Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Eds.) - The History of The Social Sciences

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol.
47(4), 417–418 Fall 2011

View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20501
© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
B O O K R EV I EW S
Guy G. Stroumsa. A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. 240 pp. $35.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-
04860-7.
Guy G. Stroumsa is a widely published scholar on religion in antiquity. The present book
studies the history of his discipline, the comparative study of religion, in what Stroumsa finds
its very beginning, the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book
is of interest to scholars in other human sciences for at least three reasons: the approach taken,
the claims made for the history of the human sciences, and most important, the significance
of the topic of religion for understanding human action.
The approach is Kuhnian, with Stroumsa’s narrative framed in terms of a paradigm shift
that occurred in the middle of the seventeenth century, which he calls an “intellectual revolu-
tion”: “the epistemological foundation of the new cognitive structures invented for understand-
ing religious phenomena” (p. 5). He draws parallels with “the birth of modern psychology in
the same period” (p. 170), citing the work of Vidal (2006). This paradigm continued until the
mid-nineteenth century, when, “with the formation of modern scholarly disciplines, the study
of religions . . . could not retain its essentially interdisciplinary character” (p. 164). The his-
tory serves another purpose as well, as Stroumsa states that “the history of a discipline [in the
humanities] remains a must for any epistemological reflections” (p. 113). The ultimate aim
of this history, however, is announced on the first page: “The religious explosion of the pres-
ent day, with the urgency of its immediate threats, has taken us by surprise” (p. vii). This ex-
plosion, then, frames the questions that the book seeks to answer.
The title nods to Vico’s New Science, but this book is not about Vico, except incidentally.
It is rather about “the views developed in some of the books in Vico’s library” (p. 4). Indeed,
the publication of the first edition of La scienza nuova in 1724 marks the midpoint of the time
studied in the book, from roughly 1614 to 1794. In 1614, Isaac Casaubon “effectively tore
down the Renaissance holistic conception of religious history” (p. 4); 1794 saw Charles
Dupuis’ study that sought a single origin of all religions. This period was not, however, only
forged by groundbreaking texts. Three events produced a cultural crisis leading to the re-
working of the category of religion: European encounters with the peoples of the Americas,
and especially Peru, but also China and elsewhere; the Renaissance, with its interest in an-
tiquity; and the religious wars, which served to relativize claims of one true faith. The out-
come, according to Stroumsa, was the “development of a single concept of religion” (p. 7),
in place of the older category of true versus false religions. With the new category came a
conception of the unity of humankind.
Stroumsa presents the details of this narrative with studies of the major figures and texts
in several areas, introducing (for this reviewer) some extraordinary individuals in the process.
Chapters deal with efforts to understand the religious practices in Peru—to what could the
Europeans compare them? The result was the emergence of a comparative approach to reli-
gion. Following is a chapter devoted to the beginnings of the historical critical approach, with
interest in ancient Judaism, and to a historical comparison of the Bible and Homer. Interest
among Christians in contemporary Judaism is also presented, with special attention to the
work of Richard Simon, who made the “first scholarly comparison of Judaism and
Christianity” (p. 70), with an ethnological approach in the ascendant. Chapter 4 deals with
417
418 BOOK REVIEWS
the beginnings of philological and historical readings of the Bible as well as the related com-
parative study of myth. Theories of the histories of religion developed: Either idolatry (called
by Ralph Cudworth in the seventeenth century by the new and less derogatory term polythe-
ism) was a degeneration of an original monotheism (based on a reading of the Bible) or, in
the view of John Spencer, one of the heroes of the text, it marked a stage in a progressive re-
finement of religious beliefs (pp. 96–97). (Spencer’s views influenced Vico.) The final chap-
ters deal with Iranian religion, changing views of Islam (putting Christianity, Judaism, and
Islam on a par, to the credit or denigration of all three), Chinese civic religion, and ancient
Roman practices. The text contains great depth of scholarship that overflows a brief review.
In conclusion, A New Science contributes to the history of the human sciences on a num-
ber of fronts as it documents the move from Renaissance symbolic interpretation to philolog-
ical and historical hermeneutics, the remaking of the category of religion to mean an
essential element of all societies, and “the inception of the secularization process” (p. 12). The
structuring of the text in terms of paradigms of knowledge works well, and while Stroumsa
does indicate the incomplete nature of this paradigm, this talk of paradigms does downplay
the continuation of older and less generous views of non-Christian religions. In situating the
ethnological studies of Peruvian religion by José de Acosta published in 1590, for example,
the accent is not on the conflicts that produced the suppression of native culture but rather on
Acosta’s conclusion of the “the Indians’ deep religiosity” (p. 17), misguided to be sure from
the Christian perspective, but no more so than were the ancient Greeks and Romans. Stroumsa
wants to argue for the dawn of new views, assuming the story of conquest better known.
Again, Richard Simon’s seventeenth-century view that “Christianity and Judaism are essen-
tially the same religion” (p. 74) is balanced by noting that Simon did not doubt the evilness
of the Jews. While the Kuhnian narrative form dominates, then, a non-Kuhnian one simmers
in the background.
The history of the study of religion has an important role to play in the history of the
human sciences. An understanding of changing conceptions of human nature and action can-
not ignore it.
REFERENCE
Vidal, F. (2006). Les sciences de l’âme, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Champion.
Reviewed by ROBERT KUGELMANN, University of Dallas, Dallas, TX.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 47(4), 418–420 Fall 2011
Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Eds.). The History of the Social Sciences
since 1945. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 268 pp. $25.99 (paper).
ISBN: 978-0-521-71776-2.
Historians of the social and behavioral sciences tend toward the particular in their work. As
in many other historical subfields, one finds here a skepticism of broad strokes and an accompa-
nying preference for careful, “dirty-fingernails” investigation. Because of this, a book called The
History of the Social Sciences since 1945 is likely to sound to many like an overreach. Many may
JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

BOOK REVIEWS 419
find it to be a tad ambitious of Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine to attempt to address
all of the histories of the social sciences since 1945 in light of the large amount of research yet
to be done in many of the constituent parts of the histories of the social sciences.
Clearly, Backhouse and Fontaine anticipate skepticism that they may be going too far
with this volume. In their introduction, they counter these concerns by citing other examples
of synthetic histories of the social sciences that have come before (e.g., Porter & Ross, 2003)
and, more importantly, by noting that, though “the ideal is . . . a comprehensive history of the
social sciences as a whole” (p. 5), this volume is something less grandiose. Such an ideal his-
tory of all the social sciences, with an appreciation for their interconnections, they tell us, “is
some way off ” (p. 5). The volume they have produced features chapters dedicated to histo-
ries of individual disciplines, with chapters addressing the post-1945 histories of psychology,
economics, political science, sociology, social anthropology, and human geography.
Backhouse and Fontaine admit the limitations of this discipline-by-discipline approach, as it
“minimizes the role played by cross-disciplinary research ventures” (p. 12). In an effort to get
beyond these limitations, they offer a substantial concluding chapter for the volume that maps
some of the possibilities for future synthesis among histories of the social sciences.
It is significant that psychology is the first discipline to be addressed in The History of the
Social Sciences since 1945. Mitchell G. Ash writes this chapter (all the disciplinary histories
here are given simple titles relating only to the discipline under consideration; hence this one is
entitled “Psychology”). Though the histories of other social sciences are beginning to grow, it
is the history of psychology that occupies much of the space in this journal and in professional
gatherings dedicated to the history of the social and behavioral sciences. Ash’s chapter is ex-
cellent, as he makes quick work of some of the major themes in the post–World War II history
of psychology before moving to two case studies he uses as exemplars of the history of the
field: cognitive science and social psychology. Ash demonstrates how these two developments
in psychology have illuminated adjustments in the field’s self-understanding and offered new
methodological tools that change how the work of the psychologist is to be understood.
Subsequent chapters are less likely to be so explicit in their use of case studies, but any
attempt to summarize more than 60 years of the history of any discipline is going to involve
some degree of synecdoche to make its point. The result is a volume that suggests numerous
points of connection between the various social sciences. Backhouse himself writes the
“Economics” chapter, and his focus on World War II connects quite nicely with Jennifer
Platt’s excellent work in the “Sociology” chapter. The chapter on “Political Science,” by
Robert Adcock and Mark Bevir, with its focus on dominant trends in theory and method in
political science, expresses a definitive central tendency in this volume. Adcock and Bevir
focus on “quantitative techniques” (p. 79), “positivist theory” (p. 85), and “rational choice
theory” (p. 91) as themes in the development of late twentieth-century political science. Their
chapter highlights numerous themes that recur throughout the volume, most important
among them the focus on strategies to legitimate a professional discipline through refinement
of method (and in particular, through hypothesis-driven, quantitative methods), and elabora-
tion of theory, the theoretical being the definitive component that many professions offer for
their own divide from “lay” knowledge. Very much in keeping with this, Adam Kuper’s chap-
ter on “Social Anthropology” addresses the role of colonialism (and its decline) in that field’s
identity, and then charts social anthropology’s development of theory. This dovetails into Ron
Johnston’s chapter on “Human Geography,” with its description of how dramatically the
study of human geography has changed since 1945, thanks to the advent of new, more “so-
cial” conceptualizations of the field.

420 BOOK REVIEWS
There is a remarkable amount of variation in the degree to which the chapters address
the institutional contexts at work in the histories of these fields. Some may prefer more
institution-centered approaches to the history of the social sciences. The chapters in The
History of the Social Sciences since 1945 are dedicated to questions (the editors list these
questions on pp. 4–5) that only occasionally touch on institutional concerns. Such a concern
for institutions appears to be beside the point for chapters as synoptic as these.
The conclusion, entitled “Toward a History of the Social Sciences,” and written by
Backhouse and Fontaine, outlines some of the possibilities for approaching the history of the
social sciences with a focus on interdisciplinary connections. Backhouse and Fontaine address
the role played by the political context of the Cold War and the 1960s, survey the impact of
positivism on the fields considered in their volume, and examine how and why the fields
of psychology and economics came to spur numerous cross-disciplinary research projects
after 1945. The conclusion thus stands as a kind of interdisciplinary capstone on a volume that
consists of discipline-centered approaches to the history of the social sciences. I suspect rather
more could be done with this. Though these topics are raised in some of the chapters here,
there is little explicit concern for some equally important issues at work in the history of the
social sciences. For instance, it would have been helpful to have seen more reflection on how
computer technology has related to projects of professionalization and methodological refine-
ment across the disciplines. The conclusion also could have benefited from greater attention
to the increasing importance of funding for social science research that comes from the for-
profit sector of the economy. Certainly it is not just the history of economics that tells us some-
thing about how markets and social science research relate to each other.
One of the reasons the editors stop short of pursuing more synthesis is that they know the
project they undertake is only beginning. The History of the Social Sciences since 1945 is an
excellent book. It is offered as an extended prolegomenon to a broader and more systematic un-
derstanding of the history of all the social sciences. The chapters collected here function on at
least two levels: They offer excellent (if necessarily too short) histories of several social science
fields, and each of them points toward how we might continue to bring these histories together.
For this reason, The History of the Social Science since 1945 is a great success.
REFERENCE
Porter, T. M., & Ross, D. (Eds.). (2003). The Cambridge history of science, Vol. 7: The modern social sciences.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Reviewed by DAVID W. PARK, Associate Professor of Communication, Department of

Communication, Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, IL.
Galin Tihanov (Ed.). Gustav Shpet’s Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory.
West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009. 369 pp. $39.95 (paper). ISBN-13:
978-1557535252.

BOOK REVIEWS 421
Detailed studies have only recently begun to appreciate the revolutionary and early
Soviet periods of Russian and Eastern European history. Stalinist repression and Cold War
interests have perverted our understanding of that time so thoroughly that few people, inside
or outside the Soviet sphere, could appreciate the intellectual vitality and the meaningful
changes that characterize the decade 1918–1928. This fine volume joins recent scholarship
that aims to correct this neglect and misunderstanding of late imperial Russian and early
Soviet culture.
The “fatherless” boy of a Polish mother, Gustav Shpet (1879–1937) became a prolific
and influential philosopher, linguist, literary and theater critic, and translator, best remem-
bered (by the few who remembered him) as the foremost Russian promoter of the phenome-
nological philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Educated in Kiev and of moderate leftist politics,
he came to Moscow in 1907 with his mentor, the philosopher Georgy Chelpanov
(1862–1936), founding director of the Moscow Institute of Psychology in 1913, about the
same time that Shpet returned from a year with Husserl in Göttingen. Shpet’s major work,
Appearance and Sense: Phenomenology as the Fundamental Science and Its Problems
(1914; English trans. 1991), explained phenomenology (if explanation is the appropriate
word), but also extended well beyond Husserl’s treatment and method. Shpet’s other writings
that are relevant to psychology, articles such as “The Inner Form of the Word” and “Wisdom
or Reason,” are not yet available in English.
The amount of translation during late imperial and early Soviet Russia astonishes every
student of modern Russian culture. In this regard, Shpet was a major contributor, translating
large works, including some by Alfred Binet, William James, George Frederic Stout, and
Wilhelm Dilthey, into Russian; he also translated several major novels of Dickens. Shpet’s
translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was interrupted by his execution; it was fi-
nally published by the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1959, three years after his (apparently
ineffective) rehabilitation.
The editor of this book includes very thorough bibliographies of works by and about
Shpet, including translations. (All Russian words are in Latin transcription rather than in
Cyrillic.) There are some excerpts from Shpet’s writings (on hermeneutics and literature) and
four sections of scholarly articles: (1) Mapping Out the Field, (2) The Russian Context,
(3) Phenomenology, and (4) Semiotics and Philosophy of Language. Part One contains a
short article by Vladimir Zinchenko and James V. Wertsch on Shpet’s “invisible” influence on
early Soviet psychology, particularly on Lev Vygotsky, the leader of the cultural-historical
school, who apparently never actually mentioned Shpet in his writings. Part Two traces in-
fluences of Orthodoxy on Russian philosophical thought, and Parts Three and Four clearly
make up the weighty center of the volume: besides phenomenology and semiotics, discus-
sions of literary theory, linguistics, translation, and hermeneutics.
In the swirl of early Soviet scholarly and educational activity, Shpet seemed well placed,
with a leadership position in the Institute of Scientific Philosophy and particularly as vice
president of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (Russian acronym GAKhN). Early in
1930, he was purged from GAKhN. What historian Sheila Fitzpatrick refers to as the “cul-
tural revolution” began in 1928 and rippled unpredictably through various Soviet cultural
spheres, until the heavier Stalinist purges began by 1934.
Shpet tried to make the best of Siberian exile and even imprisonment, ceasing his
“counter-revolutionary” philosophical writings and proposing translations of German, English,
Polish, and Scandinavian classics. Hegel’s Phenomenology was nearly completed when, during
the course of a single day in November 1937, Shpet was rearrested, tried, and executed. The same
cruel and wasteful destruction took Isaac Spielrein, father of Soviet psychotechnics, as well as

422 BOOK REVIEWS
two of his brothers, also prominent scientists. (His psychoanalyst sister, Sabina, better known
in the West, perished during the Nazi invasion in 1942.) In 1936, Vygotsky and Aron Zalkind,
leader of the broad Soviet program of child studies called pedology, were among those who
“died at the right time” of natural causes; otherwise, they too would surely have been shot in
the purges, which still destroyed much of their work and drove it all underground for decades.
It is understandable that the early Soviet period should have been misunderstood or even
unknown. Recent scholarship indicates that, although the early Soviet period obviously
brought in some important new players—those of leftist politics (Spielrein) and Jewish her-
itage (Spielrein and Vygotsky) who had less chance before the Revolution—there was some
consistent growth of European influence from the late-imperial era. Cosmopolitan scholar-
ship was brewing quite strongly right before the Revolution, if somewhat subdued by tsarist–
religious repression and certainly colored by local conditions and interests. Shpet was an
important part of this latter intellectual stream, and the scholars who contributed to this vol-
ume have delineated many aspects of his influence, rendering a very valuable resource in
English, indeed in general.
REFERENCE
Shpet, G. (1991). Appearance and sense: Phenomenology as the fundamental science and its problems. Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers. (Original work published 1914.)
Reviewed by DAVID K. ROBINSON, Truman State University, Kirksville, MO.
Evelyn Fox Keller. The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010. 120 pp. $18.95 (paper). ISBN-13: 978-0822347316.
In this concise and clearly written book, the historian and philosopher Evelyn Fox Keller
makes a decisive intervention into the nature–nurture debate. After sketching the history of
the debate, she turns to the conceptual and linguistic problems that she believes lie at its heart
and that help to explain its remarkable persistence. She traces the longevity of the debate to
a failure of our language—to our indiscriminate use of certain terms with multiple meanings,
and to the slippage between those meanings. That slippage has allowed partisans on the “na-
ture” side of the debate to make the misconceived claims for genetic determinism that they
do. Keller’s proposed solution is not to stop using those terms, however, but rather to recog-
nize and embrace their polysemy, and to reformulate the questions we ask in that light.
In her historical chapter, Keller traces the formulation of “nature versus nurture” to the writ-
ings of Francis Galton, and to Galton’s interest in a particulate theory of heredity. Before the late
nineteenth century century, Keller argues, nature and nurture were not seen as opposing forces;
they were understood as intertwined, and only distinguished (when they were) as referring to
what occurred before birth and what happened after. “Nurture” was usually used as a verb, and
“hereditary” as an adjective. Galton, however, started using them both as nouns. Following
Carlos Lopez Beltran, Keller argues that Galton’s conception of “heredity” shows “his ontolog-
ical commitment to the material concreteness of whatever it was that lay behind the hereditary

BOOK REVIEWS 423
processes” (p. 21). In Galton’s view, “heredity” or “nature” now referred to the transmission of
something internal, something biological, and he abandoned the earlier, conventional distinction
between before and after birth. While his cousin Charles Darwin also endorsed the notion of in-
ternal, biological heredity, but combined it with Lamarckianism and blending inheritance, Galton
hardened his conception of heredity even further, envisioning internal particles remaining un-
changed from generation to generation. For Galton, “heredity” and “environment” were separa-
ble, distinguishable substances, opposed (but, for him, unequal) forces.
In her philosophical chapters, Keller makes two key distinctions: (1) between trait and
trait difference, and (2) between individual lineage and population. With regard to the first,
Keller argues that when we compare two different phenotypes and their corresponding geno-
types, we are really asking what causes the difference between the two traits. That is, how
much of the difference between the two traits is due to a change in one variable as opposed
to a change in the other? We are not asking—and cannot be asking—what causes the trait.
The problem with this latter type of question is that apportioning causal influences on a trait
works only if the influences are independent variables; but as Keller points out, heredity and
environment are entangled variables, so their influences cannot be separately weighed. Keller
argues that the distinction between genes as trait makers and genes as difference makers is
rarely kept clear, but that it is crucial that we recognize that the slippage not only happened
in classical genetics but continues to happen in medical genetics today. The question about
the effect of gene differences on trait differences calls for comparative judgment; the ques-
tion about genes as trait makers calls for knowledge of what it is that genes actually do (which
in turn calls for a knowledge not simply of DNA sequence but of individual developmental
dynamics as well). The two types of questions are logically distinct.
In her second philosophical chapter, Keller distinguishes between claims made about
heredity, which refers to an individual’s ancestry, and those made about heritability, which
refers to the statistical distribution of traits in a population. Heredity, in the ordinary, non-
technical sense, refers to what belongs to an individual as a result of his ancestry. Heritability,
on the other hand, has meaning only with regard to populations, and refers to the variance of
traits within a population. Measuring statistical variance in this way says nothing, Keller
points out, about the mechanism of transmission from parent to offspring. A trait that shows
high heritability in a population could be transmitted by a variety of different means—not
only “in the genes,” but also epigenetically, culturally, or environmentally. “On the question
of the mechanism of transmission,” Keller writes, “measures of heritability are simply silent”
(p. 68). But, she argues, the two terms, heredity and heritability, are often used interchange-
ably, not only by popular authors like Steven Pinker, but also in genetics textbooks and NIH
reports. Keller identifies the problem as lying in the “linguistic practice,” in the polysemy of
our vocabulary, in the use of the same word—heritable—to mean two very different things.
“We are plagued by a linguistic practice,” Keller argues, “that actively elides the distinction
between the causal dynamics of individual development and statistical patterns of correla-
tion, and that, by so doing, structures both our basic intuitions and our reasoning” (p. 63).
Keller’s last chapter proposes some solutions to these problems. First, she suggests chang-
ing our questioning from whether a trait is “genetic” or “environmental” to what its plasticity
might be: How malleable is a given trait, at a specified developmental age? This change aban-
dons the problematic assumption that birth is a good demarcation point between what is given
by nature and what by nurture, and recognizes that all traits are to varying extents modifiable
throughout life. Second, she advises replacing talk of “genes” with talk of “DNA” (since
noncoding sections of DNA have been acknowledged as important), and recognizing the

424 BOOK REVIEWS
complexity of DNA and its interactions in the cell. She wants us to envision it less as “master
molecule” and more as “molecular resource” for the cell. Finally, she cautions us that language
matters, that we must become aware of the multiple meanings of words and of subtle shifts be-
tween those meanings. Rather than abandon the word “heritable,” though, she suggests that we
embrace its polysemy, thereby allowing for the possibility of many different modes of trans-
mission of traits from one generation to the next. Heritable does not mean exclusively “genetic.”
Keller’s book should be required reading for all those scientists, popularizers, and re-
porters whose claims for genetic causation of traits commit the very errors that her analysis
so skillfully elucidates. Her book is so clearly written that laypeople, too, could use her ar-
guments as powerful tools to assess and reject ubiquitous assertions about the power of ge-
netic determinism.
Reviewed by NADINE WEIDMAN, Harvard University.
Andrew D. Evans. Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 293 pp. $29.00 (paper). ISBN-13: 978-0-
226-22268-4.
The origins of Nazi racial theory have often been sought in late nineteenth-century an-
thropology. In his carefully researched Anthropology at War, Andrew Evans challenges the
oversimplification of this narrative. He elucidates the strong “liberal” tradition of the late
1800s, a tradition in which racial superiority and inferiority played no major role. He then ar-
gues for the transformative experiences of World War I in changing the dominant outlook in
German anthropology toward a more biologized and hierarchical view of European peoples.
Evans first provides an excellent introduction to the anthropological traditions created
by Rudolf Virchow, Adolf Bastian, and other founders of German anthropology. Explicating
the separation of race, nation, and Volk that characterized the liberal approach, Evans does
not use the term “liberal” lightly. He carefully outlines the complex relationship between the
anthropologists’ scientific and political values, including Virchow’s participation in the revo-
lution of 1848. The ideas of Comte de Gobineau and early Nordicism were not part of their
vision for a new science of man. What was particularly important for Virchow and Bastian
was the unity and uniformity of the human species across diverse peoples, a core position tied
to their commitment to monogenism. Although liberal anthropologists may have held com-
mon stereotypes regarding Jews, the growing anti-Semitism of the 1880s and 1890s was
absent or was actively opposed by these anthropologists, particularly by Virchow.
Franz Boas, who worked under both Virchow and Bastian, is not an important figure in
this book, but Evans makes it clear just how indebted Boas was to Virchow and Bastian for
his idea of “psychic unity” and his conception of an empirically based anthropology. Evans’s
thorough archival research also provides an important picture of the formation of anthropol-
ogy as an academic discipline, but one that retained the active interest of physicians and am-
ateurs. Through examination of their correspondence, announcements, programs, and grants,
as well as the role of museums and exhibits, he documents the disciplinary “boundary-work”

BOOK REVIEWS 425
delineating Anthropologie (physical anthropology) from the closely related fields of
Völkerkunde (ethnology) and Vorgeschichte (prehistory). With the death of Virchow in 1902,
Bastian in 1905, and other liberal anthropologists, a new leadership was possible, although
liberal traditions persisted in the work of Felix Luschan and others. Evans is careful to show
that there was never a simple replacement of one position by another, and he is sensitive to
the changing stances and inconsistencies of individual anthropologists.
The assertion that war transformed a discipline is easy to make but challenging to
demonstrate. Evans shows both general and highly specific aspects of this process. Some
changes are practical and incidental: The fieldwork of German anthropologists was inter-
rupted or cancelled; their funds dried up. More importantly, Evans shows how the anthropol-
ogists “enlisted” in the ideological and propaganda efforts to distinguish between Germans
and their enemies, a task which shifted the discourse toward essentializing European races.
This new discourse of scientized patriotic fervor allowed for the identification of English ver-
sus German inherent psychological traits, a blurring of race and nation that was previously
unacceptable under the liberal paradigm. Despite the objections from Felix Luschan and
other remaining liberals, these assertions about the enemy were decidedly völkisch. The war
provided anthropologists, insecure about their standing in both the scientific and broader
communities, with the opportunity to be “useful.”
The most important contribution of Anthropology at War is the detailed examination of
anthropological research undertaken with prisoners of war held in the German empire (there
were over 600,000). Unable to travel, anthropologists found this new population, soldiers
from both the European “enemies” and their colonies, an irresistible resource for research.
Historians of psychology will be interested to know that Carl Stumpf was an early participant,
organizing “phonographic studies” to record the POWs’ songs and languages. The anthropol-
ogists, starting with Felix Luschan, soon focused on the collection of extensive physical
measurements of the prisoners. Evans concentrates on the work of three anthropologists:
Otto Reche, Egon von Eickstedt, and Rudolf Pöch, and their varied constructions of the racial
“other.” In the intensely patriotic wartime climate, each moved further toward viewing the cit-
izens of an enemy country as members of a race with distinct physical and psychological
characteristics. Evans repeats his central point often: Race, nation, and Volk were now con-
flated, and concepts of European unity were discarded. Standardized photographs of the pris-
oners were considered the most objective and promising approach for understanding the
racial “types” represented in the prison camps. Given this search for “types,” through pho-
tography, I wondered whether the German anthropologists were familiar with Galton’s com-
posite photography, which had a similar aim—the discovery of an underlying type. The POW
photographs were used as both science and propaganda to show the inner nature of the enemy,
particularly the racial “other” on the Eastern Front.
Evans sees the final demise of the liberal paradigm in the emergence of the more
Nordicist field of Rassenkunde (race studies) in the 1920s, following paths prepared by the
wartime efforts. The work of Eugen Fischer, who played a major role in race science and pol-
icy during the Third Reich, and the founding of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics in 1926 are used to illustrate the changes. The
book concludes with the Nazi ascension in 1933. Anthropology at War is a brief work. It
would have been interesting to explore the connections between Egon von Eikstedt’s work
during World War I and his role as a race psychologist during World War II (see Klautke,
2006), but this is beyond the scope of Evans’s work.
Evans concludes that “Disciplinary change . . . can occur through the creeping accretion
of small, politically motivated adjustments” (p. 228). Fine-grained examination of these

426 BOOK REVIEWS
“small adjustments” helps us understand how science and politics “act as resources for one
another” (p. 8). By showing how World War I created a fusion of scientific and political aims,
Evans has made an important contribution to the history of anthropology.
REFERENCE
Klautke, E. (2006). German “race psychology” and its implementation in Central Europe: Egon von Eickstedt and
Rudolf Hippius. In M. Turda & P. J. Weindling (Eds.), Blood and homeland: Eugenics and racial nationalism in
central and southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (pp. 23–40). New York: Central European University Press.
Reviewed by ANDREW S. WINSTON, Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology,

University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada.
Kenneth M. Pinnow. Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism,
1921–1929. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. 288 pp. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN-
13: 978-0801447662.
Life and death have always been of primary interest to people, and innumerable authors
have explored this truly immortal theme. Kenneth W. Pinnow found his own niche in the
ocean of research on life and death, exploring the phenomenon of suicide as a social problem
in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and its challenge to the Bolsheviks’ struggle for the collec-
tivist society of the future. In his book, Pinnow deals with suicide primarily as a “problem of
modern government rather than an existential drama” (p. 4) and, thus, “seeks to understand
how governmental officials and social scientists conceptualized, studied, and gave meaning
to suicide” (p. 5) and made sense of the tensions between individual and collectivist values
of the “new society.”
The book uncovers the way the Soviets dealt with suicide from the three specific per-
spectives of forensic medical practitioners, statisticians, and military authorities, and focuses
on the operations of three institutions: the Department of Forensic-Medical Expertise, the
Department of Moral Statistics at the Central Statistical Administration, and the Political
Administration of the Red Army. Pinnow’s meticulous analysis of the social practices and the
evolving meaning of Soviet suicide presents an important aspect of the struggle for the “new
man” in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, which definitely makes this book of considerable in-
terest to historians of the Soviet Union—but not only to them. For a number of reasons, this
book should also resonate with scholars in the history of the behavioral and human sciences
who are not necessarily involved in research on the Soviet Union and its science.
Despite its focus on suicide, the book exposes the larger picture of the Soviet variety of
integrative, cross-disciplinary, and applied “Big Science” in the making in the 1920s. The rev-
olutionary spirit of radical social transformation involved virtually all spheres of life and a
distinctly Soviet science that was emerging out of the vestiges of the old, prerevolutionary
tradition. Driven by the prerevolutionary scientism shared by local intellectuals and the ut-
terly practical concerns of overcoming the postrevolutionary social problems of orphaned

BOOK REVIEWS 427
children and homelessness, alcoholism, prostitution, suicide, and the like, the Bolshevik gov-
ernment provided unprecedented support to national scientific research. The book presents
an excellent account of what—by analogy with the Bolsheviks’ utopian dreams of building a
“new society” and educating a “new man”—we might refer to as a “new science.” Thus,
Pinnow makes the point that although academic sociology was abolished in the Soviet Union
in the early 1920s, a wide range of social sciences not only survived, but even permeated and
merged with other human, life, and behavioral sciences to an unprecedented scale, which is
reflected in Pinnow’s discussion of the emerging “social science state.” In the Soviet Union
of the 1920s, the political was deeply entangled with the scientific and vice versa, and
Pinnow quite correctly remarks that “the boundaries between the medical, sociological, and
political spheres blurred to the point of non-existence” (p. 227). Thus, Soviet scholars of the
interwar period—especially those in the human and related sciences—were typically both so-
cial workers and social investigators at the same time. Quite characteristically, Pinnow dis-
cusses such curious blends as the “medicopolitics,” “social autopsy,” “politico-scientific
practices,” or “politico-medical therapeutics” of a great many researchers and practitioners—
criminologists, forensic medical specialists, statisticians, psychiatrists, and medical
doctors—involved in the gigantic project of investigating Soviet suicide. These numerous hy-
brids reflected the normative interdisciplinary exchange and notable overlap between subsets
of the representatives of seemingly different disciplines. The history of the “disciplinary
melting pot” of Soviet social and human sciences seems quite thrilling from the perspective
of contemporary complaints about the fragmentation of psychology and allied sciences and
increasing calls for an integrative psychological science.
Interestingly, in many ways the history of Soviet human and behavioral sciences and re-
lated practices appears not so “Stalinist” and exotic as it tends to be considered, suggesting
quite a number of interesting parallels and similarities between Soviet, on the one hand, and,
on the other, Western European and North American contexts. Pinnow argues that the de-
scription of the Soviet Union as a “social science state” is itself an argument against the ex-
ceptionalism of Soviet science, which is typically exemplified by such cases of abnormalities
of Soviet “oppressed science”—so popular among historians—as the issue of the “pedologi-
cal decree” of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that banned the discipline of pedol-
ogy (i.e., the integrative sociobiological study of the child, alias—“paedology,” “paidology”),
the notorious trials of geneticists and the success of the Lamarckian teaching of Trofim
Lysenko, or campaigns against cybernetics.
In contrast, we now tend to regard the Soviet experiment from the perspective of mod-
ern movements of the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, basically the same set of
popular core ideas about human behavior and “social science state” social environment can
be found both in the Soviet Union and in the West. These include ideas of social activism, re-
searchers’ responsibility for the transformation of society and the betterment of humankind,
emphasis on social factors underlying human behavior, interdisciplinary exchange and col-
laboration leading to the creation of hybrid fields of research and social practice, and so on.
Consider a remarkable example. North American and Western European in origin, ideas of
progressive education and mental hygiene movements were imported to Russia and spread
widely there by the early 1920s. In the postrevolutionary setting of Soviet Russia, these
movements received lavish support from the new government and, under the names of psy-
chohygiene, social hygiene, and pedology, experienced tremendous institutional growth in
the USSR, far surpassing the wildest aspirations of their originators in the West.
Furthermore, the Great Depression changed what seemed to be the natural order of things,
and in the 1930s the trend reversed: The modernity of the Soviet version of a “social science

428 BOOK REVIEWS
state” became an export item to the crisis-ridden Western Europe and North America im-
pressed by the success of the Soviet economy, and, for that matter, Soviet science. The truly ex-
citing history of the transnational circulation and inevitable transformation of ideas and social
practices still remains to be told, and is certainly beyond the scope of Pinnow’s research on
Soviet suicide. Yet the contribution of his book to the growing literature on Soviet modernity—
especially as it reveals itself in Soviet and international social research and practice—is really
important and thought provoking.
From this standpoint, it is particularly interesting to see how the book presents the
outcome of the struggle against suicide and the massive interventions of the Soviet social sci-
ence state into the lives of individuals and social practices. Standardized questionnaires,
propaganda, and surveillance—despite the scope of application and enthusiasm of the
activists—all appeared hardly efficient, and in fact proved the elusiveness of suicide and the
lack of control over the minds of Soviet citizens. In fact, it was the formalization and stan-
dardization of these interventions, suggests Pinnow, that undermined the hope for the success
of the campaign against suicide among the utopian “new men” of the future classless society.
And this is yet another lesson that we might learn from Pinnow’s book today, in the age of
the domination of post-positivist reductionistic and fragmented human sciences.
Reviewed by ANTON YASNITSKY, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Uljana Feest (Ed.). Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen. New York: Springer,
2010. 320 pp. $139.00 (cloth). ISBN-13: 978-1441914316.
The question of how we collect knowledge about the world, and how we validate that
knowledge in terms of the modes of investigation we adopt, has been a mainstay of our philo-
sophical engagement with the world. The experiential consciousness of human situatedness
is the beginning of both curiosity and the gradual development of curiosity into a formalized
dialogue with the environment in which our lives take shape. In the most comprehensive
sense, the term “methodology” concerns our experience of being and knowing, and, more
precisely, of desiring to know. If questions of epistemology and methodology are sometimes
perceived as rather formal, then we should not forget this relationship between the desire to
know, to understand, and the rigor of methodological specification. In other words, we should
not lose sight of the idea that the question of how we acquire and validate knowledge is only
a formalized extension of the wonder which properly underpins human enquiry.
Wilhelm Dilthey’s emphasis on the fundamental importance of experience for method-
ology is already a recognition that epistemology concerns both knowledge of the world and
knowledge of ourselves, and this volume, edited by Uljana Feest, represents a valuable
engagement with precisely this double-edged quality. The book comprises a collection of es-
says on a theme, and is an insightful contribution to an area which only at a first glance pres-
ents itself as rather specialized and esoteric: the conceptual dichotomy of Erklären and
Verstehen, translated in this volume as “explanation” and “understanding.” Researchers
working in fields such as sociology, epistemology, social philosophy, psychology, the history
and philosophy of psychology, intellectual and cultural history, the philosophy of science, the

BOOK REVIEWS 429
philosophy of the social sciences, and psychoanalysis will probably be familiar with these
terms. One of the intentions of this volume is to dust off a debate usually associated with the
technicalities of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy, and present it as an
area of continuing as well as historical significance. The essays contained in this collection
revisit a well-worn problematic, but reinvigorate this problematic through fresh approaches
and explorations, and through an insightful emphasis on the dialogic interrelation of history,
philosophy, and culture.
The articles are based on papers originally presented in 2006 at the Max Planck Institute
for the History of Science in Berlin for the conference, Historical Perspectives on Erklären and
Verstehen—An Interdisciplinary Workshop. The last word in this conference title is telling, for
the character of this volume is very much that of a “workshop”: a kind of open engagement or
dialogue with the Erklären and Verstehen dichotomy, where the contributing articles approach
the issue from different angles and from different disciplinary perspectives. In this context,
however, the essays are taken to address, explicitly or implicitly, two key research questions:
(1) What (if any) novel philosophical insights can be gained from analyses of the varied
and diverse previous debates about aspects of the dichotomy between explanation and
understanding, and (2) what (if any) historical insights can be gained by means of ana-
lytical tools taken from current philosophical discussions? (p. 2)
The engagement with these questions evidenced in the essays covers ground as diverse
as German cultural politics and educational ideology (Denise Phillips); Protestant theology
and hermeneutics (Bernhard Kleeberg); popular science writing (Safia Azzouni); the philos-
ophy of Hippolyte Taine (Philipp Müller); nineteenth- and twentieth-century French thought
(Warren Schmaus); William James’s ideas on human understanding (David E. Leary); scien-
tific praxis (Katherine Arens); British perspectives on the relation between the natural sci-
ences and the humanities (Roger Smith); experience in the writings of Dilthey, Rickert,
Bradley, and Ward (Christopher Pincock); German historicism (Jacques Bos); the
Methodenstreit (Filomena de Sousa); Mill, von Kries, and Weber on causality, explanation,
and understanding (Michael Heidelberger); the social sciences—Weber, Simmel, and
Mannheim (Daniel Šuber); and orthodox logical empiricism (Thomas Uebel).
In the background of these various analyses the figure of Wilhelm Dilthey, whose name
is indelibly stamped on the Erklären/Verstehen debate, looms large, and in a sense this book
might be read as an indirect study of the influence of Dilthey on nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Western thought. Indeed, on reading the title of the book one might even wish to add
the subtitle, “Dilthey’s Legacy.” The volume does a service in renewing a sense of the im-
portance of Dilthey’s work for a diverse range of fields of research in Western thought. While
the book quite rightly emphasizes the decidedly German context of the Erklären/Verstehen
dichotomy, it also seeks to consider responses to this problematic in other national traditions
(Austria, France, Britain, and the United States). This is certainly an area in need of further
research and while, as the editor admits (p. 11), there are national traditions missed out here
(e.g., Russia and Italy), this collection nevertheless goes some way in “opening out” a char-
acteristically German discourse and emphasizing its wider resonance.
While there is some explicit discussion of the significance of the Erklären and Verstehen
debate to more recent and even contemporary debates and issues, this is something which,
ultimately, the book only really touches upon, and it is regrettable that there is not a
concluding piece to the volume which addresses this issue in more detail and which directly
revisits the two defining research questions noted above with an eye to specific current philo-
sophical and other concerns. Nevertheless, this collection of essays will serve as a point of

430 BOOK REVIEWS
departure for a fuller consideration of the continuing significance and implications of the
Erklären/Verstehen debate, not to mention how this debate affects our current understanding
of the distinction between the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences, in a
contemporary culture preoccupied with specialization and yet desirous of a renewed holism.
Reviewed by ROBERT W. BUTTON, Plymouth, Devon, U.K.
© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc
Michel Meulders. Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to Neuroscience (Laurence Garey,

Trans. and Ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 252 pp. $27.95 (cloth). ISBN-13:
978-0262014489.
This unusual and excellent book begins, not with the birth of Herman Helmholtz in
1821, but with a “Prelude,” a masterful, but awkward, fancied description of the world of his
father in Potsdam in that year. This unfolds as August Helmholtz looks about him and rumi-
nates on philosophy, science, and the political surroundings of his day. The Prelude sets the
tone and establishes the structure of the book. Meulders will not only tell us the facts of an
immensely influential life, but will set that life in its complex and evolving context.
Who was Helmholtz? Physicists, physiologists, psychologists, and philosophers who
study the nineteenth-century foundations of current thought all know about limited pieces of
him. Helmholtz straddled our current intellectual boundaries. As a physician he established
the existence of conservation of energy in living things. As a physicist he showed how color
vision works and how sound becomes music. As a physiologist he managed to explain the
basis of human perception, the unconscious inference that constructs a meaningful world
from chaotic sensory input. As an inventor, apparatuses he devised working with technicians
such as Rudolph Koenig (whom the book does not mention), ranging from electrical stimu-
lation of nerve impulses to measure their speed, to spun-brass resonators to pull apart the
components of complex musical sounds, were innovative and important. In all these he rooted
his work in experiment and systematic observation, and on quantitative measurement.
The author hypothesizes that Helmholtz is not as well known as he should be because
of the wide-ranging nature of his contributions. In the compartmentalized intellectual world
that followed his, Helmholtz’s extraordinary contributions to physics, physiology, perception,
and philosophy can hardly be assimilated. In Helmholtz’s lifetime, science as we know it be-
came formalized and codified; Helmholtz was important in this development. The author
makes much of the contrast between the empirical, quantitative, and experimental approaches
that exemplified Helmholtz and his eighteenth-century predecessors. These were philosopher-
scientists whose tools were introspection upon experience and simple observation of nature.
Meulders gives us a whole chapter, for instance, on Goethe, whose notions of how color
vision works were supplanted by Helmholtz.
The book is a biography, in that it follows its subject from birth through his life, his oc-
cupations, his marriages, his many publications and well-attended public lectures, and his
thought. We learn little, however, of his private life; the author characterizes him as distant,
secretive, and personally uncommunicative. Quotes from his letters to his first wife (who was

BOOK REVIEWS 431
sickly and died at an early age) and to his second show him sometimes to be a master of de-
scription and capable of great warmth. But the sickness and death of his sons and first wife,
his close and continuing contact with his father, and his ongoing professional close col-
leagues receive little note.
Meulders does us all a great favor in putting Helmholtz in context, bringing together all
of his many dimensions. The author characterizes an earlier, contemporary biography
(Koenigsberger, 1955) as a “hagiography.” This book is no less an uncritical and enthusiastic
recounting of Helmholtz’s life. The perspective that Meulders provides is important—it
brings us from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. The book is most readable and the
translation by Laurence Garey flows smoothly. I recommend it most highly to anyone who
would aspire to understand the founding decades of contemporary science.
REFERENCE
Koenigsberger, L. (1955). Herman von Helmholtz (F. A. Welby, Trans.). New York: Dover. (Original work published
1906.)
Reviewed by DOUGLAS C. CREELMAN, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of

Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc
Heather Murray. Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North
America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 289 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
ISBN 978-0-8122-4268-3.
The scene is so familiar as to be almost unremarkable: A young person sits down with his
or her parents and, usually tearfully, declares, “I’m gay.” In her innovative and insightful study
Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America, Heather
Murray demonstrates how this “increasingly formalized and scripted” ritual of disclosure be-
came an essential, almost obligatory part of gay life, and she shows how it testifies to an en-
during “impetus for family integration” among gay men and women (pp. 179–180). Although
historians and other scholars have generally focused on the alternative kinship bonds forged
by gay people, Murray argues, “the family of origin, as both a lived relationship and a sym-
bol, has been a central animating force and preoccupation of both gay culture and politics and
has shaped gay thought more broadly” since the mid-twentieth century (p. viii). Murray mines
an extensive corpus of private and published writing by gay people and their parents to pro-
duce a careful intellectual history of this phenomenon. She argues that gay people’s shifting
hopes, fears, and expectations regarding their relationships with their parents—and parents’
evolving understandings and misunderstandings of their gay children—not only evinced but
also facilitated a broader move from reticence to disclosure around homosexuality that trans-
formed gays “from secret to known, even formalized, selves” (p. 193). These changes, in turn,
both registered and fueled fundamental transformations in the meaning of family life.
In the decades immediately after World War II, men and women who experienced same-
sex attractions sought to balance their gay lives with their family relationships. Most often

432 BOOK REVIEWS
they chose discretion, a strategy that, as Murray shows, involved varying, calibrated con-
cealments and disclosures on the parts of children and parents alike. In the late 1960s, how-
ever, the gay liberation generation began to insist that embracing and disclosing one’s gay
identity was a political imperative. Even as some gay liberationists cast their parents as sym-
bols of a repressive past, many also prioritized coming out to their parents, insisting that their
families know and recognize their authentic sexual selves. Similarly, lesbian-feminists’ polit-
ical commitments as “women-identified women” led them to critique their families, but also
to seek closer, more empathetic relationships with their mothers and other family members.
For many parents of gay men and women in the 1970s, these personal, politicized revelations
were bewildering and incomprehensible. But some parents responded with a movement of
their own. In an especially perceptive and persuasive chapter, Murray describes how this
“parents’ movement” played a crucial symbolic and practical role at a time when gay politi-
cal gains were threatened by the emerging religious right. The organization now known
as Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) originated as a kind of ac-
tivist parents’ auxiliary to gay liberation. But by the late 1970s, in response to conservative
attacks, parents’ rhetoric more and more insisted defensively that homosexuality was a natu-
ral, if perhaps unlucky, variation, and that gays and lesbians were ordinary, moral people.
Simultaneously, it embraced an “ethos of parent grief,” emphasizing the emotional burdens
of parenting a gay son or daughter in a hostile world and seeking to provide sympathy and
support to parents (p. 133).
Scholars have often cited the creation of informal peer care-giving networks during the
AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s when describing how gay people have historically forged
new “chosen” families. In the final chapter of Not in This Family, Murray seeks to decenter
this analysis, showing how families of origin were also an important part of reactions and re-
sponses to the crisis. While parents’ attitudes varied, many shared in their stricken sons’ ex-
periences of discrimination and social isolation, “placing them closer to their gay children
and intensifying the relationships—often ambivalently but nonetheless recognizably—be-
tween them and their gay sons” (p. 138). Some parents became activists. Some forged close
relationships with their children’s friends and partners. Meanwhile, public health campaigns
instructed parents to provide care for their sons, and many gay men sought their families’ suc-
cor. The AIDS crisis, Murray argues, cemented new expectations that gay children’s rela-
tionship with their parents would be characterized not only by emotional openness, but also
by ongoing support and nurture. By century’s end, if parents could not escape the fact of gay-
ness, so too was the family an unavoidable presence in the lives of gay people.
Like recent works by David K. Johnson (2004) and Margot Canaday (2010), Murray’s
study eschews a customary focus on the emergence and evolution of gay identities, commu-
nities, and politics. Instead, she places postwar gay and lesbian history at the center of
broader historical transformations—in this case, the fraught ascendance of the companionate
family. Gayness, she suggests, posed a special challenge amid the family’s shift from a pri-
marily practical, economic institution to a primarily intimate, affectionate one. Gay people
and their parents were thus key interpreters of these changes in the family; they offered un-
paralleled insights into the uncertainties and intergenerational tensions that resulted. The
move from postwar discretion to contemporary revelation, Murray argues, exemplifies how
the reconfiguration of family life produced both new freedoms and new burdens.
Murray has examined an impressively broad range of published and archival sources, in-
cluding over two dozen collections of personal papers, and she reads them with care and acu-
ity. (The sources come from both the United States and Canada, but Murray focuses on their
commonalities rather than on national differences.) Gay cartoons and artwork evocatively

BOOK REVIEWS 433
illustrate gay people’s preoccupation with making sense of family life. At times, Murray’s
cautious analysis and attentiveness to personal idiosyncrasies threaten to obscure the under-
lying trends she has identified. But the study ultimately strikes a good balance, offering a
convincing synthesis while conceding its inevitable limits, given the distinctiveness of indi-
vidual lived experience. For instance, Murray acknowledges that her subjects are dispropor-
tionately white, middle-class activists and writers accustomed to introspection, but she also
takes care to amplify rural, religious, and nonwhite gays’ voices when they offer contrasting
perspectives, marking a path for future scholarship. Not in This Family pioneers a welcome
new way of looking at how gay people, their parents, and ultimately all families have nego-
tiated the shifting terrains of sex, privacy, and kinship ties over the last half century.
REFERENCES
Canaday, M. (2010). The straight state: Sexuality and citizenship in twentieth-century America. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Johnson, D. K. (2004). The lavender scare: The Cold War persecution of gays and lesbians in the federal govern-
ment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Reviewed by BRIAN J. DISTELBERG, Department of History, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Eds.) - The History of The Social Sciences

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Eds.) - The History of The Social Sciences

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol.

47(4), 417–418 Fall 2011

Reviewed by ROBERT KUGELMANN, University of Dallas, Dallas, TX.

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

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

Reviewed by DAVID W. PARK, Associate Professor of Communication, Department of

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

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

Reviewed by DAVID K. ROBINSON, Truman State University, Kirksville, MO.

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by ANDREW S. WINSTON, Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology,

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

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

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

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

Michel Meulders. Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to Neuroscience (Laurence Garey,

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

Reviewed by DOUGLAS C. CREELMAN, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of

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

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

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

Вам также может понравиться