biagioli, mario. galileo's instruments of credit: telescopes, images, secrecy. chicago:...

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Robert Greenfield. Timothy Leary: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, 2006. 689 pp. $28.00(cloth). ISBN-13: 978-0-15-100500-0.

Were they not authenticated, the amazing coincidences and fantastic twists in the lifestory of Timothy Leary (1990–1996) could be mistaken for the plot of a Dickens or a TomWolfe novel. Consider this bare outline: The son of an alcoholic dentist father and a dotingand pious Irish Catholic mother, young Timothy spends much of a troubled childhood worry-ing about when and in what condition his father will return home from his alcoholic binges.Then, abandoned by his father, the boy shows academic promise and gains appointment to theU.S. Military Academy at West Point. There, heavy drinking and a refusal to inform on up-perclassmen lead to his being formally “silenced”: a terrible punishment in which no one ispermitted to speak with him outside of classes, or even to sit next to him in the mess hall.After resigning from West Point, Leary discovers and begins to excel in academic psychology,first as an undergraduate at Alabama, then as a Master’s student under Lee Cronbach atWashington State University, and finally as a PhD candidate at Berkeley. His research culmi-nates in The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, a system of psychodiagnosis alongSullivanian principles that quickly becomes part of the standard reading list for clinical psy-chology students, and leads to an appointment at Harvard. There, he and his colleagueRichard Alpert (later to rename himself Baba Ram Dass) discover the psychedelic effects ofmagic mushrooms and their synthetic equivalent psilocybin, and gain notoriety by promotingthe drugs’ usefulness in educational, religious, and criminological settings. Dismissed fromHarvard for abandoning his classes, Leary becomes a counterculture hero and famously urgesyoung America to “Tune in, turn on and drop out.” He establishes a commune in Millbrook,New York, which is harassed by the zealous young prosecutor G. Gordon Liddy, later to become famous himself as a Watergate burglar. Caught in a Texas drug bust, Leary is impris-oned in California but breaks out with help from the radical Weather Underground group andflees to Algeria, where he comes under the protection of the infamous Black Panther, EldridgeCleaver. Rearrested a few years later and incarcerated in Folsom Prison, he is befriended bythe prisoner in the adjoining cell, who happens to be the notorious murderer Charles Manson.After collaborating with the authorities, Leary is released and goes on a joint lecture tour withLiddy, himself recently released from prison following his Watergate conviction. Leary remains off and on in the spotlight for rest of his life, and following his death, friends sendhis ashes into space orbit.

I approached Robert Greenfield’s extensive fleshing out of this outline with a degree ofpersonal as well as professional interest because, although I never really knew Tim Leary, I didmeet him. As a new graduate student at Harvard in 1962, my first supervisor was his col-league and friend Richard Alpert. Alpert was fired along with Leary in the spring of 1963, butthe 6 months when I worked for him were long enough for me to get some sense of both men.Although their psychedelically inspired projects seemed grandiose and were coming under increasingly harsh criticism from other Harvard faculty members for their lack of rigor, theyhad at least a superficial appeal as possible ways to break away from a narrow behavioristicpsychology. Alpert was personally congenial and kind to me and Leary, from a distance,seemed a very appealing figure. With his flashing smile and a hearing aid that lent him an attractive air of vulnerability, his eloquent encomiums to the inevitable “psychobiological

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 43(4), 421–422 Fall 2007Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20277© 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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evolution” soon to be accomplished by psychedelic means seemed at least conceivable. Someof my more advanced graduate student friends had enthusiastically endorsed the psychedelicculture, and lived in the two communal homes set up by Leary and Alpert.

I opened Greenfield’s book in the hope that it would narrate the life story of a signifi-cant American cultural icon, while also providing some insight into the psychology of an intriguing figure whose life had briefly touched my own. It succeeded at the first level, pre-senting more than 600 pages of impressively researched details about what Leary did andwhat happened to him. With a plot like the one outlined above, this could not fail to be inter-esting. It also turns out to be a very sad story, as Leary is portrayed as a hopelessly addictivepersonality who left a great deal of human destruction behind him, including the suicides ofa wife and a daughter, the alienation of a son, and the wrecked careers of former friends thathe informed on when collaborating with authorities. Indeed, the book made me feel verylucky to have arrived at Harvard when I did, as the tide had turned and there was far less temp-tation to join the psychedelic community than would have been the case just a year or two earlier.

But if this book is in many ways what the narcissistic Leary deserves, its unrelentinglynegative tone prevents it from being a satisfying psychological biography. It is a story told primarily from the viewpoint of Leary’s victims, providing little insight into his point of view,and why he became the person he did. There would seem to be ample grist for more sympa-thetic interpretation in terms of his childhood problems with his father, for example, or theeffects of his harrowing experience at West Point, but this is scarcely noted. Furthermore, the book makes no real attempt to account for Leary’s undeniable charm and magnetism. Ina revealing passage in his endnote to the book, Greenfield relates that a reader of his prepub-lication manuscript told him, “Those who love Timothy Leary will hate your book” (p. 608).That is unquestionably true, and a major failure of the biography is its inability to convey why,until the very end of his life and despite his manifest flaws and foibles, Leary was able to attract a large number of people who followed and who did in fact seem to love him.

Reviewed by RAYMOND E. FANCHER, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at York University inToronto, and the former Editor of The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences.


Glenn Jacobs. Charles Horton Cooley: Imagining Social Reality. Amherst: University ofMassachusetts Press, 2006. 304 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 1-55849-519-3.

In Charles Horton Cooley, Glenn Jacobs offers an insightful if idiosyncratic account ofthe reclusive Ann Arbor sociologist who pioneered the idea of the social self. In Cooley’s organic view, the self is not autonomous but formed in interaction with others; hence, ratherthan being separate, we are in fact “members of one another” involved in a continuous socialprocess. Jacobs engages Cooley not only as a historical figure but as a classic social theorist.By seeking to uncover the enduring value of Cooley’s ideas, Jacobs reminds American socialscientists that there is much to be gained by reading the work of earlier theorists, and that theyneed not turn only to the European greats, but also to indigenous sources.

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs


Jacobs’s work is most useful in revealing unexpected influences on Cooley’s thought. Forinstance, Jacobs points to the influence of Scottish Enlightenment notions of the inherent sociability of man on Cooley’s social view of the self. Cooley used Adam Smith’s notion of“sympathy,” or the human capacity for understanding the other, against nineteenth-centuryliberals such as Herbert Spencer who viewed society merely as an aggregate of individuals.Cooley’s focus on the human capacity for empathic understanding, Jacobs argues, lent an affective dimension to his social account of the self that separated it from George HerbertMead’s more rationalistic account and anticipated the work of Erving Goffman.

Jacobs looks not only to those who influenced how Cooley thought but also to thosewho shaped how he wrote. Unlike most interpreters of social scientists, who overlook writ-ing style to focus solely on substance, Jacobs points to the significance of the essay genrefor understanding Cooley’s thought. The essay encapsulated Cooley’s preference for amore interpretive and humanistic sociology over against a more systematized and scien-tistic variety. Hence, Cooley valued the essay genre for “its multivocality, its intertextual-ity and polysemy . . . its self-referentiality and emphasis on feeling” (p. 16). As Jacobspoints out, to a large extent, the essay form is about the development of an authorial per-sonality or self. This observation holds even more true for the personal journal, and Jacobsnotes how important Cooley’s expansive and scrupulously maintained journal was for hisintellectual development. This analysis of style helps explain Cooley’s notion of sociologyas “systematic autobiography.” Thus, Cooley viewed social science as an extension of thebasic human capacity for “sympathetic introspection, a refinement of the reflexive prac-tice encountered in the social process” (p. 65). In Jacobs’s view, the unsystematic natureof Cooley’s writings, often maligned by sociologists since Mead, is actually one of itsgreatest strengths.

Although Jacobs’s account of these unexpected influences on Cooley is compelling, heworks too hard to separate Cooley from the American intellectual context in which he worked.There is something quite strange about a discussion of intellectual influences on Cooley thatdevotes more attention to Montaigne and Walter Pater than to his contemporary John Deweyand Thomas Cooley (Cooley’s father, a noted legal thinker). In addition, while seeking to con-vince us of Cooley’s worth as a social theorist, Jacobs overlooks his defects. Cooley’s socialview of the self assumed the equality of humans as participants in a democratic discussionand failed to consider the role of hierarchy in shaping individual identity. As a result, his social account of the self-naturalized, historically constructed power relations, as in a tellingsentence from his journal: “To know men perhaps the surest way is to have simple and nec-essary relations with them, as of man and wife, father and child, buyer and seller, employerand workman, teacher and scholar” (p. 185). As Jeffrey Sklansky has recently argued,Cooley’s focus on communication, exchange, and self-expression obfuscated the decisive sig-nificance of property relations in an emerging industrial capitalist American order.

Those seeking a more straightforward biography of Cooley or an intellectual history focused on his major concepts of the looking-glass self and the primary group may wish tolook first at the work of Edward Jandy and Marshall Cohen, respectively. Those seeking aprovocative exploration of Cooley’s thought and its origins should turn here.

Reviewed by DANIEL GEARY, Lecturer in Intellectual and Cultural History, School ofAmerican and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom.

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Adriana S. Benzaquén. Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointmentin the Study of Human Nature. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006. 393pp. $44.95 CAN and $34.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-7735-2972-1.

Wildness, as status and behavior, defines the borderlands of human nature, the outermostreaches of otherness, and the innermost geography of selfhood. To be wild is to be at once utterly uncommon and thoroughly universal. This paradox is the reason why wildness inspiressuch curiosity, even obsession. It is also the source of its tantalizing promise to deliver on theessential meaning of humanness. According to Adriana Benzaquén, the lure of wildness hasa long history, vividly represented in cases of “wild children” who have periodically rivetedthe attention of the public while raising the hopes of reform-minded educators, philosophers,and assorted researchers.

Some wild children have been more famous than others. Victor of Aveyron was a speech-less 9-year-old when he was captured near the French town of Saint-Sernin in 1800. His storyhas been told and retold, perhaps most aesthetically in Francois Truffaut’s film L’EnfantSauvage. Just as that film opened to critical acclaim in 1970, Susan Wiley, a severely abused 13-year-old, was removed from her home in Temple City, California. Unable to walk or talk, thegirl was renamed “Genie” by the scientists who clamored to study and save her. These and otherstories about crossing the line from savagery into civilization symbolize a “forbidden experi-ment.” The tragic circumstances of wild children have been compelling precisely because theycannot be ethically replicated. These children, who (like Victor) were frequently presumed tohave been raised by animals, such as wolves, are more likely today to emerge from the hell ofsevere child abuse (like Genie). In either case, they have the potential to tell us who, exactly, wereally are. They tempt with knowledge, Benzaquén argues. Then, invariably, they disappoint.

This is a smart, sensitive account of when, how, and why wild children were appropri-ated for the purpose of subjecting human development to scientific inquiry and humanitarianintervention. Strongly influenced by Ian Hacking, the author suggests that wild children haveconstituted “a human kind” (p. 60) at least since the eighteenth century, when German natu-ralist Johann Blumenbach began a long tradition of compiling lists of wild children to answerquestions about evidence, explanation, and causation. What facts were known in each case?How could the condition of these children be explained? Were they born wild or did isolationmake them wild? Like other scholars who have found the key to normality by looking at deviation from it, Benzaquén sees in wild children prototypical developmental narratives.They are shockingly different, and they are also us.

Encounters with Wild Children is organized chronologically. Its chapters detail particu-lar cases as well as major historical turning points: the Enlightenment, the consolidation ofthe helping professions and human sciences, the establishment of special education, the dis-covery of child abuse. Most wild children have been male and Western, captured or confinedin Europe and North America, but the book includes a chapter on the “exotic” cases of India,South Africa, and Burundi. Wherever they turned up, wild children performed similar func-tions. Across time and culture, they have been repositories for fantasy, horror, and longing.They embody passionate quests to rescue and reform while also suggesting how frighteningand limited members of the human category can be.

Benzaquén’s chastened conclusion is that our knowledge of the human category is similarly limited. Such humility has rarely been displayed among the scientific actors in the

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history she narrates, and for good reason. It requires that we admit what we do not—and per-haps cannot—know. It confronts us with the discomforting uncertainty that accompanies allinterventions designed to help, heal, salvage, and improve the process of being and becominghuman.

Reviewed by ELLEN HERMAN, Department of History, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR.


Biagioli, Mario. Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2006. 316 pp. $35 (cloth). ISBN-10: 0-226-04561-7.

Mario Biagioli’s previous book-length contribution to Galileo scholarship, Galileo,Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism, examined Galileo’s scientificcareer within the sociocultural context of the powerful Medician court, arguing that Galileo’sscientific enterprise was linked to court intrigues in a dynamic choreography that Galileodeftly manipulated to his own advantage (Biagioli, 1993). So, for instance, Galileo’s spectac-ular displays of his trademark telescope got him much-needed recognition and support fromthe Medici. Naming the moons of Jupiter after his patrons was another shrewd bit of maneu-vering that flattered Galileo’s patrons into entrenching him as court natural philosopher. TheGalileo portrayed in this work was not the one-dimensional, steadfast Copernican who defended the new science for its validity against all else. This may be the figure portrayed intraditional histories of science, but Biagioli’s portrayal is of a crafty “spin-doctor” constantlyshifting his natural philosophy to best advantage within the complicated network of court relations. In this view, Galileo’s natural philosophy and his identity as a natural philosophershifted and changed as often as the circumstances of the court.

Biagioli broadens this contextualized study of Galileo’s natural philosophy in his latestwork, Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy, beyond the role of courtculture alone to examine the dynamic university and church cultures of early-seventeenth-century Padua, Florence, and Rome and how they also influenced and were influenced byGalileo and his science. In this new work, we again see an agile and enterprising Galileo, thistime maneuvering his way through multiple marketplaces, each rich with new ideas and tech-nologies, and used cleverly by Galileo to create an image and authority for self-serving advantage. This Galileo is a marketing genius, a quick-witted opportunist, who sizes up whatever market he finds himself traveling through, whether it be intellectual, cultural, orlegal, always looking for best advantage. And the instruments used by Galileo in these marketplaces were not just brass and glass scientific instruments, like the telescope and geometrical compass that he so skillfully constructed, used, and sold. For along with thesetechnologies, Galileo employed the techniques used to master them, as well as the methodsused to make prints and illustrations to gain prestige, authority, financial support, and fame.Power and control were credits acquired from the currency of such knowledge but Galileoalso gained a monopoly over knowledge whenever he withheld it, as when he held back information about how to construct a compass or a high-powered telescope, for instance.Technologies, techniques, and secrets were the tactics used by a man who, Biagioli suggests,was preoccupied with credit, control, and priority.

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Biagioli follows Galileo through different marketplaces, each with its own currency,from the intellectual economy of the university to the courtly culture of the Medicis and thelegal court of the Inquisition. We first see Galileo in the early 1600s, an obscure professor ofmathematics at the University of Padua, supplementing his meager university income byboarding and tutoring students in his home. To take advantage of this ready market he soldcompasses and other scientific and mathematical instruments to students at a markup. And hewas also busy making his own instruments and writing how-to manuals on their use. Galileo’sactivities during this phase of his career were labor-intensive. But he had an audience here,and although his influence was very local, his authority was implicit.

In the courtly economy of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, to which he moved in the sum-mer of 1610, Galileo had to convince the courtly audience of his authority as mathematicianand philosopher and did so with the printed images of his telescopic observations of the lunarlandscape and moons orbiting Jupiter, presented in Sidereus nuncius. Rushed to press in thespring of 1610, this publication “was carefully crafted to maximize the credit Galileo couldexpect from readers while minimizing the information given out to potential competitors” (p. 81). He had moved beyond the local marketplace of the university and now sought to “establish priority and international visibility” with detailed visual images but no informationthat would facilitate replication of his claims.

In his revistionist interpretation, Biagioli suggests that the moons of Jupiter, whichGalileo dedicated to the Medici, “were not discoveries in the modern sense of the term” (p. 127), and therefore notable primarily as signposts in the history of astronomy, but wereconstrued by Galileo “as a kind of object that, while displaying some of the features of ournotion of scientific discovery, also participated in the economies of artworks and monu-ments” (p. 3). Intertwined with this analysis of the relationship between discovery and invention is a discussion of debates about realism and instrumentalism in early modern astronomy.

When Biagioli follows Galileo into the final marketplace of his study, he shows how thepictorial representations of telescopic observations, used by Galileo to seek credit, also puthim at risk. Clashing with theologians over his presentation of the movement of sunspots,Galileo found himself on the defensive. He had moved from the cultural marketplace of con-vincing to the legal marketplace of having to defend himself. Even here, however, Galileo wasable to take advantage of the arena he found himself in. He did not challenge the theologicalassertion of the primacy of Scripture as a truthful account of God’s word, and therefore, of theimmutability of the heavens. Rather, “Galileo tried to work within their regime of truth by arguing that the heliocentric structure of the world was written in a special book, the book ofnature, that, although distinct from Scripture, shared its status as a divine text” (p. 19). In thisway, Galileo was able to cast astronomy and philosophy as enterprises not distinct from theology and, therefore, not dangerous to it. Ultimately, however, this clever maneuver to grafthis arguments onto those of the theologians did not get a positive response and Galileo waswarned to discontinue his study of Copernicanism. Galileo faced a further loss of credit whenbrought to trial in 1633.

Biagioli’s book is an impressively intricate analysis of Galileo within the context of histimes, showing how he used instruments, images, and secrecy for gain. This socioculturalanalysis will likely be contentious, as it casts Galileo’s support of Copernicanism as being partof an opportunistic dance with dynamic nonscientific forces. In any light, this latest work ofBiagioli’s is a fascinating account of how Galileo made a name for himself and is another extremely valuable contribution to studies of Galileo and the scientific revolution that will no doubt fuel lively debate among scholars in these fields.

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REFERENCES

Biagioli, M. (1993). Galileo, courtier: The practice of science in the culture of absolutism. Chicago and London:University of Chicago Press.

Reviewed by JANE JENKINS, Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies, St. ThomasUniversity, Fredericton, NB, Canada.


Anne Warfield Rawls. Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim’s “The Elementary Forms ofReligious Life.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 355 pp. $80 (cloth).ISBN 0-521-65145-X.

Anne Rawls has produced an original and provocative reinterpretation of one of thegreat works in the history of sociology and anthropology. Rawls insists that the centralpurpose of Durkheim’s landmark 1912 work was to provide a sociological explanation ofthe origins of the categories of the understanding, and thus to provide the linchpin for hisentire sociology. Having identified Durkheim’s broad goals, Rawls then shows that, con-tra Hume’s empiricism and Kant’s transcendental theory of mind (as Rawls would have it),for Durkheim the origin of reason lies in “the shared emotional experience of those ritu-ally produced moral forces created by the enactment of concrete practices in the midst ofan assembled group” (p. 10). Rawls proceeds to establish her central points through ameticulous reading of central sections of The Elementary Forms—most centrally the in-troduction, the conclusion, and the first three chapters of Book 3, “The Principal RitualAttitudes.” The logic of her reconstruction of Durkheim’s argument is quite straightfor-ward. Early human religious practices involved gathering in groups and enacting sharedrituals and shared beliefs. These shared practices both express and create the experienceof the sacred, which is in fact the power and force of the collective affecting the individu-als who compose it. It is from this repeated experience of force that humans are then ableto build up the category of causality. Of course, put so bluntly, the argument seems thinindeed, and Rawls’s argument over hundreds of pages accumulates more force behind itthan I can suggest here.

Rawls’s argument seems to me to be fundamentally sound, insofar as it emphasizesthree major elements: Durkheim’s central and most explicit goal in the book is indeed his attempt to empirically explain the origins of the categories of the understanding; the social orthe collective is this origin, according to him; and the shared ritual practices of early humansis the original form of the social. However, it is difficult to see how early human ritual prac-tices could have created the category of causality, not to mention the many other categoriesof the understanding. This part of Rawls, and this part of Durkheim, remain unconvincing.These are the parts of Durkheim that most commentators have recoiled from, or simply side-stepped, and this is the part that Rawls exhaustively insists on, while taking issue with thesecommentators. This raises the question of how a book can become so important when most readers reject its central argument. It seems that the thesis surrounding Durkheim’s

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epistemological argument, that society is an all-encompassing space or matrix that leaves itstrace on everything within it, is sufficiently fruitful without having to sign on to the central epistemological argument to the letter. Rawls’s work would have been more effective if shehad worked with some of the debates, between presentists, historicists, theorists of rheto-ric, literary theorists, hermeneutics, and deconstruction, about how we select, transmit,and inherit a heritage from the past, something that never takes place literally or to the letter.

Another way of posing this problem is to suggest that those who have side-steppedDurkheim’s epistemology may be better readers and inheritors of Kant (1977, p. 61) than areRawls and Durkheim, taking more seriously his warning that where the categories of the understanding come from is a question that “cannot be further analyzed or answered, becauseit is of them that we are in need for all our answers and for all our thinking about objects.”Rawls (p. 27) signs on to what she characterizes as the aim of classical social theory, of “rein-venting philosophy as a social science.” Although something like this aim is part of the her-itage of sociology at least since Comte, it can no longer simply be repeated as an aim as ifKant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, and others had not worked at delimiting and rein-scribing the heritage of metaphysics.

Rawls is persuaded that Durkheim’s original epistemological argument can be resur-rected, because of her allegiance to the very successful contemporary sociological andinterdisciplinary research program known as ethnomethodology and conversation analy-sis. For example, linking Durkheim with ethnomethodology, she writes: “. . . Durkheim’sepistemology depends to a large degree on the empirical details of actual shared enactedpractices, details which constitute the witnessable enactment of social facts” (p. 320). Thisis an ethnomethodological gloss on Durkheim’s ideas about rituals, but it is not warrantedeither by Durkheim’s text or by ethnomethodological research practices. Rawls, however,argues that the sophisticated research techniques of ethnomethodology and conversationanalysis can now be used to complete Durkheim’s epistemology. But there is a powerfulirony here. The success of ethnomethodology depends on resolutely turning away from the metaphysical and foundational questions that Durkheim, and now Rawls, pursue.Using tape and video recordings to minutely and exhaustively identify the interactivedesign and deployment of talk and action, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis refuse all theoretical, foundational, and metaphysical speculation, thus allowing theirunique phenomena of study to come into view (Button, 1991). Ethnomethodology is thus post-Kantian, whereas Rawls and Durkheim remain fundamentally pre-Kantian, in thesense of being untouched by the rigor and grandeur of the transcendental limits to knowledge.

Rawls interpretation of Durkheim really belongs together with such types of work ascognitive science, evolutionary epistemology, artificial intelligence, and the strong programin the sociology of science, and other such endeavors that try empirically to explain the foundations of reason and knowledge. Perhaps her work would have benefited from discus-sion of some of this material.

This is a brave and rigorous work. It deserves a serious response from a wide range ofsocial science scholars, and this is why I have felt it necessary to indicate my own seriousreservations about it.

REFERENCES

Button, G. (Ed.). (1991). Ethnomethodology and the human sciences. Cambridge and New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.

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Kant, I. (1977). Prolegomena to any future metaphysics. Trans. Paul Carus, rev. James Ellington. Indianapolis:Hackett Publishing Co.

Reviewed by COLM KELLY, Department of Sociology, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB,Canada.


Laura L. Koppes (Ed.). Historical Perspectives in Industrial and OrganizationalPsychology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007. $75.00 (paper). ISBN0-8058-4440-6.

I have been looking forward to reviewing this book since its publication. My hope wasthat it would fill a void in the subdiscipline of Industrial and Organizational (I-O) Psychology.To be sure, there have been works of varying magnitudes that have traced the evolution of aspects of I-O psychology from the turn of the twentieth century to its present state, but therehas never been a volume that captured and integrated these as a single source. To its greatcredit, this text does exactly that—and more. It will provide the backbone of I-O seminars forthe next decade or more. The appendices are also a nice thought. They will provide the inter-ested scholar with a terrific foundation for examining individual topics. One of the things thatmakes historiography so challenging is just figuring out where and how to start. These appendices will help overcome that initial challenge.

If there is a downside to the text, it is the substantial differences in approaches of the chap-ter authors. Some simply chronicle events, others chronicle with occasional context, and thebest of the chapters follow a genuine deconstructionist model and dig deep into the context ofthe events. By far, the most captivating chapters are the first two, as well as those by Wilson(Chapter 9), Zickar and Gibby (Chapter 3), Vinchur (Chapter 8), and Highhouse (Chapter 14).But this is to be expected because these authors have an appreciation for historiography, hav-ing made excellent contributions in other venues. Many, if not most, of the other authors seetheir job as mining facts for others to use. I do not mean to diminish the value of mining thosefacts. Mining is hard work and a service to those who will use those facts for various purposes.But mining is the necessary but not sufficient condition for good history. The fact that thereare so many topics to cover (as evidenced by the diversity of the chapters) and so few experi-enced historiographers of I-O psychology, made this unevenness inevitable. Unfortunately, it isless interesting to hear that Person X wrote about/researched topic Y at time Z than thatContext A favored an investigation (or re-investigation) of Topic B and that Person C wasprimed to undertake that investigation because of D, yet was at the same time constrained bybackground E, and so on. The good news is that even the simple archival coverage will permitfuture scholars to move into a deeper consideration of the forces operating at a particular time.

With respect to coverage, I am surprised and disappointed that vocational psychologydid not warrant its own chapter. It was a central theme during the period 1920–1940. In theearly period of the vocational movement (1920–1930), it represented the first stirrings of the battle of “g” for prominence. Viteles, Fryer, and their colleagues posited that work-relatedemotional disorders were the result of people with insufficient “intelligence” placed or aspir-ing to be placed in “demanding” jobs. Bingham went so far as to propose that I-O psycholo-gists should leave the problems of the less-talented (i.e., the less “intelligent”) worker to the

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counseling psychologist. In the later period (1930–1940 and beyond), vocational psychologyspawned interesting and valuable research on the topic of “interests.” In the last decade, therehas been a new appreciation of the possible links between vocational interests, personality,and work behavior. This exclusion is regrettable. At the very least, this issue of interests mighthave warranted a section in the Latham and Budworth chapter on work motivation (Chapter 15)or the chapter by Zickar and Gibby (Chapter 3) on the “themes” of early I-O psychology(if for no other reason than the vocational movement actually clashed with some of thosethemes). If this is a sin of omission, the chapter on Consumer psychology by Schumann andDavidson (Chapter 11) might be seen as a sin of commission. Other than the fact that someearly I-O psychologists also dabbled in advertising as an applied adventure, I don’t think ithas much in common with I-O psychology.

I do have a serious bone to pick with the authors of many of the “O” chapters—the role ofElton Mayo in the development of I-O psychology in America. Although there is ample recog-nition of Mayo’s role in the Hawthorne studies, and in spite of the fact that Highhouse haspointed out that Mayo may have been expressing repressed longings to be a clinician in thefollow-up interviewing program, no one captured how central Mayo was to the developmentof the “O” part of American I-O psychology. When Mayo arrived in the United States in theearly 1920s, I-O psychology was just I psychology—it was applied psychometrics and a nar-row form of differential psychology. Mayo introduced the notion of personality—both ordered and disordered—into the discussion of the workplace with his theory of reverie obsession. He was a breath of fresh air to a stagnating subdiscipline during the period1924–1930. There is the merest hint of this in Table 1.4 of the Koppes and Pickren chapter.Between 1925 and 1935, no conference was complete without Mayo. He was the advocate forthe soul that was missing from the psychometric juggernaut that was I-O psychology at thetime. He was the consummate humanist and his introduction of the human relations move-ment in the mid- to late-1930s was the culmination of his theorizing about the effect of workon people. He was the I-O Freud of his time. He warranted a considerably deeper treatmentthan his popularizing role in the Hawthorne studies. To be fair, I know more about Mayo thanmost would, but not than most could.

One final passing observation. Although the chapter by Wilson on job analysis was serv-iceable, the new taxonomic architecture represented as “schools of thought” was a bitgrandiose and more than a bit distracting. As an example, he introduces the term “functionalist”and warns the reader not to confuse it with the same term used to describe a much larger—and uniquely American—school of psychology. On the contrary, in a book on history, I thinkthe reader might have been well served to use some existing taxonomies (or “schools”) withwider acceptance. Thus, he could have described structuralist, functionalist, behaviorist, andcognitive schools. This would have provided a wonderful foundation for examining the evo-lution and importance of job analysis in non-U.S. I-O psychology.

To end on the note on which I began, I think this is a “must” book for every applied psy-chologist’s bookshelf. I also think it will fill a void in graduate instruction. Finally, I agreewith the editors’ observation that there are several other volumes that might follow. I thinkthese following volumes would both fill some holes (e.g., a broader treatment of non-U.S. history, an inclusion of vocational psychology) as well as broaden and deepen the morearchival chapters of the current volume—and maybe revisit the role of Elton Mayo inAmerican I-O psychology.

Reviewed by FRANK J. LANDY, Scholar in Residence, City University of New York, NY.

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Stefan Collini. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press,2006. 536 pp. $45 (cloth). ISBN-10: 0-19-929105-5.

The contemporary debate about “intellectuals” and now “public intellectuals” is lively butlargely filled with clichés, and polarized—and often self-serving—positions. Stefan Collini’s500-page dismantling of the “absence thesis” that suggests that intellectuals have never reallyexisted in Britain is one of those rare books that moves beyond the conventional wisdom.Collini adds to the scholarly literature and, even more important, his ideas hold the potential toenlighten the broader public discussion of the role of the intellectual in the age of the internet, globalization, celebrity culture, and the research university. It is a brilliant if idiosyn-cratic book, and deserves serious scholarly and journalistic attention. Even the flaws in thebook are best explained in the terms of the author’s core theoretical argument.

Parts of the book are heavy-going, as it discusses an extensive literature on intellectualsand the history of writers and scholars in Britain. There is a fascinating and useful account ofthe history of the word intellectual, six chapters on the history of intellectuals in Britain fromearly Anglo-Saxon attitudes to Margaret Thatcher, and a series of comparative chapters thatexamine the context for intellectuals in France, Russia, Italy, Spain, the United States, andGermany, among other nations. The book ends with case studies on British intellectuals, in-cluding George Orwell, R. G. Collingwood, and A. J. P. Taylor, and a theoretical conclusionon the questions of specialization and celebrities.

Professional historians and specialists in intellectual history will have much to argueabout in this text, for it ranges over a large number of historical periods and contexts, islargely polemic in tone and purpose, and has a number of axes to grind. This is not standardintellectual history, although Collini has published widely and traditionally in the field. GivenCollini’s core argument about the tension between intellectual work that moves beyond spe-cialized discourse and traditional scholarly norms, he is hardly in a position to complain tooloudly about the knocks he is likely to receive from historians concerned with the liberties hetakes. There is no question, furthermore, that the book’s relative inattention to the genderednature of the intellectuals debate is a significant weakness. In addition, Collini has somerather sharp and critical things to say about his own disciple of English literature, althougharguably not taking up the challenge presented by the methods of the most recent scholarlywork in literary studies (trope or various forms of discourse analysis). And sociologists couldcomplain about the lack of more disciplined engagement with the contemporary sociologicalliterature on the topic (Collins and Fuchs, in particular), although he has interesting things tosay about Shils. In addition, far more could have been said about the role of scientists as intellectuals in Britain. The flaws in Collini’s own book, however, can be explained sociolog-ically, something he goes very far down the road to doing himself but stops just short as anyauthor must.

The value of Collini’s book comes from two major contributions that justify the effort required to slog through a text that could have used a serious edit for length. After Collini’sbook, it is hard to imagine any serious scholar or journalist attempting to resurrect the “absence thesis” that he destroys with such vigor and sharp, even funny, polemics. Since the Dreyfus Affair in France, the emergence of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia,and then the emergence of the Bolsheviks, the British have been looking “elsewhere” for nonspecialist intellectuals who “courageously” and “independently” write broadly for a pub-lic on contentious issues of the day in ways that enlighten democratic politics, inform

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rational deliberation, or radically transform society. Suffering from a bad case of “Dreyfusenvy,” English scholars, journalists, and writers, particularly since the 1950s, have convincedthemselves that there is something in the character, political history, and institutionalarrangements of their nation that deprives them of the type of intellectuals that the Frenchregularly produce, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu. The bril-liant Marxist intellectual Perry Anderson, in particular, articulated a highly influential ver-sion of this absence thesis in a late 1960s New Left Review piece that claims that there are no“real” intellectuals in Britain because there is no revolutionary tradition on the British Islesand that candidates for the role became far too interested in sociology for their own good.Collini demolishes this “absence thesis” not simply by discussing, at length, the numerousexamples that call into question the rule. More important, Collini shows how pervasive thisdiscourse about absence and now “decline” of the public intellectual is throughout other na-tions on the continent, even in France, as well as in the Americas. If everyone thinks that“their” nation is uniquely immune to having a “real” intellectual class, then perhaps some-thing deeper is going on here.

Collini’s case material is provocative and engaging, but the core insight he offers is a sociological explanation of the pervasiveness of debate about the absence of intellectuals inBritain and elsewhere. The “absence thesis” is not a moral panic created by simple-mindedjournalists or opportunistic celebrity academics, social types that certainly exist everywhereand are mercilessly critiqued in Absent Minds. More original and ultimately more usefulthan lampooning intellectuals for their internal contradictions (the chapter on A. J. P. Taylor isabout a public intellectual with “nothing to say” and Collini contentiously argues that Orwell,everyone’s hero today, is an intellectual who hates all intellectuals), Absent Minds presents atheoretical account of the intellectuals debate that explains it as a structural condition of con-temporary intellectual life itself. This theory illuminates so many of the discussions about thepublic intellectual today, holds the potential to lead to new research and helps us put the con-tradictions of Collini’s own analysis and writings into context.

Collini usefully distinguishes between three distinct uses of the term intellectual. The sociological meaning, exemplified by the writings of the American scholar Seymour MartinLipset, asks questions about the class and professional basis of the intelligentsia in modernsociety, leading to an extensive and often quantitative literature on the “new class” and relateddebates. The “subjective” meaning begins to dominate public debates about the issue “at thecreation” with the polemics associated with the Dreyfus Affair and continues today withRussell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals (1987) and Edward Said’s romantic notion of the amateur intellectual speaking “truth to power” articulated in the Representations of theIntellectuals (1994). Said’s text, in particular, plays a central role in Collini’s account, givenits origins in a BBC Reich Lecture. This romantic subjective notion focuses on the “courage,”“principles,” and personal “vision” of the great public intellectual, a discourse that ignores, asCollini shows to great effect, the institutional and historical embeddedness of all claims to intellectual autonomy.

As an alternative to these tired debates, Collini highlights the cultural authority model ofthe intellectual that he argues consists of four elements. Rooted in neither objective sociologi-cal factors nor subjective will, the cultural authority of the intellectual is a structure of relationsthat begins when an individual in a particular society obtains a “level of achievement in anactivity which is esteemed for—non-instrumental, creative, analytic or scholarly capacities.”Individuals who have achieved this status in what Collini usefully calls a “qualifying activity”(Russell in philosophy, A. J. P. Taylor in history, or Chomsky in linguistics) (element one),sometimes use the availability of various channels of expression and media in their society

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(element two) to express opinions and views on broad issues of concern to the public outsidethe questions addressed in their original qualifying activity. The alleged decline of the publicintellectual is, using Collini’s theoretical approach, really about the structural factors involved in the creation and sustaining of intellectuals who gain a reputation for having inter-esting and important things to say (element three) and can effectively communicate them usingexisting media (the fourth element of his model). This debate never goes away, and can never beresolved, precisely because the debate itself is created by institutional contradictions betweenspecialized expert knowledge and broad public debate as well by the tensions between celebrityculture and reputations based on knowledge and good judgement. All of these contradictions areinherent in modern society and the research university and media outlets it created.

Collini certainly cannot resolve these contradictions himself because, like most intel-lectuals who write about public intellectuals, he is doing what he is theorizing about and researching. The theoretical insights Collini offers are, in many ways, undermined by thecontentious and highly partisan judgements and polemics that make up large parts of thisbook. Collini takes a position in Absent Minds on how more academics, journalists, and in-dependent scholars can deal with the tensions we live with in what Steven Brint calls this“age of experts” that itself operates in the context of a celebrity and media saturated cul-ture. Academics with solid scholarly reputations can engage in debate on issues of broadconcern, Collini suggests, if they are aware that they must engage with diverse publics nota unified “public sphere.” In addition, they must be willing to try to balance the temptationsof self-interested publicity seeking and the dangers to their academic reputations that comewith challenges to increasingly narrow professional discourse. Collini is not likely to be-come a media star with this book, especially because he is rather old-fashioned in his rela-tive hostility to TV. There is no question, moreover, that the range and contentiousness ofhis polemics will lose him points in the academic status game. But Collini has accom-plished what he set out to do; he has written a book that says useful things about a long-standing debate, that could lead to rich and exciting follow-up research, and might even inspire others modestly to follow the balancing act he examines with such sociological andhistorical insight.

Reviewed by NEIL MCLAUGHLIN, Associate Professor of Sociology, McMaster University,Hamilton, ON, Canada.


Elizabeth R. Valentine. Beatrice Edgell: Pioneer Woman Psychologist. New York: NovaScience Publishers, Inc., 2006. 233 pp. $69.00 (cloth). ISBN: 1-59454-389-5.

Beatrice Edgell (1871–1948), psychologist and philosopher, was the first woman presidentof the Mind Association (1927), the British Psychological Society (1930–1932), the AristotelianSociety (1930–1931), and the Psychology Section of the British Association for theAdvancement of Science (1932). With a BA and MA from the University of Wales, she washired in 1897 by Bedford College for Women in the University of London as a lecturer in men-tal and moral science. She remained at Bedford College for Women until her retirement in 1933.

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On leave in 1900–1901, Edgell completed her PhD at the University of Würzburg under the supervision of Oswald Külpe and became the first woman graduate of that university. Havingoverseen the name change from the Department of Mental and Moral Science to the Departmentof Philosophy and Psychology, and the separation of those departments into independent enti-ties, in 1927 Edgell was named professor of the Department of Psychology, the first woman inEngland to hold that title. All of these accomplishments surely justify a full-length biography,and in Elizabeth Valentine, Edgell has a devoted biographer.

This meticulously researched volume has a somewhat unusual organization for a biog-raphy. Rather than a chronological narrative, separate chapters are devoted to topics such asteaching, research, professional activities, and the like. This results in some repetition and isdisorienting; it was difficult to construct a chronology without doing a great deal of back-tracking.

As a way of providing contextual material, Valentine includes a number of brief bio-graphical portraits, first of Edgell’s students, and then of other British and American womenscientist contemporaries. The portrait of Victoria Hazlitt, Edgell’s student and, later, colleaguetakes up almost a third of one chapter and includes the dramatic and bizarre story of her accidental death by burning while cleaning a silk dress with gasoline. Such sketches are in-teresting and will provide other researchers who may wish to pursue the stories of thesewomen a good starting point. They do interrupt the narrative about Edgell herself, however.The biographical sketches of Americans Christine Ladd-Franklin, Mary Whiton Calkins, andMargaret Washburn seem to unnecessarily duplicate material presented elsewhere.

The lack of personal papers and, therefore, the necessary reliance primarily on publishedwork and newspaper accounts made it difficult for Valentine to adequately convey whatBeatrice Edgell was like. There was very little personal correspondence or commentary todraw upon, and as a result, this reviewer was left with no real sense of the woman herself. Inthe preface, Valentine acknowledges that some readers may find her approach “overly descriptive,” but justifies it on the grounds that it is a necessary step in the construction of theearly history of British psychology. Others may be able to benefit from the wealth of detailoffered here and the valuable collection of references as a base for future work on Edgell orother individuals mentioned in this volume.

Reviewed by KATHARINE S. MILAR, Professor of Psychology, Earlham College, Richmond, IN.


Akihito Suzuki. Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family inEngland, 1820–1860. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 260 pp. (cloth).ISBN 0–520–24580–6.

Akihito Suzuki’s Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family inEngland, 1820–1860 explores the nuances and complexities behind understandings of and responses to mental illness in late Georgian and early Victorian society. Situating his topicfirmly within its broader cultural context, Suzuki skillfully delineates madness outside the parameters of the psychiatric profession to reveal the pivotal role families played in psychiatric

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treatment and care. Critically analyzing a number of arguments both within and outside of thehistory of psychiatry, he presents a multifaceted picture of nineteenth-century English soci-ety’s attempts to grapple with mental illness and, in the process, positions our understandingof madness beyond the world of the asylum.

Madness at Home reflects an important shift in the historiography of mental illness thathas increasingly interpreted psychiatric discourse in broad terms to incorporate the views ofgreater society. Rather than concentrate exclusively on the theories and practices of “mad”doctors, Suzuki explores social perceptions of mental illness and familial or domestic care of“lunatics” and posits that the household was paramount to the construction, regulation, andmanagement of mental illness, even as psychiatry was professionalizing and asylums grew innumber. Employing the concept of “domestic psychiatry,” he rejects the perception that psychiatrists wielded great power in the nineteenth century and, instead, argues that their authority was tempered by the views, attitudes, and actions of lay society. Deconstructing therelationship between families and doctors, Suzuki demonstrates how the “process towardsprofessionalization and establishment of psychiatry was not accompanied by the establish-ment of narrowly scientific aspirations or research programs but by the consolidation of therole of the family” ( pp. 63–64).

To unravel the subtleties of “domestic psychiatry,” Suzuki employs cases of commissionof lunacy, a legal procedure that investigated the mental state of accused individuals. Relyingon newspaper coverage of commissions of lunacy in the The Times of London, Suzuki’s sample contains approximately 200 cases, a dozen of which garnered significant attention inthe press. The principal players in the commissions—alleged lunatics, their families, wit-nesses (including doctors), lawyers, and juries—came from predominantly middle- andupper-class backgrounds. Nevertheless, the trials were often held in taverns or coffee houses,attracted large crowds, and thus constituted public spectacles. However, rather than interpretthe trials as opportunities for indulgent voyeurism, Suzuki presents them as sites for contestednotions of mental illness, liberty, and justice, and as indicative of society’s desire to under-stand and study mental illness in the nineteenth century. Moreover, he uses the commissionsto complicate our understanding as to why relatives sought state intervention, arguing that thetrials did not stem primarily from intolerance of behavior or the desire for institutional con-finement, but from concerns over the management and disposal of property.

Although greater attention to both regional variations (especially because one of his keysources, The Times, is firmly rooted in the context of London) and the composition of the juries for the lunacy commissions would have been helpful, this is a beautifully written bookbrimming with provocative insight and compelling arguments. Perhaps the work’s greatest attribute is the author’s rejection of one-dimensional or simplistic interpretations and his ability to map the diversity that characterized a range of issues related to madness in the nine-teenth century. Ultimately, by analyzing arranged marriages, cases of wrongful confinement,private “keepers,” social constructions of masculinity, and the influence of Evangelicalism onpsychiatric practices, Suzuki illuminates the complexities, contradictions, and ambiguitiesthat riddled the relationships between families, state authorities, doctors, those deemed men-tally ill, and the public, and reminds us of the important historical role “the home” played indetermining psychiatric practices.

Reviewed by JANET MIRON, Assistant Professor of History, Trent University, Peterborough,ON, Canada.

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Jerome Kagan. An Argument for Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. 304 pp. $27.50 (cloth). ISBN-13: 978-0-300-11337-2.

Jerome Kagan’s latest book, An Argument for Mind, is a personal history, a critique ofDevelopmental Psychology, a description of his approach to psychology, a commentary oncontemporary society, and an examination of brain and mind. One would expect that such awide-ranging (or ill-defined) monograph would be disjointed and its principal message obscured. Neither is true. This book possesses the compelling characteristics of his earlierworks: extraordinary breadth, high scholarship, penetrating analysis, thoughtful commentary,and pleasing prose. His principal message is unambiguous: “A complete understanding ofbrain is not synonymous with a full understanding of mind” (p. 257).

Kagan illuminates his journey through psychology and the influences that shaped his decisions with the problems that he studied: the sexual behavior of the rat with his mentor,the FELS longitudinal project, the study of human infancy, the problem of temperament, hisflirtation with biology. Historians of science may be intrigued to learn about the serendipityof the research on infant day care. The initial study of African American infants was haltedby the political climate of the early 1970s. A minister from Boston’s Chinese community res-cued the project and suggested that the sample include Chinese American and Caucasian infants. A major finding was that the two groups differed in emotionality and heart rate andthat ethnicity was a more important determinant of the results than surrogate care—a findingborn of happenstance. Kagan devoted the following 30 years to the study of temperament.

Two timely sections are his critiques of “looking time” as a sole measure of infant behavior and of contemporary morality. The former repudiates high profile unwarrantedclaims of infant mathematics and physics and the latter explains why “the traits of civility,honesty, loyalty, and humility that were rewarded . . . in the nineteenth century are being replaced with shameless self promotion” (p. 68).

Kagan’s most important message, however, is that human behavior cannot be reduced to molecules, neurons, receptors, activated neural circuits, or blood flow. This statement isrendered profound, more by recent advances in the neurosciences and the clarity of his arguments than by the novelty of the idea. He describes the limitations of inferences drawnfrom measures of brain function. For example, imaging techniques measure oxygenation ofthe blood but most events activate many brain sites— as many as twenty-four for an unex-pected sound—and many are unnecessary. How does one distinguish the relevant sites, and ifone does, which arbitrary “freeze frame” in the dynamic event is the correct segment? If aparticular brain site is activated during performance on a task, it does not mean that this siteis necessary for that performance even if shown relative to a well-matched control condition,nor does it tell us the function of the brain site. Moreover, “. . . the meaning networks forwords that name psychological events are distinct from those that name brain activity. Acts . . . have an intended goal, thoughts have a semantic coherence, and feelings have a quality. Neuronal activity has none of these properties . . .” (pp. 213–214).

Tempted by biochemistry, Kagan chose psychology; intrigued by brain, he embracedmind; lured by biology, he wedded psychology, his first love, and affirmed it as a distinct dis-cipline. It is not just his return to temperament that is expressed in T. S. Eliot’s allusion to thecycle of life but perhaps, intellectual life itself, or at least Kagan’s:

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“And the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”(From “Little Gidding,” 1943)

REFERENCES

Eliot, T. S. (1943/1971). Four quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Reviewed by PHILIP ROMAN ZELAZO, Professor of Psychology (Adjunct), McGill Universityand CRHD, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.

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biagioli, mario. galileo's instruments of credit: telescopes, images, secrecy. chicago:...

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