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Bibliotheek
ISSN0022-5001
Wassenaarseweg 52
fc2333 AK Leiden
Journal of the
History of the
Behavioral Sciences
VOL. XXIX JANUARY 1993 NO. 1
*
V•
.
Published Quarterly by
Clinical Psychology Publishing Co., Inc.
4 Conant Square
Brandon, Vermont 05733
Editor BARBARA ROSS Psychology Department University of Massachusetts — Boston
100 Momssey Boulevard Boston. Mass. 02125-3393
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1. Title of Publication: JOURNAI OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAI SCIENCES (Publication Number: 0022-5061)
2. Date of Filing: 9/19/92 3. Frequency of Issue: Quarterly
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6. Publisher: Clinical Psychology Publishing Co., Inc., 4 Conant Square, Brandon, VT 07533 Editor: Barbara Ross, 71 Revere Street, Boston, MA 02114
Managing Editor: Barbara Ross, 71 Revere Street, Boston, MA 02114
7. Owners: Clinical Psychology Publishing Co., Inc.. Brandon, VT05733; Trust B U/W Frederick C. Thome, Sun Bank, Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33302; Patricia T. Wood, Litchfteld, CT 06759; Evangelos C. Germeles, Litchfield, CT 06759; Christina Germeles, Litchfield, CT 06759; Ellen T. Lane, Bellaire, TX 77401; Vladimir Pishkin, Oklahoma City, OK 73112; Joseph D. Matarazro, Portland, OR 97201; Gerald B. and Diane L. Fuller, Traverse City, MI 49685; Margit Hunt Nahra, Washington, DC 20008 8. Known Bondholders, etc.: None
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Journal of the
HISTORY OF THE
BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
VOLUME XXIX APRIL 1993 NUMBER 2
C O N T E N T S
Dorothy Ross 99 An Historian's View of American Social Science Alan Costall 113 How Lloyd Morgan's Canon Backfired John I. Brooks III 123 Philosophy and Psychology at the Sorbonne,
1885-1913
Charlene H. Seigfried 146
Charlotte M. Porter 150
Vladimir Steffel 151
Alison M. Turtle 152
David van Keuren 154
Brian W. Ogilvie 157
BOOK REVIEWS
Review of Michael G. Johnson and Tracy Henley, Eds., Reflections on "The Principles of
Psychology": William James After a Century
Review of George W. Stocking, Jr., Ed.,
Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility
Review of Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter, and Annabel Gregory, Height, Health, and
History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750-1980
Review of Christine Blondel, Françoise Parot, Anthony Turner, and Man Williams, Eds.,
Studies in the History of Scientific Instruments
Review of Ronald Rainger, An Agenda for
Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890-1935
Review of Adrian Desmond, The Politics of
Alan Bewell 160
René van der Veer 162
Leila Zend er Ian d 164
Jonathan H. Slavin 167 Frederick Gregory 173 David K. Robinson 174 James Brundage 178 Gerd Schroeter 179 Josef Brozek 182 Katherine Arens 182 Mina Carson 184
Review of G. S. Rousseau, The Languages of
Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, Clark Library Lectures, 1985-1986
Review of Carl Ratner, Vygotsky's
Sociohistorical Psychology and its Contem-porary Applications
Review of Mark B. Adams, The Wellborn
Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia
Review of R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of
Kleinian Thought and Jean-Michel Petot, Melanie Klein: Volume 11: The Ego and the Good Object, 1932-1960
Review of John Hedley Brooke, Science and
Religion: Some Historical Perspectives
Review of Katherine Arens, Structures of
Knowing: Psychologies of the Nineteenth Century
Review of Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the
Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders
Review of Volker Kruse, Soziologie und
"Gegenwartskrise": Die Zeitdiagnosen Franz Oppenheimers und Alfred Webers, Ein Beitrag zur historischen Soziologie der Weimarer Republik
Review of Luciano Mecacci, Storia delta
psicologia del Novecento
Review of Lothar Sprung and Wolfgang Schönpflug, Eds., Zur Geschichte der
Psychologie in Berlin. Beiträge zur Geschicte der Psychologie
Review of Thomas Schlereth, Victorian
America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915
Journal of (tit History of Ihe Behavioral Sciences Voiumt 29, April 1993
AN HISTORIAN'S VIEW OF AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE
DOROTHY ROSS
This paper explicates the argument of The Origins of American Science. Starting from my own historical premises and the origin of the social sciences in both historicism and science, I compare the divergent historical orientations of the sociologies of Roben Park and Max Weber. 1 argue that the inclination of American social science toward scientism and liberalism derives from the national ideology of American exception-alism. Since this structural feature of American political culture was itself a part of history, I indicate how changes in historical consciousness and politics led American social scientists to reformulate exceplionalism and their disciplines. By the 1920s, their hope of establishing scientific control over, and maintaining the liberal direction of, the fast-changing national history was embodied in scientism. I close with some thoughts about the continuing power of scientism and exceptionalism since the 1920s and the possibility that an historical, Weberian model of social science could bridge the widening gap between scientistic and hermeneutic wings of the social science disciplines.*
I have recently finished a study of the core social sciences in the United States — economics, sociology, and political science — from their eighteenth-century roots to 1929. ' On one level, my effort as an historian to look across disciplinary lines at the social sciences is not unusual —historians often act as generalists. But due to the development of a conventionalist critique of knowledge over the past twenty years, such cross-disciplinary study has become a more radical enterprise. In the 1960s and 1970s, a powerful critique of the academic disciplines that was mounted from the political left questioned the objectivity of disciplinary knowledge and the beneficence of specialized expertise. The social sciences were particularly vulnerable to this attack. Mainstream social science, taking natural science as its model, had made very strong claims to objectivity based on the use of scientific method. The social sciences were also closely attached to the policy and helping professions, whose self-interested elitism was under attack.2
This political onslaught, as it turned out, was only the warmup to a more serious challenge. Theoretical developments from philosophy, science, linguistics, anthropology, and literature—from everywhere it seemed —were coming together to demonstrate the radically conventional character of all knowledge. In the words of Ludwig Wittgen-stein, "our truths are governed by the conventional rules of our language"; the certain-ties we are able to attain, rest only on the "customs," "forms of life," "regular ways of behaving," in which our language is embedded. Although Wittgenstein did not say so, later theorists of the linguistic turn have recognized that to anchor knowledge in "forms of life" and "regular ways of behaving" is to anchor it in history. Indeed, they often call this position "historicism," for to deny any fixed foundations to knowledge or value is to ground them in the historical world of meanings human beings construct
for their own purposes.3
Our intellectual disciplines are preeminent examples of bodies of knowledge that are based in linguistic convention and social practice. The conventionalist critique invites
DOROTHY Ross is Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and
162 BOOK REVIEWS
The essays in this collection are consistently of a very high standard and merit the attention of scholars interested in the philosophy and literature of the eighteenth cen-tury, the history of medicine and science, or social history.
Journal of lite History of the Behavioral Scitnces Votvme 29, April 1993
Carl Ratner. Vygotsky's Sociohistoricol Psychology ana its Contemporary Applications. NY: Plenum Press. 368 pp. $45.00 (cloth) (Reviewed by René van der Veer)
To write a book in which one argues the need for a psychology based on Marxist principles would seem foolish and headstrong in a time when Marxist and communist thinking have lost their appeal for millions of people. Yet this is precisely what Ratner does in his new book on sociohistorical psychology and, I believe, on good grounds. Drawing on Marx and many other critical thinkers, the author develops a radical sociohistorical view of many psychological problems. This perspective is essentially in-compatible with many of the claims and findings of present-day mainstream American psychology.
The centra] tenets of Ratner's view are that:
(a) human psychological phenomena are constructed as individuals participate in concrete social interactions and as they employ tools;
(b) humans actively transform themselves as they transform their social and natural world;
(c) psychological phenomena are dialectically interrelated.
Of course, this is still a very global view and in applying it to the very real problems of human mental life the author relies on the work of a host of critical psychologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and sociologists. The principal critical psychologist to whom Ratner refers is Lev Vygotsky whose thinking he seeks to complete by "systematiz-ing [his] rather fragmentary ideas, extend"systematiz-ing them to new areas, draw"systematiz-ing out their im-plications, empirically substantiating them, defending them against alternative theories
and data, and modifying them to enhance their validity."1
BOOK REVIEWS 163
enormous diversity of human mental functioning across cultures demonstrates the con-crete, sociocultural origin of human conduct. It is because human beings live in different societies under different socioeconomic circumstances and with different cultural facilities that they display different mental processes.
Ratner uses one lengthy chapter to argue this view for various mental processes such as perception, emotions, and memory. His argument generally takes the form of showing that a specific psychological process (e.g., color perception) proceeds in different ways and leads to different forms in different cultures and then pointing out that such differences were to be expected given the different sociocultural circumstances under which these people live.
Opponents of such a view have always argued that human beings are not that radically different across cultures, and that they share certain traits; in short, there are psychological universals which may well have a biological basis. This objection is a well-known one to Ratner and in a separate chapter he has tried to deal with the thorny issue of psychological universals. His argument is that truly universal features (e.g., all humans have emotions) are quite uninformative and may hide big differences at the level of concrete mental functioning (e.g., no culture promotes the same set of emotions). In so far as one may speak of universal psychological features these are caused by common features of social life such as division of labor, language and tool use.
From the foregoing one might wonder whether Ratner's arguments do not lead him to adopt an extreme form of environmentalism. It is fortunate that the author has devoted a lengthy chapter to what he feels is the genuine relation between biological and non-biological factors in human behavior. In this chapter Ratner argues that the relation of psychology to biology is roughly analogous to the relation between a television pro-gram and a television set. The quality of the propro-grams is normally not dependent on the set except for the rare case that physical malfunctioning of the set causes trouble. More or less the same holds true for humans, for "human biology is even less deter-mining of psychology than television sets are of television programs" and above a given threshold of biological adequacy "biological variations have minimal consequences for psychology" (200). This position brings Ratner quite close to that of defendants of the strong Artificial Intelligence view and is as likely to provoke criticism from its fierce opponents. To support his view Ratner discusses several studies that supposedly prove the important role played by genes, hormones and neurotransmitters arguing in each case that while these factors may play their part it is concrete social circumstances that ultimately determine the behavior of the subject. He discusses several studies, for ex-ample, that show that human sexual activity is not determined by hormones, but depen-dent on social practices.
The author employs the same line of reasoning in his chapter on madness. This is a rich chapter in which Ratner sketches the bewildering cross-cultural and historical variety of mental disturbances. He succeeds in pointing out that the origins, symptoms, and cures of mental dysfunctioning are dependent on the belief systems which exist in various societies and historical epochs. Moreover, he provides a lucid analysis of the objectively existing societal factors (e.g., loss of labor) that cause large numbers of people in Western society to feel stressed or depressed.
164 BOOK REVIEWS
biological reductionism wherever it crops up. Ratner has written a rich and well-argued defense of a radical constructionist view on human psychological functioning that deserves to be read and, hopefully, will lead to a lively debate between proponents and opponents of such a view. And it is very fitting that the cover of his book should be conspicuously red.
Journal of ttu History of (frf Behavioral Scttnces Volume 29. April 1993
Mark B. Adams, Ed. The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and
Russia. NY: Oxford University Press, 1990. xii + 242 pp. $45.00 (hard) (Reviewed
by Leila Zenderland)
While the insights to be gained from comparative history are frequently touted, such studies remain relatively rare. Historians attempting to write them usually face formidable barriers, including the need to master multiple languages, diverse social tradi-tions, and distinctive political contexts. In this small volume, Mark Adams has devised a strategy to circumvent these obstacles. By combining his own research on science in Russia with that of three other scholars studying parallel developments in Germany, France, and Brazil, he has produced a comparative history of the eugenics movement based largely on non-English sources. The result is an unusually coherent and provocative composite work which significantly broadens our understanding of this movement's worldwide impact.
Most literature on eugenics has focused on developments in the United States, Britain, and, more recently, Germany. Yet the eugenics movement flourished in at least thirty countries during the first four decades of this century. Three of these authors have
published book-length studies exploring the national movements they summarize here;1
nonetheless, by juxtaposing these briefer overviews (approximately fifty pages each, including separate bibliographies) within a single volume, and by adding an introduction and conclusion placing them within an even broader international context, Adams's col-lection is both extremely useful and highly suggestive.
Sheila Weiss's essay summarizes German developments between 1904 and 1945. Unlike many earlier writers, Weiss refuses to characterize this movement as simply a precursor to Nazi practices. Instead, she traces both the continuities and differences between Nazi ideology and the older and broader body of ideas that Germans usually called "racial hygiene." German racial hygiene, Weiss argues, was "far more hetero-geneous in its politics and ideology than is generally assumed" (9). Her essay proves this by exploring the social, professional, and political forces which shaped and reshaped this movement during the Wilhelmine, Weimar, and National Socialist eras, and by emphasizing the internal fissures evident within it.
BOOK REVIEWS 165
and a decline in the birthrate, and hopeful about new developments in science and medi-cine. Eugenics, he argues, was the self-proclaimed scientific solution to the widespread perception that urban, industrial life was causing French society to decline and degen-erate. This concept is indeed important, for as the other essays in this volume show, concerns about "degeneration" helped to promote eugenics in Germany, Brazil, and Russia as well. (Surprisingly, although Schneider cites the fictional works of Emile Zola and others in popularizing degeneration theories, he fails to mention the earlier work of French psychiatrist Benedict Morel, author of the influential 1857 tract, Traité des
dégénérescences. . .). French scientists responded by embracing neo-Lamarckian, rather
than Mendelian, theories of heredity—theories which stressed the inheritance of acquired characteristics. These eugenicists focused largely on "positive" measures, such as im-proving prenatal care and reforming the environment to rid the country of "social plagues" such as tuberculosis, alcoholism, and venereal disease. By the 1930s, this move-ment was increasingly advocating "negative" measures as well, including birth control, abortion, and sterilization (and incurring increasing resistance from the Catholic Church). Nonetheless, the French version of eugenic science remained markedly different from its Anglo-Saxon cousins, for its programs, whether positive or negative, were largely argued in the language of neo-Lamarckianism.
The worldwide importance of this version is obvious in Nancy Stepan's intriguing essay on Brazil. Stepan uses Brazilian developments to extrapolate what she calls a "Latin" version of eugenics — a version that had its origins in France and Italy, and that spread rapidly throughout Latin America. Its impact is evident in Pan American eugenics con-ferences held in Cuba (1927) and Argentina (1934). With its largely poor, illiterate, and racially mixed population, Brazil, Stepan argues, "represented all that Europeans re-garded as 'dysgenic'" (111). Brazilian eugenicists fought back by praising the distinctive contributions of the mulatto and by supporting public hygiene campaigns and sanita-tion science to combat tropical diseases—measures that they hoped would "regenerate" the population. "To sanitize is to eugenize" stated a popular slogan of the Brazilian movement. By the late 1920s, the introduction of both scientific and social ideas from the United States and Germany had led to conflicts between "Anglo-Saxon Mendelism" and "French neo-Lamarckianism." Nonetheless, in Brazil neo-Lamarckianism remain-ed powerful well into the 1940s.
Finally, Mark Adams's essay adds the complicated story of eugenics in Russia. He follows this movement from its origins under the Tsars, through its idealistic reorienta-tion as "Bolshevik eugenics" under Lenin, its apparent demise under Stalin, when it was officially banned, and its rebirth only a few years later under a new name —"medical genetics." The most dramatic (and ironic) incident in this story involves the gifted American geneticist H. J. Muller, a Marxist sympathizer working in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, who tried to convince Stalin that a large-scale eugenic program of artificial insemination might ultimately help socialism to triumph. Stalin was apparently unimpressed, for Muller had to be whisked out of the country, while several of his Russian protégés were shot as "enemies of the people."
In a strong and well-organized conclusion, Adams uses these essays to challenge a number of common misconceptions. Eugenics, he argues, was an extremely diverse international movement, and its British and American versions did not necessarily form the models for movements in other countries. Nor were Mendelian discoveries crucial for its development, for neo-Lamarckian doctrines could be used just as effec-tively to promote eugenic policies. Equally important, this book emphasizes the close
