Category: ECR Prize

Interview: Alfred Freeborn, ECR Prize Winner 2024

Alfred Freeborn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) was awarded the 2024 History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize for his essay ‘Testing Psychiatrists to Diagnose Schizophrenia: Crisis, Consensus and Computers in post-war Psychiatry’. 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: Congratulations on winning the Early Career Prize. Could you begin by briefly introducing your winning article, situating it in the context of your broader research project?

Alfred Freeborn: My current project looks at the history of psychiatric epidemiology and medical statistics in the 20th century in order to understand how mental health became the global field it is today. I seek to explain how the place and meaning of diagnosis in psychiatry fundamentally shifted in this period from being an act of detective-like intellectual synthesis to something more like automated pattern recognition and statistical analysis. In my article I show how the availability of certain technologies, such as mainframe computers and videotapes, enabled new ways of experimentally dissecting and reassembling the diagnostic procedure, ultimately laying the ground for a new way of evaluating the quality of the diagnostic data produced both in mental hospitals and in research. In a nutshell, the epistemic threshold of psychiatric diagnosis was massively lowered in order to secure professional consensus, and the purpose of diagnosis was increasingly understood as a tool for surveying populations, rather than the identification of natural disease entities.

HHS: What was the US-UK Diagnostic Project (DP) (1965-1975) and how did you come to be interested in it?

AF: The DP was a series of important studies comparing how psychiatrists in these two countries diagnosed people experiencing psychosis, in order ultimately to test the trustworthiness of mental hospital statistics. The basic idea was to take two mental hospitals, one in Brooklyn and one in London, and install a small group of psychiatrists trained to use a standard diagnostic procedure at both. These psychiatrists would diagnose new patients over a set period of time and their results would be compared with the local hospital statistics. The findings revealed that while the local hospital statistics showed more cases of schizophrenia in Brooklyn, the trained psychiatrists from the DP diagnosed more or less the same number in each hospital. In addition to this, a set of patient interviews were videotaped and shown to large audiences of psychiatrists in both countries who were then asked to make a diagnosis. The results in some cases were really dramatic: for one patient, known as Patient F, three-quarters of the American psychiatrists diagnosed schizophrenia, compared with almost none of the Brits. I first really took interest in the DP while working in the UK National Archives with records of the Medical Research Council when I discovered some early exchanges between the American and British sides of the project.

HHS: How is the DP usually remembered by psychiatrists and/or historians?

AF: Among psychiatrists the DP is remembered as a famous study in which the British collaborators undermined the professional credibility of American psychiatrists. It is canonised in the cultural memory of modern psychiatry as having shown that American psychiatrists over-diagnosed schizophrenia. While historians take note of the DP, the US-centric historiography has by and large failed to dwell on the importance of this collaboration. Through my archival work I realised there was another dimension to the DP. While the Americans had the money, machines and manpower and were further along in doing psychiatric epidemiology than the Brits, there was no national system for collecting mental hospital statistics in the US. The UK’s National Health Service and the statistics of the General Register Office were therefore seen as a useful data set by researchers from the American side. The Americans had ambitious plans to establish a research centre for psychiatric epidemiology in London and conduct studies with the UK census data but this was rejected by the Brits. I think the DP was not just an interesting episode in understanding how psychiatric diagnosis works, but was part of a broader struggle over how psychiatry would be reconfigured as a public health problem in the postwar era. In other words, as a struggle over who would count as an expert in the evaluating and planning of the new community care services as mental hospitals started to be closed. 

HHS: How did the DP influence diagnostic reform in psychiatry?

AF: Key players in the DP went on to reform both the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and in the latter case the DP’s results were used as leverage to replace psychodynamic concepts with ostensibly testable and statistically reliable diagnostic criteria. I also think the focus on schizophrenia in the DP had an impact. On the one hand, the DP was about enabling reliable comparisons of local and national statistics, and the focus on distinguishing schizophrenia and affective psychoses was in response to increasing evidence that lithium salts helped treat mania but not schizophrenia, therefore distinguishing these two disorders had real therapeutic implications. But the DP was also strategically designed to capture the difference between American and British psychiatrists. The very design of the DP Project aimed to highlight and showcase the psychodynamic approaches to diagnosing schizophrenia which were dominant in New York at the time and, unsurprisingly to everyone involved, it was successful in revealing that these psychiatrists in New York did things rather differently than the psychiatrists in London.

HHS: Could you introduce Aubrey Lewis and Morton Kramer and explain the significance of their ‘competing interests’ for your arguments?

AF: So Aubrey Lewis was probably the most influential psychiatrist in postwar Britain: he was clinical director of the Maudsley Hospital in south London and the first professor of psychiatry (from 1946 to 1966) at its medical school, renamed the Institute of Psychiatry in 1946. The hospital and medical school became the leading centre for a methodology-focused form of social psychiatry. Maudsley psychiatrists, led by Lewis, prided themselves on taking meticulously detailed patient case histories and avoiding the theoretical excesses of both organic and psychodynamic approaches. Morton Kramer in contrast was a stats guy. Kramer became Director of the Biometrics Branch of the US National Institute of Mental Health in 1949 with no experience of psychiatry, having been trained in statistics and epidemiology. He was perceived by his more clinically engaged colleagues as a serious epidemiologist who was focused strictly on data about populations, lacking perhaps the concern for the individual patient.

These two figures were by no means the only players in shaping the DP, but I show how their different perspectives on how to reform diagnostic classifications reveal an ongoing tension in our attempts to standardise psychiatric diagnosis. Lewis argued that reliable statistics would only be possible if psychiatrists working across the NHS could be convinced to take diagnosis seriously and use careful and detailed methodology. Kramer argued that a field trial was necessary to create public trust in psychiatrists and that the diagnosis of schizophrenia was the most suitable test case for this task since there seemed to be sufficient consensus on this issue. The DP was a synthesis of these two interests: the Maudsley consensus was used to establish a trustworthy gold standard for schizophrenia diagnosis. But the tension between these two interests endured, as I argue that the creation of these standards in the long run alienated the diagnostic intelligence of the psychiatrist and reduced the role of the expert diagnostician.

HHS: What role did computers and videotapes play in the story your article tells? What does this reveal about the relationship between technology and psychiatry?

AF: There is a wonderful passage I cite in my article where Aubrey Lewis talks about fighting for the “diagnostic souls” of psychiatrists in order to make sure they do not simply apply labels but produce careful and accurate diagnoses. For me, this is a rejection of the idea that psychiatric diagnosis can be treated purely as a technology: it is a recognition that the psychiatrist is as much part of the process of diagnosis as the particular tool they use. The videotape and the mainframe computer were deployed in the experimental dissection of psychiatric diagnosis into two parts: recording mental symptoms and applying a diagnostic algorithm. Both offered analogues for an idealised scenario in which psychiatrists would all observe the same symptoms when interviewing the patient and reliably apply the same diagnostic decision-making tree. In this scenario, the theoretical differences between individual psychiatrists and their concepts of mental disorder were made into comparable statistical differences. Using videotapes to train psychiatrists to diagnose is now completely standard practice. Computers not only enabled the application of totally reliable diagnostic algorithms, but more work intensive forms of statistical analysis to try and identify new clusters of mental symptoms and potentially improve existing classifications. However, by the mid-1970s this approach had already proved more or less a dead end. While engagement with these statistical methods led psychiatrists to re-describe diagnosis as a type of statistical analysis, in reality they made little impact on actual diagnostic classifications, which reflected consensus positions reached by committees of psychiatrists like those in the DP.

HHS: Why was ‘schizophrenia’ such a contested diagnostic category?

AF: In a fundamental sense, schizophrenia or dementia praecox has always been a contested category since its inception as a disease concept at the end of the 19th century; it is more like a set of competing yet overlapping concepts with vague boundaries than a stable or singular entity. But in the 1960s the diagnostic category became the focus of public controversy for several reasons: neo-Freudian, existential and social psychiatric ideas became dominant and challenged older views of schizophrenia as an inherited brain disease; numbers in mental hospitals peaked in the 1950s leading to overcrowding and awful conditions for patients while the mass media was filled with reports from within asylums; the new social movements grew around patient rights and so on. This story is well known by historians of psychiatry. But while most historians have tended to agree with contemporaries that schizophrenia had become a catch-all term under the influence of psychodynamic theories, I turn this on its head by suggesting that in fact in the UK there was widespread consensus on the important symptoms involved in diagnosing schizophrenia.

What do you mean by the ‘methodological imperialism of the Maudsley’?

AF: The phrase first occurred to me when interviewing the American psychiatrist William Carpenter Jr. about his time working on the WHO International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia (1965-1973), a study which used many of the same methods developed in the DP. He recalled how as a young psychiatrist he was deeply impressed and intimidated by the Maudsley psychiatrist John Wing’s knowledge of German psychopathology and that Wing reminded him of Colonel Nicholson from The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). This comparison really stuck with me. In the film the Colonel orders his men to build a bridge for their Japanese captors in order to maintain their morale and professional image as soldiers, but in the process lets his enthusiasm for this technical project and following the rules obscure his sense of the bigger conflict and values. Looking at the longer history of diagnostic reform in psychiatry and its failure to identify valid disease concepts or lead to better treatments, the comparison is striking. In this article I wanted to use the phrase to evoke how the methodological authority of the British psychiatrists in this period was perceived by their American colleagues. I think there is something more to say here analytically, but that will have to wait for another paper.

HHS: What do you conclude was most historically significant about the DP?

AF: The argument I am making in the article concerns in particular how psychiatric diagnosis was evaluated: it describes changes in methodological concepts, rather than changes in everyday clinical practice. This is not because I am not interested in clinical practice, but that I think too often historians gloss over the difficulty of actually making generalisable claims about diagnosis in clinical practice. The historian seeking to make such claims must make use of the statistical data from the time and faces the same methodological challenges as their historical actors who doubted the accuracy of these numbers. Other historians have already argued that the real changes in diagnostic practices in the UK and USA were most likely shaped by changes in health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, not the official classification systems. What I think is important is that the DP showed that to create reliable statistics on psychiatric diagnosis required small groups of trained psychiatrists conducting lengthy and detailed interviews, and this approach was clearly not suitable for everyday clinical practice. Rather than solve the problem of whether we can trust mental hospital statistics, the DP helped usher in a new way of evaluating psychiatric diagnosis in statistical terms – the tensions of which remain with us today.

HHS: Finally, I wonder if you could briefly discuss what you’re currently working on and what your next project might be?

I recently hosted a conference in Berlin on the history and legacy of the WHO studies of schizophrenia which was a wonderful experience: we not only had historians of psychiatry, but anthropologists, philosophers and psychiatrists from the field. I am now working on turning that into a collected volume. I am also currently working up revisions on my first monograph Biomedical Madness: Schizophrenia and the Making of Biological Psychiatry which will hopefully appear with University of Chicago Press next year. As in my article, which is based on a chapter from the book, I use the British context to develop new perspectives on the history of postwar biological psychiatry. 

Interview by Hannah Proctor.

Interview: Libby O’Neil, ECR Prize winner 2024

Libby O’Neil (Yale University) was awarded the 2024 History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize for her essay ‘Thinking in Systems: Problems of Organization at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Society for General Systems Research, 1950-1957’. The article is forthcoming in the journal. We asked her some questions about the winning text and his future research.

History of the Human Sciences: Congratulations on winning the Early Career Prize for your article ‘Thinking in Systems’. Could you begin by briefly introducing your winning article, situating it in the context of your broader research project?

Libby O’Neil: The article emerged from a chapter of my dissertation that I’m working on right now. My broader dissertation project is called ‘The Sciences of Unity: Organicist Systems Thinking Between Vienna and the United States’. My project is trying to trace a series of questions about the unity of science, about reductionism and holism, the mind-body problem and the nature of life across the 20th century. I do this by focusing on the careers of several Central European émigré scientists and philosophers. Part of my method has been to follow around Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who appears in my paper. He’s an idiosyncratic figure, who, I think, has been relatively understudied in the English language history of science literature because he was didn’t fit into the disciplines very traditionally. This has taken me to several interesting places, and one of those places is the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where he was one of the 1954-1955 research fellows.

In 2023, I spent a few weeks in Palo Alto working with the archival collections there, which is currently held at Stanford Special Collections. That’s when I started thinking about trying to pair together the histories of the Ford Foundation’s Center for Advanced Study and the Society for General Systems Research. I argue that both were important for thinking about interdisciplinarity and the organization of the sciences, especially the human and social sciences, and that both were looking for ways to scale between the social scientific laboratory and the national or international system. In both cases, I highlight a reflexive turn that came up during the study of these problems of organization. Both groups found that the most ready to hand laboratory for studying organization was their own organization.

HHS: How would you define ‘general system theory’ and how did you come to be interested in this?

LO: There were a lot of different interdisciplinary programs that were using the phrase ‘systems theory’ in the US around 1950. It is often tied to cybernetics by historians, for good reason. But while introducing his ‘general system theory’ or Allgemeine Systemlehre to American audiences in 1950, Bertalanffy claimed a slightly different genealogy for systems theory that drew on his training in philosophy and theoretical biology in interwar Vienna. His thinking about interdisciplinarity emerged from his study of biological growth and dynamic equilibrium. Although there are many varieties of systems theory, and a lot of them do emerge out of interdisciplinary wartime research, Bertalanffy offered a slightly different genealogy that created productive tensions within the American context.

HHS: What was the role of the Ford Foundation in shaping work in the behavioural sciences (via the creation of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences)? How did this fit within the broader context of social scientific research at this point in the period?

LO: I think something I’m always struck by when I’m reading the writing of a lot of my actors is this really close relationship they draw between the atomic bomb and the social sciences. There was simultaneously hubris and anxiety around the relationship between science and society. The Ford Foundation was one of several institutions that saw reforming the social scientific research apparatus as the key to managing some of these tensions. Beginning in the late 1940s, the Ford Foundation carried out studies of various universities, looking at their training for social scientists, human scientists, behavioural scientists and trying to understand what the gaps were. This was related to the Ford Foundation’s “Area Five” of their overall research program, which focused on interventions within the sciences to promote human welfare.

A lot of this history has been detailed by other historians. Historians like Mark Solovey, Hunter Heyck, and Jamie Cohen-Cole, for example, discuss the Ford Foundation in the broader context of social scientific funding by foundations during this time, for example. But what I focused on is how they specifically came to decide in the early 1950s that they needed a dedicated centre where they could offer advanced training for social scientists. During the planning process, foundation officials had all these arguments about the tension between humanists and scientists within the academy. Throughout there was tension between quantitative and qualitative work and explicit debate about what interdisciplinarity actually means. Is it a team with one sociologist, one anthropologist, one biologist, etc? Or is it a project that spans across the individual boundaries of disciplines? That’s the context in which they decided to found this centre. My archival work reveals how some of those tensions really persisted throughout the first few years of its operation.

HHS: You’ve spoken a little already about Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Could you introduce Kenneth Boulding and describe what was distinctive about the work they did together.

LO: Boulding is a fascinating figure. He was born to a fairly working-class family in England but ended up attending Oxford, where he studied philosophy and economics as an undergraduate. He came to the attention of John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter early in his career and spent time at the University of Chicago and at Harvard. He also became deeply involved in the Society of Friends and Pacifist activism. Boulding spent most of his career in the US — he would say in interviews that because of his working-class background he felt more comfortable in the US, rather than in British academia. His wife, Elise, is also an interesting figure. She was a peace activist who earned a PhD in sociology and worked closely with Margaret Mead in the sixties and seventies.

Boulding wrote The Organizational Revolution in 1953 (with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Council of Churches). In this book, he considered a wide variety of organizations, from labour unions to churches, and analysed them using concepts like homeostasis, feedback, hierarchical order. This work brought him to the attention of the Ford Foundation. In the early 1950s he began corresponding with Bertalanffy, who’d recently published an article in Science where he talked about his general system theory. After Boulding was recruited to the Center, he wrote a last-minute recommendation for Bertalanffy to the board, where he says – to paraphrase – that ‘other biologists think Bertalanffy is something as a crackpot but as a fellow crank I have strong fellow feeling with him’. Incredibly this recommendation letter got Bertalanffy invited to the Center and that’s the start of their official collaboration. Throughout their time at the Center, they worked together closely with a few other fellows to put on various workshops, lectures, and seminar series on general system theory, trying to recruit people from across the disciplines, to think in their particular way about how to bridge the gaps across the disciplines.

HHS: How did social scientists at the Center define ‘problems of organization’ and why was this such a conceptually complicated and controversial topic?

LO: The phrase ‘problems of organization’ is both my own analytic term and something my actors used in their writing. When I was working in the archive, I was reading through a folder where they had the statements that each fellow had written out of their proposed activities. I read through dozens and dozens of descriptions of how they’re going to reorganize their own discipline, or how they’re going to unify across the disciplines. This led me to write in my own archive notes a little paragraph about how it seems that problems of organization are the through line between all the different projects that the fellows were bringing. There was a blend of both hubris and anxiety where they both believed they could come to understand the nature of organization, and that it was crucial for our society to do so, and to enact those principles in the world.

I saw a consistent desire to understand organization as almost a philosophical, teleological concept. But at the same time, there was a slippage many of these writers made between organization as an abstract concept and concrete organizations (like businesses, institutions, centres for advanced study, etc). I think the key for the Ford Foundation was to move between these two levels, to find ways to think about organization in general that allowed them to scale between different kinds of organizations, so they could pursue their

poorly defined goal of human welfare in the world.

HHS: What was the General Systems Yearbook?

LO: The General Systems Yearbook was one of the main interventions that the Society for General Systems research made. They framed it as a communication tool. Early members of the Society for General Systems Research all agreed that they needed a way to help promote interdisciplinary, to help overcome the strict specialization within the sciences, to overcome the barriers of jargon and specific words. But they weren’t quite sure how to do that. There was a feeling that there were already too many interdisciplinary conferences. Many of the early members had been to the Macy conferences, and were a little unsure as to whether that had been a helpful experience. There were also too many new journals to keep up with. The goal for the General Systems Yearbook was not to solicit new articles, but to collect articles from across the discipline that were relevant to general systems theory. They imagined the Yearbook as a tool for interdisciplinary communication that would allow interested scientists to keep up on the literature without having to read dozens of journals across multiple fields. It’s been published yearly in one form or another since 1956.

HHS: You emphasise the ‘disunity’ of systems thinking in the case study you focus on – what is significant about that argument / how does it depart from the existing scholarship on systems thinking in this period and how does it relate to questions of interdisciplinarity?

LO: This is one of the themes that I’m interested in pursuing in the dissertation overall. My project’s working title is ‘The Sciences of Unity’, which is trying to invert the unity of science to understand the multiple ways human and physical scientists studied unity in the 20th century. Systems theory is a unifying program that shows up in a lot of really diverse contexts in the 20th century, including engineering, biology, literary theory, and anthropology. Although many people called themselves systems theorists and referenced the same founding figures, I saw real differences in the basic goals that different systems theorists had, the different metaphysical assumptions they had, and the different institutional and political purposes that they ended up serving.

My goal in this paper about the Center was to get really specific about this particular approach to systems theory and the unique models of organizations they were using. I think this is especially important for thinking about systems theory because it claims to transcend individual models. I think the task for historians of systems theory is to resist that totalizing impulse and to look for the particularities and the provincial aspects of the moments when people come together to say they’re doing systems theory.

Why was there this demand for systems theory in this idiosyncratic, weird environment of the Center? Why was it there that systems theory became popular? How were different people and institutions using systems theory for different goals? My hope in the broader project is to ask what gets left out when we generalize away from the specific.

HHS: Reading your article I wondered if there was something tricky to navigate methodologically when you’re writing something that’s a bit ‘meta’, in the sense that it’s a research project on research projects. How do you think about that?

LO: It’s something I’ve definitely thought about because I am studying scientists and academics who are doing really similar work to what I do. There are ways that the history of systems theory interacts with the history of the history of science. In the early 1970s, Bertalanffy actually became very interested in the work of Thomas Kuhn. He was on a panel at the American Historical Association with Kuhn and Christopher Lasch talking about cultures as systems, and he saw “paradigm shift” as a systems concept. There’s certainly a genealogy of the history of science that comes from systems theory. I don’t totally have a solution for the fact that I’m sort of studying my own discipline. My hope is that by doing this we can understand the conditions of knowledge production better. I do think this is a broader challenge, that in the history of science where we end up studying our own field in a lot of ways.

HHS: Finally, I wonder if you could briefly discuss what you’re currently working on and what your next project might be?

LO: My main focus is trying to finish the dissertation. The chapter that this paper is on based sits right in the middle of the dissertation, temporally. I’m moving in two different directions through time right now. On one hand, I’m both moving back in time to look at interwar Viennese philosophy of science and then the early days of cybernetics. On the other hand, I’m moving forward to look at how systems theory was taken up at the Menninger Clinic and in humanistic psychology.

Beyond the dissertation, what I would hope to do is to have some space to expand on some of the themes and questions that have emerged for me while I do this work that I don’t think will fit in the project. Specifically that’s been the really persistent recurrence of religious and spiritual language in these popular science, fictional and philosophical writings about science in the post-war era. There was a lot of collaboration between systems theorists and theologians. That is surprising to me, considering how we often think about the boundaries between science and religion. Thinking about popular science and science fiction as a way to understand the history of science has also been something I’ve been pursuing in my teaching at Yale. That’s the general direction I might move in; but we’ll see!

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor. The discussion was edited for length and clarity.

Early Career Prize, 2023-24

History of the Human Sciences – the international journal of peer-reviewed research, which provides the leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its annual prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognise a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply.

Guidelines for the Award

Scholars who wish to be considered for the award are asked to submit an up-to-date two-page CV (including a statement that confirms eligibility for the award) and an essay that is a maximum of 12,000 words long (including notes and references). The essay should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere, based on original research, written in English, and follow History of the Human Science’s style guide. Scholars are advised to read the journal’s description of its aims and scope, as well as its submission guidelines.

Entries will be judged by a panel drawn from the journal’s editorial team and board. They will identify the essay that best fits the journal’s aims and scope.

Eligibility

Scholars of any nationality who have either not yet been awarded a PhD or are no more than five years from its award are welcome to apply. The judging panel will use the definition of “active years”, with time away from academia for parental leave, health problems, or other relevant reasons being disregarded in the calculation. They will also be sensitive to the disruption that the Covid 19 pandemic has had on career progression and will take such factors into account in their decision making. Candidates are encouraged to include details relating to any of these issues in their supporting documents.

Scholars who have submitted an essay for consideration in previous years are welcome to do so again. However, new manuscripts must not be substantially the same as any they have submitted in the past.

Prize

The winning scholar will be awarded £250 and have their essay published in History of the Human Sciences (subject to the essay passing through the journal’s peer review process). The intention is to award the prize to a single entrant but the judging panel may choose to recognise more than one essay in the event of a particularly strong field.

Deadlines

Entries should be made by Friday 26th January 2024. The panel aims to make a decision by Friday 10th May 2024. The winning entry will be submitted for peer review automatically. The article, clearly identified as the winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize, will then be published in the journal as soon as the production schedule allows. The winning scholar and article will also be promoted by History of the Human Sciences, including on this website, which hosts content separate to the journal.

Previous Winners

2022-23: Freddy Foks (Manchester), “Finding modernity in England’s past: social anthropology and the transformation of social history in Britain, 1959-1977”

2021-22: Harry Parker (Cambridge), “The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th century Britain”. Special commendation: Ohad Reiss Sorokin (Princeton), “”‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)”.

2020-21: Liana Glew (Penn State), “Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history”, and Simon Torracinta (Yale), “Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants”.

Special commendation: Erik Baker (Harvard), “The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian”.

2019-20: Danielle Carr (Columbia), “Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism”.

Special commendation: Katie Joice (Birkbeck), “Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67”.

You can read more about these essays in interviews with the authors here.

To Apply

Entrants should e-mail an anonymised copy of their essay, along with an up-to-date CV, to hhs@histhum.com.

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.

History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize, 2022-23

History of the Human Sciences – the international journal of peer-reviewed research, which provides the leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its annual prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognise a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply.

Guidelines for the Award

Scholars who wish to be considered for the award are asked to submit an up-to-date two-page CV (including a statement that confirms eligibility for the award) and an essay that is a maximum of 12,000 words long (including notes and references). The essay should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere, based on original research, written in English, and follow History of the Human Science’s style guide. Scholars are advised to read the journal’s description of its aims and scope, as well as its submission guidelines.

Entries will be judged by a panel drawn from the journal’s editorial team and board. They will identify the essay that best fits the journal’s aims and scope.

Eligibility

Scholars of any nationality who have either not yet been awarded a PhD or are no more than five years from its award are welcome to apply. The judging panel will use the definition of “active years”, with time away from academia for parental leave, health problems, or other relevant reasons being disregarded in the calculation. They will also be sensitive to the disruption that the Covid 19 pandemic has had on career progression and will take such factors into account in their decision making. Candidates are encouraged to include details relating to any of these issues in their supporting documents.

Prize

The winning scholar will be awarded £250 and have their essay published in History of the Human Sciences (subject to the essay passing through the journal’s peer review process). The intention is to award the prize to a single entrant but the judging panel may choose to recognise more than one essay in the event of a particularly strong field.

Deadlines

Entries should be made by Friday 27th January 2022. The panel aims to make a decision by Friday 28th April 2022. The winning entry will be submitted for peer review automatically. The article, clearly identified as the winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize, will then be published in the journal as soon as the production schedule allows. The winning scholar and article will also be promoted by History of the Human Sciences, including on its website, which hosts content separate to the journal.

Previous Winners

2021-22: Harry Parker (Cambridge), “The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th century Britain”.

Special commendation: Ohad Reiss Sorokin (Princeton), “”‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)”.

2020-21: Liana Glew (Penn State), “Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history” and Simon Torracinta (Yale), “Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants”

Special commendation: Erik Baker (Harvard), “The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian”

2019-20: Danielle Carr (Columbia), “Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism”

Special commendation: Katie Joice (Birkbeck), “Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67”

You can read more about these essays in interviews with the authors on the website.

To Apply

Entrants should e-mail an anonymised copy of their essay, along with an up-to-date CV, to hhs@histhum.com. 

Further Enquiries

If you have any questions about the prize, or anything relating to the journal, please email hhs@histhum.com. 

Interview: Ohad Reiss Sorokin on Alfred Binet, ‘intelligence’ and failed experiments

Ohad Reiss Sorokin, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia who recently completed a PhD at Princeton University. He received a commendation in this year’s History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for his essay ‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)’. We spoke to him about his interest in Binet and other research.

History of the Human Sciences: First of all, I wonder if you could briefly introduce your broad research interests, including your PhD project “‘I [Suffer] Unfortunately from Intellectual Hunger’: The Geistkreis, Desire for Knowledge, and the Transformation of Intellectual Life in the Twentieth Century”?

Ohad Reiss Sorokin: I wrote this essay a few years ago before I started working on my dissertation. The only thing that ties them together is that the dissertation is also a history of the human sciences but from a very different perspective. My dissertation deals with the ‘Geistkreis’, which was an intellectual circle that was active in Vienna between and 1921 and 1938. It was a meeting place of young philosophers, economists, lawyers, sociologists, psychologists, and art historians. What I argue in the dissertation is that they created this Geistkreis, in order to combat the reigning intellectual environment of Vienna at the time, which is known to be the “mandarin” culture. They tried to create a more open discussion culture that does the human sciences in a way that is not subjugated to the natural sciences, on the other hand, and is not completely metaphysical and out of touch with the empirical evidence, on the other.

HHS: Now to move on to your essay, ‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)’: who was Alfred Binet, for what is he most famous and how does your article on his work depart from the existing scholarship?

ORS: Binet is a very very famous figure in the history of the French psychology and in experimental psychology. He is most famous for the Binet-Simon test, which became the blueprint for the modern IQ test. That would be his main contribution. But that’s just one aspect of his work. He wrote so much, his bibliography is huge and he worked on many aspects of psychology. He did work with geniuses and people who could make complex calculations in their head to see how they thought. He was also a playwright. My work focuses on the 1903 book [L’Étude expérimentale de l’intelligence [“Experimental Study of Intelligence”], which was not exactly ignored but I argue that there was something very significant there that people have missed.

HHS: From what scientific contexts did the concept of ‘intelligence’ first emerge as a scientific object?

ORS: That is not an easy question to answer because we have a concept of intelligence from at least the Renaissance or even earlier. I focus on a very, very specific concept of intelligence that we talk about now, when we talk about intelligence, which has to be with intelligent tests, it has to do with the ranking of people according to their potential for intellectual achievement. This concept was created in an intellectual context in which empirical psychology became a lot more important in the late mid to late nineteenth century. It was a context in which such a concept was needed in order to sort students in a much more democratized education system.

HHS: And how did Binet understand ‘intelligence’?

ORS: The concept of intelligence I just described, that Binet developed in his 1903 book, has to do with personality, it’s called the personality type psychology of intelligence, which is like types of functions, holistic intellectual affinity/taste capabilities that can be described but cannot be ranked on a hierarchical scale. This is the kind of work that Binet does with his daughters in the 1903 book. He later developed a scale and its goal was to differentiate between what in English is called the ‘feeble minded’ and students who could actually succeed. Later on when he thinks about what was done with his intelligence test, especially in the United States, he never meant to create a number that you can sort people according to, but a scale to be used only in a specific context. It’s plausible that he never meant to do it, but he did nonetheless give the tools that allowed other people to do it.

HHS: What was the significance of Binet’s experiments on his daughters and, specifically, of the failed experiment you discuss?

ORS: The book is is quite interesting. There are definitely other books like that but it’s definitely not something you would see today in any of the natural sciences of psychology. It’s a big collection of experiments described from beginning to end, with all the details included, that he conducted with his daughters for many years. And, at least the way he presents it, he didn’t have a specific goal in mind, other than to study the intelligence of his daughters – whatever this means – and he tries many things. What I emphasize is that a failed experiment can teach us sometimes more than a successful one, especially if the experimenter reflects on the failure, then he can explain to us what he was looking for, he can explain what he didn’t get with the results. Then we can better understand the epistemic object or the thing that he was after that he did not discover. This is, to my mind, the key to understanding the most successful experiments which we just hear were successful.

HHS: What were the implications of Binet conducting experiments outside a laboratory setting – including his discussions of ‘outside noise’ and ‘distractions’ – for his understanding of intelligence?

ORS: I think the interesting thing is that he does not reflect so much about that, if I remember correctly. At the time he was working and was eventually the head of the experimental psychological laboratory in the Sorbonne so he had access to all the machines and instruments that were required but he does not reflect much about the effect of taking those instruments outside of the laboratory. He does, however, get very much annoyed by the fact that he doesn’t have adequate conditions in his home. So I would say as an answer to the question is that he has two subjects that can sees roughly every day, for many, many years which is something that it’s really difficult to duplicate in a laboratory setting. He has all the instruments and he exposed all the norms of laboratory science by remarking on the infringements of the norm that happens because he was working outside the laboratory. If it was just in a laboratory we wouldn’t know, for example, that sound isolation is important to measure intelligence because it’s not obvious, it hasn’t come from the concept that you need to isolate the subject. So in this book he makes these norms explicit and that’s what I found interesting about it

HHS: Why did Binet part ways with British associationism?

ORS: British associationism was, at the time, one of the leading theoretical frameworks for understanding the mechanics of the mind. Binet, who was an autodidact, read all the major works by John Stuart Mill and others, and at first took after them. During the time he was working with his daughters he discovered a number of phenomena that he could not square with the assoociationists’ passive understanding of consciousness, most important among them is, of course, “attention”, i.e., our mind’s capability to willfully focus on certain inputs and ignore others. This break with the British tradition helped him to articulate the need for a theory of the active mind. Intelligence is one way to think about it.

HHS: What role did time measurement devices play in Binet’s research?

ORS: I use the analysis done by Jimena Canales in the book Tenth of a Second. Canales argues that measuring things to the 10th of a second became such a crucial element of science in general in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It became like a symbol for science in a way. What I argue in the article is that at the beginning of that book it seemed like Binet measured things just out of duty. He’s a scientist so he needs to have a number somewhere. We know that in modern psychology that the mind is tied with time, it happens in time not in space so therefore it follows to measure time. There are tools for that and there’s a concept for that. But you can find time marks for tests that have nothing to do with time. He doesn’t comment on the time, he doesn’t explain why it is important that some took longer or shorter amounts of time.

But then, at some point, he changes, and I argue cautiously that the change is not necessarily a conscious one. At some point he asked the girls to write sentences. He defined the sentence according to their quality, quality in terms of whether it was a descriptive sentence, a poetic sentence or an imaginative sentence and so forth. He measured how much time it took for them to produce each kind of sentence. But then it is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. He compares the different times it took to each girl to perform different tasks. He has time as a way to compare the performance, but he does it in a way that makes no sense, because he himself defines the tasks as diffrernt. He doesn’t explain why he does it but in the paper I argue that this is the blueprint for the notion that we have today that doing something faster is an indication for greater intelligence. I mean to cook an egg is faster than to write paper. It says nothing about the persons cooking eggs or writing papers. That’s basically the argument.

HHS: How is the difference between the two concepts of intelligence Binet outlined in 1903 and 1905 conventionally characterised and how do you understand the relationship between them? Why do you claim that the concept of intelligence outlined in his 1903 book should be seen as a ‘major ontological leap’?

ORS: These are two separate questions, I think. The first one is easier to answer because usually scholars treat the 1905 publication as introducing Binet’s concept of intelligence because in this iteration of the concept intelligence becomes measurable and hierarchical. Those two components are “missing,” or better, not yet in existence, in 1903.

For the most part scholars either treat the1903 concept as a deficient concept on his way to create the, “fully developed” 1905 concept. Or they ignore it altogether because they don’t think about it as a work about intelligence, but as a work about “personality types”. I don’t remember seeing a good account that explained why he called it intelligence nevertheless in 1903.

I was trying to draw attention to the fact that there are some similarities between the two concepts. It’s difficult, I don’t think it’s impossible, but it’s difficult to find in other major works on intelligence from the time period. It is the idea that intelligence is subjective, in the sense that we measure or look at the intelligence of each person separately. It is not about a philosophical or general concept of intelligence. It’s immaterial – not about the size of the brain or the density of the brain or anything like that – and yet it’s empirically observable.

It’s not something that you learn from a conceptual analysis of any sort. Instead you need to take people to the lab or make an empirical examination or make them take a test. The combination of those characteristics is already there in 1903.

I wouldn’t be the first to argue that Binet has a very eclectic method. This constellation of characteristics is the result of his eclectic method and it’s an ontological leap in the sense that it creates in the world an object that did not exist before. The idea that we each have a specific thing that was like an organ but immaterial and yet is observable with particular methods.

HHS: I began by asking you about your PhD project and wondered if in conclusion you could say something about where you hope your research might lead in the future.

ORS: I’ve been working on the dissertation about the ‘Geistkreis’ for four years now and with time I realized that what I found so attractive about this circle is that they are almost an embodiment of the idea of desire for knowledge. I’m interested in how knowledge and desire survive together in the realm of professional humanities, in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. I’m about to start a postdoc position in the Institute for Advanced Studies of Culture at the University of Virginia and I hope to follow this thread.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.

Interview: Liana Glew on psychiatric paperwork

Liana Glew is this year’s co-winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to her about her research and her winning essay ‘Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history’.

HHS: First of all, congratulations on winning the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for your essay ‘Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history’. To begin I wonder if you could briefly introduce and summarise your essay and say a little about what inspired you to write it.

Liana Glew: Thank you for the honour of the prize. The essay examines paperwork from US psychiatric hospitals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My purpose in this examination is to develop methods of reading that center patient agency and disability identity. The inspirations for piece were twofold. Firstly, it was inspired by a trip to the Oregon State Archives where they’ve done a really beautiful and careful job archiving this challenging history. That’s where a lot of the the material comes from. Second, it was inspired by a graduate seminar taught by Ebony Coletu, which is where I first started thinking critically about bureaucracy and paperwork.

HHS: Before I ask more about the piece itself I wonder if you could briefly talk about your PhD thesis project and how this article relates to your research more broadly?

LG: The article represents the third chapter of the dissertation, edited to stand on its own. Each chapter covers one genre of text about life inside asylums in the 19th and 20th century. So the first chapter is about fiction, the second about memoir-exposes which is a sort of hybrid genre that I’ve identified to talk about the journalistic and memoir pieces coming out around that time about life in an asylum. This third chapter covers the same paperwork material as this essay, then the fourth chapter is on archival patient writing. I’m taking writing to be a really big category, so it includes different types of artistic expression, house organs, personal journals, letters, and more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HHS: How do you define ‘archival excess’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor

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

Simon Torracinta, PhD candidate in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale, is this year’s co-winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and his winning essay ‘Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants’.

HHS: To begin I wonder if you could briefly introduce Edward Tolman and say a little about what inspired you to write about him?  

ST: Edward Tolman was an American psychologist who worked mostly in the 1920s to 1950s, and spent most of his career at the University of Berkeley (their psychology building was named ‘Tolman Hall’ in his honour until it was demolished in 2019). He was a member of the so-called ‘neo-behaviourist’ generation, the cohort of psychologists, with figures like Clark Hull and B.F. Skinner, who took up the banner of behaviourism in the middle of the 20th century. They developed it into a robust research framework and succeeded in making it the dominant experimental paradigm – especially in the United States –  for several decades.

I was initially drawn to Tolman’s work because of his particularly explicit theorization of drives. But I was surprised to find that, although he was one of the most influential psychologists of his day and he’s still cited in neuroscience research today, he has mostly been neglected by historians, besides the excellent biography by psychologist David Carroll. But as I hope readers of the article will see, much of his work speaks to core concerns in the history of the human sciences. Although Tolman was sincerely committed to behaviourism as an epistemological framework, he was consistently drawn to phenomena – cognition, purpose, desire – that pushed against the limits of that framework, which produces some really fascinating tensions.

HHS: Before I ask more about the article itself, I wonder if you could briefly talk about your PhD thesis project and how this article relates to your research more broadly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.