Author Interviews – History of The Human Sciences

Interview: Freddy Foks, History of the Human Sciences ECR Prize winner, 2023

Freddy Foks (University of Manchester) was awarded the 2023 History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize for his essay ‘Finding modernity in England’s past: social anthropology and the transformation of social history in Britain, 1959-1977’. The article is forthcoming in the journal. We asked him some questions about the winning text and his future research.

History of the Human Sciences: First of all, why were a particular group of social historians – your article focuses on four case studies: Keith Thomas, Peter Laslett, E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm – in Britain drawn to social anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s?

Freddy Foks: There are two main reasons. The first was about anthropology and its ideas and status and the second was about what the historians wanted to do with those ideas.

Laslett, Thomas and Thompson all wanted to explain that social change change wasn’t just determined by economic change. By the 1960s social anthropologists in Britain had been making arguments like that for decades. Not only that but it was a pretty high-status discipline with a lot of prestige in the academy. Some big names had published big ethnographies by the 1960s: Audrey Richards, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Max Gluckman, Victor Turner etc. Those are names that might even be familiar to some historians today.

So the historians saw a prestigious discipline doing something they wanted to do: they didn’t want to subscribe to an economically determinist account of history (apart from Hobsbawm, who I think we’ll talk about later in the interview). Anthropologists tended to analyse religion, economy, kinship, ritual etc. as part of a whole account of a society. That’s what really appealed to the historians: this focus on the small scale and moving away from political elites.

HHS: Why did Keith Thomas think that engaging with social anthropology might enable historians to break with ‘vulgar Marxism’?

FF: In the early 1960s Keith Thomas was frustrated with colleagues who were mostly looking at very high politics – the lives of politicians, foreign policy, wars, battles etc. Historians who wanted to avoid doing ‘high politics’ in that era tended to reach for Marxism to explain social and economic change even if that method didn’t reflect their politics. The term ‘vulgar Marxism’ has a political slant. It has connotations during the height of the Cold War of a politics associated with the Soviet Union. In terms of ideology this ‘vulgar Marxism’ implies rigid Marxist-Leninism. By implication, Thomas suggested that historians might be uncomfortable simply drawing uncritically on Marxist historiography. And he proposed that anthropology might be a way to avoid high politics and allow historians to write about economics by connecting it to all these other facets of social life, such as religion and kinship. Using social anthropology as a theoretical toolkit rather than Marxism has the advantage, as Thomas saw it, of not placing the historian in the same camp as official Communist Party historians.

HHS: How did Thomas argue that social anthropology might be helpful for making sense of the emergence and subsidence of witchcraft accusations in England? How did his arguments differ from those made by Max Gluckman?

FF: By the time you get to the late 1950s and early 1960s witchcraft had become a classic subject to study in social anthropology. The really key insight that anthropologists had brought to the table was that witchcraft should be understood as neither irrational nor random but as something that’s connected to changes in the social structure, as something that may even have its own particular logic for the people who believe in it, and for those who accuse others of it, and maybe even for the people who are accused of it. That might sound like common sense for social scientists or historians today but that’s because we’re working in the wake of classic works of social anthropology from the 1930s onwards which set out those kinds of arguments.

The anthropologist Max Gluckman made the argument that witchcraft accusations rose in Central Africa as a result of colonialism and capitalist expansion. As people experienced more social dislocation, stress, anxiety, uncertainty about the world they reached for scapegoats. Gluckman then made a comparative point about how he thought the future would pan out. He thought that the decline of witchcraft beliefs in England had occurred once industrial production had got to a certain scaleand more rational forms of production took hold and so he argued that the same process would probably help dispel witchcraft beliefs in Central Africa.

Thomas posed a problem with Gluckman’s’s reading of English history. It wasn’t during the industrial revolution that witchcraft accusations subsided in England. Witchcraft accusations fell away a century earlier, at the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth. Thomas agreed with Gluckman to the extent that witchcraft accusations arose because of social dislocation and social stress, but at least in England’s case witchcraft accusations subsided in England because social structures stabilised after the introduction of a new set of poor laws and there was much less political stress within the system after the Glorious Revolution. Thomas suggested that the witch craze died down because of the stabilisation of the social structure more generally and not just because wealth increased.

HHS: Who were the American Committee on Comparative Politics (CCP), why did they make overtures to Thomas and what were the results?

FF: The American Committee on Comparative Politics were a group of mostly American political scientists who came together in the 1950s. They were really interested in applying new social science techniques to the contemporary world. They thought that you could chart the current problems that countries might be facing, especially in terms of social breakdown and revolution, by looking back at sequences of history. This became known as modernization theory which posited that countries pass through particular stages, through certain crises, in a particular sequence. If social scientists knew more about how those crises arise and what the sequence of crises would be, then maybe policymakers and political elites could avoid social breakdown that might cause revolution (which in a Cold War context was about avoiding a turn towards the Soviet Union).

The Committee were interested in Keith Thomas because he also seemed to be applying social science to history. So they flew Keith Thomas out to America and he went to a couple of their conferences. He was quite intrigued by the idea of applying social science to history but he became skeptical of modernization theory. This was something he shared with a number of other historians who worked with the Committee – they were all pretty skeptical of the idea that there was a unilinear or teleological modernization happening in history, and that you could squash all of the different societies and nations in the world onto one abstract sequence of progress and breakdown. Thomas did up being influenced by the broader turn towards social science in history, and that’s partly why he looked to anthropology, but he didn’t think that the kind of American modernization theory which the Committee on Comparative Politics was generating was that helpful for describing the European past. It was a too much of a blunt instrument.

HHS: In Peter Laslett’s work how were the politics of early modern historiography tied to Cold War debates about revolution?

FF: This is something that we’ve been circling around in this interview so far, which is how far these quite specialized debates about changes in the countryside or industrial production in seventeenth or eighteenth-century England might relate to the biggest clashes of ideology and geopolitics in the mid-twentieth century.

Peter Laslett, like Keith Thomas, also related English history to the Cold War. For Soviet historians and for many Marxists in Britain, the mid seventeenth century in England gave rise to the first bourgeois revolution in world history. This English Revolution was part of a sequence of revolutions that moved through the French and American to the Russian Revolutions.

If the civil wars in England came about because of a class struggle between a rising bourgeoisie and a feudal monarchical order then the Marxist story seemed right. If that wasn’t the case, then maybe that would pose a broader challenge to the way that Marxists understand the history of revolutions and what causes them. Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost is very keen to say that England in the mid-seventeenth century was not a class society. He used anthropology to suggest that what you see in England is a society in which elites are relatively closed off from the rest of society but that there isn’t the kind of antagonism that Marxists would want to suggest between elites and the rest of the rest of the social world. Instead he described the elite as a ‘web of kinship’ in the same way that contemporary anthropologists explained other pre-capitalist societies.

HHS: What was distinctive about EP Thompson’s engagements with anthrology and how were they informed by his political convictions?

FF: The two historians we’ve been talking about so far thought that social anthropology was useful because it helped to explain societies that were very different from their own. For Keith Thomas, anthropology provided a series of analogies to make sense of witchcraft beliefs in the past. Peter Lalett’s thinking about kinship drew on analogies between English history and societies that anthropologists were studying where there were struggles between kinship lineages and within the elite over political power.

E. P. Thompson wanted to use anthropology to understand the past and also to help us understand later political developments and he came up with the idea of the moral economy to do this. This is the idea that there’s a form of economic and social life which is informed by common-sense ideas of justice, to which market rationality and profit-seeking and capitalism, especially at moments of social stress, seems to be in total opposition.

That’s something that Thompsons saw playing in English history and also something he saw in anthropological literature describing many different societies.

Thompson proposed that the moral economy was something that could be drawn on as an inspiration for contemporary politics. The moral economy didn’t just describe a world that had been lost. For Thompson the moral economy could provide some lessons and inspiration and it reflected a series of struggles going on around the world in the mid twentieth century that he thought historians should be interested in.

HHS: You claim that in Thompson’s article ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ (1971), he ‘used anthropological exemplars in exactly the way he chided other historians for doing’ – what were his criticisms of other historians and how did he fall into the same trap?

FF: In a review Thompson published a year after his moral economy article he’s really keen to suggest that history is really about particular contexts and that each society has to be treated on its own terms. He was very into empiricism generally and he was pretty skeptical of social theory more broadly. In 1972 he warned about making grand comparisons between different societies. But in his famous 1971 article on the moral economy he does seem to do exactly what he criticised others for doing, which is to make big comparisons and connections between very geographically dispersed societies at different periods of time. He says that the moral economy really is something that’s global, not just national and that you can see examples of it all around the world. One of those examples is England. Thompson certainly didn’t just apply abstract models to the past in the way the Committee on Comparative Politics did but he did definitely have a kind of implicitly comparativist mindset. He did – more than has been understood before by people writing about him – use social science comparatively, but the social science that he’s using is anthropology and ethnography. It’s not abstract in the sense that contemporary modernization theory or development economics were abstract, his social-scientific sensibility was ethnographically sensitive and particularist but it nevertheless drew him to make comparisons across different societies and different contexts to explain the English past.

HHS: What did Eric Hobsbawm see as the potential dangers associated with historians borrowing methods from the social sciences?

FF: Hobsbawm, unlike Thompson, was very excited by the new histories of growth and economic development appearing in the 1950s. He was worried, though, about historians drawing from anthropology and sociology because, in his view, anthropologists and sociologists hadn’t thought enough about change over time. So while he thought that anthropology and sociology might be useful, they hadn’t been describing social change or creating models to explain how it happens. Hobsbawm was invested in the interdisciplinary discussions going on at the time between historians and other social scientists. But because he was a Marxist and an economic determinist he thought that the kind of social science that historians should be interested in should be a social science of change, conflict and development.

HHS: How did Hobsbawm’s accounts of ‘social banditry’ differ from the kinds of argument made by Thompson and how did this reflect their respective political outlooks?

FF: When I was talking about Thompson I explained that there’s a way of reading his work that suggests that protests against modern forms of economic rationality rely on this common sense moral disgust at profit-making, especially in times of social hardship.

The kind of protests he’s interested in are very similar to what Eric Hobsbawm had called social banditry just over a decade earlier. These bandits weren’t necessarily organised or part of a bigger political project. They might be local protestors who based their resistance on folk ideas of justice. For Thompson that would have looked like evidence for a sense of moral economy, but for Hobsbawm these bandits looked irrational, pre-modern and not very helpful for our understanding of what drove social change. For Hobsbawm only committed Communist Party discipline of a broadly Leninist kind was going to bring about socialism and then communism. This reflects, at least in part, Hobsbawm and Thompson’s different politics.

After 1956 with the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’, Thompson left the Communist Party of Great Britain but Hobsbawm stayed on even though he had a very fraught relationship with the Party. What Hobsbawm calls social bandits may have been protesting against capitalism, but they did so on a moral basis and without being part of a vanguard party and without an economic understanding of the world, which he would see as necessary for the creation of socialism. Hobsbawm’s book on bandits came out of lectures given at Max Gluckman’s anthropology seminar at the University of Manchester and there are many similarities between his account and the work of the Manchester School of Gluckman and Victor Turner.

HHS: What distinct understandings of the relationship between the modern and the ‘primitive’ did these historians rely on?

FF: Social anthropologists in the mid-twentieth century were very sceptical of evolutionary social science, where the concept of the so-called primitive represented an earlier stage of human history and then history had progressed from that point forward. There’s a bit of an irony in the story I tell in the article because in many ways the historians began to reformulate the old Victorian story about evolutionary progress by drawing on the works of the anti-evolutionist social anthropologists.

Thomas, Laslett and Hobsbawm all reinstantiated a kind of historical teleology of modernity in which they used ethnographic examples from the twentieth century to read back into Europe’s pre-modern past. So, in a way, there’s a kind of irony here that the social anthropologists were trying to relativize amongst different societies around the world in order to challenge the notion of a ladder of history with English society at the top, while many of the historians recreated a version of that story by using anthropological examples to measure a distance from an ethnographically-informed past to the present. The one historian who really stands out in comparison to that idea is Thompson, who had a different idea of development and change in history. He never wrote a big manifesto laying it all out in a fully worked through theoretical way but amongst these four historians who I write about he’s the one who seems to be most relativist and the one who wants to maintain an anthropological sensibility by saying modernity hasn’t simply left behind the premodern past. Maybe the premodern even provides resources – political, imaginative and moral resources – for ways to protest against and resist what he saw as the worst features of his present.

Finally, I wonder if you could briefly discuss what you’re currently working on and introduce your monograph Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain (University of California Press)?

FF: The book came out a couple of months ago. It’s a history of social anthropology in the twentieth century that looks at the discipline’s development over time and its effects on Britain’s intellectual culture. The book ends with a few brief comments about these historians that I discuss in the article, but it doesn’t go into nearly as much detail. Writing this article was a chance to draw on research I had done for a chapter of my PhD thesis which I then had to mostly cut from the book. So it’s been really great to get the opportunity to get this research out there and I hope it’ll be interesting for readers of HHS.

I’m now working on a totally different project millions of miles away from the stuff we’ve been talking about here. I’m working on a new book about emigration from the UK between the mid nineteenth century and the mid twentieth century. I’m looking at how emigration from the UK transformed the British state and affected citizenship law. It explores ideas about race and empire, economic policy and social policy so it’s totally different to the history of anthropology. I’ve left intellectual history behind to some extent and I’m moving on to social, economic and political history over a bigger timespan than my first book. But I’m still interested in the relationship between social science and historical writing. I guess I’m now trying to do some social science history rather than write about other people doing it.

This interview was conducted by Hannah Proctor. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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

Harry Parker (University of Cambridge) is this year’s winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and winning essay ‘The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th century Britain’. Congratulations to Harry whose essay will be published in full in a future issue of the journal.

History of the Human Sciences: First of all, I wonder if you could briefly introduce your PhD project ‘Popular auto-ethnography in Britain, c. 1870-1940’ and describe how this essay relates to that larger project?

Harry Parker: The essay comes from what I think is probably going to be the third chapter of the thesis, which broadly looks at various attempts within the human sciences across the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to turn the anthropological gaze inwards. I do that through looking at a series of surveying projects across the periods that enrolled non-specialists to become observers of their own culture.

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

The ‘popular’ bit comes from my training (if you can call it that) as a social and cultural historian of modern Britain. Some of the work that I’ve most admired has used the archives of social sciences to try and understand what we might call its vernacularization: how social science concepts were being employed in everyday life. My project isn’t so much about vernacularization per se, but I think that some of the projects that I’m looking at offer a way into understanding how people of various kinds grappled with the question of what it meant to obtain a perspective on one’s own culture.

HHS: What was the regional survey movement and how do you treat its ‘amateurism’ in your analysis?

HP: A regional survey was a technique for studying the social world developed by the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes. The way it worked in practice was essentially as a mass data gathering exercise. Practitioners of the survey involved themselves in collecting information on everything from the climate of the region to major industries to population. It was an attempt to create a total knowledge of a place.

The amateurism of it actually played quite an important role in the way that it was promoted. Writers on regional survey tended to stress that you didn’t really need to have any specialist skills in order to do a regional survey. In fact, they almost thought it would be better if you didn’t. They conceived it very consciously as a civic or participatory exercise. The survey was, in an important sense, both a social scientific endeavour – trying to create useable knowledge – and a form of social practice – trying to reunite people with their communities.

I’m also interested in the way it related to social thought in Britain at the time. As many historians of sociology have pointed out, many of the distinct innovations or problematizations within social thought tended to come from outside of what we might think of as the sociological discipline itself. This seems to be especially true in Britain, where sociology institutionalized rather late in comparison to elsewhere in Europe. Amateurish social inquiry seems to me to be a significant current within the interwar period, where lots of proto- or quasi-sociological work was being done, not necessarily by professional sociologists but by social workers and reformers.

HHS: Why do you claim that the regional survey movement could be understood in relation to the discipline of ‘social anthropology’?

HP: Anthropology is undergoing a pretty significant moment of transition right at this moment. It’s a moment when something like the modern ‘culture’ concept is coming into being, the idea that cultures are discrete, bounded systems of affinity that can be made knowable via the work of a field worker. Although most of the regional surveyors didn’t conceive of themselves as anthropologists what was striking to me is that they seemed to be articulating many of the same problems. Namely, they were keen to stress that social inquiry should be a field science or something that should be done by a kind of participant observer, someone who’s embedded within the culture, but who also also has to try and gain a detached or scientific perspective on it.

HHS: Who was Patrick Geddes? How did he understand society/social ‘types’ and how was this reflected in the survey method he developed?

HP: Patrick Geddes was a rather eccentric and idiosyncratic thinker. He operated across a range of different disciplines. He was at various points, a botanist, a biologist, a sociologist, a geographer, a town planner. He started his career studying biology under Thomas Huxley. Increasingly, over the course of the 1870s and 1880s he became interested in how one might apply evolutionary theory to the social world. In biology, he was particularly interested in this question of cooperation among organisms and that seemed to underpin a lot of his thinking about society. He developed – and this in large part owed to the influence of a lot of French thinkers, including Frédéric le Play and his followers – he developed his model of the ‘valley plan of civilization’, where he delineated seven distinct social types that he saw as the basis of modern civilization. Much like in his biological studies, he was interested in how those social types were engaged in processes of cooperative adaptation. The task for the regional surveyor was to understand the balance of those social forces within the industrial city.

HHS: How did Geddes conceive of ‘modern life’ and its relationship to ‘pre-modern life’?

HP:

He took up an interest, in particular when he was studying cities, with what he called paleotechnic and neotechnic forms, which I think he intended as a play on the way that archaeologists and anthropologists were writing about paleolithic and neolithic ages. Although he conceived of his paleotechnic and neotechnic forms as being of much more recent origin. The paleotechnic city was powered by steam and the neotechnic city was powered by electricity and oil. He was trying to seek out possibilities for social and environmental progress within what we now know as the moment of the second industrial revolution.

HHS: How did the regional survey movement sit in relation to the broader contemporaneous autoethnography movement? Why do you believe that this approach – ‘the exhortation to “begin where you are”’ – had such traction at this historical moment?

HP: The interwar period is sometimes seen as a moment of of introspection. It’s a moment of imperial contraction. It’s a moment within culture where Greater Britain themes are being replaced by little England ones, if you like. Those developments seem to have prompted some kinds of renewed attempts to try and understand the British nation anthropologically. Jedy Esty’s work on high modernist writers like Woolf and Forster and Eliot, for instance, whom you might think of as these rather metropolitan characters, shows that by the 1930s are turning inwards to invoking and representing the ‘imagined community’. I think the regional survey picks up on some of those themes. It’s a method for trying to get people to rediscover their community. Geddes wrote about the survey as a sort of recuperation from war, a sort of convalescence.

HHS: Though you seem to express some skepticism about that in the paper…?

HP: Geddes was never particularly clear about exactly what a survey might involve. He was much more interested in what its effects might be on civic life. His followers who took up the survey project in the interwar period seemed to take from his ideas what was convenient for them or what suited their own political attachments or intentions.

HHS: You discuss Geddes’ use of visual metaphors – what metaphors did he use and what do they reveal about his approach to observation?

HP: When Geddes wrote about surveying being a convalescence from war, one of the things he was particularly concerned about was this kind of inertness to one’s environment.

In trying to promote observation as a social good he was trying to define a form of it that would allow the observer to rise above their acculturated self to transcend their inherently limited or partial perspective. The first metaphors he used were the metaphors of the child and the tourist. This was about trying to get at a raw visual experience, to access a dehabituated form of vision. At the same time, he also was interested in the survey as this total apprehension of the region. He called this synopsis. He also used visual metaphors that related to viewing things from above or on high: the hillway traveller or the airman. He was particularly interested in flight as a way of apprehending space.

HHS: In the interwar years, who were the regional surveyors and what was their relationship to the local cultures they studied?

HP: They were a rather heterogeneous group with some divergent interests. They included regional geographers (regional geography was the dominant approach to geography in the period), town planners, antiquarians, amateur naturalists and a core group clustered around the Sociological Society ( relocated to a new group of organisations called Le Play House). They all had slightly different approaches to what a regional survey was. The Le Play House group was probably the most tourist-like. Especially from the 1930s onwards, most of their work involved organising field trips in Britain and across Europe to conduct regional surveysBut other projects were much more committed to the survey as a civic project. There were surveys in Manchester and Liverpool, for instance, where the survey did seem to operate more through the organs of civil society, through local naturalist societies and civic societies of various kinds, like the Workers Educational Association and other bodies committed to civic improvement.

HHS: How would you characterise the political orientation or aims of the regional survey movement in the interwar years? For example, how were notions of community, democracy or ‘good citizenship’ articulated in discussions within the regional survey movement?

HP: The political orientation of the regional survey is hard to characterize partly because of the movement’s heterogeneity but partly because it was never very explicit about what its politics were. Some writers on regional survey even seemed to claim that the survey was a means of of transcending politics as such. They never had an explicit analysis of class and were very much opposed to doing that. If they had a conception of what an ideal region might look like they were probably reliant on what we might think of as a rather conservative conception of an organic community. Although interestingly, in the interwar period that notion resonates with parts of the left as well.. There were some advocates for regional survey who would probably have considered themselves ethical socialists. They were drawing on some of the thinkers that had inspired Geddes, like Ruskin, but also Kropotkin and his ideas about mutual aid. I suppose that’s probably where their idea of community was coming from.

HHS: It seems people involved in the regional survey movement grappled with tensions between the part and the whole, the specific and the general, the social and the geographical – how did those tensions play out in practice? Could this perhaps be linked to a point you make at the end of your article that they paid little attention to the national question? You talked earlier of a notion of an ‘imagined community’ but if the imagined community isn’t a nation but is something smaller, more micro, what then is it that they’re imagining?

HP: I would say that they never really came up with a satisfactory answer to that question. The idea of the region comes from Geddes’ engagement with French geographers and it partly comes out of his bio-social approach, in which he’s conceived the survey as a study in human ecology. The region plays the role of a rather ill-defined ‘environment’. That was certainly how many of his geographical followers understood the region. In some of his other writings, Geddes would more tightly define the region as a central city surrounded by the countryside on which it relied for its resources. He borrowed there from Auguste Comte: this is a Positivist ideal of a world of autonomous city states. In practice, regional surveyors were operating at a much more micro scale. They liked to begin with small rural parishes and so on, but generally the aim was always to work up to something they imagined as a ‘region’. Part of what they were doing, and there were a number of advocates of regional surveys who wrote about this, was assuming that they shouldn’t start with a predefined notion of community or space in which they were conducting their investigation. This was something that had to be worked up from the ground.

The region would emerge from doing the survey, rather than the other way round.

What I think is interesting about that is the way it departs from other autoethnographic projects emerging in the interwar period. So something like Mass Observation, which looms large in histories of interwar social science, is much more oriented towards the nation. This I think is mainly because it had a different conception of what the observer was supposed to do. M-O’s founders liked to claim that they were turning everyone into anthropologists of their own lives but in another sense they were also committed to a much more modernist data gathering project in which observers would function as these kind of human antennae that would report back to a national mainframe. So really the main task of doing the analysis and forming social theory would happen at the national centre rather than in the field, whereas the regional surveyors were committed to a project of knowledge production at the fieldwork site..

HHS: Finally, where do you hope your research leads next?

HP: In the next part of the PhD project I’m going to be thinking about early attempts at doing community studies. At the moment I’m looking at one rather experimental community self-study project in a place called Brynmawr in Wales.

More broadly, I’m interested in histories of the field sciences, and the possibilities of anthropological archives for illuminating these.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The interview was conducted by Hannah Proctor.

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 20^th 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 20^th 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 19^th through the mid-20^thcentury, 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 19^th 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 19^th-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 20^th 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.

‘Mothering in the Frame’ – an interview with Katie Joice

Katie Joice (Birkbeck) was awarded a special commendation in the History of the Human Sciences’ Early Career Prize. We spoke to her about her essay ‘Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67’, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal.

HHS: Congratulations on your History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize commendation for your essay ‘Mothering in the Frame. To begin with I wonder if you could briefly introduce and summarise your essay and say a little about what inspired you to write it.

Katie Joice: Thank you. The essay introduces readers to the different ways in which film was used by anthropologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to study mother infant interaction in the post-war period. Historians have recently become interested in the concept of the pathogenic mother, but my specific focus is on how cinematic frame analysis, or microanalysis, enabled clinicians to classify and quantify mother-love. The essay begins with a discussion of how mothers’ ‘small behaviours’, the everyday, repetitive acts that no-one notices, coalesce into a new and influential causal model for mental illness. I then go on to discuss four case studies: Margaret Mead’s work on child-rearing in Bali, Ray Birdwhistell’s body language research, Rene Spitz’s studies of institutionalised babies, and Sylvia Brody’s classification of mothering styles. All four of them used forms of microanalysis, but in different styles, and for their own ends.

In terms of inspiration, I got interested in films about mothers and babies when I first joined the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck. I was researching the visual history of psychosis and came across Spitz’s film, Grief, about the devastating effects of maternal deprivation. At that time memories of my own son’s infancy were fresh in my mind, and I’d already done a lot of thinking about the invisible work that goes into creating subjects or ‘making people’. I realised that our humanity is not a given; it’s something that is constantly being constructed in early childhood, usually by women.

HHS: Would you be able to say a little about your PhD thesis project and situate this essay in relation to your research more broadly?

KJ: The title of my PhD is The Empty Frame: Child Analysis and its Visual Cultures, 1932-67. It examines the visual methodologies that were used in the post-war period to interpret the pre-verbal mind. The first part is on film, and is a much expanded version of this essay. Another part looks at play therapy, particularly the work of psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld. I also discuss the use of art and film in the post-war period to access the mind of children with autism. What I’m most interested in is the cultural history of these methodologies; how the ‘psy’ disciplines became entangled with all sorts of other practices, like film history, art history, philosophy and anthropology.

HHS: You write that ‘In this period, mother-love became a new scientific object, subject to new forms of description and empirical analysis’. How was mothering conceptualised in a distinct way within the social sciences in the post-war period? At the beginning of the essay you state that ‘maternal ‘presence’… became an ontological question for post-war social science’ – could you also expand on that?

KJ: Anthropology, psychiatry and cybernetics were then enmeshed in ways that’s hard to imagine now. Mothering came to be seen as an origin story for social science, partly because of the continued influence of the Culture and Personality school within anthropology, which claimed that child-rearing techniques form distinctive national characters. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict argued that mothers set certain patterns of behaviour in motion, which were then written into every aspect of that culture. Also of crucial influence within psychiatry was a new psychoanalytic focus on the ‘micro-traumas’ that occurred in the pre-Oedipal stage of childhood. Harry Stack Sullivan in the US, and the English analysts Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott were theorists interested in this pre-verbal zone of experience, and its role in triggering psychosis. As the cine-camera became more portable and more accessible to amateurs, film came to offer a new evidential basis for these theories, a means of observing damage as it happened, rather than retrospectively in the therapist’s office.

I think this ‘search for origins’ also chimed with the need for a historical ‘blank slate’ after the war. There was a hope that the calibration of mothering would create a new generation of compassionate and pacifist democratic subjects.

On the question of presence… I’m talking there about how the quality and the reliability of a mother’s responses – actions or messages that might take place in a split second – came to be seen as constitutive, not only of the child’s personality, but also cultural and social habits. Though actually it was mothers’ emotional absence, rather than presence, that became the biggest preoccupation of the thinkers I look at in this essay. The effects of affectlessness, if you like. And the aesthetic and technical questions of how emotional absence might be captured on the screen. I’m intrigued by how these ineffable categories – presence, absence, mother-love, ‘maternal surround’, get translated into codes, scales and statistics.

HHS: Why was film deemed to be the most appropriate medium for capturing the ‘small behaviours’ of the mother? And why was this form of microobservation so central to the analysis of mothering?

KJ: Mother-infant interaction was only one field in which film was being experimented with as a diagnostic and documentary tool in this period. Film was seen more generally as a utopian technology that might reveal the hidden truths of behaviour. It was used extensively within animal studies, psychiatry and cybernetics research, to break behaviour into units which then could be analysed by the researcher, and sometimes used curatively by patients as well. Film could be slowed down, reduced to stills, re-watched and cross-analysed by a number of observers, and could bring the intimacy of conversation or breastfeeding into a lecture hall. And it encouraged particular forms of reflection: Rene Spitz and Sylvia Brody both said that they felt the cameras shielded them from the intensity of the emotions that they were observing. Film also allowed child analysts to think about different qualities of time: fleeting movements could be identified and counted, or particular thresholds in development ratified. A whole childhood could be compressed into a single film. The relationship between the analytic potential of film and the temporalities of early development is what compelled these thinkers.

HHS: Why do you think that the non-verbal was accorded such significance in this period?

KJ: I think it emerged out of the anthropological and psychoanalytic trends that I’ve already mentioned, as well as a new interest within linguistics in the secret codes of gesture and dance. There was a peculiar paradox at work in non-verbal communication research – on the one hand it was anti-humanist, in that it focused on free-floating ‘cybernetic’ codes which moved through an animal-human-machine continuum. But it was also an expression of pan-humanism, of a desire to create a universal behavioural science which transcended language barriers. That desire was fuelled by the tensions of the Cold War. For example, Edward Hall who invented proxemics, theories about how humans use space to communicate, was secretly funded by the CIA. There was a lot of political potential in non-verbal communication research.

HHS: Returning to something you just mentioned, could you say something more about the specific temporalities of early infancy and motherhood and how you see this as relating to the specific temporalities associated with film? Is the temporality of the former as historically contingent as the latter? By which I mean: is there a clash here between something understood to be universal, on the one hand, and a novel technology that ushered in new ways of thinking about or representing time, on the other?

KJ: It’s true that films such as Spitz’s transformed professional and public perceptions of infant experience and infant suffering: the documentary and diagnostic power of the technology enabled people to ‘see’ something that had in fact always been there. We might see this as part of the civilising process, a relatively recent extension of humanity to the pre-verbal child. On the other hand, we can never truly disentangle our biological parameters from environmental influence or our changing norms of selfhood. There is no universal infant. Balinese or American middle-class mothering-styles, like the institutionalisation of babies, are all products of history. What we can say is that practitioners of microanalysis assumed, and still assume today, that in infancy ‘small behaviours’ have potentially enormous effects. So in that sense, the microanalytic method matches the model of mind that is being advanced.

As for the temporalities of motherhood, I think mothers’ experiences were generally brushed under the carpet by these maternalist thinkers. They were much more interested in defending the infant against the mother, rather than delving into the social causes of maternal anguish. But the point I wanted to underline is that someone has to do the imaginative and emotional work of creating subjects. And I think that often scares the hell out of people. It’s something that’s rarely talked about. As a society we talk a lot about the practical problems of childcare, but not the existential ones.

HHS: Your first case study is Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s work in Bali. You claim they were the first to put ‘mothering in the frame’ and argue that their work was foundational for infant psychiatry – could you summarise the significance of their work for the phenomenon you’re analysing?

KJ: Mead and Bateson’s work was funded by an influential interwar funding body called the Committee for Research into Dementia Praecox, which was a pre-war term for schizophrenia.

This committee was looking for big answers to the problem of mental illness and institutionalisation. Mead and Bateson set out to make ambitious claims about what the small behaviours of mothering might mean, arguing that Balinese culture was essentially schizoid, but that it was saved from collective madness by ritual and trance. Mead made tendentious comparisons between the tiny finger movements of Balinese babies or Balinese mothers’ blank expressions, and institutionalised schizophrenics in the West. But the very exuberance of her claims threw down the gauntlet to a generation of researchers and clinicians that were interested in the significance of mothering styles. The books that emerged from their research in Bali, Balinese Character and Growth and Culture were also aesthetically compelling: peculiar juxtapositions of art, gesture, and expressions. Mead was suggesting that academic research could be presented non-discursively as well, that it could rely on a language or grammar of images.

HHS: Your next case study focuses on Ray Birdwhistell – what do you see as the impetus for his attempts to quantify affect and notate emotion through ‘kinesis’? How does this compare to what you describe later in the essay as Sylvia Brody’s ‘Taylorism of mothering’?

KJ: Birdwhistell was an anthropologist who was hugely influenced by linguistics, particularly the work of Edward Sapir. He wanted to reveal a hidden dimension of communication –kinesics or body language, that often ran counter to verbal communication. He created an immensely complex notation system based on the fine slicing of films of interpersonal behaviour. Mothers interested him because like Mead and Bateson he thought that their small behaviours were potentially pathogenic to young children. But he ended up mired in his methodology, splitting cinematic images into ever smaller temporal and spatial units.

In contrast, Sylvia Brody was a practicing psychologist and a pragmatist. She used film to count and evaluate the actions of mothering – such as touching, looking, speaking – with the aim of categorising mothers into a small number of types, some of which were pathogenic and in need of treatment. I use the term ‘Taylorism of mothering’ because efficiency, which we associate with Taylorism, was one of her ideal mother’s qualities. Paradoxically, it’s a model of efficiency that has to be underpinned by right feeling. The observer can count and dissect mothers’ movements, but a mother who who treats feeding mechanically becomes inefficient at satisfying her baby. Like Taylor and Gilbreth’s time and motion studies, the clock is prominent in Brody’s film footage; it splices the action.

HHS: Finally, I was wondering about overlaps between the kinds of social scientific applications of film you’re considering and film’s more artistic uses. I thought, for example, of the artist Maya Deren’s films shot in Haiti and her involvement with Bateson and other anthropologists. In your analysis of Rene Spitz’s films, for example, you discuss the angles from which the films were shot that excluded the institutional context to focus entirely on the child, emphasising this as an aesthetic decision. I was wondering how you think about these more aesthetic questions both in terms of how the films were composed and in terms of your own methodological approach to analysising them and how that relates to you claim in the conclusion that film in these studies became an ‘arbiter of authenticity’.

KJ: As I expand on this essay in my thesis I’ve been asking myself how these films resonate with the visual cultures of their times. And notions of authenticity were central to those visual cultures. This was the time of cinema verité in France, Free Cinema in Britain and Direct Cinema in the US, promising new access to ‘raw’ psychological states and to overlooked aspects of social life. In the course of working on a longer piece on Rene Spitz, I discovered that his film was shown at a New York avant-garde cinema club called Cinema 16, headed by film curator Amos Vogel. Much like Maya Deren, Vogel believed cinema should offer the viewer an altered state or conversion process, rather than entertainment, and Spitz’s film fitted into this manifesto.

What’s interesting about many of these film-makers, like Mead and Bateson, Spitz and also James Robertson in Britain, who made A Two Year Old Goes to Hospital and Young Children in Brief Separation, is that they were ‘auteurs’ in a sense. Their films were artful, singular and idiosyncratic. What happens in the era of Sylvia Brody and Mary Ainsworth is that cinematic studies of mothers and babies become much more laboratory based, and more standardised and static. Conventions emerge and settle over time, but their pre-history is often surprisingly heterogenous.

I’ve also been thinking about how to present my own research in visual form. I am collaborating with my colleague Ian Magor from the Hidden Persuaders project on a short teaching film which incorporates footage from the films discussed here. We’re hoping it will be published on the Hidden Persuaders website in the autumn and act as a visual accompaniment to my essay.

HHS: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.

‘Ghastly Marionettes’ – interview with Danielle Judith Zola Carr, winner of History of the Human Sciences’ Early Career Essay Prize

History of the Human Sciences is delighted to announce Danielle Judith Zola Carr (Columbia University) as the winner of the journal’s first Early Career Essay Prize for her essay ‘Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism’. Katie Joice (Birkbeck, University of London) was awarded a commendation for her essay ‘Mothering in the Frame: Cinematic Microanalysis and the Pathogenic Mother, 1945-67’. Congratulations to both scholars.

‘Ghastly Marionettes’ was included in our Special Issue on Cybernetics, published in February 2020, guest edited by Stefanos Geroulanos and Leif Weatherby. We spoke to the author about the essay, Hannah Arendt, Cold War liberalism and the place of intellectual history within the history of the human sciences.

HHS: First of all, congratulations on winning the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for your essay ‘Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism’. Can you tell us a bit about the piece?

DC: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to publish with the journal. The essay actually originated as an early 2017 post-Trump piece, when I think everyone was reading The Origins of Totalitarianism. It was my first time reading it, and I was struck by how infused the book is– especially in its last third–with a castigation of the Pavolovian imaginary of the human, and how that imaginary of a human determined by stimulus and response was equivocated with this new Cold War concept of totalitarianism. So I started looking into that realised that nobody seemed to have written about that specifically in relation to Arendt

I think Arendt is a good figure to think with, because she encapsulates this emerging Cold War common sense– what many scholars now are starting to think about as Cold War liberalism. One of the questions in thinking about Cold War political ideology is this: What is this liberalism that happens in the postwar period going into the Cold War and how is it distinct from early twentiety-century liberalism? In the early twentieth century, there is a lot of space for thinking about technocracy, technologies and human engineering in relation to the Progressive-Era emergence of social science, largely funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation. There are critiques of the idea of engineering the human, but they are coming from the religious right and the labor left, not the liberals. What’s really distinctive about postwar liberalism is that this friendly relationship to social engineering disappears. Suddenly, Cold War liberals are thinking about the human as being something distinct from technology, as a being not determined by the same sort of push-button responses that you can use to control machines.

I thought that that gave an interesting vantage on to a question that is relevant to the history of cybernetics: why did cybernetics fail, while cognitivism was successfully taken up as a scientific movement? Many times, when we are thinking about information theory in the history of science, it’s easy to say that cybernetics is the basis of contemporary information sciences. Cerrtainly in some ways that’s true – particularly if we are thinking about the role of cybernetics in developing information theory and influencing the computerisation of many scientific fields. But equally, there’s something key about cybernetics that fails to take hold. What my essay tries to do is to show that there’s something going on in what we could call Cold War liberalism that makes that political project incompatible with cybernetics, but that makes it form the conditioning ground for cognitivism.

The approach that I take in the essay is part of my overarching method, which is to treat the history of science as intellectual history. The goal is not just to read the history of science alongside intellectual history, but to say we can do intellectual history within the sciences. This makes sense as an approach, because this is a moment when science has been popularised for mass consumption: the cybernetics conferences are being covered by major newspapers, for example, and you have this efflorescence of popular writing in the postwar period as ordinary people become interested in technology. The atomic bomb is this huge moment in American consciousness. You have a spate of high profile technologies that emerged through the infusion of federal funding into the sciences driven by the war. With the rapid ascent of the sciences, suddenly everyone is reading Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics, and there is an exploding popular market for writing about science. This is also a moment of profound interdisciplinary fusion between the social and physical sciences, as Jamie Cohen-Cole has shown. So Origins of Totalitarianism—and liberal political thought in general—is happening in a moment in which the political thinkers are reading the scientists and the scientists are reading the political thinkers. It makes sense to take an historical approach which thinks of these groups as literally talking to each other, because they were.

HHS: Before I ask you more about the essay itself I wonder if you could briefly talk about your PhD dissertation project and situate this essay in relation to your research more broadly.

DC: My dissertation is about a weird historical stutter: brain implants for a psychiatric disorder are invented for permanent intercerebral use in humans in the 1950s, then disappear after the 1970s, only to reemerge again in the early 2000s with no reference to their Cold War past. You have to understand, brain stimulation for psychiatric research and treatment was not a fringe technology in the fifties. The people who were working on it were going to conferences with all the other neurophysiologists; they were leaders in the field. This goes on into the 1970s, as people try to find the neurological basis for hunger, sex pleasure, aggression, and so on. As you go into the 1970s, this becomes explicitly political, as people are trying to find things like the neurological basis of race riots. For instance, here in LA, there was a collaboration between the justice department and the neurophysiologists who wanted to start a research centre to find the neurological basis of aggression, which is of course, a racialised aggression. And so in the 1970s, the question of neurological control becomes a political problem. There were literally congressional hearings about this specific technology, which then disappears and then comes back in the early 2000s with no reference to its contested history.

What the PhD thesis asks is this: why is that brain implants for psychiatric states—a technology that was technologically possible since the 1950s– politically impossible, politically incompatible with what we want to think of as liberalism. And why, moreover, is it now compatible with regnant political ideologies of the subject once again? This essay tells a little piece of that story, the part that has to do with what’s happening in the 1950s around ideas of determinism, mechanism, language, and freedom. It lays out how it came to be the case that, by the 1970s, this technology is seen as the limit case of Big Brother government, as technocratic overreach. It was like the apotheosis of what the antipsychiatry movement was going against. In its current revivification, the people behind it are data capitalists and DARPA, the science branch of the US military. And I think that tells us something about how political ideology has accomodated and conditioned itself to changes in the value production from liberalism to neoliberalism—or however you want to periodize the 1970s to the present.

HHS: When you were introducing the essay, you were talking about this moment where behaviourism is dominant and then briefly challenged by cybernetics, but cybernetics doesn’t really succeed and cognitivism eventually ‘wins’, so to speak. You are clear that Arendt was not (and could not have been) a cognitivist but nonetheless suggest that she could be understood as a kind of proto-cognitivist in some sense.

DC: One of the axes that I wanted to grind is this paper was to more clearly elucidate the relationship between behaviourism and cybernetics. It’s not just that cybernetics goes against behaviourism, displaces it, and wins. It’s that cybernetics tries to replace behaviourism and fails, because it tries to replace the wrong thing– that’s what dooms it. Metaphysically– and this is really an essay about political metaphysics – cybernetics stays in the thrall of what it is about behaviourism that’s going to be nixed by cognitivism. And that’s an metaphysics that does not particularly allow for freedom. Of course, freedom and creativity are the things that dog cybernetics as the problem that it’s going to have to solve in order to be compatible with Cold War liberalism. What cybernetics shares with behaviourism is that it is premised on a metaphysics without transcendence.

Arendt is in many ways a good bellwether for what is shared in common by many postwar liberals. She is specifically saying that you have to have an outside to the world of mechanistic cause and effect; you have to have a space of non-determinism. That “outside” to the ordinary world is where we’re going to locate politics. So for Arendt, that space of the “outside” is going to be language, and language is not going to work mechanistically. I’m not saying that Arendt is a cognitivist, but I am saying that the pieces for cognitivism to succeed are already in place by the 1950s, by the time that she publishes The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cognitivism is taken up because it solves precisely the problems that she’s laying out.

HHS: Almost like it’s waiting in the wings.

DC: Exactly. There are two bad ways of doing the history of scienced. The first one—one that we all already know is wrong, is to look at a period of scientific contestation say, ‘Well, the scientific truth succeeded and the good guys won.’ But the second mistake—one that isn’t as clearly bad but that can be pernicious—is to solely focus on scientific practice, looking at what happens in the lab and identifying alliances between groups of people, instruments and object (blah blah blah, Latour). And I want to say that there is a way to let politics as such back in. It’s not that there is not a determining relation between political ideology and scientific thought, but there is a conditioning role between political ideology and scientific practice. This is especially true when we’re talking about the history of the human sciences that are asking questions like ‘what is the human?’

HHS: From reading your essay it seems that language is central to Arendt’s understanding of freedom. Could you explain why language had this significance for her and how it relates to her valorisation of spontaneity?

DC: As an anthropologist, I know this history best in terms of what happens with structuralism in the midcentury. There’s a move away from physicality and the material—this is the decline of functionalism– and the rise of the idea that what’s human about the human has very little to do with the body or the physical environment. In French structuralism, particularly French structuralism, the human is comprised of symbolic systems. The subject is comprised in language. So you have a general movement away from the material and into what I call “linguistic idealism.” Arendt is part of that intellectual movement to say that what is human about the human is not tool use, it’s language.

Your question is also picking up on something that I was trying to do, which is to connect this fixation on language as a non-deterministic space with the resurgence of postwar vitalism. For midcentury liberals, there’s something about life, language and the cognitive subject that does not operate according to mechanism. And the fact that it isn’t determined by material laws has a political valence of “good,” basically. Language is key in all of these kinds of different sites as being the place where this political metaphysics is going to ratchet open a metaphysical space for the kind of freedom that’s central to Cold War liberalism.

HHS: What did Arendt mean when she spoke of the ‘psychic life of totalitarianism’? Or would it make more sense to say that she understood totalitarianism as the absence of psychic life or the negation of the psyche? You mention other contemporaneous projects that sought to understand totalitarianism from a psychological perspective – how was The Origins of Totalitarianism distinct from these?

DC: For Arendt, there is no psychic life of totalitarianism because it is the operation of totalitarianism to destroy what she would recognise as the psyche. And the way this idea of the mind as the zone of freedom comes together will be crucial in shaping the next thirty years of political common sense in the United States. Something interesting happens from the fifties to the seventies: this idea that totalitarianism relies on an evacuated mind—one that is overdetermined by external forces– becomes key what will become the kind of antibureaucratic, proto-libertarian movement, that, by the 1970s becomes Silicon Valley ideology. There’s a wonderful book by Fred Turner called From Counterculture to Cyberculture that charts this development. You can also see it in, for instance, Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man and the critique of the bureaucratised, mass consumptive subject that happens in the Frankfurt School.

What you see happening is a kind of dialectical formation, such that, by the time you get to the seventies, the antipsychiatry movement– which is basically libertarian– is able to make strange bedfellows with the residue of this Cold War liberal discourse. One of the reasons that I picked Arendt to be my interlocutor here is not because she’s saying anything particularly fringy, but that she’s really giving voice to this ambient common sense: to think is the opposite of totalitarianism because for the behaviourist there is no such thing as the thinking subject, there’s no inside, there’s no mind. So the very presence of mind is a political presence.

HHS: I was intrigued by the term the ‘laboratory of behaviourism’ in the essay and wondered if you could define that or talk about how Arendt defined it.

DC: One of the craziest things that shakes out of doing close reading of Origins of Totalitarianism is that when Arendt talks about the camps as being a laboratory, it’s not a metaphor. She’s not saying the camps are like the behaviourist’s laboratory, she’s saying the camps are the behaviourist laboratory. This connects with stuff that will begin happening in psychology in the early 1960s, where people look at, for instance, Stanley Milgram’s experiments and say “You’re not showing us anything about totalitarianism; what you’re doing is totalitarianism.” This is where a lot of what will, by the 1980s, become bioethics begins to come from. It’s the idea that science is not necessarily telling us something about the world occurring elsewhere outside of the lab; politics and the creation of a certain form of human subject is occurring in the laboratory. One of the things I wanted to do was to connect what will become bioethics in the US with Arendt saying that the camps are a laboratory.

HHS: This also made me think of antipsychiatric discourse and its obsession with institutions and the question of how institutions relate to society or are metonyms for society.

DC: Completely! You see an anxiety about the possibility of creating a new form of the human in discourses like, for instance, Goffman’s idea of “total institutions.” This idea that there’s something fundamentally artificial about these institutions and that can be connected with what is happening in the 1920s and 1930s. Rebecca Lemov’s book World as Laboratory is really excellent on this, where you begin from the scientists end to say, we can use the world as a laboratory. We can run experiments on an entire town. The world itself becomes an experiment.

HHS: You cite Arendt discussing Pavlov’s dogs and I wondered if it’s significant for her that this is the dominant paradigm in the Soviet Union.

DC: Definitely. One of the crucial features of The Origin of Totalitarianism– and Cold War liberalism generally– is this formation of the concept of totalitarianism, specifically as a way of making equivalent the Soviets and the Nazis. The revisions to her book made just before it goes to publication show that she quickly added a lot of stuff about the Soviet Union in order to underline this equivocation. You have to remember, Pavlov is one of the leading scientists of the Soviet Union, and one of their claims to an illustrious scientifi heritage, and this matters in the scientific and ideological race with the Soviets.

HHS: At the beginning of this interview you said this originated as a post-Trump essay. I was wondering about parallels or analogies (or indeed the lack of them) that you see between the historical moment you’re analysing and the present moment. You talk about the collapse of liberalism and its postwar resuscitation, but you also have spoken about how Cold War liberalism was distinctive and I wondered how this relates to liberalism today.

DC: I think liberalism has a fundamental contradiction at its core. There is the idea that the body is something that’s common to all humans; this common body is going to be the basis of common knowledge and by implication also freedom and choiceboth epistemic democracy (like science) and political equivalence (like human rights). There’s an idea that a common body equals a common humanity. But the problem is that once you start taking the body seriously as something that can be governed and known through science, the question of whether the human is actually free emerges. The fundamental contradiction of liberalism continually reasserts itself and has to be solved: Foucault calls it the tension between discipline and ideologies of freedom. I want to suggest that this tension relates to the fact that liberalism is a political ideology that is perpetually collapsing.

What we’re seeing in the current moment is yet another implosion of liberalism. It is not identical, to but certainly has features that are in common with, earlier collapses of liberalism. My essay charts one attempt to recover liberalism from an earlier collapse, in this case Cold War liberalism’s attempt to salvage the wreckage of the failure of early 20^th century liberalism. We are facing a similar problem today, one that should cause us to seriously reckon with whether liberalism is something we even want to attempt to reconstruct.

You have to hand it to Cold War liberals, at least they understood that something had gone fundamentally wrong, and there was going to have to be a metaphysical recalibration in the heart of what liberalism was in order to fix it. Our problem now is that for current liberals, all their answers to this crisis are nostalgic. Liberals today don’t understand that the crisis is structural, fundamental and integral. They don’t understand that what liberalism is is going to have to be reconstituted. There’s a general failure of liberals to apprehend the magnitude of the failure that Trump represents.

There’s a lot of talk now about QAnon and conspiracy theories and this almost mystical side of American fascism. I think that we have to think about that as being a response to the evacuated technocratic forms of governance that marked liberal governance from Clinton to Obama. It’s a form of governance in which you have this ascent of elite technocratic knowledge that says “There’s no need for politics here, experts will decide everything because the technocrats know best.” And as is always the case with technocracy, it has produced a hunger for politics as such. So I would say that it is possible to make sense of the present moment as a rupture of political theology—that is, of metaphysics.

In my view we have to accept that there is a resurgence of the political and directly incorporate it into our work. What this looks like for historians of the human sciences is not just a fixation on infrastructure studies or actor network theory, both of which are ways of trying to get ‘reality’ back into the humanistic inquiry that has been dominated by exactly the sort of linguistic idealism that I discuss in the paper. There’s no way out except to directly reckon with politics. So, in short, we need to become historical materialists.

HHS: That seems like a great place to conclude – thank you!

(Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor)

Circuits of Colonial Knowledge

For the October 2019 issue of History of the Human Sciences, the editors are delighted to present a special issue edited by Bruce Buchan (Griffith University) and Linda Andersson Burnett (Linnaeus University) – “Knowing Savagery: Humanity in the Circuits of Colonial Knowledge.” Here, Chris Renwick speaks to to Bruce and Linda about what the stakes of the issue – and draws out some of its central contributions.

Chris Renwick (CR): “Knowing Savagery” is a brilliant special issue for History of the Human Sciences. It brings together a wide range of topics that have a bearing on questions about how our understanding of the human has been shaped. I wondered whether there was a particular spur for the special issue on the topic and you see as the main points you think a HHS audience will take away from it?

Bruce Buchan and Linda Andersson Burnett (BB & LAB): Our special issue is the product of a long collaboration. We are both intellectual historians whose work explores the connections between European traditions of thought and the experience of colonisation, both within Europe and beyond. Though we have different fields of specialisation (Linda on the history of travel, natural history and Nordic colonialism, and Bruce on political ideas with a focus on Australia’s colonial history) what we share is an interest in uncovering the colonial burden wrapped up in concepts, and the words we use to convey them. Thanks to the generosity of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond in Sweden, we’ve been able to pursue this idea through a joint research project entitled ‘The Borders of Humanity: Linnaean Natural Historians and the Colonial Legacies of Enlightenment’. Our special issue forms part of this project and gives a more formal shape to what we’ve learned by working collaboratively with so many wonderful scholars.

We hope that readers of History of the Human Sciences will take away from our special issue a greater appreciation for the sometimes unpredictable ways in which European concepts facilitated colonisation globally. We also hope that readers will see how the very processes of colonisation around the world shaped the development of European thought on humanity. Our aim was not to attempt a comprehensive global coverage, but a series of targeted case studies examining various dimensions of this conceptual change in relation to one main concept: savagery.

CR: The articles in the special issue are indeed focused on the topic of “savagery”. One of the main conclusions I took away from them – your own article in particular – was that, as a non-specialist, I’d probably assumed much more continuity between “savagery” and “race” than there actually was between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That seems a particularly significant point, with quite far reaching historiographic implications. Are there issues or questions that you think are the next step in taking these conclusions forwards?

BB & LAB: Savagery was an old concept long before the period covered by most of the papers in our special issue, namely the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Antonella Romano’s paper in particular demonstrates this by considering how Iberian missionaries began to refer to savagery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet for all its antiquity the term ‘savagery’ has often been misunderstood. It is frequently confined to eighteenth century debates over supposedly ‘noble’ versus ‘ignoble’ savages. What we wanted to accomplish with this special issue was to branch out beyond such debates and to consider savagery in a wider set of contexts: by means of intellectual, emotional, religious, sensory, cross-cultural histories and the history of science. We hoped that by doing so, we could show how savagery became so deeply embedded in the ways that Europeans interpreted and evaluated other peoples, that it also shaped how Europeans understood themselves.

In part, this is an exercise in excavating savagery from the layers of European thought in the era of Enlightenment. Silvia Sebastiani’s paper accomplishes this by examining the history of anatomy. Hanna Hodacs and Matthias Persson’s joint paper explores savagery in relation to political economy and evangelism. Jacqueline Van Gent’s paper considers savagery in missionary discourses. Having excavated savagery however, we were intent on showing the role it played in conceptual change and development, as Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker and Gunlög Fur do in their papers.

In our own paper we wanted to explore the way in which savagery was integrated into the way in which ‘Enligthened’ natural historians and colonial travellers understood the very concept of ‘humanity’. Here is where we see the need for more research, following the lead of scholars such as Emmanuel Eze, Roxann Wheeler, Silvia Sebastiani and others who have drawn our attention to the intimate connections between race, humanity and Enlightenment. What we argue in our paper is that Enlightenment ascriptions of a universal humanity were gradated by ascriptions of savagery, but also by terms such as race and variety. These were still ambiguous terms in the late eighteenth century, but they were coming to be defined by a growing focus on alleged anatomical differences between human populations, suggesting a more static or fixed set of attributes to each variety or race. What is particularly interesting for us is that those attributes included not only physical characteristics (such as skin colour), but what might be termed moral or social qualities as well (such as language, religion or forms of government). It was these latter qualities that the term ‘savagery’ had previously been used to delineate, but in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a discursive change took place that was to have dramatic consequences in the centuries to follow. This was not a clear transition from a discourse of savagery to one centred on race. The change was messy but its effect were that race subsumed rather than replaced savagery. We feel very strongly that the time is right for further research on this discursive change – both on the historical moment and its antecedents, and on the important consequences, the effects of which still linger. Not only are we witnessing a distressing resurgence of spurious claims about the ‘science’ of racial differences, the troubling legacies of Europe’s Enlightenment are also being debated with renewed vigour around the world. At the forefront of these legacies are the long-term consequences of our inherited language of race and savagery.

CR: Your special issue engages with a range of different approaches to savagery, as we’d probably expect, given its interest in the circulation of knowledge. Over all, though, you seem most concerned with the intellectual dimensions of savagery. Was there a reason for that? Especially as historians of science have been more enamoured with material and ethnographic dimensions of such problems in the recent past.

BB & LAB: That’s right, but we wanted to add a different dimension to this important research by paying greater attention to the language used by natural historians, missionaries, and colonists who travelled around the world, as well as the intellectuals who taught them and often never left Europe. The guiding principle of our collaboration is that the terms we use to convey thought have complicated histories, and that recovering those histories requires an acknowledgement that language is not innocent. Savagery was a term of great use in the task of state formation in Europe, and was just as useful in the process of imperial expansion. It conveyed a knowledge about human groups and their amenability to colonisation, and so we wanted our special issue to focus on how the term, and the knowledge it implied, circulated within and between imperial and colonial domains. That circulation involved some unpredictable confrontations and reversals of meaning (notably when Indigenous people rebuked Europeans as savages, or missionaries expressed horror at the savagery of colonial violence). But even here, in tracing the intellectual history of savagery the material element is crucial. Savagery subsisted in the pages of the journals that natural historians wrote, it lived within the pages of the books they read and carried with them on their journeys, and it was inscribed on the artefacts that they collected and sent back to Europe, which was in effect a physical curation of humanity.

CR: Your special issue deals with savagery in the context of empires, rather than any single empire. One of the great things about the issue you’ve put together is that it involves bringing together a number of different histories that make it a global history of its topic, which in the process brings things to the attention of an English-reading audience work that they might not be familiar with. This is the kind of thing HHS likes to encourage. Could say a little more about the challenges and opportunities that editors face in doing it?

BB & LAB: One of the problems that scholars in the English-speaking world face is the predominance of an Anglo-centric perspective. This predominance takes many forms, but one of its effects has been a tendency to consider the history of colonisation through the lens of the British Empire. The presumption is quaint of course. Scholars of the Iberian empires (such as Antonella Romano in our special issue) can point to global influences at least as extensive as that of Britain’s. The point though is not about the extent or duration of imperial influence, but the degree to which we fall under the spell of ’empire’ itself. Scholars can tend to speak of various empires (British, Spanish, Dutch, etc) as if they were monolithic entities that acted rather like international relations scholars sometimes think states act today: moved by a centre of power, devoted to the pursuit of particular interests, and so on.

As we see it, intellectual history offers us a way to complicate these presumptions about empire by showing how profoundly the language of colonisation flowed across imperial and colonial frontiers, and was of course decisively shaped by confrontations and engagements with non-European and Indigenous peoples across the globe. By working with the team of scholars represented in this special issue of History of the Human Sciences we’ve been able to highlight at least some of these dimensions of complication: where for example Swedish missionaries were confronted by Lenape interlocutors in colonial North America; or how knowledge of the orangutan circulated through and across Dutch and British empires, brokered by a range of intellectuals and intermediaries spanning the globe; or why the confusion of both French and British colonial natural historians about how to describe (and to picture) Indigenous Australians illustrated the ambiguities of race and savagery.

This is the opportunity that working with a trans-national team of researchers makes possible, but it is matched by challenges of translation and interpretation. In part this is a question of how to make wonderful scholarship in one language available in another. The broader point however, is one of integrating knowledge and making it comprehensible. Our collaborators combine diverse expertise in histories of cross-cultural encounter, histories of science or the emotions, histories of trade and travel, or the history of ideas and concepts across a broad sweep of time from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. It is here that our thematic focus on savagery provides an avenue for meaningful communication across these divides. In the process we open up more possibilities to challenge the continuing presumption of scholarship that remains both Anglo-centric and bound to empire.

Bruce Buchan is an intellectual historian at Griffith University, whose work traces the entanglement of European political thought with the experience of empire and colonisation, focussing on the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods.

Linda Andersson Burnett is a historian of the Enlightenment and Linnaean natural history at Linnaeus University, with a research focus on the exchange of scientific, economic and cultural thought between British and Scandinavian intellectuals in the Enlightenment period, and the importance of colonial and nation-building encounters with marginalised and indigenous social groups in the development of these thought exchanges.

Chris Renwick is senior lecturer in modern history at the University of York and an editor of HHS.

Some semblance of a ‘field’

In February this year, HHS published a special issue on ‘the future of the history of the human sciences, edited by Chris Renwick. That issue (and the event it drew from) brought together scholars from a wide range of backgrounds and institutional positions, to reflect on the constitution of ‘the history of the human sciences’ as a field – and also to think through its possible or likely futures. Representing, perhaps, different ‘generational’ approaches to these concerns were Roger Smith (now working independently in the Russian Federation, and a Reader Emeritus in History of Science at Lancaster University), who wrote on resistance to the neurosciences, and Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau (a Vising Fellow at Weill Cornell Psychiatry, and associate member of the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill) who wrote on the discovery of the unconscious. Here, Alexandra puts some questions to Roger on the past and present of the history of the human sciences as a field.

Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau (ABV): Roger, how has the history of the human science – as a field – changed since you were a graduate student?

Roger Smith (RS): There was no field of history of the human sciences when I was a graduate student (1967-70). Very little activity in the history of science concerned the non-physical sciences; and the separate social science and psychological disciplines wrote narrow histories for internal consumption. The phrase ‘the human sciences’ was uncommon (though in France, sciences humaines and les sciences de l’homme were well-established terms, each with its own connotation in intellectual life). The change, to which I contributed, was the constitution of some semblance of a ‘field’ of history of the human sciences in the second half of the 1980s, and the piecemeal spread thereafter of reference to the term. Then and now, the identity of the field, its novelty and its trajectory are issues open to debate. It was precisely the value of an umbrella term under which to debate questions roused across existing disciplinary borders that encouraged the use of the term, practices to go with it, and the founding of the eponymous journal in the first place. The way the field has developed has varied considerably in response to local institutional pressures and purposes.

Reference to the existence of the field is now much more common, though hardly general. I am not aware, however, that the identity of the field has substantially changed (however much specific content may be local). In addressing this, though, and in relation to your other questions too, readers will want to bear in mind that I have worked outside a UK institutional setting for over twenty years. I hope other answers will qualify what I say. I note, almost randomly, a few points. Many people feel that the neuro-disciplines demand new recognition, accommodation or critique, and the history of the human sciences has responded to that. Attention to Michel Foucault’s work has been remarkably sustained, relating both to his writings and to the critical lever given by pursuing ‘the history of the present’, leading to analysis of ‘regimes of truth’ in the social and psychological sciences. There has been a spate of good work on post-World War 2 human sciences, mediating between historical knowledge and current concerns. Explicit political critique is less common and there are more signs of conformity to professional standards – though it cannot be said that history of the human sciences has any standards peculiar to itself as a field. The standard of basic contextual reference in historical writing now seems well established. I would much like to know if other people think there have indeed been, or are about to be, changes.

ABV: What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the field today?

RS: Intellectually, the challenges are as they were: to provide leadership in situating ‘the human’, or the knowledge-constituting process, at the centre of the sciences. This continuously and necessarily demands open-ended debate about the ontology of these processes and engagement with notions of ‘the human’. The issues are so complex and have been discussed with such intense abstraction in so many specialised ways, that there is huge scope for collective projects and forums rendering the issues more concrete in specific historical settings. I think it is up to the history of the human science to show the work it does is central to the rhetoric (in the deep, constructive, collective sense) of taking the issues further. Work in the field provides models of ‘the golden mean’ between high theory and historical empiricism. The history of the human sciences needs to do more to bring in the intellectual riches of fields such as comparative ethnology and linguistics. I also increasingly value studies which are well written and manifestly wish to communicate (which has nothing to so with ‘dumbing down’).

I also think it’s a challenge for scholars who work in the field to restate what they think are the relations between ‘the human sciences’ and ‘the history of the human sciences’. I often do not know in what sense contributors think (if they do so think) that they work in a field under the title of ‘history’. I would welcome more studies with a long time perspective on ‘the human’. Some think that there is a contemporary ‘transformation’ of the human, and of course to describe such a transformation requires some reference to a ‘before’ as well as to an ‘after’. Certainly, disciplined history of the human sciences ought in this context to be a major resource.

And institutionally, the challenges are the challenges facing the humanities in general, and it is hardly news to say that these are large and disturbing. the history of the human sciences ought to be at the forefront of the rational demonstration that the pursuit of knowledge cannot be built on measures of production taken from the business world. But of course the argument is with political processes which reject the value or pertinence of rationally formulated knowledge.

ABV: What do you make of the promises / limits of interdisciplinarity?

RS: Interdisciplinarity (however understood) has been around for decades, if not a century or more. The history of the human sciences was constituted as an interdisciplinary field; the history of this field should therefore provide a kind of empirical commentary on the promises and limits of interdisciplinarity itself. The field houses an excellent body of practice and exemplary range of discussions to offer to those seeking to move out of narrowly disciplinary-focused studies. I think the constitution of a domain shaped by long-term assumptions about the relevance of a great range of disciplines and topics (from art history to studies of utopias) to shared problems, has a lot going for it. Publishers don’t seem to share this view, unfortunately, and work according to preconceived market slots (which of course include the slots that goes with famous names). By and large, there is no need to keep talking about interdisciplinarity while the option of doing the history of the human sciences is on the table.

ABV: What excites you most about the future?

RS: I guess this is a question about the field – the future ‘in general’, given the strident failures of political processes, is, shall we say, hard to get excited about. (Utopian ideas may be another matter.) I get excited about particular projects, rather than about ‘a field’, especially one as nebulous as the history of the human sciences. So you will have to excuse me if I call to mind my current project, a book on The Sense of Movement: An Intellectual History (in press). It would be exciting if I could, by this means, reassert the value of intellectual history, link history of science and the history of the human sciences, write the history of a sense and explain what is ‘moving’ about feeling movement (it requires wide-ranging answers). It’s exciting that there is a lot of good work being done, for example, on the history of the emotions, on the culture of the senses, on the constitution of categories like ‘depression’, and on recognition of the data of comparative ethnography about representations of ‘the human’. A lot of people, happily, see that the umbrella category, ‘the history of the human sciences’, has the intellectual and social potential to hold in constructive relation particular studies of the large issues at stake.

Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau is a Vising Fellow at Weill Cornell Psychiatry, and associate member of the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. With Aude Fauvel, she is the editor of “Tales from the Asylum. Patient Narratives and the (De)construction of Psychiatry,” a special issue of Medical History.

Roger Smith is an an independent scholar in the Russian Federation and a Reader Emeritus in the History of Science at Lancaster University. Among many contributions, he is the author of Being Human: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature.

Time with a capital T

In the April 2019 issue of History of the Human Sciences, Allegra Fryxell, from the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, published ‘Psychopathologies of time‘ – a paper that opens up the tole of time both a methodological tool and a site or clinical focus in early 20th-century psychiatry. Here she talks to Rhodri Hayward about the psychopathological functions of time in this period.

Rhodri Hayward (RH): Allegra, in your article, you draw the reader’s attention to a neglected tradition in Western psychiatry which sought to explore the connections between mental disturbance and the corruption of time consciousness. In particular, you draw attention to the work of Henri Bergson and Eugène Minkowski showing how they explored the tensions between lived time and clock time to build what you call a ‘futurist’ psychiatry. As I understand it, this contrasts with the contemporary psychotherapies of Freudian psychoanalysis and Janet’s dynamic psychiatry. Whereas psychoanalysis is concerned with an individual’s inability to integrate their past, and Pierre Janet’s methods that aimed to orientate consciousness toward the present, Minkowski’s followers were concerned with the idea that patients were alienated from the future. Could you say a little more about this ‘futurist’ psychiatry and why you think it flourished in the interwar years?

Allegra Fryxell (AF): I think it is perhaps unsurprising that a ‘futurist’ approach took root in psychiatry at the same time as a variety of avant-garde movements like Italian Futurism were engaging with ideas about the future. Many historians have understood interwar Europe and North America as a period characterised by dramatic social changes following the Great War, which catalysed a discussion about the ‘shape’ of possible new futures — particularly in Europe, where the revolutions of 1917-1919 ushered in a period of political instability. The futurist emphasis of the phenomenological psychiatrists upon whom I focus in this article is a natural facet of this socio-historical context. That being said, I don’t think the history of psychiatry that I am attempting to unravel is simply an interwar phenomenon. Psychological research on time started in mid-nineteenth-century experiments on the time of responses to physical stimuli as well as memory. Interwar phenomenological psychology was in conversation with these earlier developments as well as concurrent discussions about time in philosophy and science — like Einstein’s theory of relativity or Bergson’s philosophy of duration — in which time had occupied a central place since at least the 1890s. We need only think of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) to see evidence of this temporally focused discourse in modern literature.

Indeed, ‘Time with a Capital T’ (as contemporaries wrote) was a major focal point of discussion transcending physics or philosophy in western culture. Historians have admirably uncovered some aspects of this phenomenon, including Jimena Canales’ work on ‘microtimes’ and the debate between Einstein and Bergson in 1922 (in A Tenth of a Second: A History (2009) and The Physicist and the Philosopher (2016)), or Vanessa Ogle’s masterful exploration of the uneven implementation of standardised clock time, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950 (2015). My own work, however, complicates the long-standing historical interest in the proliferation of clock-time and time standardisation by uncovering a deeper and far more complex debate about time across the arts and sciences. The phenomenological psychiatry that I bring to the fore here is part of a larger project in which I attempt to tease out a conception of time that challenges or resists the simple quantification of clock-time in philosophy, drama, music, and science fiction—I’m hoping to address sociology and economics, too, in the final monograph!

What I find especially interesting is how deeply this ‘time discourse’ penetrates late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century understandings of lived experience and the universe. While we tend to view ‘modern’ time in terms of relativity theory or the triumph of clock-time (tied to experiences of industrialization and now globalization or the information economy), my research suggests that a far deeper exploration of what it means to be-in-the-world was at play in this period (thus we must read the phenomenological tradition in Western psychiatry as a counterpart to intellectual approaches such as the philosophies of Edmund Husserl or Martin Heidegger). Part of my goal is therefore to bring psychiatrists such as Minkowski into discussion when considering the zeitgeist of the 1880s through the 1930s, in order to demonstrate how time was central to modernist understandings of the world—not simply in the form of ‘clock-time’ or linear ‘acceleration’, as Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, Michael O’Malley, Hartmut Rosa and others have argued. The futurity at work, then, in interwar phenomenological psychiatry is part of a broader discussion regarding the meaning of time: what is it? How do we experience it? How do temporal disorders cause illness? And what constitutes a ‘temporal disorder’? The ‘futural’ answer put forth by psychiatrists like Minkowski and Erwin Straus is not exclusively about the future—it is about integrating or orienting oneself in time towards the future, while remaining mindful of the present and in full possession of the past. It is their resolution to address all three dimensions of time that distinguishes their approach from the past-orientation of Freudian psychoanalysis or the presentist discussions of Pierre Janet.

RH: You quote Wyndham Lewis on the ‘time mind’ of the interwar public but arguably contemporary academia shares this same ‘time mind’ with a rich stream of books, special issues, conferences and seminars on temporality appearing now, as well as a formidable array of conceptual tools for addressing time (multiple modernities, chronotypes, pluritemporality, heterotemporality etc.).

AF: Most certainly! I started my doctoral research before temporality had become the current vogue in academic research, so I find the recent focus on time simultaneously surprising and enriching. As I suggested in my recent article on modern time in Past & Present, part of the attraction to time lies in the fact that the history of Western modernity has been entangled with the fetishisation of controlling or measuring time since the Enlightenment — one might therefore interpret the resurgence of time within the academy as another feature of this aspiration to define time. On the other hand, I think the ‘temporal turn’ is a natural product of the various ‘turns’ in historical research; linguistic, cultural, and particularly spatial. It makes sense that, after scholars have attempted to understand the significance ‘space’ holds in experience and theory, they have turned to its concomitant ‘time’ in seeking to understand the world. In fact, if we consider history as the discipline par excellence concerned with time, it is surprising — as Keith Moxey underscores in Visual Time: The Image in History (2013) — that historians have not questioned our epistemology of time given its centrality to our discipline and to our methodology. Working on time has made me more aware of the work that seemingly neutral labels like ‘Renaissance’, ‘early modern’ or ‘1848’ do to shape our understanding of the past. Consequently, I think the temporal turn is partly a legacy of postmodernism, encouraging us to reconsider time as a tool of historical research as well as an intrinsic part of historical experience. Everyone, after all, lives within and through time, even though our individual experiences of time are subjectively different and even though we might live within multiple simultaneous ‘time cultures’ (the religious calendars of Judaism or Islam, for example, compared to the predominantly Christian-inflected social calendars of the West; or the rhythms of semesters and birthdays, of gestation and menstruation, of childhood, ageing, and disease). If we think about the oscillation between ‘utopian’ and ‘dystopian’ views of the future in Western thought across the twentieth century, too, then the current vogue for temporality in academic research may also reflect a widespread unease or anxiety regarding the future.

RH: I’d like to come back to that idea of contemporary anxiety, but just focusing for a moment on the growing interest in phenomenological psychiatry (in the work of Matthew Ratcliffe and Gareth Owen for instance), what role do you think that the ideas of Minkowski and Bergson have to play in psychiatry today? I’m struck by the contrast between the current emphasis on being in the present which seems central to the contemporary mindfulness movement (see Matt Drage in HHS from last year) and to the phenomenological urge to recover a lost connection to the future.

AF: This is an excellent question, and happily I think these ideas are indeed resurfacing in psychiatry today. You are absolutely right that the mindfulness movement brings renewed attention to presence, and although it might seem ostensibly ‘presentist’, I think it harks to the same project that Minkowski et al are trying to achieve: orienting the body within time. Although mindfulness practitioners emphasise a focus on the present in meditation, mindfulness is arguably about relaxing the mind and body in order to approach the future with vitality and direction — the orientation that Minkowski and his colleagues saw lacking in individuals suffering from schizophrenia or depression. While interwar psychiatrists failed to offer a solution (unlike mindfulness practitioners), both groups are striving to understand how time shapes existence and how individuals can better relate to time in order to be healthy and successful.

As far as academic research goes, phenomenology appears to be re-entering experimental paradigms and theories in current psychology. There is a lot of recent research indicating that Minkowski’s ideas are resurfacing as alternative means of exploring psychiatric disorders, suggesting that the turn toward analytical philosophy and pharmaceutical psychiatry in the latter half of the twentieth century no longer holds validity for addressing lived experience.

RH: So on our current anxieties. You’ve drawn from people like Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog the idea that technological modernity has led to a shrinking of the present, but I wonder if there is also a political process under way. In reading Minkowski and his colleagues’ descriptions of patients’ alienations from the future, I’m reminded of the radical claims made by critics such as Mark Fisher and Ivor Southwood that contemporary working conditions with their inbuilt precarity create a situation in which planning ahead/or imagining a future becomes impossible. At the same time we see similar arguments being made around the triumph of neo-liberalism (which is seen as obscuring the possibility of a radical future) and environmental degradation (which is seen as robbing us of any future at all).

AF: Undoubtedly. In fact, I would say that most histories of time focus on power and time or technology and time, thus reinforcing an emphasis on the ‘compression’ of the present and the ‘acceleration’ toward the future that is understood to be central to modernity. It has been shown that precarity — whether financial or otherwise — can halt or stymy consideration of longer durations like the future. Researchers have proven, for example, that individuals who live in poverty find it difficult to save money because they cannot adequately conceive of the future when they are focusing on making enough money to survive a 24-hour-cycle or having enough to eat (psychologist Eldar Shafir calls the cognitive effects of scarcity ‘bandwidth poverty’, and economist Sendhil Mullainathan locates the same bias in busy professionals whose stress limits effective time management). The conclusions that Minkowski and his colleagues drew from their research in the 1920s and 1930s indicate that any number of stressors can prohibit an individual from achieving ‘syntony’, their word for the temporal integration of conceptions of the past, present, and future requisite for an active and healthy life that scientists are now starting to understand as impairments in neurocognitive function. They also underscored how an inability to synchronise the time of individual experience with the tempo of social life (much as Bergson suggested the need to synchronise duration within the social fabric of daily life his philosophical writings on duration) prohibits healthy existence. If there is one lesson to be learned from this research, it is that experiences of trauma or stress — including the stressors of living within authoritarian regimes, extreme neoliberal societies, or environmental catastrophes — can have a profound impact on individual syntony. Indeed, one of my students has recently finished a dissertation on the intrinsic relationship between the pathologisation of anxiety and the rise of neoliberalism since the 1960s.

RH: I guess the strong claim that you — and your students — are making about the relationship between social organisation and the experience of time raises a larger question around the writing of history — a question you’ve already touched upon in your reference to Keith Moxey. If our conception of temporality is based upon a particular culture or economic structure then how might the writing of history — and the history of the human sciences — be done differently?

AF: If we accept François Hartog’s claim that the relationship between past, present, and future determines the configurations of possible histories, then the temporal assumptions of our own culture significantly condition the possibilities of writing history in the present. When approaching my own period (roughly 1880 to 1940), attentiveness to the radically different relationship between past, present, and future has led me to interpret the seemingly ‘anachronistic’ juxtapositions of historical eras in modernist literature, for example, as a serious gesture – one that moreover resonates with the religious revivals of the nineteenth century or beliefs in the afterlife in Victorian and Edwardian spiritualism and occultism, such as theosophy. It also shifts the epistemological foundations of fields like archaeology, as my work on popular Egyptomania in British culture elucidates and offers new insight for understanding the relationship between explorations of multiverses in geometry and physics (the fourth dimension, relativity’s space-time, etc.).

Overall, the connections that are newly underscored by attending to the temporal assumptions at work in a given historical moment offer us new ways of understanding seemingly transformative moments (such as the development of relativity theory) within longer-term cultural perspectives that do not always ‘fit’ into existing paradigms (such as the surge in spiritualism following the Great War alongside the secularisation thesis). It also compels us to read our own histories in a different light. I wonder, for example, whether the determination to find examples of schisms or ruptures between epochs (like the First World War) or experiences of ‘acceleration’ in the nineteenth century – when the majority of Europeans and North Americans did not have access to new technologies like the telegraph until much later in the century – is tied to globalization and the rise of cybernetics, and thus rather more reflective of our own time culture and social anxieties.

Having said that, I suspect that I am skirting around your question rather than directly resolving it. The temporal turn behoves us to evaluate past histories from the perspective of that culture’s specific temporal assumptions and attend to how past time cultures shaped the possibilities of existence. The latter includes belief systems including science, experience of childhood and ageing, models of the body and society, and perspectives on past and future. Given the centrality of time to human experience, I think the human sciences in particular can benefit from a temporal approach to understand its disciplinary histories.

Allegra R.P Fryxell is a Trebilcock-Newton Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She is a cultural historian of modern Europe, focusing on the interactions between the arts and sciences in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and America.

Rhodri Hayward is Reader in History at Queen Mary University of London, and an editor at HHS.