of epistemological econometrician with interests in both prices and psychology, an economist whose normative orientation is not simply towards efficiency or individual preference maximization, but also towards the virtues of “nonpecuniary goods,” such as happiness, justice, and friendship.

Schabas and Wennerlind pursue this argument across seven tightly argued chapters. They first place Hume’s long-standing pursuit of economic knowledge in biographical context. The authors detail Hume’s birth in 1711 (as “David Home,” changed to “Hume” in 1734) to modest circumstances in Scotland, his brief clerkship to a Bristol sugar importer (a position from which he was dismissed for correcting his employer’s grammar – surely a sobering warning to aspiring pedants everywhere), his time living abroad in continental Europe, where he observed the cultural and demographic effects of differing levels of economic development (25-39). This chapter also reveals Schabas and Wennerlind’s main approach to contextualization: they take great care to reconstruct Hume’s intellectual network, combing through his correspondence to trace the paths of influence and intellectual development. Throughout the book, the authors note his interactions with a diverse range of figures, such as the Dutch financier Isaac de Pinto, Scottish “stadial theorists” Adam Ferguson and Lord Kames, famed natural historian Comte de Buffon, as well as with other leading Enlightenment figures including Adam Smith, Diderot, and Rousseau (from whom he later became estranged, a not unusual occurrence given Rousseau’s temperament) (27-28). These reconstructed intellectual networks are connected with significant events in Hume’s life – the authors note, for instance, that his time in Bristol would have exposed him to complex economic transactions, surely influencing his later thoughts on economic flows and monetary issues. Indeed, with Bristol’s leading place in the sugar industry, Hume would have had firsthand experience of one of Britain’s most dynamic economic sectors, but also a sector that was fundamentally connected with Caribbean slavery and the Atlantic slave trade (32).

Chapter two details Hume’s approach to economic methodology. Hume’s principal concern, Schabas and Wennerlind argue, was to create a true “science” of economics. His approach was thus nomothetic, with the variety of human experience brought into lawlike order and unity (51-52). The authors draw nuanced connections to Hume’s epistemological skepticism regarding the limits of human knowledge. Hume’s critique of these limits regarding the physical world has become famous enough to be called the ‘Hume Induction Problem’. In brief, given the epistemic apparatus of our senses, we are essentially locked out from knowing the “inner causes” of most phenomena covered by the physical sciences. Thus, while we may have seen one event constantly follow another – billiard balls striking each other, in Hume’s famous example – and thus may strongly expect (or mentally associate) that they will act similarly in the future, this sort of induction from experience does not, in the end, produce sure knowledge of the necessary logical connection between cause and effect. However, Schabas and Wennerlind observe, for Hume this is not the case with economic behavior. As they write,

Whereas in the physical sciences, we must ‘confine our speculations to the appearances of objects,’ as Hume had said, with human actions we can also venture into the internal causes, presumably via the same process of introspection that Hume used to establish the mental laws of association. The moral sciences have this advantage of permitting us to grasp a layer of causation that is blocked for the most part in the natural sciences (62).

Because economic behaviour is the interaction of human agents, in principle we can probe the nexus of causal factors: willed action, moral dispositions, habit, customs, and so on. On an epistemological level, then, for Hume economic science was actually more secure than the physical sciences.

Schabas and Wennerlind next tackle Hume’s account of the institutions of property and commerce. Hume placed property rights at the center of his theory of justice, they argue, so that the rule of law could securely channel individual economic interests into virtuous circuits of exchange. Hume, they write, put much stock in the potential of commerce to engender more refinement, prudence, and liberty. He also believed that the concomitant urbanization would induce more civility, friendship, and humanity. Above all, the modern economy would foster a wide array of social virtues, notably honesty, politeness, and beneficence. All of this depended critically on upholding the system of property rights and hence the rule of law. It was these beneficial outcomes, the effects of the law, that gave it warrant, not a more primitive appeal to fairness or equality (96).

The putative utilitarian logic of mutually beneficial commercial exchange, in this view, would polish manners, pacify hostilities, and lead to aggregate increases in happiness. To do so effectively, the authors note, required two further institutions: markets and money. Schabas and Wennerlind’s focus is mostly on the latter – fittingly, given Hume’s attention to monetary issues. They suggest that money, for Hume, was “intrinsically semiotic” (99). Rather than constituting an inherent store of value, money was a kind of language, in which different commodities could be “translated” into each other through market exchange. Monetary transactions thus represented a kind of pledge, a promise that two commodities were, in the minds of the transacting parties, of commensurable value. Insofar as monetary transactions depended on the fulfillment of a promise, Schabas and Wennerlind note, Hume thus saw money and credit as residing on the same continuum (100-103). Hence the importance of maintaining faith in the security of the money supply and, as the authors examine in later chapters, of avoiding the seductive pitfalls of public credit.

 What moral qualities might characterize this improving world? Schabas and Wennerlind suggest that, for Hume, the material particularities of commerce produced a host of moral benefits: greater urbanization, greater equality between the sexes, the softening of hostile impulses, the promotion of cross-cultural trade, the development of new tastes, the fostering of a spirit of “industry” (115-119, 127). Schabas and Wennerlind compellingly argue that industry was particularly important for Hume not only for the commodities and wealth it might produce, but also for the virtuous habits and dispositions it might inculcate: “Hume insisted that by working diligently in one’s profession, one could not only find happiness but also inadvertently cultivate various virtues and thus contribute to the refinement of society. Because work occupies the majority of one’s waking hours, it offers the means to discipline and dignify one’s life” (121). The authors further connect this dispositional advantage of industry to Hume’s sociology: the “middle ranks” of society were those most able to sustainably produce the spirit of industry, while also integrating the honest virtues of the lower classes and the generous sociability of those above (136).

Schabas and Wennerlind return to monetary matters in chapter five. This is where the authors examine Hume’s antimercantilist arguments about the specie-flow mechanism, in which individual consumption patterns in the aggregate necessarily frustrated any top-down political attempts to dominate the global marketplace (143-146). Schabas and Wennerlind also lay out the “non-neutrality” of Hume’s quantity theory of money: money might be a kind of language, for Hume, but it was a language that could create real effects in the system of production. The authors build this argument by exploring one of Hume’s characteristic thought experiments: a galleon, laden with specie, arrives from Cadíz and unloads in a local port. What happens to the local economy? Both authors agree that, for Hume, this influx of money stimulates economic growth. But at this sole point in the book, the authorial voices splits in two. Wennerlind favours a broadly demand-side explanation: the influx of foreign specie is a result of increased demand for exports, raising both domestic wages and output, which increased wealth, in turn, filters into other sectors of the local economy through market exchange. Schabas, on the other hand, expounds an initially supply-side account, focusing particularly on the money supply. The influx of foreign specie replaces the poor-quality money in which wages were normally paid – in a kind of inverse of Gresham’s Law, good money here drives out bad. With workers now paid in high-quality specie, they happily work more intensively, allowing manufacturers to respond dynamically to increased foreign demand for output, with spillover effects on other domestic sectors as workers also increase domestic spending. Whichever explanation is favored, the authorial voice reconverges in suggesting that Hume had thus foreseen the economic concept of the multiplier (153-158).

Hume was deeply concerned about the distributional and political implications of international trade and public finance. The authors here find him at, simultaneously, his most and least cosmopolitan. Schabas and Wennerlind dissect Hume’s critique of the “jealousy of trade” plaguing eighteenth-century capitalism. In a world crisscrossed by imperial rivalries, Hume noted a distressing tendency to towards zero-sum thinking, with one nation’s economic ascendancy thought to entail another’s decline. This, in turn, dictated protectionist policies, destructive imperial competition, and devastating wars. Hume pleaded for nations to abandon the malevolent passion of jealousy and instead, through free trade, channel “envy and emulation” to more globally salutary ends (177-180). Free trade would not eliminate interstate competition but domesticate it, with nations spurring each other to ever-greater heights of improvement and wealth. For Schabas and Wennerlind, Hume here becomes an early theorist of globalization: given the variety of initial conditions, free trade policies would set countries along differing developmental paths, with rich countries specializing in high-quality manufactures and poor countries specializing in agriculture and rougher commodity production. But, given the mobility of labour and capital, in the long run the benign effects of emulation and trade would spread improvement across the globe (182-186). Free international trade would thus accomplish the economic ends of empire, but, supposedly, without the need for violence or conquest. Hume’s cosmopolitanism did, however, slam into racial barriers. As the authors note, though he opposed slavery and the slave trade, his dismissive opinions regarding the developmental capacities of non-white peoples, particularly Africans, were nothing short of appalling (191-194). This chapter also sees the authors explicating Hume’s pessimistic account of public debt. Since debt funded imperial warfare, led to burdensome taxation, perverted the political order, and so offered an irresistible tool for irresponsible policymakers, to Hume it represented an existential threat to states (195-202). Thus, as he put it, “either the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation” (195-202). Hume preferred the former.

The seventh and final chapter discusses Hume’s lasting influence on economic thought. Schabas and Wennerlind make a convincing argument for Hume’s enduring influence on his friend and younger contemporary Adam Smith (211-221), as well as on later economic theory of both libertarian and liberal convictions (230-237). Other connections are drawn a bit more thinly. The authors, for instance, claim that the Encyclopédie’s famous plates, which promoted the dignity and importance of the mechanical arts, “reflects Hume’s own emphasis on the economic importance of manufacturing and practical knowledge” (222). But while Hume was undoubtedly influential, the Encyclopédie plates drew from a vast array of intellectual wellsprings.[2]

The book ends on a decidedly ambivalent note. Until the end of his life, Hume remained optimistic about the potential of actions enmeshed in the web of commerce and capitalism to improve the world. But were he to land in current times, the authors ask, would he hold the same opinions (240)? They leave it a provocatively open question.

A Philosopher’s Economist marks an important scholarly intervention. The authors make a compelling case for the importance, if not the centrality, of economics to Hume’s work. They skillfully reconstruct Hume’s multiple and interlocking economic doctrines, a difficult task given both the complexity of Hume’s thought and the comparatively short length of the volume. Particularly impressive is the way that they connect these doctrines to Hume’s epistemological and metaphysical stances, connections which otherwise might have been overlooked. Their contextualization of Hume’s social and intellectual networks, and how they shaped his work, is also well executed. In their overall construction, Hume articulates a broadly optimistic vision of how commerce might lead to an improved world, but it was still a world vulnerable to human vanity, weakness, and jealousy.

This is a compact volume, Hume’s thought is expansive, and the authors have written elsewhere on the topic.[3] That said, for a standalone work, there are two areas that might have been profitably addressed. Firstly, the question of how Hume’s personal stances on slavery and empire may, or may not, have intersected with his economic thought. As mentioned, Hume, despite his contempt for the mental capabilities of nonwhite peoples, was an opponent of slavery. However, he also seems to have lent money to a friend involved in the slave system, as well as maintained friendships with those connected to Atlantic slavery (192). Schabas and Wennerlind do not obscure any of this. But they also do not press these connections much beyond the charge of hypocrisy. For all his disapproval of slavery, Hume was nonetheless willing to carve out a degree of space for the circulation of slave-produced commodities. As the authors note, Hume at one point suggested that, however temporarily, tariffs might be designed to steer domestic demand away from foreign brandy and towards British rum (180) – a distilled molasses product, the sugarcane for which would have been produced within the hellish world of the Caribbean slave complex. Similarly, they rightly note that Hume was firmly opposed to military conquest and empire by the sword (177-178). But that does not necessarily imply being opposed to empire tout court. Indeed, Hume served (as a noncombatant) in the abortive invasion of Lorient in 1746, and later as undersecretary of state during an age of imperial expansion (xiv, 177). And as Hume’s friend and correspondent Diderot, in his contributions to the Abbé Raynal’s massively influential Histoire des Deux Indes, argued, colonies were theoretically permissible under certain circumstances.[4] The degree to which Enlightenment thought was or was not sympathetic to empire, colonization, and enslavement continues to be a live topic.[5]

Second is Hume’s position on finance. Schabas and Wennerlind observe that, in 1761, Hume invested about one thousand pounds in securities, likely publicly traded “bonds or shares in a mercantile company” (41). Hume was, apparently, adamant that his financial holdings were ‘real’, as opposed to the speculations of stockjobbers. How might this notion of ‘real’ financial wealth intersect with Hume’s overall starkly negative account of public debt, along with his theoretical concerns over money and credit? Given that capital mobility and the liquidity of money were central to his accounts of the specie-flow mechanism, global development, and economic multiplier effects, it would be valuable to know more not just about what Hume thought of the concept of finance, but also about the mechanics of financial markets.

Such explorations would perhaps have added further to what is already a strong and important intellectual contribution. A Philosopher’s Economist is an insightful, well-argued, and compelling volume, written and researched with great skill by two expert scholars. It will be of great interest to readers in the history of economic thought, the history of capitalism, and Enlightenment studies.

Tyson Leuchter (@inkybrained) is a lecturer in Global History at King’s College London. He is currently composing a book manuscript on financial capitalism, the Paris Stock Exchange, and the transformations of the French empire in the early nineteenth century.

[1] In English, the closest work the authors note is Eugene Rotwein’s editor’s introduction to a collection of Hume’s economic writings, originally written in 1955, then revised and reissued in 1970 and 2007; other book-length studies have addressed Hume’s economics, though Schabas and Wennerlind argue that these works do not take as systematic an approach as their own.

[2] John R. Pannabecker, “Representing Mechanical Arts in Diderot’s ‘Encyclopédie’,” Technology and Culture, 39 (1998), 33-73.

[3] Both authors have written several articles specifically on Hume, in addition to hosting a workshop on his economics (241), and co-editing David Hume’s Political Economy (Routledge: Abingdon, 2008).

[4] As Diderot wrote, “Both reason and equity permit the establishment of colonies, but they also mark out the principles from which one must not stray when founding them.” See Denis Diderot, “Extracts from the Histoire des Deux Indes,” in John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler, eds, Diderot: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1992), 175.

[5] The classical statement of the issue is Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et Histoire au Siècle des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 1971). See also Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); William Max Nelson, “Making Men: Enlightenment Ideas of Racial Engineering,” American Historical Review, 115 (2010), 1364-94; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500-c. 1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

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

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 firm and willing to work extraordinary hours in pursuit of this vision. They’re able to inculcate commitment to the firm’s mission among their employees through the example of their own work ethic, so people authentically buy into what the firm’s about. They seek to emulate the work ethic of the entrepreneurial leader of the firm.

The material in this article helps to fill in this story. This article is about the Santa Fe Institute, which has been an important proponent, particularly since the 1990s, of entrepreneurial management in the American economy. They had an illustrious list of clients, in what they call their business network, who came to them for advice about how they ought to manage their firms in the construction of what was called at the time ‘the New Economy’. I’m interested in the way that this research institute used a particular metaphor from the natural sciences, the complex adaptive system, to legitimate these changes that were occurring on a much broader scale in the American economy at this time – outsourcing, downsizing, the elimination of middle management ranks etc. All of this was again in service of this vision of a firm that is really managed by inspiring employee initiative, rather than by directing employees in a bureaucratic manner. This was possible because the firms themselves would be saturated with a creative purpose that was supplied by their entrepreneurial leaders.

The other component of this article is this concept of social entrepreneurship, which became a key concept at SFI in the last 20 years. This is the extrapolation of the vision of the entrepreneurial business leader to the social realm. It involves a conception of social problem solving that’s driven by the creative, diligent work of particular entrepreneurial leaders, whether that’s an NGO, working in private businesses, or particular kinds of charismatic political figures. This is related to a broader migration of this concept of entrepreneurship out of the for-profit business world into a much wider range of professional settings, to the point where the Santa Fe Institute researchers themselves are often encouraged to self-identify as scientific entrepreneurs. This, of course, also entails an entrepreneurial work ethic and the expectation of a uniquely driven and committed devotion to a particular creative project.

HHS: I was wondering if you would argue that an ‘entrepreneurial work ethic’ is demanded by academic work and institutions today? 

EB: Totally. A large part of the motivation for this project in the first place was identifying this compulsion to extraordinary and increasing work hours that characterize not just my experience in academia, but the experience of people working in all sorts of professional settings. This is, of course, encouraged top down from university leadership. The rhetoric of entrepreneurship, particularly in United States universities, is totally ubiquitous – there are campus centres for encouraging entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship prizes etc. This is the way that academics, alongside all kinds of other professional and managerial workers, are supposed to be conceptualizing themselves. One of the reasons that I was attracted to this project was precisely because there are intellectual figures, scientists and social scientists, who are advocating for entrepreneurship while they’re also conceptualizing themselves as scientific entrepreneurs. You can see the porosity of the boundaries between these domains and the way that this culture of entrepreneurialism has come to saturate both these fields.

HHS: Why did you choose to focus on the Santa Fe Institute?

EB: There was a lot of serendipity involved, ultimately. When I was starting my research and tracking down examples of this way of thinking, I was struck by this quite surprising elective affinity between economic and managerial concepts of entrepreneurship and innovation, on the one hand, and the scientific concept of complex adaptive systems, on the other. That led me to the Santa Fe Institute, which is still the biggest name in this field. But also, I was struck by the extent to which this place seem to be a kind of gravitational attractor for these people and that got me really interested in thinking about SFI, not just as a machine for cranking out ideas, but as a social location or social space where people came, learned something and acquired elements of a new worldview and then left and did other things.

HHS: You claim that the SFI’s main accomplishment was not the invention of ideas or an ideology, but of a particular subject (the SFI libertarian) – what distinguishes/defines this political subject? What is their ‘conceptual worldview’?

EB: This comes from a blog post from a libertarian blogger in the mid-2000s reflecting on the emergence of this new type of person or, as they say on Twitter, a ‘new type of guy’, who this writer calls the SFI libertarian. This is a person who consistently votes for Democrats, who thinks of themselves generally as a liberal person, but who substantively shares elements of the libertarian worldview, namely an emphasis on free markets and an emphasis on this concept of entrepreneurship. This is the most important synthesis that occurs at SFI. Their entrepreneurship becomes the site of their social problem-solving impulses. They’re liberals who recognize real problems in the world, and they want to solve them, but the way that they think that think they ought to be solved is through energetic entrepreneurial people like themselves starting initiatives and, in some cases, for-profit businesses.

HHS: When did these kinds of ‘independent-sector’ institutions emerge and what distinguishes them from the kinds of institutions the preceded them?

EB: In the article I situate the emergence of SFI in the collapse of the Cold War science funding regime, which saw the creation of the national laboratory system and an enormous expansion of government funding for science in universities. By the 1980s, as the Cold War was winding down, simultaneously with the emergence of a new regime of austerity in American domestic politics under Ronald Reagan, this science funding regime came into jeopardy. National Science Foundation budgets were slashed and universities were encouraged to commodify their scientific research in order to bootstrap their own science funding operations. A lot of that led to an increasing movement of scientists out of universities and national laboratories into these new, smaller ventures that were dependent not on the government, but on private philanthropy either from formal charities or from wealthy individuals.

The Santa Fe Institute is emblematic of this trend. It was founded by alums of Los Alamos National Laboratory and subsequent decades it has attracted a great number of expatriates from the world of university science. 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.

HHS: What is the significance of funders in the story of SFI that you tell? And relatedly, what is ‘philanthrocapitalism’ and when does it emerge?

EB: Philanthropists come on the scene at SFI shortly after it’s founded, because they need money. There’s this optimistic idea that once the founders bring all these brilliant people together, they can leverage their connections and their prestige and everyone will be really excited about what’s going on, and that the money will take care of itself. But, of course, that doesn’t happen. They find themselves in financial dire straits pretty quickly and start to think about how to attract big funders. Eventually they establish a few really important relationships with particular corporate and philanthropic funders, and this leads to a change in the way that they conceptualize what this new institute is all about. It wouldn’t just be a place where you could bring together all the brilliant people and have them talk to each other –– they wanted something more focused and concrete. This led to an increasingly narrow identification with the subject matter of complexity or complex adaptive systems, and an increasingly explicit orientation towards the worlds of management, economics and political libertarianism. It’s a feedback loop. They see for themselves the role of wealthy corporations, foundations and individuals in getting their own research institute off the ground. This then becomes a template for how they imagine problems can be solved in the rest of society.

Not just at SFI but, more generally, the rising social importance of corporate and individual philanthropy and social problem-solving gets labeled as philanthrocapitalism. This portmanteau is supposed to denote a synthesis of older school philanthropy with the imperatives of efficiency and innovation associated with capitalism. This is philanthropy but not in a noblesse oblige way. This is philanthropy that’s supposed to zero in on the really important problems, to figure out the best way to solve them and to industrialize the process of philanthropy. This becomes closely associated with the concept of social entrepreneurship and it’s a feature of the orientation towards politics and social problems that becomes characteristic of the SFI in the 21st century.

HHS: What is the ‘complex adaptive systems concept’ and how did it become a central focus for the SFI? What does it mean to treat ‘complexity’ as a subject matter?

EB: This is a complex story in itself. So, complex systems are everywhere. You can see them everywhere from meteorology to evolutionary biology. They’ve been studied for a long time. What makes the system complex is, basically, that it can’t be modeled linearly. Small effects in one area of the system have surprising and difficult to predict consequences for the behavior of the system as a whole.

The concept of complex adaptive systems comes a bit later. This really begins to take off in the 1980s. The complex adaptive system is a complex system that, in addition to having all the other complex system attributes, adapts to its environment. It displays properties of self-organization and increasing fitness in response to external stimuli. The idea is that complex adaptive systems exhibit properties of order and in some settings even beauty –– but they were not designed that way. This happens spontaneously, as a result of processes of adaptation. There’s no director who sits atop the complex adaptive system and tells it how to improve, rather each agent or molecule in the complex adaptive system is responding to its own environmental challenges. And as a result of the way that the system is organized, this adaptation produces increasing fitness and order for the system as a whole.

This concept of the complex adaptive system has very strong analogies with the concept of spontaneous order, which was developed in the mid 20th century period by intellectuals associated with political libertarianism, including the economist Friedrich Hayek and the philosopher Michael Polanyi. This is a connection that it does not take long for libertarians and scientists to recognize, which helps to explain why libertarian philanthropists get very excited when they hear that some of the scientists at the Santa Fe Institute are interested in complex adaptive systems. They really encourage them to go further down this path, to draw out these analogies between complex adaptive systems in nature and this conception of markets and firms in the capitalist economy as spontaneous orders. So SFI became increasingly preoccupied with attempting to spell out the principles that unify these complex adaptive systems everywhere. And again, this is a move away from the initial vision of the institute, which was to identify people who are at the top of their fields in different disciplines and get them together to see what emerged from their collaboration.

HHS: You argue that the 1990s was ‘characterized by a strong degree of coordinated action by elite actors in business and government to enact the transformations required for the construction of the New Economy’ – would you also argue that this was a significant moment in the development of libertarianism (either generally or at SFI specifically)?

EB: Yes, certainly. This is a major theme of my work and I think a lot of the best recent work on libertarianism and neoliberalism: itrequires a lot of work and coordination to construct a system that’s supposed to regulate itself. This is a period that has been characterized as the zenith of neoliberalism. After Reagan and Thatcher even formerly centre-left parties in the US in the UK turn towards free markets, deregulation and privatization under Clinton and Blair. But the point that I want to make is that this was not just a matter of giving up on public policy or of letting it go laissez faire. This required the construction of intellectual and social networks that allowed this basic political orientation to travel throughout different spheres, different sectors, different domains. Particularly on the level of management: If you want an entrepreneurial economy, then firms and corporations require significant overhauling. You need to get businesses to become more entrepreneurial themselves and that means, in the rhetoric of this time, ‘shedding dead weight’, getting rid of bureaucracy, adopting organizational innovations to encourage employee initiative, streamlining firms to give them a laser focus on a particular sort of creative mission that is set by their entrepreneurial leadership etc. This was not a change that happened organically, it was a change that was encouraged by consultants and by the management press and the business school world.

The Santa Fe Institute was one node in the network that made these changes happen. Its contribution was to say, the economy is a complex adaptive system, the economy is composed of firms that are complex adaptive systems, and at the base layer are people who have to be trained to take this adaptive entrepreneurial approach to the world. SFI gets really interested in evolutionary psychology and claims are made that on an evolutionary level human psychology has evolved to give people certain innate dispositions towards problem solving, cooperation and adaptation.

HHS: What kinds of criticisms did SFI face in the 90s, and why or how did it overcome them?

EB: There are two challenges that emerge. One is a degree of scientific criticism from scientists, funders and science journalists. In particular there’s a scathing piece published in Scientific American in the mid-90s that takes on this new paradigm of complexity science and argues that in their search for abstract principles that unify complex adaptive systems these scientists have become untethered from empirical reality and factuality. The claim is made that no facts about the world are being discovered or accumulated at SFI, rather it’s all modeling and computer modeling in particular. The SFI research has a self-referential character, and it becomes about the coherence of this computer model, rather than any connection to procedures of verification or empirical testing. Secondly, eventually the New Economy model comes under threat, because the dot com stock market bubble bursts, and some of these firms that are supposed to be the new innovative entrepreneurial leaders, most infamously Enron, are exposed as fraudulent. There’s a lot of concern about the morality of this new high-tech venture capitalist funded economy.

At SFI this leads to a period of reorientation towards a greater interest in things like evolutionary psychology, which in their minds is a bit more grounded in the realm of the testable. The question of how humans are programmed evolutionarily or disposed by evolution to behave seems to be an empirical question in a way that questions about the grand unifying principles of complex adaptive systems are not. Then there’s also an increasing orientation towards a more socially liberal articulation of the efficiency of entrepreneurship, which leads towards the social entrepreneur and the social problem-solver. You get a series of studies that come out of SFI that tackle problems like inequality, education and global poverty. Rather than just being really enthusiastic about what’s happening on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, there’s an idea that the principles that are emerging out of this institute can help people who are interested in making the world a better place, rather than than just in making money.

HHS: Samuel Bowles, who became director of SFI, has an interesting ideological trajectory away from Marxism – could you introduce him and describe the changes he introduced at SFI?

EB: Bowles starts his career as an important Marxist economist. Along with his collaborator Herbert Gintis, he is denied tenure for his political views and activism at Harvard in the late 1960s, early 1970s. He decamps to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where he writes with Gintis a book called Schooling and Capitalist America that’s still on sociology syllabi and is an incredibly important work about the relationship between class and equality in education in the United States. Over time they drift away first from Marxism and then eventually from socialism. Especially important for them in making the transition is the rise of the concept of human rights and of human rights advocacy organizations like Amnesty International, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. This is happening concurrently with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bowles and Gintis don’t abandon their commitments towards social justice along with their Marxism and their socialism, but they believe they can continue to pursue these goals by adopting this liberal politics of human rights and by looking to these organizations like Amnesty International and other NGO-type advocacy groups to engage in more entrepreneurial social problem-solving.

Bowles and Gintis come to SFI in this period of internal soul-searching at the end of the 1990s. They really help to reorient the institute towards evolutionary psychology, which they’ve become extremely interested in. Bowles oversees the rebranding of the economics program to be about behavioral science. They publish papers on people’s innate instincts towards cooperation. They imagine that a sense of fairness is evolutionarily engrained in human actors. The view becomes that it’s by encouraging this personal virtue, this cooperative behavior among individuals, that these goals that they’ve held since the 1960s can best be actualized in the 21st century. This fits into a broader story of deradicalization and a shift away from leftism, but it is important to underscore is that Bowles never loses his sense of himself as a person of who’s fighting for reform, for justice, for equality and for fairness. It’s just that his idea of how to achieve these values shifts, and there’s an intersection with this stream of thought, with roots in political libertarianism, that emphasizes entrepreneurial action and spontaneous social problem solving. For those of us who want to critique this worldview, it’s inaccurate to characterize it as a resurgence of selfishness or a retreat from other sorts of values we might think are important. The critique has to be on the question of how social problems emerge and can get solved, and particularly on the possibilities of collective action. We need to ask: what are the practical consequences of an emphasis on social-entrepreneurial problem-solving?

In the 2000s Bowles and Gintis go back to Schooling and Capitalist America. They acknowledge that inequality in educational outcomes is a real problem and that education isn’t working for a lot of people. But the answer to this is no longer this socialist political programme that’s prescribed in the original volume, it’s a much hazier and more pessimistic view about the ability of public policy to solve these problems. But it leaves the door open for

independent sector entrepreneurial solutions, namely charter schools, to address these problems instead. Again, critiquing the charter school movement by just saying that we need to care about educational outcomes or care about educational inequality is a bit of a dead end, because this is not a premise that’s denied by these people. Rather they have a different operational or instrumental perspective on how these values are best promoted.

HHS: You explain that the notion of ‘implicit bias’ arises from this context – what understanding of human nature and society does this rely on/presume?

EB: Mahzarin Banaji, the psychologist who is the co-creator of the field of implicit bias and the co-author of the most popular book on the subject, is an SFI affiliate faculty member. Samuel Bowles is in the acknowledgments of that book. The implicit bias model claims racial inequality is maintained basically by accident. There are no malicious actors. There aren’t consciously racist actors in the story that implicit bias tells. This is consistent with a view of human nature that emphasizes people’s innate desire for fairness and their innate desire to cooperate with one another. But the story is that, as a result of a hangover from a past aberrational era of forthright racism, this layer of implicit bias sort of got written over the fundamental bedrock of pro-fairness, cooperative instincts. As a result, people, in contradiction to the values they perceive themselves to hold, engage in subtle discriminatory behavior in their interactions with other people.

The solution, then, is for people to realize that they hold these implicit attitudes this and so they instinctively act in a way that’s inconsistent with the values they really hold. It holds out the promise of clearing away this residue encrusting our innate cooperative instincts. The spontaneous social dynamics that are maintaining racial inequality can just dissolve if there’s sufficient awareness of the nature of this problem, and so the way that the solution is framed is often in the form of consulting or trainings, which have now proliferated. I don’t necessarily want to say these trainings are are bad or that they shouldn’t be done. But the goal the history that I tell is to direct our attention at the kind of underlying social theory and theory of human nature that’s operating behind this movement, and to think about what’s left out of that picture.

HHS: I have a very broad question to conclude: what have been the broader social and political implications of the emergence of ‘social entrepreneurism’?

EB: It depends where you’re looking, but in the United States I think what’s most important is the way this ideology has helped to channel the broad desire for social change and social progress into support for particular entrepreneurial initiatives, alongside a tolerance for the slow erosion of other modes of social problem solving, namely the welfare state and labour unions. This is often made explicit by the more conservative or libertarian proponents of the social entrepreneurship vision, which is presented as the successor for these institutions that are seen as characteristic of a hopelessly outdated politics of the past.

On a global scale, this concept of social entrepreneurship is profoundly entwined with understandings of economic development, going back to much earlier in the 20th century. This discourse still thrives today in development circles. And we see the consequences of this worldview with the impending divorce of Bill and Melinda Gates, who are considered archetypal social entrepreneurs. The Gates Foundation is often held up as a model of social entrepreneurship or philanthrocapitalism in the realm of global health and economic development. Questions now loom about the future of this organization and the future of this one private fortune that so much of today’s global development infrastructure depends on. We’re really seeing the downsides of giving particular individuals such an outsized, non-democratic role in setting the agenda and directing the flow of resources on a global scale. And Bill Gates, too, is an extremely ardent defender of intellectual property protections and has exerted an enormous countervailing force against efforts to liberalize the intellectual policy regime around Covid vaccines. My question is, who made this guy the boss of global health? Social entrepreneurship is part of the answer.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.

Interview: Liana Glew on psychiatric paperwork

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. I’m taking writing to be a really big category, so it includes different types of artistic expression, house organs, personal journals, letters, and more.

HHS: Your essay discusses medical paperwork –what is distinctive about this kind of medical text? Does it make sense to talk about paperwork in terms of genre?

I think it does, yes. I think we’re used to looking through paperwork to get to the content of it and we don’t see the form itself. And so, by framing paperwork as a type of narrative just like other types of narratives, by placing it alongside these other genres, I think we are able to see some of the mechanisms of power at work inside these bureaucracies in a way that would be almost invisible if we weren’t taking the time to stop and look at the writing of paperwork as a genre of writing.

HHS: To rephrase a question you ask in your introduction, how did you go about reading these kinds of documents ‘while centering patients’ agency’? In what ways does paperwork repress  agency?

LG: To start, I think I would define that term patient agency as a person’s power to make decisions about their treatment and to control the stories told about them during the course of their treatment and after. I specifically chose the word agency, rather than something like independence, taking a cue from disability scholars. Sometimes decision-making happens in conversation or in groups, but I wanted to honour the person’s desires and political drives and needs, etc. The type of paperwork I’m looking at often frames a person’s narrative as evidence of ‘madness’ – madness or insanity are the terms they would use – rather than as a valid representation of what they were experiencing. When a patient spoke, the only time their words would end up in that paperwork was often to prove that they were mad. So as a narrative tool, paperwork really subsumes patient agency within its grasp.

HHS: In discussion of mediation and agency in relation to these documents where or how do you position yourself as a historian?

LG: I’m doing my PhD in English Department—even though this project is historically situated, narrative is my primary lens. As I’m developing these methods for reading, I try to be very aware of my own positionality and follow scholars like Gail Hornstein by leaving room for a diversity of madness narratives. I’m constantly checking myself to make sure that I’m not, for example, just replacing a pro-psychiatry narrative with an anti-psychiatry narrative. I’m trying to create these methods for reading that can encompass a really broad array of lived experience and while I’m doing this, I’m also noticing the roles of narratives, stigma, disability, etc, in how we understand history.

HHS: Why were you particularly interested in hospitals built according to Thomas Story Kirkbride’s architectural plans for psychiatric institutions?

On the surface level, they had a more unified and formalized record keeping practice so it was easier to find some of these archives. Although they were still not especially easy to find, as many of them have been destroyed, lost, or taken up by private collectors. On a more theoretical level, I’m interested in how Kirkbride’s vision for architectural design parallels the way that administrators fashion their own role within this bureaucracy. Kirkbride saw very little distinction between architectural design and therapeutic practice so he thought about how each design element would reflect or influence the humane treatment that he hoped patients would receive. Once the construction of the hospitals were set in motion by the Kirkbride Plan, they were set in the context of eugenic America and became sites of overcrowding and abuse. I believe that administrators’ bureaucratic moves demonstrated and reflected the sort of underlying punitive or eugenic ideology of the hospital, just as Kirkbride’s design reflected his underlying utopian vision of the hospital. I think there’s some some parallel work happening there.

HHS: What was the value of Ann Laura Stoler’s injunction to read ‘along the archive grain’ for your project?

LG: Stoler’s work for me was a really good starting place for working with this material because it teaches us to see and notice how groups and power constructed narrative, as well as the real life effects that those narratives can have on the people experiencing life in the hospital. Stoler provides a starting point, the first place that I go before developing the argument and methods further. Put altogether I think the methods more readily reflect

Marisa J. Fuentes’s approach of reading along the bias grain. Not to overcomplicate the metaphors here, but just as Stoler moves along the archival grain which involves following wood grain, Fuentes talks about cutting fabric on the bias, which makes it stretch. My examination of paperwork shows where these narratives stretch—what’s missing, where patients push back against the institutional narrative, etc. Stoler’s work is a good starting point, but then I move out towards this more elastic understanding of the archive.

You describe finding some empty forms in the archive that struck you as significant for identifying the ‘archival grain’ – how so?

LG: That’s an anecdote I go to because it was one of the first times I started realizing how we’re trained to think about paperwork. I was working on a really tight schedule in an archive and I had this really thick folder of paperwork that I had brought to the desk. I worked with this really wonderful, helpful archivist who scanned the documents for me; I came back a few hours later and I realized she had only scanned about half of the papers. She said she didn’t scan the others because they were “blank.” And this led to such a generative conversation between the two of us in realizing that we are trained to see forms as blank, even when they contain plenty of text. It was this moment where it clicked for me that this is something that’s really worth looking at and something that we’re so trained to see as invisible.

HHS: What key historical shifts in psychiatry were evident from studying these documents?

LG: I’m hesitant to make broad claims about psychiatry as a whole, because my access to archives has been limited to the US and limited to really two or three hospitals. But I have noticed within that scope a shift more towards family history, so in the late 19th century, a lot of these forms were more about the person’s individual history: when they started exhibiting behaviours that were non-normative, etc. And then the paperwork that I’m looking at around the 1920s starts moving towards asking more questions about family history. The other thing that I noticed was a shift in where authority was located in the intake process, the process of a patient being admitted into the hospital. Around the 19th century, so many of these forms just reference the fact that a physician has done an exam on this patient behind closed doors, that the physician declares this patient is insane and that they should be hospitalized, and so the reader of the form is supposed to just trust the doctors’ authority. In the 20th century, these intake forms went from being about three pages to about ten pages. A community member or a friend (whoever brought the patient to the hospital that day) was expected to fill out the form and provide a detailed family history. The authority started residing in the bureaucratic process itself rather than in the individual physician.

How does this essay bring together approaches from disability studies and medical humanties?

I think they work together. In this essay in particular I’m interested in some questions borrowed from medical humanities, such as how medical practices operate, how decisions are made at the top, how power flows, how power operates in doctor-patient encounters etc. But as someone who has come to this from the perspective of disability studies, I feel that we can’t answer those questions without also answering questions about how one self identifies with disability or doesn’t, how stigma and ableism operate in these hospitals and how we can centre the lived experiences of disabled people. These questions, for me, are are part and parcel, they really can’t be separated. We can’t answer the questions about how bureaucracy operates without answering questions about the effects on people’s lived experiences.

HHS: How do you go about disentangling different ‘layers of voices’ in these documents?

It’s often a really complicated process. I tried to be transparent about the ambiguity, about the impossibilities of disentangling some of those voices when I’m writing about the documents.

I work with one document, for example, that’s just called ‘Case notes continued’. It’s typed up but it’s completely unclear to me as a 21st century reader whether this was dictated by a physician to another worker to type up after interviewing a patient, if some other worker in the hospital read the patient’s file and then summarized it in this type of document, or something else. I don’t know how this document came to be or what the process behind it was. I don’t know whose voice is leading it, but it’s written in this almost omniscient scientific voice. I think that the ambiguity builds that scientific authority so that it reads not as the voice of an individual, but as the voice of the hospital or the voice of science. The patient’s voice is buried really, really deep in there. In this particular document, they say that the patient claims that her husband is abusive, just as she claims to hear the voice of God; these claims are immediately followed by a diagnosis of paranoia. So, as I said before, her voice just becomes evidence of her madness. This is significant because her voice is completely subsumed by this medical narrative. I think noticing those ambiguities and the work of those ambiguities is important.

HHS: Could you say more about Mrs H’s story and what seemed significant or intriguing about it?

LG: This is a true story. It is both the heart of the essay and the thing that I was most hesitant to include. The case file that I was just referencing is actually hers—her husband brought her to the Oregon State Hospital. The first forms that we see are filled out by the husband and by the doctor, and they declare that she’s heard the voice of God, that she has religious insanity etc. And then, in that case notes file we get this little glimmer where she says, ‘no my husband is abusive I shouldn’t be here’. But then that becomes evidence of her paranoia. She was there for about a month or two before the hospital received a petition signed by 150 of her friends, church members, community members, etc. These signatures attested to her sanity and to the fact that her husband is an awful abusive man.

What I can glean from the case file – there are a few carbon copies of letters that the doctor sent after receiving this petition to the judge, to the husband, and to the friends of this patient – is that the doctor came to believe her story. He sent her home into the care of friends and he told her husband he should have nothing to do with her anymore. It’s a really moving story.  It’s triumphant, it’s this example of community power, of people coming together and achieving this thing. But it also is in no way representative of most of these files, and so I was hesitant to include it because it’s so spectacular and I didn’t want it to be distracting. I think that’s the limit of case studies, but I think it’s also important to untangle some of the narrative voices in a story like this. It’s intriguing, it’s captivating, it’s triumphant and it’s also a little bit distracting from the patients who came to the hospital but whose voices don’t seem to bubble up in their paperwork nearly as much as Mrs H’s. Her story is important and it’s also challenging because I want to be very careful not to let it represent the whole of people’s experiences in these hospitals.

HHS: How do you define ‘archival excess’?

Archival access is the third mode of reading that I get to at the very end. Other people have used this phrase before but not quite in this context. I’m using it to reference how material spills out over these prescribed bureaucratic boxes. One example is marginalia. I have another example in the essay of a discharge notice that’s written on an edge of a piece of paper, it seems a doctor ripped it off and said, ‘if this woman’s fit to go home then send her home, if not keep her here’. That’s all it says, and that was her discharge notice. This sort of haphazard ephemera I think of as archival access. It could also be something like a patient’s answer to a question that the form didn’t ask, but the patient thought was important information to convey at the bottom of the form. I think archival access is one of those windows into seeing the form as a genre and as a piece of writing. It helps show the limitations of the form, what story that hospital is trying to tell and what story the patient felt was important to tell back. I find it a useful tool for reading.

HHS: Is there something specific about working with the archives of psychiatric institutions that might provide insights into working in archives more generally?

LG: I went back and forth between wanting to make a claim about disability and archives generally, and these very specific archives. US psychiatric archives tend to have vanished or gone into private collections or been shredded or something else, but there are places like the Oregon State Archive that have have really stewarded this history. But those places are few and far between and I think there’s something to how closely guarded so many of these archives are. I also came up against some challenging ethical questions regarding anonymity; I chose to make all of these forms anonymous in my own writing. That was a choice I made with some hesitation because I’ve seen some really excellent work on the history of disability that deanonymizes these stories to tell stories with names and faces to them. I think that’s important work, but the patients whose stories I’m looking at—stories that have been heavily mediated by paperwork and institutional narratives—never had the option to say if they wanted to be part of this project of destigmatizing mental illness, for example, and so I try to honor that and by making all of these stories anonymous.

But a choice like that is a choice that’s really specific to the archive, and it’s really specific to the history that I’m trying to tell. Psychiatric archives open up a set of questions that are relevant to archiving more generally, but I don’t want to claim any of these these choices, like my choice to anonymize my sources, are a prescription for how all archiving and all archival research should work.

HHS: Your essay explores the ‘structural relationship between bureaucratic institutions and disabled people’ – could this relationship be linked to the distinction you make in your conclusion between ‘spectacular, unsettling, disturbing’ narratives and ‘mundane, undisturbed, and undisturbing’ paperwork?

LG: Absolutely. The sort of spectacular stories, like Mrs H’s triumphant story of getting out of the hospital, are few and far between. More frequently we get stories of institutional violence that are made to seem really mundane and so at the end of the essay I start talking about paperwork that represents the forced sterilization of people who are in these institutions. This paperwork refers to violent murderous eugenic history and practice but the paperwork makes it seem so mundane and so unchallenged. It’s yet another reason to look really closely at this paperwork to see what stories are being told, to see what stories are not being told, and to centre the lived experiences of disabled people when we’re talking about this kind of medical history and practice, because the stakes of the issue can be obscured if we were just reading the story that that paperwork wanted to tell us.

Liana Kathleen Glew is a PhD candidate in English at Penn State University where she teaches writing and an Introduction to Disability Studies course. Her dissertation, “Ravings: Reading, Writing, and Psychiatry in the American Asylum” examines four genres of texts by and about psychiatric patients in the US between 1860 and 1940: fiction, memoir-exposés, paperwork, and archival patient writing. Her work can also be found in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and the C19 Podcast.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor

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

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 to your research more broadly?

ST: My broader dissertation is about wants and desires as objects of the human sciences in the late 19th through the mid-20th century, particularly in disciplines like economics and psychology.

Historically in the early modern human and moral sciences there was a lively discussion around the springs of action, so to speak, in which economic, psychological, and anthropological concerns all spoke to each other. For Adam Smith, to take a classic example, the Wealth of Nations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments were hardly a separate enterprise. And scientific writing on the passions, appetites, and desires continued late into the 19th century.

But my contention is that, as the professional disciplines emerged and introspection retreated as an epistemologically valid form of investigation, it was replaced by methods that looked to behaviour, whether found in experiments or prices or anything else, as the primary evidence base for explaining motivation. This led to what we might call an ‘emptying out’ of interiority, with wants defined along increasingly tautological or teleological lines, and a growing emphasis on calculative rationality above all else. I try to trace these developments across several fields through the decline of faculty psychology, the marginal revolution, and the emergence of behaviourism, neoclassicism, and eventually rational choice – and to some extent through dissidents like the neo-Freudians. So Tolman’s work is at the midpoint of these trends.

HHS: How did Tolman define ‘wants’? Are wants distinct from desires or needs, for example?

ST: Tolman had a very expansive definition of wants, which he understood to include all motives of behaviour, including basic drives like hunger and thirst, for instance, but also more ‘sophisticated’ forms of motivation that we might call ‘desires’ in ordinary language. But that was part of his aim to unite all human and animal motivation in a single theoretical model, in which rat experiments could be understood to say something important about human behaviour.

Of course, this was an idiosyncratic definition, and throughout the dissertation I show how other scientists tried to bound and delineate these concepts. The way the terms are defined and set in relation to each other can tell you a lot about a project, and certainly the boundary drawn between ‘basic’ needs and more subjective ‘wants’ is always a political one. Many 19th-century psychologists, for instance, delineated categories of higher ‘desires’ or ‘sentiments’ that supposedly distinguished civilized humans from lower animals (or races). Economists, meanwhile, moved from an explicit discussion of pleasure to more neutral, object-oriented terms like utility and want, and eventually dropped that vocabulary altogether in the turn to ‘revealed preference.’

HHS: How, according to Tolman, are human wants expressed through behaviour?

ST: Since Tolman was operating under a behaviourist paradigm that prohibited appeals to ‘unverifiable’ mental states, his theory of wants couldn’t begin by considering the experience of desire, for example. On his account that would be based on unreliable and subjective testimony. So instead, wants have to be explained through a stimulus-response model, or input from the world and output in behaviour. He tried to devise experiments that would help elucidate the mechanisms connecting a given situation – prototypically, a rat in a maze – to the behaviour it produced. That led him to list of basic drives that, he thought, motivated all behaviour, rat and human – or, as he put it, to his theory of wants. A fairly complex set of mechanisms linked distinctive and specific motivations – wanting to be a military officer, for example – to a set of underlying, basic drives.

HHS: Why were experiments with rats so central to his insights into human behaviour?

ST: Rats were really important to Tolman – he even dedicated one his books to Mus norvegicus albinus – the albino lab rat! Rat experiments exploded in popularity in the early 20th century, as Rebecca Lemov and others have shown, because they promised a kind of assembly line for attacking the major problems in psychology. This was especially compelling within a behaviourist structure of explanation that tended to think about all organisms in the same way. Rats were and are relatively cheap to breed and keep, and they are mostly powerless to resist being subjected to an endless battery of tests!

The maze in particular became very important by the 1930s, because it was a uniquely adaptable tool for manipulating and observing rat behaviour. But whether you were trying to research perception or learning or anything else, you almost always needed some kind of food or other reward to motivate the rat to traverse the maze in the first place – which is what got Tolman so interested in wants. I should add that, for Tolman, it was a good thing that a rat couldn’t introspect – that it couldn’t give you a subjective account of its own experience, unlike a human being. For him that meant its behaviour was less open to misinterpretation, and you had to construct a theory of wants from outward evidence alone.

HHS: Why did Tolman have faith in behaviourism as a ‘tool of emancipation’? In what ways do his political beliefs challenge conventional assumptions about behaviourism?

ST: This was one of the real surprises in my research. Typically when we think of behaviourism and its applications today, it has a somewhat sinister resonance, and its promises of behaviour modification seem to license authoritarian forms of ‘mind control.’ I mean, just look at the controversy over algorithms and behaviour manipulation on social media platforms today. The big fear there is that artificial platform environments are producing ‘unnatural’ behaviour or affect – which echoes a lot of mid-century popular reactions to behaviourist ideas.

As Danielle Carr [the previous winner of the History of the Human Sciences essay prize] has suggested, Cold War liberal intellectuals often felt behaviourism was a dehumanizing, totalitarian approach, which helped fuel the ‘cognitivist’ reaction in the 1960s. To some extent, these tropes have been reproduced in the scholarship on the history of behaviourism – though of course, certain behaviourists did fit the stereotype.

But Tolman is a particularly interesting character. He was a quiet radical, raised in a Quaker family and a lifelong pacifist. Although he didn’t serve, he had a nervous breakdown during World War I, and spoke of a consistent horror and aversion at the idea of war itself. He was actively involved in attempts to connect psychology to social issues in the Depression, and took a principled stance on loyalty oaths in the 1950s that briefly got him fired from Berkeley. For him, behaviourism held out the promise of altering the environmental determinants of behaviour in order to produce a more healthy and peaceful society. Now, some of this may sound like the disquieting ‘utopia’ of B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two, but what’s intriguing is that Tolman was more interested in satisfying basic drives at a larger scale through education and redistribution, and even hinted his vision looked something like socialism.

HHS: Where do studies of aggression fit into this history? How do theories of aggression relate to understandings of drives?

I take this from the work of Gregg Mitman and others, but aggression became a key object of study across many disciplines, from psychology to anthropology to animal ethology, in the 1940s, as scientists sought to make sense of World War II. Psychologists at the time, Tolman included, were particularly taken by the so-called Dollard-Miller or ‘frustration-aggression’ hypothesis, which created an input-output model out of Freudian ideas by suggesting that aggression could be explained by frustration. This really became ubiquitous in the postwar period, with social scientists explaining workplace problems or teenage delinquency or anything else by appeal to frustration-aggression.

But the idea was particularly important to Tolman because it allowed him to link his interest in wants to the problem of war as he saw it. If aggression was explained by frustration, then frustration was explained by misdirected drives, or ‘bad’ wants. His book Drives Toward War, published in 1942, ended up suggesting that the basic drives could be satisfied or redirected to avoid the frustrations that culminated in war.

HHS: What is the significance of the mechanical metaphor from which the term ‘drive’ derives?

ST: ‘Drive’ has a complex genealogy within psychology, since it can be traced both to the German idea of Trieb – suggesting an urge or impulse – and to the ‘drive system’ of a motor. But American psychologists fairly consistently used the latter analogy, which I think is telling in itself. The metaphor suggested that human action could be explained much like a motor, with a drive system channelling energy into particular types of motion.

Of course, using machine analogies for the human body goes back to Descartes at least, but what is significant is how the metaphor shifts as the machine of reference changes. As Canguilhem suggests, early modern thinkers like Descartes and La Mettrie were thinking of regular mechanical devices like clocks, but the motor is really something quite different. The motor created a distinctively thermodynamic model of human behaviour, so to speak. This was what made the frustration-aggression so compelling: the drives were steady conduits of energy that required constant satisfaction, and their frustration necessitated the discharge of that energy elsewhere – that is, through aggressive behaviour.

I should add that even the concept of ‘motivation’ itself comes out of the interest in ‘motive power’ produced by the development of steam engines. Add to that that behaviourism first emerged at the peak of the Second Industrial Revolution alongside bodies of thought like scientific management, and we really see how significant the social and technological context was.

HHS: To stay on the question of metaphors, you quote Tolman as saying that a brain is ‘far more like a map control room than it is like an old-fashioned telephone exchange’ – what did he mean by that and how did it relate to his theorisation of cognitive maps? Were the metaphors he employed also reflected in his ‘striking visual iconography’?

ST: Right, yes, again the metaphors are so important here! The telephone exchange is intended to invoke the stimulus-response model embraced by Tolman’s behaviourist colleagues: line goes in, line goes out. To the extent there is a mental structure, it’s simply akin to the wires connecting incoming to outgoing connections. Tolman became increasingly dissatisfied with the narrowness of this model, which he felt couldn’t explain forms of ‘spatial’ and ‘latent’ learning by rats that took place in the absence of any obvious reward. His metaphor of the map control room suggests that a mental representation of the world is built up in the brain over time: this is his famous theory of the cognitive map, which is still influential in neuroscience today.

But in the article I play with the metaphor a bit further to suggest that, if the motor had become the model of behaviour, then then Tolman’s theory of wants was intended to trace the ‘roadmaps’ through which a rat or human navigated the world. Successful or failed attempts at satisfying the drives altered the structure of wants over time – a phenomenon Tolman tried to capture in his fairly maze-like ‘maps’ of the mechanisms of want.

I don’t get into this at length in the article, but it’s also interesting to note the unexpected ways in which the concept of cognitive maps travelled since it was coined by Tolman in 1948. It gets picked up almost immediately as a key metaphor in economist Friedrich Hayek’s foray into psychology, The Sensory Order in 1952, it provides the general framework for urban planner Kevin Lynch’s classic The Image of the City in 1960, and the Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson even adopts it as a tool for critical theory in 1988, with wide uptake in the humanities after that. But by this point its origins with the albino rat have vanished.

HHS: You liken Tolman’s understanding of humans’ hidden motivations to a psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious – and he also used terms like ‘libido’ and ‘cathexis’ – but how was his understanding of mental processes distinct from a Freudian one?   

ST: Freud was crucial to Tolman in ways that I hadn’t anticipated at the outset. Tolman’s archives show he was regularly teaching American neo-Freudians like Karen Horney and Abram Kardiner, and of course his technical vocabulary was filled with psychoanalytic concepts. Now some of this was part of the general trend of behaviourism at mid-century, which mined Freud’s work for ideas to insert, in a rather mechanical fashion, into its framework. But Tolman’s engagement with Freud is especially interesting because of his research interests in want and desire – and with motivations Freud would have attributed to the unconscious.

In a way, we might say Tolman tried to create a systematic model of Freud’s theory of unconscious drives that specified (and literally mapped out) each link in the causal chain. But as I argue this had a quixotic character to it, which we can see Tolman’s totally weird and complex illustrations. There’s really a paradox in the way Tolman engaged with Freud: he was clearly drawn to the insights of psychoanalysis into unconscious motivation, but the behaviourist ban on introspection meant that subjective testimony gathered together by the analyst in a ‘case’ was totally out of bounds – which was of course at the core of Freud’s method. Once you throw that out there’s not a lot left.

HHS: What were the therapeutic implications of Tolman’s theories and how did he see the role of psychologists in fostering world peace?

ST: Tolman thought that his theory of wants had implications for psychotherapy. If frustration was the outcome of misdirected drives, or a bad roadmap, so to speak, then a therapeutic intervention might hope to ‘correct’ this roadmap. I was struck by the connections between this idea and the dominant approach of cognitive-behavioural therapy today, which similarly aims to address what one CBT pioneer, Aaron Beck, called ‘maladaptive ideations.’ And of course as the name itself suggests, behaviourism was an important tributary into the development of CBT.

More broadly, Tolman thought that his theory of wants could be applied at a much larger scale to promote the healthy satisfaction of drives – thereby holding out the possibility of constructing a more lasting peace. His famous ‘Cognitive Maps’ paper even finishes with a little-cited plea to the ‘child-trainers and the world-planners of the future’ to heed his advice. Looking back, the idea of or even the phrase ‘world peace’ strikes us as rather quaint, but it was certainly an understandable concern in the 1940s. But I think this single leap from the mental to the global shows up the limitations of the thin universality of behaviourist models – which could be applied to practically any situation, but ultimately without much concreteness or a great deal of insight.

HHS: There are various baffling-looking diagrams from Tolman’s books reproduced in the article and you suggest that something about his ‘abstruse and byzantine representations’ gestures towards the difficulty or absurdity of rendering elusive things like human wants in scientific terms. It made me think of how Freud often dismisses his own diagrams as insufficient or inaccurate because they can’t capture the weirdness of the unconscious. But is there something in that impossibility, in the strangeness and convolution of the attempts to create a topography of the mind, that’s revealing in its own right?

ST: Absolutely! I wanted to include several of Tolman’s illustrations because words really do not capture the strangeness – and I hope readers will experience that for themselves.

Sometimes I joke that I embarked on this dissertation because of my own occasional difficulty in sorting out my personal motivations, in figuring out exactly what or why I want. So I find the strangeness in Tolman’s attempts revealing and maybe even comforting in that regard. On the other hand, abandoning want and desire as scientific objects altogether had heavy costs: just look at the incapacity of much of the social sciences today, whose models of rationality falter in accounting for the upsurge of feelings of ressentiment or alienation that are wreaking havoc across the globe.

Your question also makes me think of William James, a hero of Tolman’s and also part of the dissertation, who famously presented a quasi-determinist account of the will in his Principles of Psychology, but then seemed to revel in the sheer contingency of unconscious motivations in his Varieties of Religious Experience ten years later – a work tellingly influenced by his own experiences. As James would have been the first to admit, the strange and the unexpected are also part of the story.

Finally I want to suggest that despite its failures, Tolman’s work might still have lessons for us. I agree with affect theorists that there’s something politically useful about recognizing the embeddedness of desire within the infrastructure of our lives – and Tolman recognized this too. Today, one of the perpetual injunctions of our culture is simply to ‘be yourself’ – as if that had some obvious, stable content. Setting to one side whatever one thinks of their project overall, the behaviourists would have laughed that idea out of the room.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.

Review: Reproduction

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 to try to make sense of the issue of ‘coming to be’. In so doing, they paid attention not only to human beings and their souls but also to plants, animals, stones and minerals. Reproduction progressively replaced generation in the mid-eighteenth century and signified, in contrast, how things were re-produced. This new meaning centred mainly on living organisms and the process of perpetuating species. This gave rise to a focus on population, its quality and quantity.

The volume is divided into five parts. As a historian of the modern period, my review will concentrate on parts IV and V. Part IV, ‘Modern Reproduction’, traces the meaning of reproduction in the industrialised world of the nineteenth century up until the Second World War, while Part V, ‘Reproduction Centre Stage’, shows how reproduction became paramount on the national and international levels after the war and how it was always contested. Since then, two somewhat contrasting phases of change have occurred: an acceleration of the medicalisation of reproduction, which gave rise to a challenge to this medicalisation by feminism and social movements from the 1960s onwards. In the context of fertility decline in Western countries from 1870, with the exception of France whose fertility decline was already in train by 1800, and fears about degeneration, nation-states became worried about the quality, namely the ‘fitness’ of the population, and quantity of their population and the prospect of depopulation in their colonial possessions. In this context, procreation became a battleground. In addition, population became an international and global problem over the twentieth century; fears around population growth fuelled the creation of international organisations and philanthropic foundations aimed at curbing this increase, where population experts such as demographers, geographers, birth control campaigners, economists and ecologists shared knowledge and devised international family planning campaigns (Alison Bashford). These family planning campaigns prescribed the new technologies of contraception and abortion that had developed from the second quarter of the twentieth century onwards (Jesse Olzynko-Gryn and Nick Hopwood); some of the campaigns relied on coerced contraception. However, as the century advanced, reproductive rights as human rights became the key motto of international organisations, which emphasised ‘reproductive health’ and choice under pressure from feminist activists.

In these two rich parts of the book, we learn that the breeding of animals inspired eugenic thinking and that artificial insemination saw fertility specialists join forces with animal physiologists (Sarah Wilmot). Reproduction and sex became separate due to campaigning movements that included neo-Malthusians, eugenicists and radical sex reformers (Lesley Hall). Despite strong opposition from the medical profession, governments and the Catholic Church, birth control campaigners advocated the use of contraception and thus made the concept of limiting births a possibility. In so doing, they paved the way for the provision of contraception that would become acceptable in the interwar years. While the dissemination of information on birth control, partly carried out by birth control campaigners, increased dramatically in the first half of the twentieth century, ignorance was still the dominant frame for understanding how individuals acquired knowledge about sex and reproduction and who produced information on these subjects, especially in Britain (Kate Fisher).

Simon Szreter and Christina Benninghaus touch upon the issue of infertility; Szreter does so via new estimates of the prevalence of venereal diseases as potential contributors to the fertility decline in Britain, while Benninghaus argues that infertility took a modern meaning in the years around 1900. She reveals that while the female body became the object of increasingly invasive intervention, national differences existed with regard to the male body. In Germany, sperm testing was first practised in the 1880s, whereas the practice was rare in Britain. Female sterility was perceived to be connected to gonorrhoea transmitted to an ‘innocent wife by a promiscuous husband’ (462). Over the years, new medical technologies such as artificial insemination, glandular extracts and later hormones and transuterine tubal insufflation became routine medical practice for treating ‘sterile’ couples. These developments and the new faith in scientific medicine boosted patients’ expectations and accounted for the increasing number of patients seeking fertility treatments. Sterile couples looked to medicine to overcome their condition before IVF, but IVF did represent a watershed moment in that it gave birth to a private flourishing new industry (Nick Hopwood).  

In the colonies, reproduction also had a prominent place in the political agenda of imperial powers, and women became the sustained targets of state intervention (Philippa Levine). Low fertility was at once perceived as an asset for settlers who considered locals a nuisance to be eliminated or relocated, and as a problem in colonies that relied on local labour. Maternal mortality was deplored, and childbirth became increasingly medicalised in the colonies and in the metropole. In continental Europe, hospital births became common practice by the 1960s. However, as Salim Al-Gailani argues, the medicalisation of birth was not imposed on passive women patients by all-powerful male obstetricians. Demand for it shaped the provision of maternity care, even when the maternal mortality rate was higher in hospital than at home. With hospital births gaining prominence, antenatal care expanded, and prenatal diagnosis and screening for defects became routine practice in the last quarter of the twentieth century, generating new stress for mothers-to-be (Ilana Löwy).

This volume shows the necessity to consider the history of reproduction from an interdisciplinary perspective. It is a must-read for students and scholars interested in the issue of reproduction.

Review: Chimpanzee Culture Wars

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 we walk a woodland path through the empty waterlogged grounds of the Institute. 

As we walked, he told me that Bruno Latour had developed actor-network theory after studying baboons with the primatologist Shirley Strum in the late 1970s. Langlitz explained that while Latour’s designs for a ‘primatology of science’ understood human culture not as the result of a cognitive difference to apes but a quantitative proliferation of technical objects, which the apes did not have, subsequent primatology had left Latour behind. In the 1980s primatologists increasingly observed apes using objects. The question of what set human cultures apart from ape cultures remained fiercely debated and paralleled in many ways the debates over pseudoscience in the science wars. All this controversy had resulted in an impasse whereby communication between people interested in human cultures and those interested in primate cultures broke down. While Langlitz’s colleagues in cultural anthropology had followed Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions (Haraway, 1989) in dismissing the epistemic goals of primatology as a morally dubious political project of ranking humans and chimps, he could not help but sympathize with the desire of many primatologists to demoralize the study of apes and their behaviours. In this sense, Langlitz understood the debates over how to study chimp culture as a site from which to reflect on his own epistemic culture. I was surprised by this unfamiliar perspective on the intellectual origins of science studies and struggled to focus on our conversation while navigating the wet path on which my shoes quickly became sodden and caked in mud. 

As part of his virtuoso ‘experiment in reflexivity’, Langlitz walks with ease across disciplinary boundaries and alongside many different observers. The book operates across three levels: it is primarily ethnographic in that it follows Langlitz’s fieldwork from the mid-2010s with cultural primatologists and comparative psychologists across West Africa, Japan and Germany. At a second level, its analysis involves a comparative epistemology of laboratory work and field work including a comparison of national research traditions. Finally, as a historical work, its chronological arc begins with the origins of cultural primatology in 1950s Japan, through to the so-called North-American chimpanzee culture wars that began in the 1970s and up to the transformations in methods and professional politics that mark contemporary primatology. After two opening historical chapters, the book moves across the different sites where Langlitz was able to observe scientists observing chimps: the shrinking forests of Guinea and the Ivory Coast, a psychological laboratory attached to the zoo in Leipzig and the large chimp enclosures of a primate research institute in Inuyama, Japan. While the author’s determination to keep ideas in situ may overwhelm the reader lacking any prior knowledge of primatology – I strongly recommend watching one of the many documentaries about chimp intelligence before reading – it is nonetheless a book for historians of the human sciences.

Langlitz anchors his wide-ranging observations to the eighteenth-century project of philosophical anthropology, showing both how the last representatives of this European tradition (such as Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School) have celebrated the idea of a strong distinction between humans and chimps, as well as how contemporary disciplinary differentiation continues to frustrate unifying visions of a science of primates. Langlitz’s own contribution to this project is to position the ability to observe observers, to conduct what Niklas Luhmann called ‘second-order observations’, as the distinguishing ability of humans against their primate cousins. In an entirely refreshing manner, the book relocates tired debates of positivism versus the humanities in what will be to many readers an entirely foreign landscape. To accompany Langlitz on such a journey is demanding, but it comes with its own rewards. I remember leaving Princeton on the Megabus back to New York relieved not to have lost my footing and with much to think about. 

To summarize my observations: there is no single consensus over the limits of chimp culture as an object of scientific study nor over what has made homo sapiens such a successful primate. The point of Chimpanzee Culture Wars, as the title suggests, is that culture as a concept must be understood as a term of conflict, born out of asymmetric comparisons, by which certain things are compared and certain things excluded from comparison. The essence of Langlitz’s (anti-)polemical argument is that the scientific study of culture, chimp or human, in the field or in the laboratory, need not be conducted in moral terms and that the reluctance of cultural anthropologists and science studies scholars to engage with the question of human distinctiveness blocks our ability to understand our current period of natural history (e.g. the Anthropocene). In a final epilogue, Langlitz suggests that we should by all means be more human about nature, preserving biodiversity and slowing climate change, but that we should also try to be more chimp about culture: sometimes, in between energetic bouts of working to control our environment, all we can do is move with the powerful forces around us. 

Bio: Alfred Freeborn (@Alfred_Freeborn) is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science at Humboldt University, Berlin. His research focuses on the history of biological psychiatry in postwar Britain, North America and Germany, with a special focus on the changing field of schizophrenia research – and he has published on the history of the Mind and Brain Sciences in HHS. He will join the Practices of Validation in Biomedical Sciences Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in July (link: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/departments/max-planck-research-group-biomedical-sciences) 

References 

Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge, 1989.

Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 

Langlitz, Nicolas. Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2012. 

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. trans Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.

McGrew, William C. “Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists, by Nicolas Langlitz.” Primates 62, no. 2 (March 1, 2021): 443–44.

History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize – winners!

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.

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

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 Beirut on the foothills of Mount Lebanon: ʿAsfuriyyeh, the place of the birds. The name came – like Bedlam in the British context – to serve as a pejorative stand-in for asylums and madness in general, cropping up in novels, plays, and love songs, in spite of the institution’s relentless efforts to stress its scientific credentials and its relocation to a new site in the 1970s. It is a term which has regional currency, too, in a testimony to the hospital’s long history of treating patients and training medical students and psychiatric nurses from Syria, Palestine, Jordan, and beyond. Abi-Rached’s sympathy for this misremembered institution is clear. As well as rescuing ʿAsfuriyyeh from the myths and rumours which have grown to surround it, her concern is to remember the hospital at a time when its original site is at risk of being ‘developed’, like so much of historic Beirut, into amnesiac high-rises.

Weaving together a prodigious range of sources, including Arabic-language scientific and medical journals, missionary accounts, diplomatic correspondence, and hospital reports, Abi-Rached’s aim goes beyond simply narrating an institutional history. Instead, she treats the history of ʿAsfuriyyeh as a ‘sampling device’, or as ‘metonymy and metaphor’,[1] to reveal broader themes. Some of these will be of particular interest to historians of Lebanon and the wider region, but many of them have global resonances. In Abi-Rached’s capable hands, the story of ‘Asfurriyeh helps us think through the often complex relationships between the mind sciences and modernity; medicine, missionaries, and empires; war, conflict, and mental disorder; as well as a host of other crucial themes, including sectarianism, gentrification, memory, and ruination. ʿAsfuriyyeh’s six chapters proceed largely chronologically, with a pause near the middle of the book for a more synoptic exploration of the diagnosis and treatment of patients.

The opening chapter, ‘Oriental Madness and Civilization’, explores understandings of madness in the decades before ʿAsfuriyyeh was established, mobilising two distinct literatures to do so. The first half of the chapter draws on the writings of European and American travellers, missionaries, and medical doctors, who were concerned above all with the abusive treatment of ‘lunatics’ in the region, and the pathological nature of even the ‘normal’ local mind. The second half traces how the sciences of the mind were introduced and elaborated in the pages of Arabic-language scientific and medical periodicals like al-Muqtataf (‘The Digest’), which emphasised a naturalistic account of mental illness. Abi-Rached underlines the strikingly dissonant interests of these literatures and their authors: rather than accepting European accounts of the inherently pathological nature of the so-called ‘Oriental mind’, local intellectuals tied the question of insanity and the deterioration of care for the mentally ill to their wider programme for reforming the late Ottoman state and its people.

The second chapter, ‘The Struggle for Influence and the Birth of Psychiatry’, draws on diplomatic archives as well as the records of ʿAsfuriyyeh itself to reconstruct the history of the founding and early development of the hospital. Although founded by a Swiss Quaker missionary, Theophilus Waldmeier, Abi-Rached argues that the hospital needs to be understood not as a unilateral attempt at proselytization, but rather within the context of a complex struggle for power and influence in the region which involved local as much as international actors. Good relations with the Ottomans were key to the survival of the hospital, with its British medical director and matron permitted to remain on site during the First World War, when they were technically enemy subjects. Although avowedly non-sectarian and cosmopolitan in outlook, the hospital was perceived as ‘Protestant’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’, both of which fuelled French suspicion of the institution once they replaced the Ottomans after the war, though their policies – covering hospital fees through the introduction of the assistance publique, for instance– indirectly benefited ‘Asfurriyeh.

The third chapter, ‘The Rise of ʿAsfuriyyeh and the Decline of Missions’, charts the transformation of the institution across the middle decades of the twentieth century, as the missionary zeal which had played a role in its foundation withered away and – contrapuntally – psychiatry’s domain was extended to encompass not just the obvious ‘lunatic’ but the everyday strains of industrial modernity. After the Second World War, a series of neuropsychiatric clinics were founded, as well as a forensic unit for prisoners, to bring mental hygiene to the home, school, factory, and military. If the impressive uptake at these outpatient clinics is any indicator, the wider population welcomed psychiatry’s expansionist ambitions. While in part encouraged by demand, these innovations were driven too by competition with a rival institution, Dayr al-Salib, a convent to the north of Beirut which had been converted in the 1920s by a Lebanese Capuchin priest into an asylum for elderly priests, and subsequently transformed into a psychiatric institution in the 1950s. Abi-Rached also stresses the role played by successive leaders in this period, above all Dr Antranig Manugian, medical director from 1962, whose transformational vision of ʿAsfuriyyeh as a modern psychiatric institute would be torpedoed by the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war.

The fourth chapter, ‘Patriarchal Power and the Gospel of the Modern Care of Insanity’, grapples with the backgrounds, diagnosis, and treatment of patients at ʿAsfuriyyeh right across its lifespan, notably through quantitative analysis of annual reports. This throws up interesting trends: peaks in admissions, for instance, to the hospital during the First and Second World Wars, as well as in the 1950s and 1960s at a time of growing economic prosperity, inequality, and substance use. While Abi-Rached makes some use here of patient case files – mostly from the hospital’s early years – she is reluctant to immerse herself in this archive, on the grounds that ‘the patients’ voices, personal narratives, and singular stories are buried in medical dossiers under the “tyranny” of their diagnosis’.[2] Instead, Abi-Rached largely limits herself to deploying these files to puncture myths surrounding the (in)famous case of Mayy Ziyadah, the influential feminist and poet admitted to the hospital in 1936. No one would deny that medical case files are tricky to work with, methodologically as well as ethically, and it may well be the case that these are amongst the files still in the process of being organised by archivists and so perhaps inaccessible. But they do seem to represent a rich, and here largely untapped, vein for researchers to explore further in future.

The fifth chapter, ‘The Downfall of ʿAsfuriyyeh and the Breakdown of the State’, was to my mind the most compelling and haunting of the book. Zooming in on ʿAsfuriyyeh between the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975 and the hospital’s closure in 1982, Abi-Rached draws on the correspondence of the hospital’s medical director, Dr Manugian, to paint a deeply felt picture of a hospital which not only found itself in the midst of war, but a target within that war. Staff, students, and patients were kidnapped, injured, sexually assaulted, and killed, and every building hit at least once by shells. It is a harrowing story which Abi-Rached locates within a broader shift in the nature of political violence over the century towards targeting hospitals as a strategy of war – a strategy tragically familiar to us today, whether in Syria, Yemen, Gaza, Afghanistan, or elsewhere.  

The final chapter of the book, ‘The Politics of Health, Charity, and Sectarianism’, takes us past the official closure of ʿAsfuriyyeh in 1982 to develop some of the previous chapter’s reflections on non-sectarianism as the hospital’s deeply held – and ultimately, at a time of sectarian conflict, costly – ideology. Not only is it the case that health services, including mental health services, have been ‘sectarianised’ in Lebanon since 1982, but the very memory of ʿAsfuriyyeh itself is under threat of being sectarianised, with legal consequences: the Supreme Council of the Protestant Community in Syria and Lebanon is seeking to assert its control over this ‘Protestant’ institution in the courts. Abi-Rached vigorously contests this strategic misremembering of an institution whose executive committees, staff, and patients were always drawn from a range of backgrounds.

There is much here to digest for anyone interested in the histories of psychiatry, Lebanon, or the modern Middle East; certainly more than enough to guarantee the book a well-deserved place on undergraduate as well as postgraduate course syllabi, where some of its larger claims are sure to provoke reflection and discussion. At a time when re-institutionalisation is increasingly mooted in the West, Abi-Rached is at pains to emphasise that the closure of ʿAsfuriyyeh cannot be seen as part of any broader movement towards de-institutionalisation, as in Europe and North America. Instead, vast psychiatric hospitals continue to accommodate thousands of patients in Lebanon and the wider region: Dayr al-Salib, which historically rivalled and ultimately outlived ʿAsfuriyyeh, has a bedstrength of 1,100 today, a staggering figure which is nonetheless surpassed by at least two mental hospitals in Egypt and a further institution in Iraq.

Abi-Rached also takes issue with two components of Foucault’s account of the asylum: rather than replacing the leprosarium, Abi-Rached argues the asylum should be seen as emerging in the Middle East as a result of the decline of the bimaristan, charitable healing institutions with their own long history of managing the mentally ill; and rather than any ‘great confinement’, Abi-Rached argues that neither numbers, nor the routes by which patients arrived at ʿAsfuriyyeh, support this picture of the mass incarceration of the insane in Lebanon. While both these narratives have been roundly critiqued on empirical grounds not only in histories of psychiatry beyond Europe, but within it too,[3] one gets the sense that ʿAsfuriyyeh feels obliged to return to them, as the first English-language monograph on the history of psychiatry in the region, for its historiographical moorings.[4]

ʿAsfuriyyeh is a rich, original, deeply researched, and often moving work. Given its many strengths, I wondered whether it needed to be quite so pugnacious in its engagement with the few existing works on ʿAsfuriyyeh, which are criticised for being ‘still stuck in the Foucauldian and postcolonial frameworks’.[5] To give an example, in the otherwise excellent fifth chapter, Abi-Rached takes a tilt at Eugene Rogan for dismissing the hospital’s non-sectarianism as a mere public relations ploy. But Rogan doesn’t quite, at least in my reading, argue this.[6] At other points, a focus on rebutting these interpretations leaves some bigger, and more interesting, questions undisturbed. Responding in the fourth chapter to the claim that the Ottoman authorities embraced ʿAsfuriyyeh because it offered a means to cleanse the streets of lunatics, Abi-Rached marshals statistics to show that a majority of patients at the hospital were almost always private. But the more difficult question this leaves – as Abi-Rached recognises – is the degree to which coercion and dubious motives on the part of families, if not the state, may still have played a role in these admissions. Patient case records might have offered the beginnings of an answer.

In a sense, the book’s pioneering focus on the history of psychiatry in the modern Middle East means that Abi-Rached has to work hard to find bodies of scholarship with which to engage. While the connections she draws are almost always fresh and thought-provoking as a result, the invocation of a spectral figure of ‘Foucauldian and postcolonial frameworks’ at times jars. This does not at all detract from the accomplishment of this book, which not only provides a compelling history in its own right but generously offers future lines of inquiry an essential point of departure. In the opening pages of ʿAsfuriyyeh, Abi-Rached states that her goal is ‘to save this influential institution from oblivion’.[7] This is too modest a description of what she has achieved here, but it does capture a quality which I think characterises this remarkable history: a deep sympathy at its heart for ʿAsfuriyyeh, its reputation, and its people.

[1] Here Abi-Rached is drawing on Charles Rosenberg, ‘What Is An Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective’, Daedalus 118, 2 (1989) and Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) respectively.

[2] Abi-Rached, ʿAsfuriyyeh, p.99. Here Abi-Rached is quoting Charles Rosenberg, ‘The Tyranny of Diagnosis: Specific Entities and Individual Experiences’, Milbank Quarterly 80, 2 (2002), pp.237-60.

[3] For example, in this journal, Andrew Scull, ‘Michel Foucault’s history of madness’, History of the Human Sciences 3, 1 (1990), pp.57-67. For colonial psychiatry and the ‘great confinement’, see Megan Vaughan, ‘Idioms of madness: Zomba Lunatic Asylum, Nyasaland, in the colonial period’, Journal of Southern African Studies 9, 2 (1983), pp.218-38.

[4] Happily this situation looks set to change in the near future, with forthcoming monographs by Lamia Moghnieh, Beverly A. Tsacoyianis, and this review’s author. For the history of psychiatry in Israel, see Rakefet Zalashik, Ad Nafesh: Refugees, Immigrants, Newcomers, and the Israeli Psychiatric Establishment (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameukhad, 2008) [Hebrew] and Das Unselige Erbe: Die Geschichte der Psychiatrie in Palästina und Israel (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2012) [German]; for the history of psychiatry in the Ottoman empire, see Fatih Artvinli, Delilik, Siyaset ve Toplum: Toptaşı Bimarhanesi (1873-1927) (Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2013) [Turkish]. For earlier histories of madness in the Middle East, see Michael Dols, Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, ed. Diana E. Immisch (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1992), and Sara Scalenghe, Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. ch. 3. Much more attention has been paid to the career of psychoanalysis in the region: see in particular Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017).

[5] Abi-Rached, ʿAsfuriyyeh, p.18.

[6] The reference given here is to Eugene Rogan, ‘Madness and Marginality: The Advent of the Psychiatric Asylum in Egypt and Lebanon’, in Eugene Rogan, ed. Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), p.115. This is what Rogan has to say about ‘public relations’: ‘As a private institution without government support, the Lebanon Hospital dedicated tremendous effort to what would now be termed public relations. On the one hand, the hospital was entirely dependent on networks of private subscribers… On the [other] hand, they sought to preserve good relations with the Ottoman officials of the Mutasarrifiyya (governor general).’

[7] Abi-Rached, ʿAsfuriyyeh, p.xxvii.

Normality – interview with Peter Cryle

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 which the book led to this special issue. We had a sense that there was much to be done. We had a working seminar in Italy to which we invited most of the people that took part in this special issue. Their thoughts, their contributions and their implicit constructive criticisms of our book provided us with extra material and extra things to think about.

HHS: How do these articles in the Special Issue respond to and expand on the insights of the book?

PC: The most obvious thing that they do is go to some topical and geographical places that we didn’t go to. Even though the term ‘école normale’ became widespread on the basis of French usage, we made a decision fairly early on not to follow this thread of the normal in education because we thought there were more urgent issues around the key themes we were focusing on. We were therefore very pleased to have Caroline Warman come and do a serious history of the first ever normal school, which came together in revolutionary Paris. That was one completing move, if you like.

Others included the work that Kim Hayek did on 19th century French psychology. It might seem odd that although we spent so much time concentrating on France, we didn’t get around to talking more about what happened to psychology in late 19th century France. We followed psychology to the German speaking countries so we left that out and Kim Hayek wrote a very valuable piece that filled in that gap. Indeed, to say she filled in a gap is a bit misleading because she explored things that we hadn’t explored and she enriched what we’d done. Chiara Beccalossi did work of a complimentary kind for us as well, looking at the Latin Catholic world that stretched from southern Europe to Latin America and that followed a kind of normalizing medicine that we had not looked at.

Those are some of the more obvious ways in which these articles complete, compliment and enrich what we’ve done in our book.

HHS: In your introduction you claim that ‘study of the normal lends itself to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary analysis’ – could you explain why or in what ways you think that is the case?

PC:  It’s very challenging to work on a history of the normal because of the extraordinary mixture of things that are involved. We knew we were onto something when we found the emergence of the notion of the normal in medical writing in France around 1820, which became very significant from about 1830 onwards. That was one of our key entrees into the whole thing, but we were also aware that in everyday usage in education people talked about normal curves in grading students, for instance. The term ‘normal curve’ was around in some sort of bastardized version of statistical thinking so we went back looking through the history of statistics and, indeed, wrote our own history of statistics in a way, with a focus on how statistical thinking produced the notion of the average.

The notion of the average helped to build one of the key thematic elements of the normal. In addition to that we found that anthropology and anthropometrics became an area in which so much was done to measure normality in people’s bodies. So we looked at the kind of endeavors that went on there, some of them connected with the study of race. Race then became a significant theme in our work. Partly comparable work was also taken up in criminology, especially in Italian criminology, where people claimed to be able to measure the bodies of criminals and identify criminals traits. We found ourselves in a number of different thematic places, each calling for its own kind of disciplinary awareness, although we would claim that there was a coherence.

Later we came to talk about the later 19th century and the history of eugenics, which came out of anthropology and anthrometrology. We then found ourselves confronting the thing which had actually been a trigger for the two of us in many ways, which was the history of sexology and the history of psychoanalysis, where the notion of the normal bulks large. That had initially been our major irritant: the extraordinarily powerful assumptions about normality in those contexts seemed to us to need work done on them in order to lose some of their overweening generality.

HHS: What is the significance of the relationship between the specialist and non-specialist/popular in the history of the term ‘normal’ that you (and/or contributors to the special issue) trace?

PC: Some concepts in the history of science seem to develop in properly and, indeed, in sometimes quite narrowly scientific contexts. Others seem to get out of those more constrained spaces. I think it’s interesting to look at the recent issue of History of the Human Sciences on sexology edited by Katie Sutton and Kirsten Lang. The history of sexology shows how certain terms came into existence in the thinking and the writing of sexologists – terms like homosexuality, autoeroticism and so on –they became great discursive favorites in the writing of sexologists and to some degree psychoanalysts. It seems to me that kind of history –let’s call it popularisation, extension, vulgarization–does not give you a very good model for the history of normality. There is some of that, but one of the things that we found was that in the 1940s and 1950s, especially in the US, the term normal started to be used in ways that had very little to do prima facie with the history we’d been working on. Part of our challenge was to ask, how can we bridge between a history of a scientifically self-conscious notion of the normal, however problematic that might seem to us today, and the kind of breezy assumptions that start to appear around the time of the Second World War, and especially in the US, that the normal is an ideal.

In an earlier period, Francis Galton was one of the people who wrote a lot about the normal and about its significance for the development of eugenics. A word he used as a synonym for normal was mediocre and for him, and indeed for his contemporaries, normal and mediocre were acceptable synonyms. When the normal becomes an ideal around 1950 you can no longer use mediocre as a synonym for it. Something important began to change, so there was a term that had a perfectly dignified scientific existence, albeit a narrow one, that broke out, but as it broke out it changed its significance and meaning. It continued to have some of the significance of the scientific connotations, but it was also given a whole range of new meanings and a capacity to be used for exhortation of people. It became something that people wanted to be. Before that it seems normal was just a place on the scale. There were good things about being normal, but to be normal was to be approximately healthy in physiological terms. It was no ideal, it only became an ideal in that later modern context.

HHS: In tracing the discursive history of a concept how do you go about disentangling it from terms with which it is often conflated including the average, the ideal or the typical?

PC: I don’t know whether we ever did properly disentangle them. What we did was find thematic threads and tried to show the genealogy of each of those. But we had to recognize that, in practice, they didn’t always function separately. That was one of the ironies.

Fenneke Sysling’s paper led me into an area I hadn’t worked on before – phrenology – which struck me as interesting because it occupied a space somewhere between respectable science and something more folksy, related to commercial popular activities of various kinds. What Sysling’s work shows is that something which belonged to one of the most serious areas of 19th century science, which was averages, were used in an impressionistic way in phrenology when people were given evaluations which they paid for. They then got numbers that came out showing particular qualities in relation to averages. One of the things that she found is that it happened very seldom that people would be found to have average measures of a particular quality. If you paid for knowledge then you came away with better numbers.

One of my sisters works in education and she’s done a study into how the notion of the average is used in expensive private schools in Australia. If you pay significant amount of fees it’s part of the implicit contract that your child will not have average results, but that leads to statistical nonsense because if nearly everybody in the school is above average then it leads to a kind of inflation of the average. The average keeps moving up and Fenneke found a similar pattern in 20th century commercial popular medicine. It’s an invitation to us to regard the average as a remarkably fluid notion, despite what mathematicians might want to say about it.

HHS: Your own essay in the issue also discusses phrenology, exploring how it ‘occupied an intermediate position between science and commerce’ – what light can an analysis of commerical activity shed on the history of scientific knowledge-making? 

PC: I think this is a very hard question. The best that I could manage is to say what we find in practice when there are people who are professionals in hat-making who claim generalizable knowledge based on mensuration. At the same time there are others in the field of phrenology – and also a little later, but more strenuously and more assertively in the field of anthropometry – saying we measure people’s heads and measuring people’s heads is an important way of building scientific knowledge. It seemed to me interesting to see that phrenologists, and especially phrenologists in Scotland, were open to the idea that hatters knew things about head sizes that were in a sense, confirmatory of phrenological claims about general patterns in the population.

But in France where the Paris anthropological society was led by a very hard-headed scientist called Paul Broca there was a determined resistance to the idea that commercial hat-makers might be able to produce data of value to craniometric science. There were all these people around the society who thought there was interesting stuff going on in the area of hat-making that could be used as valuable evidence and that shouldn’t be ignored. But the hard-headed scientists were embarrassed because they wanted to keep their craniometry free of what they saw as individualistic measurement. Broca thought that a given hatter could measure people’s heads, but in science these measurements have to be repeatable when they’re done by different people in different laboratories. The measuring had to be done in a particular way to produce scientific knowledge. Scientific anthropologists wanted contributions and wanted support from the general public, but they didn’t value the ways in which those contributions were typically produced. They were actually stuck between their desire to be open and welcoming, on the one hand, and their embarrassment at the fact that these kinds of measures were not in their view scientifically worthy, on the other. They were trying to police the boundaries of science, but were having some difficult moments while doing it.

HHS: You identify sexology and psychoanalysis as ‘fields in which the concept of normality underwent decisive change at the turn of the 20th century’ – in what ways did the concept shift?

PC: When you do serious historical work you find out sometimes that the assumptions with which you began were wrong. We shared a strong assumption, which reflected our broad training in Continental critical theory. We supposed that so much of the thinking that was involved in conceptualising the normal could be thought about in terms of binaries, so if we talked about the normal we would expect to find that the normal and the abnormal were cognate. We assumed that as the notion of the normal arose historically in particular places that the notion of the abnormal would have arisen alongside it. It was quite a remarkable thing for us that this was not how it happened. People talked about the normal in medical contexts but they had no notion of the abnormal. They talked about the anomalous but that did not mean the same thing.

We were able to show that the notion of the abnormal emerges in the late 19th century as a term that has a particular function in psychiatry and in sexology, which is maybe 60 or 70 years after the notion of the normal emerges in medical writing. We thought that was highly significant and worth talking about. Birgit Lang addresses this in her contribution to the special issue. She particularly has something to say about the other point that emerges at that time through psychoanalysis, which is that Freud initiates a rethink of the whole notion of normality in such a way that it can’t be neatly opposed to abnormality. Normality itself is something mobile, something of an artefact. The notion that normality might be stable is one that Freud has no sympathy for and helps to undermine. Her paper asks what it was like for people to experience themselves as psychologically abnormal in their everyday lives. This introduces the contradiction between a broad normal activity and a kind of local normality which brings a richness that we had pointed at but not fully explored.

HHS: In her closing essay Elizabeth Stephens writes ‘the idea of the normal functions not only as a standard but also as a system, one that continues to operate even when its meaning and processes are conceptually opposed or incoherent’ – what does it mean to understand the normal as a system?

PC: When you work together with someone you each make all kinds of contributions but sometimes the other person turns up one day and has a really nifty way of putting something and you realize you owe them a great debt. I’m not saying Elizabeth doesn’t also owe me great debts, but I owe her the great debt of this insight.

There are quite a few colleagues, for example in the area of queer studies, who are convinced that the idea of the normal is riddled with contradictions and that you just have to push in some places to dismantle it or make it crumble. We were also sympathetic to this view but became convinced through our work that yes, it’s full of contradictions, but it actually flourishes on those contradictions because it means it’s able to defend itself in different ways against different kinds of attacks. The hope that it will crumble if you just press on it seems to us to be a forlorn one. We think that it’s much more sagacious to say that the normal is a very resilient notion and its resilience is sustained by the fact that it’s got these contradictory elements in it.

Someone might have noted in an analysis of Donald Trump that his success was based on the management of contradictions in his thinking and not just on some central lack of intelligence or lack of perception. Something much more interesting, complex and tricky is at work. We think that you can talk about the normal in the ways in which it holds the ideal, the typical and the average together. The normal has proven itself, no more so than in the last year, to be a remarkably powerful and resilient notion.

HHS: This leads in nicely to my final question: what is the status of the normal today?

PC: Normal became the keyword of 2020. It was one of the most used words in all kinds of popular contexts. We didn’t predict that and, indeed, we wouldn’t have wanted to because it was the pandemic that made it so. But I think there are some things in our history that suggest how that might have come about. In medical terms, the normal stands over against the pathological. When the pathological is so widespread and so threatening it’s quite obvious that the normal comes to be revalued. Instead of just being some tawdry failure to be impressive, the normal becomes something to be longed for because it takes us out of the space of pathological disorder. In current references the normal is spoken of as something to get back to, to return to. There is an attempt to retrieve a moment in the past.

One of the other great success adjectives in the pandemic is ‘unprecedented’. The notion that we’re living in a time which is unprecedented is, I think, accompanied by nostalgia to get back to a time when we just had some nice sensible precedented things around and we didn’t have the horror of the unprecedented. The novel and the unprecedented, which are things that we attempted to give some history of, then become very directly connected to the pathological. The normal appears to people as the hope for a world without novel viruses and without unprecedented moments. We didn’t write that whole history, but the history we’ve written does give you some things to stand on if you want to think and talk about the present moment.

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. We ended up being thoroughly ambivalent about those things. We didn’t think the things that we began with were mistaken, but we realized how much work the normal could do. We didn’t cease to believe the normal was constructed, inhibiting or trivializing but we saw the richness of it. Initially we thought we would just demolish it but we found stuff that we didn’t know we were going to find. We didn’t just start with some clever theory and demonstrate that is was true, regardless of what evidence we ran into, and I think that’s a good thing.

 Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.