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History of the Human Sciences
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.498 ![]() Citation Impact (citeScore): 1 Number of Followers: 6 ![]() ISSN (Print) 0952-6951 - ISSN (Online) 1461-720X Published by Sage Publications ![]() |
- Mind and knowledge in the early thought of Franz Boas, 1887–1904
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Authors: Valentina Mann
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Franz Boas’ articulation of a new historicist and relativistic framework for anthropology stands as the founding moment of the discipline. Accordingly, scholars have sought to trace its source and inspirations, often concluding that Boas’ thought was shaped almost exclusively by his German background and characterized by a foundational methodological tension. Here, I instead show that Boas’ most creative early work benefitted from close interaction with debates in psychology and that his methodological reflections were part of the much wider series of discussions in North America engendered by the importation of the German Geistes-/Naturwissenschaft debate. Central to such debates, as well as to anthropological ones in these years, were the contested definitions of the human mind and of knowledge. Recovering this shared focus reveals the importance of such questions to Boas’ early writings, allowing us to better reconstruct his views on anthropology and to appreciate how he approached the question of how to justify the bounding of human knowledge into specific disciplines.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-04-29T05:06:42Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951221091137
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- Stressing the ‘body electric’: History and psychology of the
techno-ecologies of work stress-
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Authors: Jessica Pykett, Mark Paterson
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article explores histories of the science of stress and its measurement from the mid 19th century, and brings these into dialogue with critical sociological analysis of emerging responses to work stress in policy and practice. In particular, it shows how the contemporary development of biomedical and consumer devices for stress self-monitoring is based on selectively rediscovering the biological determinants and biomarkers of stress, human functioning in terms of evolutionary ecology, and the physical health impacts of stress. It considers how the placement of the individual body and its environment within particular spatio-temporal configurations renders it subject to experimental investigation through standardized apparatus, electricity, and statistical normalization. Examining key themes and processes such as homeostasis, metricization, datafication, and emotional governance, we conclude that the figure of the ‘body electric’ plays a central limiting role in current technology-supported approaches to managing work stress, and that an historical account can usefully open these to collective scrutiny.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-03-21T08:19:52Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951221081754
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- Quentin Skinner, contextual method and Machiavelli's understanding of
liberty-
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Authors: Nikola Regent
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
The article examines Quentin Skinner's influential interpretation of Machiavelli's views on liberty, and the sharp divergence between his methodological ideas and his actual practice. The paper explores how Skinner's political ideals directed his interpretation against his own methodological precepts, to offer a basis for a ‘revival’ of republican theory. Skinner's reinterpretation of Machiavelli as a theorist of negative liberty is examined, and refuted. The article analyses Skinner's claim about liberty as the key political value for Machiavelli, and demonstrates that liberty is secondary to empire on the list of Machiavelli's priorities. Skinner's vocabulary and efforts to tone down or ignore Machiavelli's more aggressive ideas are closely examined. The analysis offered in the article, it is suggested, has wider implications, showing the difficulty of applying contextualism in practice, by the very founder of this approach in the history of ideas.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-02-28T02:14:16Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211049930
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- Confronting the field: Tylor's Anahuac and Victorian thought on human
diversity-
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Authors: Chiara Lacroix
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Victorian anthropologists have been nicknamed ‘armchair anthropologists’. Yet some of them did set foot in the field. Edward Burnett Tylor's first published work, Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern, described his youthful travels in Mexico. Tylor's confrontation with the ‘field’ revealed significant in tensions between the different beliefs and attitudes that Tylor held towards Mexican society. Contrasts between the evidence of Mexico's history (prior to European contact) and the present-day society of the 1850s led Tylor to see both progress and degeneration in Mexico, both ‘authentic’ culture and deep cultural mixture. In order to show that he was capable of uncovering the ‘authentic’ Mexican society, Tylor portrayed himself as a professional traveller-ethnographer, even though he was an anthropological novice. The embodied confrontation with the physical field also created tensions in Tylor's relationship to Mexico. Despite Tylor's mainly ethnocentric vision of foreign societies, his experiences of physically navigating the Mexican land and environment led him towards an empathetic relativism with respect to material culture and social practice. At the same time, his role as a traveller encouraged him to see the field as a fluid entity with no clear boundaries, even as he searched for a bounded and untouched Mexican society amidst cultural mixture. Drawing out the tensions resulting from a Victorian traveller's confrontation with the foreign field allows for a more balanced engagement with the works of these Victorian scholars of human diversity, which have often been portrayed as naively ethnocentric.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-02-25T05:31:57Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211069512
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- The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute libertarian*
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Authors: Erik Baker
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Why do corporations and wealthy philanthropists fund the human sciences' Examining the history of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a private research institute founded in the early 1980s, this article shows that funders can find as much value in the social worlds of the sciences they sponsor as in their ideas. SFI became increasingly dependent on funding from corporations and libertarian business leaders in the 1990s and 2000s. At the same time, its intellectual work came to focus on the underlying principles of adaptation, innovation, and decentralized coordination supposedly at work in ‘complex systems’ from biological ecosystems to markets and firms. This research cast the ideas of the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek into a new scientific idiom. SFI also became a space where figures in business, media, academia, and politics could come to learn to see the world in a particular way—to acquire the subjectivity of what I call ‘the Santa Fe Institute libertarian’. At SFI, visitors did not simply learn the principles of neo-Hayekian complex system science. They came to see themselves as agents of social evolution, providing the spark that the free-market system needed to produce new technologies and new solutions to social problems without top-down political direction. For the Institute's corporate and libertarian financiers, SFI was not just a space where intellectuals described the world in favored ideological terms, but a space where elite actors became committed to the project of making a new political-economic order.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-02-21T12:42:10Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211068995
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- Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric
history-
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Authors: Liana Glew
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Paperwork plays a key role in a how institutions accommodate, refuse, or manage disabled people. This article develops modes for reading paperwork that build on each other, beginning with (a) recognizing the institutional pressures at work in shaping bureaucratic practices, then (b) considering how a person's relationship to disability influences how they might encounter these practices, and ultimately (c) noticing how the encounter between disabled/mad people and an institution might create something new, what the author calls archival excess. These methods for reading are in conversation with disability studies, medical humanities, and document studies, and ultimately work toward a goal adapted from the principles of Disability Justice: recognizing the wholeness of disabled subjects in institutional archives.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-02-16T02:50:18Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211068975
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- The conundrum of the psychological interface: On the problems of bridging
the biological and the social-
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Authors: James Rupert Fletcher, Rasmus H. Birk
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
In this article, we consider how certain types of contemporary biosocial psychiatric research conceptualise and explicate biology-social relations. We compare the historic biopsychosocial model to recent examples of social defeat research on schizophrenia and cultural neuroscience work on affective disorders. This comparison reveals how the contemporary turn towards the ‘biosocial’ within psychiatric research relies upon ideas of the psychological as an interface. This is problematic because psychological notions of ‘experience’ are used as the central mechanics of biosocial processes, but lack any meaningful engagement with considerable debates within psychology and cognitive science about what the mind, and indeed the psychological, actually is, its relationship to social life, and how we should study it. The psychological interface is therefore vital to these biosocial hypotheses but is remarkably underdeveloped in comparison to its biological and sociological components. We argue that biosocial psychiatric research could gain a great deal from engaging with contemporary theorisations of experience and being more critical of vague appeals to psychological phenomena.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-02-08T10:20:18Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211070503
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- Lesbian and bisexual women's experiences of aversion therapy in England
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Authors: Helen Spandler, Sarah Carr
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article presents the findings of a study about the history of aversion therapy as a treatment technique in the English mental health system to convert lesbians and bisexual women into heterosexual women. We explored published psychiatric and psychological literature, as well as lesbian, gay, and bisexual archives and anthologies. We identified 10 examples of young women receiving aversion therapy in England in the 1960s and 1970s. We situate our discussion within the context of post-war British and transnational medical history. As a contribution to a significantly under-researched area, this article adds to a broader transnational history of the psychological treatment of marginalised sexualities and genders. As a consequence, it also contributes to LGBTQIA+ history, the history of medicine, and psychiatric survivor history. We also reflect on the ethical implications of the research for current mental health practice.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-01-06T08:38:06Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211059422
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- Social science and Marxist humanism beyond collectivism in Socialist
Romania-
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Authors: Adela Hîncu
First page: 77
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article brings together the history of the social sciences and the history of social thought in Socialist Romania. It is concerned with the development of ideas about the social beyond collectivism, especially about the relationship between individual and society under socialism, from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s. The analysis speaks to three major themes in the current historiography of Cold War social science. First, the article investigates the role of disciplinary specialization in the advancement of new ideas about the social in the postwar period. Specifically, it asks how the debate over the relationship between sociology and Marxism-Leninism has challenged ideas about collectivism from Stalinist social science. Second, the article shows how social practice, individual and collective agency, and people's subjectivities became theoretically relevant in the 1960s, and how they were integrated, via empirical sociological research, into the reworked conceptual apparatus of post-Stalinist Marxism-Leninism. This complicates accounts about the role of quantification and theorization in postwar social science by foregrounding the intense reflection on the role of empirical research in sociology under state socialism. Third, the article shows how the relationship between individual and society became a topic of interest across social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. The Marxist humanist approach to the social, although it never achieved the institutional status of a distinct discipline, adds an important perspective from East Central Europe to the existing historiography of the ‘thinning’ of the social in social sciences and social thought beginning in the 1950s.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-02-16T02:50:29Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211069491
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- Freud in Cambridge Review Symposium
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Authors: Felicity Callard, Sarah Marks
First page: 194
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-03-18T07:41:13Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951221084503
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- Fort/Da/Freud
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Authors: Paul Kingsbury
First page: 198
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-03-18T07:39:30Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211066257
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- A public inquiry into Freud’s influence upon Cambridge
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Authors: Steve Pile
First page: 205
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-03-18T07:38:50Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211066255
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- Freud in Cambridge: An institutional romance'
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Authors: Jessica Dubow
First page: 212
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-03-18T07:38:10Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211066254
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- Criticism as self-analysis
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Authors: Clive Barnett
First page: 219
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-03-18T07:40:32Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211070934
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- Reply to my commentators – Thinking with Forrester: dreams, true crimes,
and histories of change-
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Authors: Laura Jean Cameron
First page: 229
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2022-03-18T07:37:12Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211066251
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- Alfred Vierkandt’s notion of the social group
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Authors: Sandro Segre
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
German sociologist Alfred Vierkandt is hardly remembered today. This may seem surprising. Several prominent sociologists from the German-speaking countries contributed to the Handwörterbuch der Soziologie (1931), which Vierkandt edited and published. However, Vierkandt did not interact with any of them significantly, and this publication brought no recognition of the importance of his sociological oeuvre in Germany, the United States, or elsewhere. His key notion of the social group found no acknowledgment among other contemporary or later sociologists, even though several of them used this notion and discussed social groups in their own writings. Moreover, those who paid close attention to his writings, like Abel and Hochstim, evaluated them quite critically. Both before and after World War II, Vierkandt remained a solitary and relatively unknown author.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-12-16T11:00:32Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211053136
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- Modern European sexological and orientalist assimilations of medieval
Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah to erotology-
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Authors: Alison M. Downham Moore
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article discusses the term erotology, which was applied to medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah (the science of coitus), as well as other world traditions of sexual knowledge, by European sexologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who contrasted it with their own forms of inquiry into sexual matters in the modern field of sexual science. It argues that the homogenisation and minimisation of all ancient and non-European forms of medical knowledge about sex, even one as substantial as the ‘ilm al-bah tradition, supported a particular story about the origins of sexology's own emergence as a new and unprecedented biomedical and scientific way of knowing, characterised by an opposition assumed between sexuality and religion, by a view of sexual variations as perversions or pathologies, and by a view of Arabs and Muslims as sexually excessive. The article focusses on French, English, German, Austrian, and Italian sources of the 19th century that discussed the history of sexual medicine, relating these accounts to recent attempts to historicise sexology. It considers how forms of colonial hierarchy and exoticist views of non-European cultures impacted the dismissal of ‘ilm al-bah among European sexual scientists and how they may continue to exert an influence on forms of modern historical inquiry that are not attentive to scholarship on medieval Islamicate sexual medicine.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-12-09T01:01:59Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211056152
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- Measuring non-Han bodies: Anthropometry, colonialism, and biopower in
China's south-western borderland in the 1930s and 1940s-
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Authors: Jing Zhu
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article examines the biopower of non-Han bodies by considering the intersections of anthropology, racial science, and colonial regimes. During the 1930s and 1940s, when extensive anthropometric research was being undertaken on non-Han populations in the south-western borderlands of China, several anthropologists studied non-Han groups under the aegis of frontier administration. Chinese scholars sought to generate the physical characteristics of ethnic minority groups in the south-west of China, through the methodology of body measurement, in order to identify forms of social and political intervention in the management of the non-Han population in wartime. This article examines the global transmission of Western social science in China, highlighting the local reception of Western racial taxonomy. Non-Han bodies were represented as a subcategory of the Mongolian/‘Yellow’ race through anthropometric research. The body measurements of non-Han people were used to demonstrate physical similarities between the Han and various ethnic minority groups in order to evoke a unified Zhonghua minzu (Chinese ethnicity) that embraced both the Han Chinese and frontier ethnic minority groups.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-12-06T11:13:05Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211049906
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- ‘You never need an analyst with Bobby around’: The mid-20th-century
human sciences in Sondheim and Furth's musical Company-
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Authors: Jeffrey Rubel
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article offers a case study in how historians of science can use musical theater productions to understand the cultural reception of scientific ideas. In 1970, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's musical Company opened on Broadway. The show engaged with and reflected contemporary theories and ideas from the human sciences; Company's portrayal of its 35-year-old bachelor protagonist, his married friends, and his girlfriends reflected present-day theories from psychoanalysis, sexology, and sociology. In 2018, when director Marianne Elliott revived the show with a female protagonist, Company once again amplified contemporary dilemmas around human sciences expertise—this time, the biological fertility clock. Through Company, Sondheim and Furth—and later Elliott—constructed arguments about modern society that paralleled those put forth by contemporary human scientists, including psychoanalytic models of the mind, the lonely crowd phenomenon, and shifting conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Because of their wide popularity and potential for readaptation, musicals such as Company offer a promising source base for analyzing the relationship between contemporary society and scientific expertise in specific historical contexts.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-11-30T02:31:14Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211049922
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- The pragmatic use of metaphor in empirical psychology
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Authors: Rami Gabriel
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Metaphors of mind and their elaboration into models serve a crucial explanatory role in psychology. In this article, an attempt is made to describe how biology and engineering provide the predominant metaphors for contemporary psychology. A contrast between the discursive and descriptive functions of metaphor use in theory construction serves as a platform for deliberation upon the pragmatic consequences of models derived therefrom. The conclusion contains reflections upon the possibility of an integrative interdisciplinary psychology.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-11-26T11:24:43Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211047395
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- Psychoanalysis and anti-racism in mid-20th-century America: An alternative
angle of vision-
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Authors: Tom Fielder
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
The conventional historiography of psychoanalysis in America offers few opportunities for the elaboration of anti-racist themes, and instead American ‘ego psychology’ has often been regarded as the most acute exemplar of ‘racist’ psychoanalysis. In this article, consistent with the historiographical turn Burnham first identified under the heading of ‘the New Freud Studies’, I distinguish between histories of psychoanalytic practitioners and histories of psychoanalytic ideas in order to open out an alternative angle of vision on the historiography. For psychoanalytic ideas were in fact omnipresent within American culture at mid-century, and they played a fundamental role in the psychological reworking of race that unfolded in the work of social scientists, literary artists, and cultural critics in the 1940s and early Cold War years, culminating in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954, a major landmark in the civil rights narrative. By pursuing the implications of psychoanalysis in anti-racist struggles at mid-century, and with particular attention to Richard Wright and his autobiographical novel Black Boy, I move towards unearthing an alternative historical account of the intersection between psychoanalysis and race, which offers new ways for psychoanalysis and the history of the human sciences to think about this period.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-10-27T12:10:19Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211042784
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- From class origins to individual psychopathology: Spousal murder according
to state socialist Czechoslovak criminology-
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Authors: Kateřina Lišková, Lucia Moravanská
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Over the course of 40 years of state socialism, the explanation that Czechoslovak criminologists gave for spousal murder changed significantly. Initially attributing offences to the perpetrator's class origins, remnants of his bourgeois way of life, and the lack of positive influence from the collective in the long 1950s, criminologists then refocused their attention solely on the individual's psychopathology during the period known as ‘Normalization’, which encompassed the last two decades of state socialism. Based on an analysis of archival sources, including scholarly journals and expert reports, and following Ian Hacking's insight that ‘kinds of people come into being’ through the realignment of systems of knowledge, this article shows how new kinds of spousal murderer emerged as a result of shifting criminological expertise. We explain the change as the result of the psychiatrization of criminology that occurred in Czechoslovakia at a time when the regime needed to consolidate after the upheavals of the Prague Spring of 1968. The criminological framing of spousal murder as belonging squarely in the individualized realm of the private sphere reflected the contemporaneous effort of the regime to enclose the private as a sphere of relative state non-interference.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-10-09T06:38:43Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211027724
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- From the margins to the NICE guidelines: British clinical psychology and
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Authors: David J. Harper, Sebastian Townsend
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Although histories of cognitive behaviour therapy have begun to appear, their use with people with psychosis diagnoses has received relatively little attention. In this article, we elucidate the conditions of possibility for the emergence of cognitive behaviour therapy for psychosis (CBTp) in England between 1982 and 2002. We present an analysis of policy documents, research publications and books, participant observation, and interviews with a group of leading researchers and senior policy actors. Informed by Derksen and Beaulieu’s articulation of social technologies, we show how CBTp was developed and stabilised through the work of a variety of overlapping informal, academic, clinical, professional, and policy networks. The profession of clinical psychology played a key role in this development, successfully challenging the traditional ‘division of labour’ where psychologists focused on ‘neurosis’ and left ‘psychosis’ to psychiatry. Following Abbott's systems approach to professions, we identify a number of historical factors that created a jurisdictional vulnerability for psychiatry while strengthening the jurisdictional legitimacy of clinical psychology in providing psychological therapies to service users with psychosis diagnoses. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence played a significant role in adjudicating jurisdictional legitimacy, and its 2002 schizophrenia guidelines, recommending the use of psychological therapies, marked a radical departure from the psychiatric consensus. Our analysis may be of wider interest in its focus on social technologies in a context of jurisdictional contestation. We discuss the implications of our study for the field of mental health and for the relationship between clinical psychology and psychiatry.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-09-28T09:50:48Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211027738
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- Psychometric origins of depression
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Authors: Susan McPherson, David Armstrong
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article examines the historical construction of depression over about a hundred years, employing the social life of methods as an explanatory framework. Specifically, it considers how emerging methodologies in the measurement of psychological constructs contributed to changes in epistemological approaches to mental illness and created the conditions of possibility for major shifts in the construction of depression. While depression was once seen as a feature of psychotic personality, measurement technologies made it possible for it to be reconstructed as changeable and treatable. Different types of scaling techniques (Likert versus dichotomous scales) enabled the separation of depressive personality from reactive depression, paving the way for measuring the severity and intensity of emotions. Techniques to test sensitivity to change provided a means of demonstrating the efficacy of new psychoactive drug treatments. Later, more advanced techniques of precision scaling enabled the management of a new measurement problem, clinician unreliability, associated with the growing number of professionals involved in mental health care. Through statistical management of unreliability, the construct of depression has dramatically reduced over this period from hundreds of questionnaire items to potentially just two. Exploring the history of depression through this lens produces an alternative narrative to those that have emerged as a result of medicalisation and the actions of individuals and pressure groups.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-05-04T10:18:42Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211009085
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- Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip on the social significance of schizoids
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Authors: Gal Gerson
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
The mid-century object relations approach saw the category of schizoids as crucial to its own formation. Rooted in a developmental phase where the perception of the mother as a whole and real person had not yet been secured, the schizoid constitution impeded relationships and forced schizoids to communicate through a compliant persona while the kernel self remained isolated. Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip thought that schizoid features underlay many other pathologies that earlier, Freudian psychoanalysis had misidentified. To correct this, a move to the attachment-oriented theory was necessary, triggering the development of the object relations perspective as a distinct and independent approach. While playing this role in the development of object relations theory, the schizoid category also attracted a note of disapproval. Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip described schizoids as harmful to society through their everyday actions and through the ideas they propagated. This judgemental nuance highlights an aspect of the alliance between object relations theory and the contemporary welfare state ideology. Culminating in the Beveridge plan, that ideology framed citizenship as comprehensive engagement with society on multiple levels. Citizenship was not just a political activity but also a personally rewarding one, as it allowed expression to each person’s wishes in ways that benefited others. Inability to engage and be rewarded in this way marked obstinate classes and produced rigid and conservative ideologies that opposed the welfare state. Object relations theory described the schizoid condition along similar lines and castigated its consequences for similar reasons.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-04-29T07:25:48Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211008078
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- On some antecedents of behavioural economics
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Authors: Kristian Bondo Hansen, Thomas Presskorn-Thygesen
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Since its inception in the late 1970s, behavioural economics has gone from being an outlier to a widely recognized yet still contested subset of the economic sciences. One of the basic arguments in behavioural economics is that a more realistic psychology ought to inform economic theories. While the history of behavioural economics is often portrayed and articulated as spanning no more than a few decades, the practice of utilizing ideas from psychology to rethink theories of economics is over a century old. In the first three decades of the 20th century, several mostly American economists made efforts to refine fundamental economic assumptions by introducing ideas from psychology into economic thinking. In an echo of contemporary discussions in behavioural economics, the ambition of these psychology-keen economists was to strengthen the empirical accuracy of the fundamental assumptions of economic theory. In this article, we trace, examine, and discuss arguments for and against complementing economic theorizing with insights from psychology, as found in economic literature published between 1900 and 1930. The historical analysis sheds light on issues and challenges associated with the endeavour to improve one discipline’s theories by introducing ideas from another, and we argue that these are issues and challenges that behavioural economists continue to face today.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-04-22T06:59:31Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211000950
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- Cultivating trust, producing knowledge: The management of archaeological
labour and the making of a discipline-
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Authors: Allison Mickel, Nylah Byrd
First page: 3
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Like any science, archaeology relies on trust between actors involved in the production of knowledge. In the early history of archaeology, this epistemic trust was complicated by histories of Orientalism in the Middle East and colonialism more broadly. The racial and power dynamics underpinning 19th- and early 20th-century archaeology precluded the possibility of interpersonal moral trust between foreign archaeologists and locally hired labourers. In light of this, archaeologists created systems of reward, punishment, and surveillance to ensure the honest behaviour of site workers. They thus invented a set of structural conditions that produced sufficient epistemic trust for archaeological research to proceed—a system that continues to shape archaeology to the present day.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-06-16T09:12:47Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211015855
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- Revisiting the ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’: Multiple discovery and
the rhetoric of priority-
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Authors: Joel Barnes
First page: 29
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Between the 1930s and the mid 1970s, it was commonly believed that in 1880 Karl Marx had proposed to dedicate to Charles Darwin a volume or translation of Capital but that Darwin had refused. The detail was often interpreted by scholars as having larger significance for the question of the relationship between Darwinian evolutionary biology and Marxist political economy. In 1973–4, two scholars working independently—Lewis Feuer, professor of sociology at Toronto, and Margaret Fay, a graduate student at Berkeley—determined simultaneously that the traditional story of the proposed dedication was untrue, being based on a long-standing misinterpretation of the relevant correspondence. Between the two, and among several other scholars who became their respective allies, there developed a contest of authority and priority over the discovery. From 1975 to 1982, the controversy generated a considerable volume of spilled ink in both scholarly and popular publications. Drawing on previously unexamined archival resources, this article revisits the ‘case’ of the so-called ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’ as an instance of the phenomenon of ‘multiple discovery’. A familiar occurrence in the natural sciences, multiple discovery is rarer in the humanities and social sciences. The present case of a priority dispute in the history of ideas followed patterns familiar from such disputes in the natural sciences, while also diverging from them in ways that shed light on the significance of disciplinary norms and research infrastructures.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-09-09T09:03:27Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211019226
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- Frederick Antal and the Marxist challenge to art history
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Authors: Jim Berryman
First page: 55
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
First published in 1948, Frederick Antal’s Florentine Painting and Its Social Background was an important milestone in anglophone art history. Based on European examples, including Max Dvořák, it sought to understand art history’s relationship to social and intellectual history. When Antal, a Hungarian émigré, arrived in Britain in 1933, he encountered an inward-looking discipline preoccupied with formalism and connoisseurship; or, as he phrased it, art historians of ‘the older persuasion’ ignorant of ‘the fruitful achievements of modern historical research’. Despite its considerable scholarship and erudition, Antal’s book was not warmly received, largely because he had used historical materialism to understand the production of art and the development of styles. Antal’s class-based account of the social position of the artist and the role of the patron in determining the emergence of early Renaissance styles was especially controversial. However, although Marxist analysis was used to challenge the assumptions of Anglo art history, it was not Antal’s intention to weaken art history’s disciplinary autonomy. With historical materialism, he sought to place art history on a firmer historical footing. Most importantly, this approach was compatible with the discipline’s Central European tradition, where art-historical scholarship was framed by questions of method and based on broad historical research. Without defending its more deterministic features, this article supports a re-evaluation of Antal’s book, as an important forerunner of interdisciplinary art scholarship. It considers why Antal’s legacy has not endured, despite the ‘social history of art’ enjoying widespread acceptance in English-speaking art history in later decades.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-05-18T09:40:15Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211003779
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- Simulating Marx: Herbert A. Simon's cognitivist approach to dialectical
materialism-
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Authors: Enrico Petracca
First page: 101
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Starting in the 1950s, computer programs for simulating cognitive processes and intelligent behaviour were the hallmark of Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence and ‘cognitivist’ cognitive science. This article examines a somewhat neglected case of simulation pursued by one of the founding fathers of simulation methodology, Herbert A. Simon. In the 1970s and 1980s, Simon had repeated contacts with Marxist countries and scientists, in the context of which he advanced the idea that cognitivism could be used as a framework for simulating dialectical materialism. Simon's idea was, in particular, to represent dialectical processes through a ‘symbolic’ version of dialectical logic. This article explores the context of Simon's interaction with Marxist countries—China and the USSR—and also assesses the outcome of the simulation. The difficulty with simulating distinctive features of dialectical materialism is read in light of the underlying assumptions of cognitivism and, ultimately, in light of the attempt to tame a rival world view.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-08-02T12:55:49Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211031143
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- Rahel Jaeggi’s theory of alienation
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Authors: Justin Evans
First page: 126
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Rahel Jaeggi’s theory of alienation has received less attention than her work on forms of life and capitalism. This theory avoids the problems of traditional theories of alienation: objectivism, paternalism, and essentialism. It also sidesteps post-structuralist criticisms of the theory of alienation. However, Jaeggi’s theory is flawed in two ways: it is not historically specific, and so cannot explain why alienation is a problem for modernity rather than other historical periods, and it is difficult to connect to social critique. I argue that Karl Marx’s later theory of alienation, as interpreted by Moishe Postone and others, is able to avoid the problems that Jaeggi’s theory avoids, and is also able to avoid the flaws in her theory. This suggests that critical theory should focus on a theory of capitalism rather than normative social theory.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-07-13T09:33:08Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211015875
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- The idea of an ethically committed social science
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Authors: Leonidas Tsilipakos
First page: 144
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
This article presents a long overdue analysis of the idea of an ethically committed social science, which, after the demise of positivism and the deeming of moral neutrality as impossible, has come to dominate the self-understanding of many contemporary sociological approaches. Once adequately specified, however, the idea is shown to be ethically questionable in that it works against the moral commitments constitutive of academic life. The argument is conducted with resources from the work of Peter Winch, thus establishing its continuing relevance and critical importance for the social sciences, sociology in particular. Special reference is made to heretofore unappreciated aspects of Winch’s work, including within the groundbreaking The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, but focusing specifically on his later contributions to ethics.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-07-16T12:51:45Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211020983
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- On the assumption of self-reflective subjectivity
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Authors: Christoforos Bouzanis
First page: 167
Abstract: History of the Human Sciences, Ahead of Print.
Contemporary social theory has consistently emphasized habitual action, rule-following, and role-performing as key aspects of social life, yet the challenge remains of combining these aspects with the omnipresent phenomenon of self-reflective conduct. This article attempts to tackle this challenge by proposing useful distinctions that can facilitate further interdisciplinary research on self-reflection. To this end, I argue that we need a more sophisticated set of distinctions and categories in our understanding of habitual action. The analysis casts light on the idea that our contemporary social theories of self-reflection are not consistent with everyday notions of agential knowledgeability and accountability, and this conclusion indicates the need to reconceptualize discourse and subjectivity in non-eliminative terms. Ultimately, the assumption of self-reflective subjectivity turns out to be a theoretical necessity for the conceptualization of discursive participation and democratic choice.
Citation: History of the Human Sciences
PubDate: 2021-09-01T01:25:50Z
DOI: 10.1177/09526951211032895
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