Showing papers in "History of the Human Sciences in 1999"

The ordinariness of the archive

Abstract: This article argues that the notion of the archive is of some value for those interested in the history of the human sciences. Above all, the archive is a means of generating ethical and epistemological credibility. The article goes on to suggest that there are three aspects to modern archival reason: a principle of publicity whereby archival information is made available to some or other kind of public; a principle of singularity according to which archival reason focuses upon questions of detail; and a principle of mundanity, whereby the privileged focus of archival reason is said to be the commonplace dimension of everyday life.

Education for maturity and responsibility

Abstract: Adorno: The demand for maturity and responsibility [Mündigkeit1] seems to be entirely natural in a democracy. To clarify this I should just like to refer to the start of Kant’s very brief treatise entitled ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’2 He there defines ‘tutelage’ – immaturity and irresponsibility [Unmündigkeit] – and thus also by implication maturity and responsibility, by saying that this tutelage is one’s own fault if it originates not in a lack of understanding, but rather in the lack of the resolution and courage to rely on oneself without the guidance of another. ‘Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.’ This project of Kant’s – which no one, even with the worst will in the world, can accuse of being unclear – seems to me to remain extraordinarily up-to-date. Democracy is founded on the education of each individual in political, social and moral awareness, as embodied in the institution of the representative vote. If this process is not to result in irrationality, then a prerequisite must be the capacity and courage of each individual to make full use of his reasoning power. If we do not keep hold of that then all talk of Kant’s greatness becomes empty talk, lip-service; as if, for example, someone were to draw our attention to the Great Elector3 while walking down the Siegesallee. If the concept of a German intellectual tradition is to be taken at all seriously, then this is what we must work against above all, and with the utmost energy.

Archives in formation: privileged spaces, popular archives and paper trails:

Abstract: The article begins with Derrida’s etymology of the word ‘archive’: a privileged site to which records are officially consigned and in which they are guarded by legal authority. It explores contemporary variations on the theme of archive. The cases presented include efforts to construct scholarly archives that stand as personal monuments, struggles over the collection and consignment of records during official investigations of government scandals, and the ‘popular archive’ produced by the media spectacle surrounding the O. J. Simpson trial. The discussion orients to these archives not only as sources of documentary information but also as sites of historical struggle over the writing, collection, consignment, destruction and interpretation of writings.

Against Relativism in Psychology, On Balance

Abstract: Relativism in psychology unravels the truth claims and oppressive practices of the discipline, but simply relativizing psychological knowledge has not been sufficient to comprehend and combat the discipline as part of the ‘psy-complex’. For that, a balanced review of the contribution and problems of relativism needs to work dialectically, and so this chapter reviews four problematic rhetorical balancing strategies in relativism before turning to the contribution of critical realism. Critical realism exposes positivist psychology’s pretensions to model itself on what it imagines the natural sciences to be, and it grounds discursive accounts of mentation in social practices. The problem is that those sympathetic to mainstream psychology are also appealing to ‘realism’ to warrant it as a science and to discredit critical research which situates psychological phenomena. Our use of critical realism calls for an account of how psychological facts are socially constructed within present social arrangements and for an analysis of the underlying historical conditions that gave rise to the ‘psy-complex’. Only by understanding how the discipline of psychology reproduces notions of individuality and human nature, a critical realist endeavour, will it be possible to transform it, and to socially construct it as something different.

The politics of the liberal archive

Abstract: The idea of considering the archive as a political technology of liberal governmentality is developed in this article, questions of the uses of archives (important as these are) taking second place here to the politics apparent in the design and idea of one particular form of the archive. This form is the public archive as it became apparent in the 19th-century institution of the public library, the two chief examples being in Manchester and at the British Museum in London. The public archive can be seen to constitute a liberal public which was itself increasingly a democratic one. This constitution turned upon ideas such as the ‘free library’, ‘self-help’ and the active constitution of new readings of social life and social conditions. These readings involved the management of class relations at the time, and parallels are drawn between a sort of ‘anthropologizing’ of the archive evident in India and its ‘sociologizing’ in Britain at the same time. The constitution of democratic, liberal citizenship thro...

The seductions of the archive: voices lost and found:

Abstract: The archive can take many forms but all are marked by a connective sequence: archive, memory, the past, narrative. The author explores this sequence through an account of her engagement with four d...

‘Culture’, ‘society’and the figure of man

Abstract: The invocation of large-scale social unities - states, societies, empires, cultures, civilizations - is a long-established and pervasive practice among sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists and so on. This article examines the treatment of such unities as defined or held together by shared understandings and values, and as independent, boundary-maintaining social systems. We argue that both the ideational and the systemic presumptions at work here are dependent on what Foucault calls the figure of man: the first as an inescapable consequence of that figure, the second as a tempting, but by no means necessary, one. Our first major argument concerns the remarkable persistence of concepts, such as ‘culture’, which designate unities that are ideational in character. We use the case study of anthropology to suggest that this is a consequence of the constitutive role of the figure of man within the human sciences. Human scientists and others critical of the stress on sameness resulting...

Was Adam Smith an individualist

Abstract: Smith is generally regarded as an individualist without qualification. This article argues that his predominantly individualist policy prescription is rooted in a more complex philosophy. He sees nature, including human nature, as a vast machine supervised by God and designed to maximize human happiness. Human weaknesses, as well as strengths, display the wisdom of God and play their part in this scheme. While Smith pays lip-service to justice, it is really social order that preoccupies him, and, within that, the defence of property. Individuals are valued as bearers of property. As persons, individuals are deceived by nature into acting in a socially beneficial way. In different ways Smith systematically denies the autonomy of the individual with respect to the whole of which he or she is part. For Smith, individual liberty is not the end, but the means, of sustaining social order and property.

Maturity and education, citizenship and enlightenment: an introduction to Theodor Adorno and Hellmut Becker, ‘Education for maturity and responsibility’:

Abstract: In a series of radio broadcasts, one of which is translated for the first time in this issue (pp. 21-34), Adorno and Becker claimed that modern education is profoundly inadequate. Their views on ed...

Archival action: the archive as ROM and its political instrumentalization under National Socialism

Abstract: In German archival terminology, the term Akte (file) as the basic unit of storage corresponds with its actualization as discursive (re-)action: the word ‘acts’ can designate at once the content of what is to be archived and the archive itself (Derrida, 1995: 17). Whereas the network of Prussian state archives from post-Napoleonic Germany until the First World War figured as a non-discursive juridical Read Only Memory of internal autopoetic bureaucracy, the German Weimar Republic sought to develop a more democratically transparent archival information politics. This remained, however, for the most part an aspiration of the new political culture, and it was never systematically adopted by state institutions. By contrast, the National Socialist regime was the first to make use of archival memory in a partisan, active manner; Akten were actively instrumentalized as part of the programme for the annihilation of European Jewry. This article, based on the German state archives and also on a case-study concerning...

Regulating Criticism: Some Comments on an Argumentative Complex

Abstract: This commentary identifies a range of flaws and contradictions in Parker’s critical realist position and his critique of relativism. In particular we highlight: (1) a range of basic errors in formulating the nature of relativism; (2) contradictions in the understanding and use of rhetoric; (3) problematic recruitment of the oppressed to support his argument; (4) tensions arising from the distinction between working in and against psychology. We conclude that critical realism is used to avoid doing empirical work, on the one hand, and to avoid scholarly interdisciplinary engagement, on the other.

Durkheimian sociology and 20th-century politics: the case of Célestin Bouglé

Abstract: This article revises received wisdom about the Durkheimian school of sociology and its relationship to Marxism by analyzing the work of Celestin Bougle, one of the most influential and least examin...

Ferdinand Tönnies on crime and society: an unexplored contribution to criminological sociology

Abstract: I offer a discussion of the criminological sociology of Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1936). While Tonnies is generally well known for his theory of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, his elaborate contribut...

Epistemology in the face of strong sociology of knowledge

Abstract: Advocates of the strong programme in the sociology of knowledge contend that its four defining tenets entail the elimination and replacement tout court of epistemology by strong sociology of knowledge. I advance a naturalistic conception of both substantive and meta-level epistemological inquiry which fully complies with these four tenets and thereby shows that the strong programme neither entails nor even augurs the demise of epistemology.

The uncertain sciences

Abstract: There is poignancy in books that have taken time, in which the author reflects on the reading and thoughts of many years, and attempts to see whether they can all add up and sustain hope. In a way, Bruce Mazlish began this book when he cooperated with Jacob Bronowski on The Western Intellectual Tradition (1960) (poignant for me as it was the book in which I discovered there might be such a thing as an intellectual tradition). He went on to publish wide-ranging books, which are inappropriately assessed by narrow academic criteria. He has speculated on shifts in consciousness in The Fourth Discontinuity (1993), about the information technology revolution, and – most recently – on globalization. In The Uncertain Sciences he gathers his thoughts under the rubric of the human sciences in order to shape a picture, and propose a future, for the knowledge that we have of ourselves. This future, he argues, lies with a shift in human consciousness towards the situation in which the human sciences become the knowledge of a self-recreating human community. With this he wants to face the pessimism of the late 20th century.

Partial readings: Addressing a renaissance archive

Abstract: By considering a variety of readings of Renaissance Florence from Burckhardt to the present, this article discusses the nature of the interrelation between the archive and the historian, with a view to illustrating the partiality of both. The records contained within the archives are by nature fragmentary; vestiges of the past, they are also partial in the sense of being subjective, testimonies to past relationships either between individuals or between individuals and institutions - social or political. Likewise, the readings of historians are partial both in the sense that the historian’s research is focused upon particular parts of the archive and in his or her subjectivity as an historian. Interestingly, in this context post-Burckhardtian Florentine historiography shares common ground, however unwittingly, with certain aspects of post-modern writing in decentring the subject, for observations concerning the partial subjectivity of Burckhardt’s Renaissance individual apply equally to observations conce...

Enlightenment, modernity and war:

Abstract: The modern is not just the preserve of modernity. Even in the fifth century A.D. Latin moderns celebrated and emphasized the rupture between their new Christian era and what had gone before. But arguably our sense of being modern, of being carried along by the trajectory of modernity, is unique. My justification for this observation is largely sociological. The position taken here, and throughout this book, is that the philosophical representations of modernity, which are now usually referred to as ‘Enlightenment narratives’, mask and disguise a concrete socio-economic cultural form. Thus, here modernity is viewed essentially as a structural organization of state, economy, society and culture; a power complex and a mode of consciousness. Its historical significance results from the manner in which it self-consciously cut its links with all that had gone before and its generation of novel technical powers, which it constantly sought to upgrade. Modernity unleashed forces which were able to vanquish the past and the horizontal present in the form of less technologically powerful cultures.

Meno and the Internet: between memory and the archive

Abstract: This article is an analysis of the Internet as a mnemonic system and an assessment of its debt to and impact upon the classical tropes of memory established by Plato in the dialogue Meno.

The Frankfurt School and the problem of social rationality in Thorstein Veblen

Abstract: The Frankfurt School attacked Veblen ’ s claims regarding machine-induced rationality in industrial societ y. Their criticisms stemmed in part from the fact that Veblen failed to present his ideas systematically in a formal treatise on either economics or sociolog y, and because he did not use concepts or jargon familiar to the critical theorists. This article thus aims at: (1) demonstrating through textual exegesis the meaning of social rationality in the corpus of Veblen ’ s writing, especiall y The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904); (2) elucidating the problems that arose in the Frankfurt School ’ s critique of Veblen because he used nomenclature and conceptualizations unfamiliar to Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer; (3) reiterating Veblen ’ s thesis on the impact of ‘transfer effects’ on workers interacting with the machine process; and (4) outlining the failure of the Frankfurt School adequately to examine his claims in the American political environment in which they were made.

Psychologists interpreting conversion: two American forerunners of the hermeneutics of suspicion

Abstract: Because of the importance of Puritanism in its history, one of the forms taken by religious Angst at the end of the 19th century in New England was uneasiness about the psychological nature and validity of the conversion experience. Apart from William James and G. Stanley Hall, the leading psychologists who investigated this phenomenon were Edwin Starbuck and James Leuba. Each had a different personal stance with regard to the plausibility of religious belief. In practice their differences of opinion over the psychology of conversion pivoted round the role of sexuality. In the first part of the 20th century their conflicting views brought to the fore themes that were eventually given full expression 40 years later in Paul Ricoeur’s account of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’.

Universality and particularity in the philosophy of E. B. Bax and R. G. Collingwood

Abstract: This article examines the ways in which E B Bax and R G Collingwood attempted to avoid relativism and irrationalism without postulating a pure and universal reason Both philosophers were profound historicists who recognized the fundamentally particular nature of the world Yet they also attempted to retain a universal aspect to thought - Bax through his distinction between the logical and alogical realms, and Collingwood through his doctrine of re-enactment The article analyses both their metaphysical premises and their philosophies of history Finally an attempt is made to use their arguments as starting-points from which to arrive at a historicist resolution of the problems of relativism and irrationalism

The Dialectic of Enlightenment: a contemporary reading:

Abstract: The importance of the concept of subjectivity has been underestimated in the work of Theodor Adorno. In order to address this lacuna we make an interpretation of Adorno’s text Dialectic of Enlightenment, in the form of an ‘idealized’ narrative of enlightenment’s historical decline into its ‘self-conceived’ opposite, namely myth. Within this narrative we unravel the Freudian assumptions underlying Adorno’s work. We depict the form of subjectivity that Adorno regards as inextricably connected to enlightenment reason. We then analyse his argument for the inevitable regression of this kind of subjectivity, and the resultant collapse of reason and enlightenment themselves. In so doing we demonstrate that, in Adorno’s view, the enlightenment concept of subjectivity is seriously flawed and entails an inevitable regression which, in the end, encompasses the very ‘death of the Subject’.

Eros and Civilization revisited

Abstract: The article consists of a re-examination of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization in the light of continuing interest in that work. After a brief consideration of Marcuse’s attempt to use Freud to indict contemporary civilization, focusing on the concepts of surplus repression and guilt, the article turns to his utopian sketch of Eros as a culture builder and the reconciliation of reason and instinct. These themes, which form the focus of recent interest, are explored by examining Marcuse’s interpretation of Kant and Schiller as well as Freud. In all cases Marcuse’s interpretation is shown to be flawed. The conclusion is that Marcuse’s attempt to indict established reason in the light of instinct and yet to hold out the prospect of a reconciliation of reason and instinct leads to an impoverished concept of both.

The relevance of Bentley for group theory: founding father or mistaken identity?:

Abstract: A. F. Bentley’s The Process of Government (1908) is widely accepted as an important source of contemporary interest group study. This paper argues to the contrary that Bentley’s arguments in this area are obscure and have contributed little to the programme of modern interest group research. His importance is as a contributor to the debate on the nature of social science and social science method and not as the starting-point for interest group analysis. The judgement about his role as a social scientist should rest on consideration of his body of work and not simply the one book. In terms of his much cited book, Bentley, it is argued, is misread. The central purpose of this article is to explore the consequences of that misinterpretation. The misreading of The Process of Government, and the unmerited assumption that it is directly connected to modern interest group theory, has led to a misunderstanding of that contemporary theory. In particular his use of the term ‘group’ is much wider in scope than is n...

When did a psychologist last discuss ‘chagrin’? American psychology’s continuing moral project

Abstract: The starting-point of this article is Graham Richards’ (1995) claim that American psychology includes a moral project present even before the discipline got underway as a modern institution. We accept this, but identify a different kind of moral project, stemming from the radical critique of morality by Ralph Waldo Emerson, rather than the moral aims of Noah Porter and James McCosh. This leads to a morality based on (but not reducible to) psychological events, and worked out, not in academic psychology, but in the practical disciplines of counselling and psychotherapy. We trace its elaboration from Freud to the writings and practice of Albert Ellis and Carl Rogers. The critique is of a traditional morality of obligation with its discourse of ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’. A parallel is drawn with a similar (and contemporaneous) critique in moral philosophy.