Interviews – History of The Human Sciences

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 20^th 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.

Interview: Archiving the COVID-19 pandemic

Archiving the COVID-19 pandemic in Mass Observation and Middletown, Special Section, interview with co-editor Nick Clarke (University of Southampton).

History of the Human Sciences: Clive Barnett with whom your collaborated on this Special Section sadly passed away before it was published. I wonder if you might want to begin by paying tribute to Clive and reflecting on your experience of working together?

Nick Clarke: In the summer of 2020, Clive and I started working on a project about popular responses to COVID-19, funded by the British Academy. A part of that project was a seminar series that we ran with the Mass Observation Archive. The Special Section emerged out of that seminar series. I was working with Clive on finalising the first draft of these articles when he died suddenly in December 2021. Clive and I had actually been working together for years, since I arrived in Bristol as a PhD student in 2000. I subsequently went on to work as a researcher for Clive as a postdoc. I considered him a close friend and his sudden death was devastating, of course for his family, but also for many friends of his in academia, myself included. No doubt Clive would have had lots of brilliant ideas for how to develop the Special Section.

Perhaps the best thing I can do for the purposes of this interview, instead of talking about Clive all day, which I could do, is to refer readers to a set of things that have been written about Clive in the last year or so. There was a blog post that I wrote soon after his death, about his generosity as a supervisor, a reader, a thinker and collaborator. This was posted on ‘Covid Responsibility’, a blog that we were both writing together specifically about popular responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Clive was an editor at the journal Progress in Human Geography at the time he died and there’s an a nice obituary there that people can read too.

HHS: Thank you so much. What were you hoping to achieve with this Special Section?

NC: Clive and I won the British Academy grant to study popular responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically by using Mass Observation’s COVID-19 collections. As I said, a part of that project was to organize a seminar series with the Mass Observation Archive where we got people from many different disciplines to talk to us about those collections and related collections of biographical writing about everyday life during the pandemic, including the Everyday Life in Middletown Project’s COVID-19 collections.

In the seminars, contributors were speaking about a particular way of knowing the pandemic through the human sciences, and especially through diaries and related forms like mass photography. Our seminar series was also archiving initial responses to these collections. All of these initial analyses, it became clear to us, were informed by and shaped by the history of the human sciences, and especially the distinctive histories and human sciences of Mass Observation and Middletown. By the end of the seminar series we came around to the idea of submitting a Special Section to History of the Human Sciences that would focus on the pandemic and we thought it made sense to structure it around the past, the present and future.

The past, in the sense that archiving practices during the pandemic were informed and shaped by the histories of Mass Observation and Middletown. The present, in the sense that, among other things, what the articles in the Special Section seek to do is know the pandemic through the human sciences in the present. And the future, in the sense that one function of the Special Section, we hope, is to archive these initial engagements between researchers and archives, which could then inform researchers in the future.

HHS: What role did scholars from the human sciences contribute to ‘ways of knowing’ in the COVID-19 pandemic?

NC: In the introductory article we write about different ways of knowing pandemics. Of course, the most prominent way of knowing the COVID-19 pandemic – at least in the UK but I suspect all around the world – was through the health sciences: epidemiology, virology, and so on. But in the UK and probably elsewhere, the human sciences were also included in official ways of knowing the pandemic. So, for example, psychologists, behavioural scientists, anthropologists and historians were included in SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, or at least in expert groups on the periphery of SAGE. There were some very interesting debates among psychologists. There was an argument between what some people have called ‘the frailty tradition’ of psychology – that positions people as mentally frail, easily susceptible to pandemic fatigue, and so on – and a tradition that identifies as ‘the social identity tradition’, which argues that people can be expected to comply with the rules and guidance around non-pharmaceutical interventions so long as certain certain kinds of advice and information are provided to them and certain support is given.

We focus on one particular way of knowing pandemics through the human sciences in the Special Section: diaries, other biographical writing, and related forms like mass photography. We do this not least because the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to be a diarological moment. Many diaries and similar forms were kept, produced, collected, published during the pandemic by many different actors.

HHS: Could you briefly introduce Mass Observation and the Middletown studies?

NC: I’ll try my best but they’re very complex organizations and projects with very complex histories!

Let’s start with Mass Observation, which in its original form existed from 1937 to the late 1940s. It was an independent research organization influenced by anthropology and surrealism, and primarily focused on revealing the everyday lives of ordinary people in the UK. It did that by using volunteers, so-called ‘mass observers’, who were meant to observe their own lives and the lives of people around them and then submit those observations to Mass Observation who would publish them.

In the introductory article to the Special Section we also write about the contemporary iteration of Mass Observation, which is made up of the Mass Observation Archive, established in 1975, attached to University of Sussex in Brighton. That archive contains the papers of the original project, but it’s also become a set of active research projects. Out of the archive is run the Mass Observation Project, which is sort of a panel study. Mass Observation maintains a panel of 500 or 600 volunteer writers based across the UK who, every three or four months, are sent a ‘directive’ consisting of a suggestion of topics to write about. These ‘directive responses’ are sent back in and added to the archive. There is also the 12th May project, which asks people across the UK to keep a day-diary every 12th May and send that in to the archive.

The other archive and research project covered by the Special Section is the Everyday Life in Middletown project. The original Middletown study of Muncie, Indiana was completed by Robert and Helen Lynd in the 1920s. It actually influenced the foundation of Mass Observation in the 1930s. One of the first projects of the original Mass Observation was the ‘Worktown’ study of Bolton, which took its title from Middletown. The original Middletown study was a community study of Muncie, Indiana, which sought to study life in general in a small American city and to trace how life was changing in the 1920s in the context of industrialization.

Since then there have been numerous Middletown studies and the Everyday Life in Middletown project is one of the latest or most recent of those. It was established in 2016 and also runs a panel of volunteer writers.

HHS: What are distinctive about Mass Observation and Middletown as human sciences?

This is a question we try to address in the introductory article to the Special Section. The original Mass Observation had a number of characteristics that mark it out as a distinctive human science. For the purposes of this interview I’ll focus on a particular framing we use, which I think previous writing about Mass Observation has never quite fully developed. This framing is the idea of the original Mass Observation as a science ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. ‘Of the people’: this basically meant to focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people. ‘By the people’: this was achieved in the way Mass Observation attempted to use ordinary people to collect observations about everyday life. These were the mass observers who were recruited to do a kind of citizen science, if you like. Thirdly, ‘for the people’: in that Mass Observation sought to publish these observations as widely as possible, including back to the mass observers who had been making these observations in the first place.

If we think about the contemporary Mass Observation, there are a whole series of characteristics that distinguish it as a particular human science, but it still continues to focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people and continues to mobilize people as mass observers or writers. Perhaps what it does less than the original Mass Observation is publish that writing widely. It’s still ‘of the people’ and ‘by the people’, but perhaps there’s a bit less emphasis on it being ‘for the people’.

The original Middletown study was distinctive as a human science, informed by functionalist cultural anthropology. The Lynds focused on the majority population in Muncie. They produced an account that excluded minorities. The Everyday Life in Middletown project, which is influenced by that original study, is also its own study with its own distinctive human science. It also focuses on the everyday lives of ordinary people in Middletown, but

brings to the foreground the idea that Middletown is a particular place. It is not typical America, but one particular community; a community now characterized by industrial decline, class conflict and provincialism.

The Everyday Life in Middletown Project is influenced by Mass Observation, both the original and contemporary versions, and makes an effort to publish all of the writing that it collects back to those people doing the writing, and it does that digitally. They call it the ‘digital commons’. It is very much trying to practice that democratic science ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’.

HHS: How does Rebecca Coleman and Dawn Lyon’s article ‘Rupture, repetition, and

new rhythms for pandemic times: Mass Observation, everyday life, and COVID-19’ use “rhythm as an object and tool of inquiry to make sense of spatio-temporal change”? How did they gather data on people’s experiences of time during the pandemic?

NC: The authors ran a directive on COVID-19 and time through Mass Observation in August 2020. They partnered with the archivists to send out a directive to the panel of volunteer writers, asking a series of open questions about experiences of time during the pandemic. The authors were interested in the centrality of rhythm to experiences of everyday life and in how the pandemic was potentially disrupting the rhythms of everyday life. The writing they got back suggested to them that the pandemic seemed to be rupturing rhythms of everyday life. Many regular activities had been stopped. Many of the panelists were experiencing time during lockdown as monotonous, as lacking in rhythm, so they were finding ways to make new rhythms by, for example, attuning to nature. One of the most interesting things coming through from this article was the way that Dawn and Rebecca found the responses to their directive contained less life-writing than is usually the case in directive responses for Mass Observation, which suggested it was difficult for people to do life-writing during the pandemic. What people seemed to be doing instead in responses to this directive was grappling with a live present, grappling with the unfolding of the pandemic. The writing takes the form of fragments, small stories. I’ve come to think of the Special Section as partly an archiving of those fragments and small stories and initial analyses of those forms.

HHS: In the article you co-wrote with Clive Barnett, ‘Seeing like an epidemiologist? Mobilising people against COVID-19’ you discuss how ordinary people were encouraged to ‘see like an epidemiologist’ – how was this ‘process of translation’ carried out and to what extent was the attempted mobilisation achieved?

NC: This article started from an observation, which was that during the pandemic one means of governing the pandemic in the UK was that citizens were being encouraged it to see ‘like an epidemiologist’: to think in terms of populations and groups; rates, trends, and distributions; the capacity of public services; and complex systems of causation. By saying ‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’, the government was asking people to think in terms of a complex system of causation. All this was being communicated in terms of statistics, charts, maps etc. at press conferences, for example. Citizens were encouraged to develop a kind of scientific literacy to process all of these resources and then to act accordingly.

Clive and I thought that one of the things we might be able to use Mass Observation’s COVID-19 collections to do would be to see how citizens responded to this attempt to govern the pandemic. It might be that the citizens would become kind of an ‘epidemiological public’ with ‘epidemiological imaginations’, that they would come to see like an epidemiologist. But it’s also possible that citizens would develop their own kind of ‘lay epidemiology’ in response to these attempts to govern behavior during the pandemic.

We read as much as we could of these collections and identified a lay epidemiology

that involved confident use of epidemiological terms and concepts by ordinary people: rates, curves, spikes, that kind of thing. But we also found a much more skeptical and reluctant engagement with the subject positions being offered by epidemiology during the pandemic – ideas of vulnerable groups, at-risk groups and so on. I think our conclusion is that mobilization of people as epidemiologists, or translation of the idea of seeing like an epidemiologist, was partial in the way that it worked out during those first eight months of the pandemic.

HHS: Annebella Pollen’s article in the Special Section ‘‘There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence’: Picturing the pandemic in Mass Observation’s Covid-19 Collections’, looks at visual observation in MO’s COVID-19 collections that take various forms (from photos to drawings to memes) – what does she argue is revealed through the visual culture of COVID-19?

NC: Annebella was interested in how the pandemic was visualized or pictured, so she focused on a particular sample of directive responses and day-diaries in Mass Observation’s COVID-19 collections, responses that included photography, drawing, painting, but also writing about the pandemic’s image cultures and writing that included visual descriptions.

One thing that seemed to be revealed by these materials is a wider pandemic visual culture

in which these materials submitted to Mass Observation was situated. This wider visual culture seems to be comprised of stylized renderings of the spiked spherical virus, photographic documentation of the first stage of the pandemic (empty cities, for example), and also depictions of the main actors of the pandemic, for example, masked healthcare workers. Another thing that’s revealed by these materials is the important role of Mass Observation in that pandemic visual culture. She notes that many of the public photography projects that were set up during the pandemic to collect images and publish them cited the original Mass Observation as an inspiration and justification. Submissions to Mass Observation that the article analyzes were both influenced by a wider pandemic visual culture, but also played an active role in the production of that culture.

The other thing it’s just worth highlighting about this paper is that, similar to the Lyon and Coleman, she notes how a lot of the submissions she was reading contained a kind of live processing of the pandemic and people’s experiences of the pandemic and the questions that the pandemic was posing to people. That’s very similar to Rebecca and Dawn’s observation that what they were reading was a sort of grappling with the live present of an unfolding pandemic.

HHS: Like the Coleman and Lyon article, Patrick Collier and James J. Connolly’s ‘Time shifts: Place, belonging, and future orientation in pandemic everyday life’ looks at experiences of the pandemic from a temporal perspective via materials gathered by the Everyday Life in Middletown project. According to the authors, how were disruptions associated with the pandemic reflected in autobiographical writing?

Collier and Connolly use diaries and directive responses submitted to the Everyday Life in Middletown project to consider how the pandemic distorted experiences of time and place and potentially caused problems for the construction of autobiographical selves in doing so.

During the pandemic people in Muncie seemed to experience the present as confusing because everyday rhythms were disrupted. They didn’t really write much about the future. They seemed to feel disconnected from the future, unable to plan for the future, which is different from what the project would usually receive in terms of autobiographical writing. People writing during the pandemic didn’t write so much about the lifetime; didn’t provide in their writing a sense of continuous life and belonging, which was different to the usual writing that the project would get in response to directives. Ultimately, what Patrick and James suggest is that the pandemic seemed to generate new forms of writing, reflective of new experiences and new forms of relating.

HHS: Finally, a more general question: what were the challenges associated with archiving the pandemic specifically or with analysing archives of the very recent past more generally?

NC: Lots of challenges! One of the challenges was that the pandemic disrupted everyone’s lives, including the lives of researchers and archivists. This is one of the reasons why these projects became so important during the early stages of the pandemic. They were long-standing research projects, organizations and archives. They were already set up. They had an existing infrastructure that allowed for the collection of diaries and other forms of biographical writing during the very early stages of the pandemic, when perhaps setting up something new would have been difficult. There were some ethical challenges to setting up new research projects during the beginning of the pandemic, asking people for their time and asking people to write about a very difficult situation. Mass Observation and the Everyday Life in Middletown project already had panels of volunteer writers and a trusting relationship with those people so it seemed possible to do ethical research and ethical archiving through those organizations.

Now, I’ve talked about those two projects as an opportunity at the beginning of the pandemic, but they are also a constraint. Both of these projects have their own characteristic human sciences; they attract certain participants and certain forms of participation and so they produce a particular account of the pandemic and we have to keep that in mind. I think that’s why it’s so important to situate these projects in the history of the human sciences.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview: Nadine Weidman on the Hoffman Report

We spoke to Nadine Weidman (Harvard University) about the Special Section she edited on ‘The Hoffman Report in historical context’, published in the December 2022 issue of History of the Human Sciences.

History of the Human Sciences: Could you briefly introduce the 2015 Hoffman Report and explain its historical background?

Nadine Weidman: In the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration began what it called the Global War on Terror. As part of that war his administration introduced ‘enhanced interrogations’ of political detainees, who were held as prisoners of the war on terror in places like the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. The administration had a great hunger for information about the possible location of future terrorist attacks and so they detained people who they didn’t charge with any specific crime and who were often held in extremely inhumane conditions in these military prisons. Many observers and international organizations said that these enhanced interrogation techniques were actually tantamount to torture. They would involve things like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions – all kinds of really inhumane techniques.

Psychologists got involved in assisting in these interrogations. The APA [American Psychological Association] got into it in 2005 by issuing high-level ethical guidelines that permitted psychologists to assist with and engage in these so-called interrogations. In 2005 the APA convened a committee and put out a report called ‘Psychological Ethics and National Security’, which gave ethical sanction to psychologists participating in these interrogations. As you might imagine, this created a huge firestorm of controversy within the profession. For 10 years – from 2005 to 2015 – the APA faced a great deal of criticism including from psychologists within the APA. Many people left the APA in response to this issue. Then towards the end of 2014 a journalist made public an email correspondence between APA authorities and national security officials showing that the APA had drawn up those high-level ethical guidelines in 2005 in collusion with members of the military, in collusion with the Department of Defense [DoD].

In the wake of this revelation, which showed that the APA was working with the military to produce the high-level guidelines sanctioning psychologists’ involvement in torture, the APA decided it was finally time for some self critique. They appointed an independent legal investigator, David Hoffman, to conduct an investigation of what had gone on with that 2005 report. The Hoffman Report came out in the summer of 2015 exploring what had happened and showing that the APA had colluded with the Department of Defense to come up with these guidelines. Since then the Hoffman report has itself become a target of controversy. People who are named in the Hoffman report as part of this collusion effort have been suing the APA. So the APA is under litigation right now about the report and some people have been trying to vilify Hoffman and his efforts. It’s a huge ongoing controversy and, of course, Guantanamo Bay is still open. I understand that there are still possibly psychologists involved there. It’s an ethical problem that the American Psychological Association has got itself into and doesn’t seem like it has any clear way forward.

HHS: What were you hoping to achieve with this Special Section?

NW: When the Hoffman Report came out in 2015 and I saw the explosion in the field that it had created, I thought that it was necessary to provide some historical perspective on it. The Hoffmann Report itself does contain some history but only a small section out of 500 pages is devoted to history and historians didn’t put it together so it’s kind of sketchy and brief. I thought it would be interesting for historians of psychology who have done a tremendous amount of work on the relationship between psychology and the US military over the past century or more to lend some perspective on this. I felt that there was an idea that what happened with the APA and torture was just a matter of a few bad apples. I kept hearing that expression: “Oh, it’s just a few bad apples. It’s not really anything to do with the profession or with the APA.” It was as if it was just these renegade psychologists who were making sure that these torture interrogations were, as they put it, safe, legal, and effective.

But how could they be safe and also effective? The whole point was to garner some kind of information out of these detainees, who might not have had any involvement in anything at all.

I thought that we needed some more explanation for how psychologists could have turned in this way to cooperating with the military. It made a very striking contrast to psychiatrists. The American Psychiatric Association specifically distanced itself from having anything to do with the War on Terror, whereas the psychologists didn’t. I thought that needed some explanation and I thought that looking at the longer history of psychology and the military starting in World War I and throughout the Cold War would really lend a context and a historical explanation that I felt was missing from other commentary on this issue. So I got together these authors who are experts in this field to give us insight into this relationship.

The first two articles by Joy Rohde and Dan Aalbers are past-oriented and discuss the history, while the latter two articles are more future-directed, they think about what the profession can do now that we know that this has happened.

HHS: In her article ‘Beyond torture: Knowledge and power at the nexus of social science and national security’, Joy Rohde demonstrates that far from originating in the War on Terror, psychology has long-standing connections with the national security services. What is the significance of these historical entanglements and what ‘cautionary lessons’ do they offer for those responding to the Hoffman Report in the present?

NW: She argues that there has been this ‘psychological-national security nexus’ and that it has benefited both partners. I think that’s key – there have been professional benefits and economic benefits on both sides. The APA itself has benefited in certain ways and I think she shows that. That offers a cautionary lesson in itself because if those benefits are flowing in both directions then we need to know that.

HHS: In ‘The Hoffman Report in historical context: A study in denial’, Dan Aalbers claims that the Hoffman Report can be viewed as a ‘study in denial’ or as an example of ‘motivated blindness’ – what does he mean by this?

NW: He’s arguing that during the Cold War the APA looked away from what might have really been going on. There were these Cold War precedents for involvement of social scientists in interrogation and torture techniques. He says that the DoD and the CIA were using social scientists for their expertise and that professional organizations like the APA were refusing to acknowledge it or refusing to look at the real implications of that. They didn’t want to know what was going on, so they never really faced up to it. They never really opened up about it. I think it’s a little bit of a different argument from saying they gave sanction to it, which I think is what we saw in that 2005 report. This is a little bit more nuanced.

HHS: And he discusses how the use of euphemistic terms like ‘enhanced interrogation’ also facilitates this kind of denial…

NW: Yes. I got these articles together when I was the editor of History of Psychology, which is an APA journal. I was putting together this Hoffman Report special section for that journal. I got all these authors together, they wrote their articles, they went through round after round of peer review and then they went through round after round of legal review. The APA lawyers looked at these articles and censored them. We had to change words. My authors had to insert things like, “in my opinion” or “in my view” or, as you say, use some euphemisms. The APA cited their own legal concerns and their own ongoing involvement in litigation. And then, at the very last minute, when the section was about to appear in the journal the APA called me up and said they declined to publish the special section. The whole thing got stopped right at the very end. They refused publication.

That’s when I turned to Sarah Marks at History of the Human Sciences and asked if we could publish it with you instead. The APA said we could publish it in a non-APA journal but this was after their legal counsel had supposedly approved the articles. That really I did it for me as it seemed like they were preventing this history from being known or trying to use this ongoing legal battle over the Hoffman Report to censor their own history and to legislate what academic historians can and cannot say. That disturbed me. I was very glad that HHS could pick it up and it could finally see the light of day.

HHS: What was specific about the ‘weaponization of psychology post-9/11’ (according to the co-authored article by Jean Maria Arrigo, Lawrence P Rockwood, Jack O’Brien, Dutch France, David DeBatto and John Kitiakou)?

NW: The authors (who are both psychologists and military/intelligence professionals) argue that military sector objectives and academic science objectives are very different. They include charts in the article that show that their [respective] aims and methods are just completely different. And yet, they argue, academic organizations like the APA are prime targets for infiltration from military sector objectives. I think they mean that studying what happened with the APA and within psychology can act as a warning for other social science organizations who might be tempted to line up with the military. They show that this is not a good partnership because the goals are so fundamentally incompatible.

HHS: Elissa N. Rodkey, Michael Buttrey and Krista L. Rodkey’s article ‘Beyond following rules: Teaching research ethics in the age of the Hoffman Report’ argues that the findings of the Hoffman Report ‘illustrate how ethics codes are not objective and ahistorical, but always products of a particular time and place’ – what is the significance of this insight for how ethics codes are understood and taught?

NW: This article asks what the revelations in the report mean for the profession, for psychologists. The authors also ask what it means for us as teachers of psychology and of ethics. They ask how we can teach ethics knowing that one of the major professional academic organizations in the US compromised its ethics in this way. The authors see ethics codes as historically situated, products of time and place. They’re not universal or trans historical or trans cultural. They give some historical background of the APA ethics code, which was one of the earliest in the profession. They also trace how it changed over time. They then talk about the outcomes of the Hoffman Report for the APA ethics code and ask what remains to be done to ensure that such military collusion does not recur. In the end they propose a wholly different view of ethics from what we might be accustomed to. They suggest that we take up ‘virtue ethics’ as an alternative to a more cost-benefit analysis which is the way ethics is usually taught and practiced. I think they’re saying that kind of cost-benefit analysis can lead us into situations like the collusion that the Hoffman Report uncovered.

I think the APA would like this whole issue to go away and for us to move past it, to say that it’s in the past so let’s forget it. The whole point of the special section is to show that the historical roots of the connection between psychology and the military are very deep.

The links are very longstanding and they have had and continue to have tremendous significance for the profession. Division 19 of the APA, which is military psychology, is one of the largest and most powerful of the divisions. Those interests are still very potent in this discipline. I don’t think that there’s a place for psychologists – who are supposed to be in the helping professions – in an arena that involves torturing people. I think the whitewashing and euphemisms that the APA has used in describing these connections are problematic.

I don’t think we can understand how the ethics report got issued in 2005 without looking at the longer history. I don’t think we can understand where we should go from now on, how we should act from now on, without understanding how we got to that point. This is a place for historians to make a contribution. That’s what I was hoping to do with this section. Someone at the APA must recognize that there is a threatening issue here, that there’s something really serious going on, or the special section would not have been pulled from the History of Psychology journal.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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

Erik Baker (Harvard University) received a commendation in this year’s History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and his commended essay ‘The Ultimate Think Tank: The Rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian’.

HHS: First of all, congratulations on your commendation in the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize, for your essay ‘The Ultimate Think Tank’. To begin with, could you briefly introduce your dissertation on ‘The Entrepreneurial Work Ethic: Creativity, Leadership, and the Sciences of Labor Discipline in the United States’ and explain how this article fits into that project?

Erik Baker: Thanks and thanks again to the editors of HHS for the commendation – it’s a real honour and thank you for taking the time to share this work.

My broader dissertation project is about the history of what I call ‘entrepreneurial management.’ That strikes some people as a contradiction in terms. Typically we think of management and managers as faceless, gray-suited technocrat types, and we tend to think of entrepreneurs as really dynamic with innovative startups etc. But the cultural figures who typify the entrepreneur category are themselves also bosses. If you think of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, these are people who are icons of entrepreneurship, but they’re also executives who command increasingly large armies of employees. What I show is that since the early 20th century, management theorists have been interested in capturing this mystique that surrounds the entrepreneur, which seems to allow entrepreneurs to command attention, loyalty and legitimacy in a way that other kinds of managers don’t. And they’ve sought to propagate that entrepreneurial spirit among the managerial ranks more broadly.

The result, in the United States economy, is what I call ‘the entrepreneurial work ethic’. This comes from the claim that what makes entrepreneurs effective bosses is the fact that they themselves are committed to a creative project that energizes the firm and willing to work extraordinary hours in pursuit of this vision. They’re able to inculcate commitment to the firm’s mission among their employees through the example of their own work ethic, so people authentically buy into what the firm’s about. They seek to emulate the work ethic of the entrepreneurial leader of the firm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Santa Fe Institute is emblematic of this trend. It was founded by alums of Los Alamos National Laboratory and subsequent decades it has attracted a great number of expatriates from the world of university science. This exodus from the established world of government labs and universities is reconceptualized as a form of entrepreneurship: the scientists are striking out for themselves and they have their own new creative ventures that they’re really committed to and they’re going to work hard to get them off the ground.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.

Interview: Liana Glew on psychiatric paperwork

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HHS: How do you define ‘archival excess’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.

Normality – interview with Peter Cryle

The current special issue of the History of the Human Sciences is a collection of essays on Normality, edited by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, which responds to their co-written book Normality: A Critical Genealogy, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017. We discussed the genesis and contents of the special issue with its co-editor Professor Peter Cryle, University of Queensland.

HHS: Before asking you more about the special issue, could you briefly introduce your jointly authored book, Normality: A Critical Genealogy, which was published by Chicago University Press in 2017?

Peter Cryle: Quite often when people are doing research they start off with something that’s a bit of an irritant, something that annoys them and which they wish they could resolve. For me and my friend and colleague Elizabeth Stevens ‘normality’ was a major irritant. We thought the idea was extraordinarily widespread but very poorly analyzed and that it involved all kinds of contradictions.

We had two main options: one was to stop complaining and ignore it, and the other was to try to do the kinds of things that cultural and intellectual historians can do in these circumstances, which is to have a look more closely at this rather messy thematic monster to see if we could nail some things down about it. That’s a way, if you like, for intellectuals to fight back against intellectual messiness. That was our main thought and then we had to go and look for the normal wherever we could find it and make a history out of that.

The two of us worked on it in parallel for about eight years, so we knew at the end we would have a book that would hold together, but we also knew that there were many places that we could have gone to and that there was much more for us to learn about those places. That was the way in which the book led to this special issue. We had a sense that there was much to be done. We had a working seminar in Italy to which we invited most of the people that took part in this special issue. Their thoughts, their contributions and their implicit constructive criticisms of our book provided us with extra material and extra things to think about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the end we realised, you can’t just make the normal into the name of everything hateful and everything that’s to be avoided, scorned or deconstructed. There are things about the normal that are enabling and that are functional and that we can’t and shouldn’t reject. We ended up being thoroughly ambivalent about those things. We didn’t think the things that we began with were mistaken, but we realized how much work the normal could do. We didn’t cease to believe the normal was constructed, inhibiting or trivializing but we saw the richness of it. Initially we thought we would just demolish it but we found stuff that we didn’t know we were going to find. We didn’t just start with some clever theory and demonstrate that is was true, regardless of what evidence we ran into, and I think that’s a good thing.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.

Histories of sexology today – interview with Katie Sutton

‘Histories of sexology today: Reimagining the boundaries of scientia sexualis’ is the current issue of History of the Human Sciences, guest edited by Kirsten Leng and Katie Sutton. Special issue co-editor Katie Sutton spoke to the journal’s web editor Hannah Proctor about how the essays in the issue contribute to extending our understandings of histories of sexology.

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HHS: First of all, could you say a little about the genesis of the Special Issue? What did you, as editors, hope to achieve with this collection of essays?

KS: Kirsten Leng and I have both been working in various areas of the history of sexology for some time and with this special issue we really wanted to push some of the boundaries of the field.

Michel Foucault influentially turned his attention to the history of sexual science in the History of Sexuality and since then there’s been a tendency to prioritize certain kinds of analytical questions within the field – for example, how has our understanding of homosexuality developed over time? Or, how have scientists gone about diagnosing “deviants”? This has been a history with a decidedly Western, male, white and European focus. The history of sexology has also often been limited to the “medical” and “scientific”. We were interested in opening up the historiography in more interdisciplinary directions, including by problematizing the disciplinary boundaries of the field from its very early days onwards. We were also interested in how we could use this issue to explore more of the transnational connections that have influentially shaped this field across time, as well as pushing further at questions around gender and intersectionality that historians have been turning their attention to in recent years.

In these respects, this issue connects in interesting ways to a debate that was published a couple of years ago in this journal between Heike Bauer and Ivan Crozier, a back and forth about the disciplinary limits of sexology that asked, among other things, how we might use concepts like translation to push those a bit further.

In your introduction you discuss the historiography of sexology, which, as you point out is still relatively young – how do you see the essays in this collection as intervening in or extending this historiography?

Firstly, in a geographic sense. The essays extend a historiography that has often focused on Western European and specific national contexts. For example, they shed light on how Eastern European sexologies and sexologists crossed the iron curtain during the Cold War era, or the prominence of North American thinkers at various key moments.

Secondly, they extend it by looking backwards and forwards in time. We’ve got essays such as Benjamin Kahan’s, which looks right back to the mid 19th century in the US, but we also have pieces that look forward through to the post World War II era. These expand the parameters of a historigoraphy that has tended to focus on the early 20^th century.

But as well as pushing at conventional limitations of space and time, we were interested, as I’ve already noted, in approaching questions of disciplinarity in more open ways. For example, one essay engages explicitly with animal studies, and shows how scientists turned to the natural world to make new kinds of arguments about human sexual and gender diversity. As Ina Linge shows in this essay, animal research has always been part of the sexological project, but it has been a decidedly neglected aspect of historical scholarship. Other essays in this issue explore the porous boundaries between sexology and various traditions of psychotherapy (both Western Freudian traditions and Eastern European traditions of Pavlovian psychotherapy), as well as with fields more at the edges of scientific tradition, such as phrenology and transcendentalism.

How do you see scholarship on the history of sexology as contributing to explorations of ‘the relationship between sexual knowledge and sexual politics’?

Ina Linge’s piece is a good example of this. It shows not only how research into intersex moths and butterflies in early 20th century Germany was used to make arguments about the naturalness of sex and gender variation, but also how the scientists very consciously applied their experimental findings to quite politicized arguments around decriminalizing homosexuality, particularly during the Weimar Republic.

Another good example is Kate Davison’s essay, which opens up questions around the understudied context of sexual politics in the Cold War. Sexologists in socialist countries were examining homosexuality just as their colleagues on the other side of the iron curtain were. Yet the history of gay “conversion” therapies in Czechoslovakia points to more progressive paths than were taken elsewhere. Researchers there argued for legal reforms around homosexality, but their ideas were taken in much less politically progressive directions when they were drawn on, selectively, by scientists in the West.

These essays also contribute to thinking about sexual politics and sexual science in relation to race. Scholars such as Heike Bauer and Laurie Marhoefer have shown that racializing frameworks have always been a critical, if often invisible, part of how sexual scientific knowledge was produced and conceptualized. Such ideas have continued to shape our thinking, though often in quite implicit ways, such as by feeding the colour blindness of much contemporary LGBTQ politics. Even someone quite progressive like Magnus Hirschfeld, who is often lauded as a left-wing pioneer of gay rights, was very much tied up in imperialist and rationalizing frameworks, from which we haven’t quite extricated ourselves, even in the present. Benjamin Kahan’s piece is an example of work that furthers this project by pushing at the racial dimensions of some of the earliest sexological thought, and showing how this was tied up with discussions in other fields such as phrenology that were thoroughly infused with underlying racializing and racist thought.

Finally, recent work has started to pay more attention to rethinking the place of pleasure and desire in the history of the sexual sciences. What are the political implications of bringing pleasure and ideas of the erotic back into the equation? Sarah Bull’s piece on the complex relationships between sex researchers and erotic and explicit print cultures does this particularly well, but this is a question that has often been sidelined.

As you underline in the introduction, one of the strengths of the issue is its emphasis on transnational conversations between sexologists –what was significant about these kinds of exchanges?

We’ve tended to do research that has been quite constrained by national boundaries, or sometimes by the linguistic boundaries of the German speaking world or the English speaking world. We’ve also often tended to assume that there was a distinctly German origin of modern sexual science. But if we pay a bit more attention to the conversations that were always going on, such as between North American and European researchers in the mid 19^th century, we can develop a more nuanced account of sexology as a field that has always looked beyond national boundaries, even from its earliest beginnings.

The trade in erotic books and the non-scientific circulations of medical and scientific writing on sex discussed by Bull is a good example here. Erotic book trade dealers in North America saw a strong market in trading in European sexual scientific works in the 1930s and 1940s, and publishing new editions of works by sexologists like Havelock Ellis. These kinds of circulations brought ideas that had been originally formulated in a distinctly medical-scientific space to a much wider mid-century US audience of lay readers.

Ina Linge’s essay explores how research into ‘intersex butterflies’ influenced sexologists at the Institute of Sexology in Germany. What are the implications of the case she makes for ‘paying attention to non-human actors in the history of sexology’?

Ina Linge’s essay, which we touched on earlier, makes a strong case for paying more attention to non-human actors in the history of sexual science. Many of us may know that Kinsey, for example, made a name for himself studying insects before he turned his attention to his students at Indiana University and human sexual behaviors, but in general, animals have been sorely lacking from the historiography of sexology, and that’s not really justified. When you look at the earliest sexological journals, animal research, along with ethnological comparisons, were frequently used as reference points. What was naturally occurring in animals could be used to argue for what was also naturally occurring in humans, and for what by extension could be considered “normal” or legally justifiable. Similarly, my co-editor Kirsten Leng has shown that German feminists in this era were busy drawing on nature comparisons to justify their political demands as in line with what nature intended.

Linge points out that pop culture today is really fascinated with stories about queer animals, such as penguins showing same-sex desires. Those comparisons tend to be used to argue for the naturalness of sex and gender variation in humans as well, and what Linge does that is new is to situate these comparative moves in that early 20th century moment. She draws on what Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal have referred to as the ‘moral authority of nature’ to show how some scientists were starting to advocate for more progressive sexual politics. Jewish German geneticist Richard Goldschmidt knew very well when he was publishing his research on intersex moths that this might be drawn on to make political points about humans as well, especially when it came to defending homosexuality. These kinds of analogy were intensely politicized in Germany at that time because of the criminalization of gay sex under Paragraph 175. At the same time, Linge’s essay shows how these ‘natural is normal’ arguments could be put to more sinister use, such as by those arguing against interracial sexual contact or in favor of sterilizing homosexual men.

A series of intersexual females of *Lymantria dispar*, R. Goldschmidt, *The Mechanism and Physiology of Sex Determination* (1923)

Sarah Bull’s contribution, which explores the relationship between sexual science and erotic print culture, raises questions about respectability and the sources of scientific knowledge – what light does this shed on what she describes as the ‘porous’ boundaries of sexology as a discipline?

Sarah Bull’s piece really problematizes those border areas between sexual science, on the one hand (with practitioners working to establish a respectable scientific field of inquiry not weighed down by older notions of religion, morality and taboo), and on the other hand, ways of looking and talking about sex that were more aligned with traditions of erotica and pornography. From the late 19th century British sexologists in particular were constantly vulnerable to censorship, prosecutions and to their works being labeled obscene, although censorship was also an important factor shaping the development of sexual science elsewhere.

Bull shows that sexual scientists were both loudly disavowing any connection to these seemingly dubious realms of smut and porn, but, at the same time, they were absolutely dependent on those “grey” areas of the publishing world for their evidence. They were also dependent on them for disseminating new kinds of knowledge about sex, including across national boundaries, as I mentioned earlier. She points out that the borders between these fields were always porous, but they were also always policed, with appeals to “science” often used to justify protecting work from the censors.

She points to some interesting examples of that porosity over time, especially as erotic literature traders began republishing older sexological works and circulating across their original national origins in ways that targeted less specialist audiences. By the 1970s sexologists were themselves publishing in erotic magazines like Playboy. There is still a lot that we don’t know about these interplays between the “erotic” and the “scientific” in the history of sexology.

You highlight the importance of ‘balancing sexology’s global dimensions with its regional specificities’. Both your essay and Benjamin Kahan’s contributions examine sexology in the US at different historical moments – what was distinctive about the trajectory of sexological research in North America?

This is a really interesting question and I like how you bring those two pieces together, because they do speak to different ends of the history of sexology in North America, which has often played second fiddle to its European counterparts.

Kahan’s piece, which we touched on earlier, shows how mid-19th century American researchers such as Elizabeth Osgood were highly influential in coining key terms in sexual science, as early as several decades before terms like ‘Sexualwissenschaft’ were introduced in Germany. My own work as a cultural historian of Germany, meanwhile, has tended to follow the narrative around the German “invention” of modern sexuality—an explanation that sees the German speaking world as crucial in coming up with many of the identity categories, such as “homosexual” or “trans” identities, that have stayed with us in into the present. But Kahan’s work shows that if we pay more attention to North American actors, and to what was going on in science-adjacent fields like phrenology and transcendentalism, then we can develop much more nuanced and transnational narratives of the sexual sciences.

My piece hones in on Kinsey’s research in the late 1940s and 1950s. I do see sexology as shifting its global centre of gravity in this period, from the German speaking world following the rise of the Nazis across the Atlantic to North America. Many Jewish medical practitioners, analysts, and scientists emigrated from Europe to North America, and they shifted these conversations in very distinct ways. By the mid twentieth century North America had become the international centre of both sexology and psychoanalysis, but we also need to examine the distinctly national interests that shaped these disciplines in that context, such as the fundamental shifts in US psychoanalysis compared to early Freudian thinking due to the prominence of a certain brand of Protestant Christianity.

Finally, would it be possible to reflect on how work into the historiography of sexology engages with the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ as historical categories?

I would say that work on the historiography of sexology has played a key role in encouraging researchers working across all sorts of fields, not just the history of sexuality, to engage more critically with ideas of the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ – to ask how these categories have changed over time and to recognise that they’ve always been historically contingent. There are some really interesting connections between the essays in this special issue and those in another issue coming out soon in the History of the Human Sciences on the history of normality (edited by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens). Their work and work by scholars such as Laura Doan shows that the “normal” has always been a contested and contingent idea, and one that only really came to carry the meanings it does now in the mid 20th century. Some of this critical attention on the “normal” is now also shifting to the “natural”, with scholars pushing at how the natural and the normal are sometimes seen as interchangeable categories, but also how and where they can, or must, be teased apart.