The ArgumentDespite the enormous historical attention psychoanalysis has attracted, its popularization in Britain (as opposed to the United States) in the wake of the Great War has been largely overlooked. The present paper explores the sources and fate of the sudden “craze” for psychoanalysis after 1918, examining the content of the books through which the doctrine became widely known, along with the roles played by religious interests and the popular press. The percolation of Freudian and related language into everyday English (...) was effectively complete by the 1930s. Crucially, it is argued that in Britain the character of psychoanalytic theory itself demonstrably converged with the psychological needs of the British population in the postwar period. The situation in Britain was clearly different in many respects from that in the United States. This episode bears on numerous questions about scientific popularization, the distinctiveness of British psychoanalysis, and though it is treated here only peripherally the epistemological status or nature of psychoanalysis. More generally the present paper may be read as an exercise in reflexive disciplinary historiography, in which the levels of discipline (“Psychology”) and subject matter (“psychology”) are viewed as interpenetrating and mutually constitutive. (shrink)

The Irish playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw has been of marginal concern for historians of biology because his vitalist Lamarckism has been viewed as out of step with contemporary science. However, Julian Huxley and J.B.S. Haldane were certainly of the opinion that Shaw was a man of influence in this regard and took pains to counter his views in their own attempts to engage the public in science. Previously, Shaw's colleague and friend H.G. Wells had also agued with Shaw (...) from his own mechanistic neo-Darwinian perspective. The very public debate between Shaw and Wells, which continued to concern Huxley and Haldane, shows that public concern over the moral implications of Darwinism has a long history. Taking into account the opinions of John Maynard Smith on this matter, I suggest that a consideration of Shaw in this context can give us an understanding of the historical popularity of vitalist teleology as well as of the persistent ambivalence to the non-normative character of Darwinism. (shrink)

This book is the first major account of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, both West and East, to appear since the end of the Cold War. Skillfully blending intellectual, political, and cultural history, Jan-Werner Müller elucidates the ideas that shaped the period of ideological extremes before 1945 and the liberalization of West European politics after the Second World War. He also offers vivid portraits of famous as well as unjustly forgotten political thinkers and the movements and institutions they inspired. Müller (...) pays particular attention to ideas advanced to justify fascism and how they relate to the special kind of liberal democracy that was created in postwar Western Europe. He also explains the impact of the 1960s and neoliberalism, ending with a critical assessment of today's self-consciously post-ideological age. (shrink)

Until recently the British zoologist Lancelot Hogben has usually appeared as a campaigning socialist, an anti-eugenicist or a popularizer of science in the literature. The focus has mainly been on Hogben after he became a professor of social biology at the London School of Economics in 1930. This paper focuses on Hogben’s life in the 1920s. Early in the decade, while based in London, he focused on cytology, but in 1922, after moving to Edinburgh, he turned his focus on experimental (...) zoology, first concentrating on vertebrate endocrinology and later moving over to the comparative physiology of invertebrate muscle. In the early 1920s Hogben played an active role in the development of experimental zoology in Britain. As such he was a fearless critic of evolutionary and metaphysical speculations. But in this period Hogben’s career prospects were seriously hampered by his confrontational nature and serious depression. As a result he was forced to leave Britain in 1925. He first accepted a position in Canada and in the period 1927–1930 he was a professor of zoology in South Africa. This paper will also add crucial new material to James Tabery’s recent discussion of the history behind Hogben’s ideas about the interaction of heredity and environment in individual development. In addition a previously unknown Lamarckian controversy will be discussed. (shrink)

Butler’s idea of evolution was developed over the publication of four books, several articles and essays between 1863 and 1890. These publications, although never achieving the success expected by Butler, proposed a psychological elaboration of evolution, called ‘unconscious memory’. This was strongly in contrast with the materialistic approach suggested by Darwin’s natural selection. Starting with a historical introduction, this paper aspires to ascertain the logic, meaning and significance of Butler’s idea of ‘unconscious memory’ in the post-Darwinian physiological and psychological Pan-European (...) discussion. Particular attention is devoted to demonstrating that Butler was not only a populariser of science but also an active protagonist in the late Victorian psychological debate. (shrink)

During the first half of the twentieth century, the horticulturist Luther Burbank was largely considered an irrelevant figure by the scientific community, despite winning acclaim from the public as an eminent scientist. In examining the intellectual, social, and political claims embedded in texts by and about Burbank, this essay argues that consideration of the Burbank stories as they circulated in the vernacular realm can aid historians in understanding the dynamics of science in American life. Among the themes it addresses are (...) how the Burbank stories directly engaged the question of who should legitimately count as a student of nature; the varied philosophical perspectives that derived from siting science within the domestic sphere; and how these stories played with the possibility of a philosophy of nature based on the concept of "living matter," as opposed to one grounded on mechanistic principles. The essay also discusses how Burbank's views on evolution were mediated by the image of the child and the way in which his convictions regarding the power of the environment to release latent characteristics in physiological material presented a view of the future of the American "race" that was at odds with conventional eugenic thinking and assigned a central role to women in the drama of American evolution. (shrink)

In everyday parlance, "inhibition" suggests repression, tight control, the opposite of freedom. In medicine and psychotherapy the term is commonplace, its definition understood. Relating how inhibition—the word and the concept—became a bridge between society at large and the natural sciences of mind and brain, Smith constructs an engagingly original history of our view of ourselves. Not until the late nineteenth century did the term "inhibition" become common in English, connoting the dependency of reason and of civilization itself on the repression (...) of "the beast within." This usage followed a century of Enlightenment thought about human nature and the nature of the human mind. Smith traces theories of inhibitory control from the moralistic psychologies of the early nineteenth century to the famous twentieth-century schools of Sherrington, Pavlov, and Freud. He finds that the meanings of "inhibition" cross disciplinary boundaries and outline the growth of our belief in the self-regulated person. (shrink)

SummaryE. W. MacBride was one of the last supporters of Lamarckian evolution, and played a prominent role in the ‘case of the midwife toad’. Unlike most Lamarckians, however, he adopted a very conservative political stance, advocating the permanent inferiority of some races and the necessity of restricting the breeding of the unfit. This article shows how MacBride turned Lamarckism into a plausible means of supporting these positions, by arguing that progressive evolution is a slow process, and that degeneration of the (...) germ plasm takes place in unfavourable environments. In conclusion, it is suggested that MacBride's example shows that there are no intrinsic links between scientific theories and social views. These who insist on the social character of scientific knowledge must recognize that a theory may acquire different ideological links in different social environments. (shrink)

The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by widespread optimism about biology and its ability to improve the world. A major catalyst for this enthusiasm was new theories about inheritance and evolution (particularly Hugo de Vries's mutation theory and Mendel's newly rediscovered ideas). In Britain and the USA particularly, an astonishingly diverse variety of writers (from elite scientists to journalists and writers of fiction) took up the task of interpreting these new biological ideas, using a wide range of (...) genres to help their fellow citizens make sense of biology's promise. From these miscellaneous writings a new and distinctive kind of utopianism emerged – the biotopia. Biotopias offered the dream of a perfect, post-natural world, or the nightmare of violated nature (often in the same text), but above all they conveyed a sense that biology was – for the first time – offering humanity unprecedented control over life. Biotopias often visualized the world as a garden perfected for human use, but this vision was tinged with gendered violence, as it became clear that realizing it entailed dispossessing, or even killing, ‘Mother Nature’. Biotopian themes are apparent in journalism, scientific reports and even textbooks, and these non-fiction sources shared many characteristics with intentionally prophetic or utopian fictions. Biotopian themes can be traced back and forth across the porous boundaries between popular and elite writing, showing how biology came to function as public culture. This analysis reveals not only how the historical significance of science is invariably determined outside the scientific world, but also that the ways in which biology was debated during this period continue to characterize today's debates over new biological breakthroughs. (shrink)

During the British socialist revival of the 1880s competing theories of evolution were central to disagreements about strategy for social change. In News from Nowhere (1891), William Morris had portrayed socialism as the result of Lamarckian processes, and imagined a non-Malthusian future. H.G. Wells, an enthusiastic admirer of Morris in the early days of the movement, became disillusioned as a result of the Malthusianism he learnt from Huxley and his subsequent rejection of Lamarckism in light of Weismann's experiments on mice. (...) This brought him into conflict with his fellow Fabian, George Bernard Shaw, who rejected neo-Darwinism in favour of a Lamarckian conception of change he called "creative evolution.". (shrink)

Freud may never have set foot in Cambridge - that hub for the twentieth century's most influential thinkers and scientists - but his intellectual impact there in the years between the two World Wars was immense. This is a story that has long languished untold, buried under different accounts of the dissemination of psychoanalysis. John Forrester and Laura Cameron present a fascinating and deeply textured history of the ways in which a set of Freudian ideas about the workings of the (...) human mind, sexuality and the unconscious affected Cambridge men and women - from A. G. Tansley and W. H. R. Rivers to Bertrand Russell, Bernal, Strachey and Wittgenstein - shaping their thinking across a range of disciplines, from biology to anthropology, and from philosophy to psychology, education and literature. Freud in Cambridge will be welcomed as a major intervention by literary scholars, historians and all readers interested in twentieth-century intellectual and scientific life. (shrink)

The article traces the origination of the psychological concept of the ‘herd instinct’, popularized by British surgeon Wilfred Trotter, locating this in a distinctive moment of dialogue between the natural and human sciences. It challenges the incorrect association of Trotter’s model with the crowd theory of Gustave Le Bon and negative commentaries on mass culture. In contrast, it shows that Trotter’s model rests on imitation and suggestion not as the sign of a derogated culture but as the ground of associated (...) life, with altruism as its highest expression. His argument that individuals possessed an inherent capacity for association and a disposition to act in the interests of the social group was designed to challenge the hierarchical models of Social Darwinism. Instead, he highlighted the evolutionary importance of variability and innovation and proposed a horizontal model of cooperation as the basis of adaptation. Trotter’s narrative of human potential pre-dated and informed Freud’s own collective psychology, as well as providing an influential challenge to his theory of repression. The widespread take-up of Trotter’s model of the herd instinct in the context of futures thinking, forming the basis of an egalitarian approach to governance that proposed human fulfilment and social progress as complementary aims, supports the article’s argument that psychological approaches to collectivity were well established prior to the First World War rather than formed in response to it, and that these were embedded within social thinking across the political spectrum, rather than derived for instrumentally conservative purposes. (shrink)

Much has been written about the relationship between biology and social science during the early twentieth century. However, discussion is often drawn toward a particular conception of eugenics, which tends to obscure our understanding of not only the wide range of intersections between biology and social science during the period but also their impact on subsequent developments. This paper draws attention to one of those intersections: the British economist and social reformer William Beveridge’s controversial efforts to establish a Department of (...) Social Biology at London School of Economics during the 1920s and 1930s. Featuring a fully equipped laboratory headed by a leading geneticist, the Department of Social Biology was Beveridge’s attempt to “cross-fertilise” biology and social science and, in so doing, take the ideological heat out of social scientific, in particular economic, methods of investigation. Exploring why Beveridge’s project failed and throwing light on its long-term legacies, this paper considers what we can learn from the short-lived Department of Social Biology. (shrink)