History of the Human Sciences

This article analyzes the approach to systems theory promoted by Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Kenneth Boulding during their time at the Ford Foundation’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in 1954–5 and in the pages of the 1956 General Systems Yearbook. At the Ford Foundation’s Center, social scientists engaged in interdisciplinary research on ‘problems of organization’ that encouraged them to develop theoretical tools that scaled between organisms, institutions, and social organizations. Bertalanffy and Boulding were able to gain financial support from the Center for their ‘general system(s) theory’ that promised to solve these ‘problems of organization’ while unifying the social sciences in the service of the Foundation’s philanthropic mission. Systems thinkers at the Center founded the Society for General Systems Research, an important professional organization for systems theory in the coming decades. In the Society’s General Systems Yearbook, Bertalanffy and Boulding debated the meaning and underlying politics of thinking in systems in language shaped by their time at CASBS. By attending to this instantiation of systems thinking in its institutional and social context, this article attempts to tell a history of system without accepting the universalizing aspirations of its historical subject.

Educational genomics is an emerging field of research that analyses associations between vast samples of human DNA and educational outcomes. I trace how this field navigates a series of old and new methodological problems and political controversies, while attempting to distance itself from the elitist, eugenic, and racist history of genetics in education. Moving away from genetic determinism, its multidisciplinary approach embeds knowledge from the social sciences selectively. In particular, I highlight how microeconomic methodologies and concepts have become salient not only in educational genomic explanations and hypotheses but also in scientists’ political understanding of ‘equality’, reframing past political debates and reimagining governance applications of genetic knowledge. While controversies on the biologisation of social hierarchies persist, the associated debates on human difference, now framed around producing educational ‘equality’, are premised on educational genomics’ contribution to predicting, valuing, and enhancing social human capital.

Ole Ivar Lovaas – a Norwegian-born professor of psychology at UCLA – is considered a pioneer in the development of interventions for autistic children based on Applied Behaviour Analysis. According to previous accounts, Lovaas and his family were forced farm workers during the German occupation of Norway between 1940 and 1945, when Lovaas was 13–18 years old. This article shows that the Løvaas family were in fact members of the collaborationist fascist party Nasjonal Samling. His father, Ernst Albert Løvaas, was a prominent leader in the propaganda apparatus of the German-installed fascist government. Ole Ivar Lovaas himself was an active participant in, and a local leader of, the fascist youth movement. The article concludes by comparing these revelations about Lovaas to previous similar revelations about another important figure in the history of autism, Hans Asperger.

The critical stance adopted by Iran's prominent communist party, the Tudeh Party, toward psychoanalysis is illustrated through a polemical essay preceding the translation of A Primer of Freudian Psychology. Echoing the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, who vehemently criticized psychoanalysis as a ‘bourgeois science’, Hushang Tizabi, a translator affiliated with the Tudeh Party, delves into the shortcomings of Freudian thought in the preface to his rendition, contrasting it with the ‘bright dialectical materialism’ inherent in Marxian ideology. This article represents an intersection between Marxism and Freudianism in a nation not communist in the vein of the Soviet Union but significantly influenced by socialist discourse. It exemplifies how prefatory materials in translation can alter the politico-ideological stance of a text, offering new interpretations and emphasizing specific elements while potentially overlooking other significant aspects. This discussion also contextualizes translations within the historical landscape of humanities in Iran.

In this article I examine five psychoanalytically inflected essays that the American sociologist Talcott Parsons published during the 1950s. It is of no small significance that they were produced during the time that Parsons was formulating the general theory of action. I refer to them as the totem–taboo thematic essays given that they deal with many of the intertwined problematics that the Viennese founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, confronted in his controversial book, Totem and Taboo. I first describe the circumstances in which Parsons initially encountered Freud's totem–taboo thesis in 1925. I then briefly consider his involvement in building action theory, that produced a unique conceptual framework by which to interpret classical psychoanalysis. Next, I look at Parsons's modifications of Freud's propositions in the context of his theorizing about social systems and cultural values. In the fourth and longest section, I closely examine the totem–taboo themed essays in which Parsons investigated many of the central issues in Totem and Taboo. Finally, I argue that in his totem–taboo thematic essays Parsons presents a compelling theoretical articulation between psychic reality and sociocultural reality.

There has recently been something of a resurgence of interest in the Derrida–Foucault debate, with this leading to a reassessment of its aims, content, and outcome. This article contributes to that endeavor by following Amy Allen's claim that the debate was not concerned with madness per se, but with a critique of reason. However, I depart from Allen's conclusion in two ways: First, Allen does not actually engage with the debate per se but sets out to offer arguments for why we should side with Foucault's approach. As such, second, Allen not only falls into the logic of binary opposition of winner and loser, but also returns us to and so restricts critique to the parameters of Foucault's thinking. In contrast, I argue that it is the disagreement itself that provides the ‘positive’ moment in the debate, insofar as it brings us to critique reason itself without necessarily restricting us to the parameters of either thinker. In short, the Derrida–Foucault debate continues to be of interest, not because of what it divulges about Foucault's History of Madness per se, but because the differences that are revealed between Derrida and Foucault stimulate a critique—understood in terms of a questioning of the conditions of possibility—of reason itself, including its composition and limit, as well as its relationship to its other, including the question of that other.

This article offers an affirmative reading of the Socratic and Cynical ‘figures’ in Foucault’s lecture series at the Collège de France, his last (if not final) word on the philosophical care of the self and cosmopolitanism. Foucault interprets ancient philosophy in a series of figures, all of whom are characterized by an affirmative care of self rather than by the hierarchical pastoral power relations he ascribes to Christian confessional politics. In an overlooked complication, Foucault introduces border figures (figures-limites) that mark the limits of a classical figure (e.g. Diogenes the Cynic) and anticipates or recalls very different historical and philosophical configurations of truth, power, and self. This article describes Socrates and Cynics as figures and as border figures introducing new relations of subject, truth, and power. The article distinguishes the practices of the life-affirming figure of Socrates from ‘Platonism’ and uses the concept of the border figure to explore the practical range of commitments of Cynic cosmopolitans. The article then addresses recent and present-day radical cosmopolitans in terms of the figure of the cosmopolitan and the border figure of the defiant performance artist and militant political revolutionary. Not easily amenable to simple labels, Foucault’s cosmopolitanism could be described as zetetic, or searching and testing. As militant and radical, its radical commitment is to experimenting with different configurations of subject, truth, and power.

This article highlights the personal and intellectual relationship between Bronisław Malinowski and Edvard Westermarck. In the interwar period, social anthropology went through a paradigm shift from evolutionism to functionalism. Malinowski put himself forward as a reformer, in contrast with Westermarck's more conservative and conciliatory approach. On the other hand, Malinowski always deferred to Westermarck and described himself as his disciple. Westermarck was Malinowski's teacher, his friend, and later his colleague at the London School of Economics. Our study of their personal and intellectual exchanges questions the traditional perception of a sudden intellectual revolution in social anthropology. The paradigm shift was essentially a change of perspective: a refocusing away from cross-cultural comparisons and towards intensive local studies. Westermarck, as a pioneer of fieldwork, contributed substantially to that development. His notion of social origins was close to Malinowski's notion of function. Thanks to their friendship and constant exchange of ideas, Westermarck became the bridge that connected evolutionism to Malinowski's brand of functionalism. Our chief primary source is their correspondence, with additional material by Westermarck's Finnish contacts.

Historical objectivity is a polysemic concept whose genesis and validity merit more non-polemical attention than it usually receives. As a notion that encapsulates the special applications of the language of objectivity to methodological and ethical issues faced by historical scholars all across the human sciences, it will be addressed here from a perspective that combines conceptual history, history of ideas, and theoretical reflection. A peculiar mode of claiming objectivity will be at focus, one that assumes that historians can bring together two attitudes often regarded as mutually contradictory: objectivity and engagement. My main assertion is that from at least the mid 19th century a new avenue for historical thought was opened, as a few intellectuals challenged the traditional requirement that histories be written sine ira et studio; and especially as they did so while at the same time upholding a strong commitment to the value of research. I intend to show how in the mode of engaged objectivity, a disposition like anger, which was traditionally taken to be a historiographical vice, was turned into a potential virtue. This general point will be illustrated with a case study of the underlying motives and the structural configurations of Alexandre Herculano's History of the Origin and Establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal, a confessedly committed, utterly critical, and sometimes furious research-based historical account.