George Makari – författare

WINNER OF THE 2022 ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD (NONFICTION)A BLOOMBERG BEST NONFICTION BOOK“Does not pull its punches.”—The Independent"Enthralling.”—New York Times"A compelling story of racial and ethnic animosity.”—Wall Street JournalAn illuminating work revealing the long history of xenophobia—and what it means for today’s divided world  Over the last few years, it has been impossible to ignore the steady resurgence of xenophobia. The European migrant crisis and immigration from Central America to the United States have placed Western advocates of globalization on the defensive, and a “New Xenophobia” seems to have emerged out of nowhere.  In this fascinating study, George Makari traces the history of xenophobia from its origins to the present day. Often perceived as an ancient word for a timeless problem, “xenophobia” was in fact coined only a century ago, tied to heated and formative Western debates over nationalism, globalization, race, and immigration. From Richard Wright to Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, writers and thinkers have long grappled with this most dangerous of phobias. Drawing on their work, Makari demonstrates how we can better understand the problem that is so crucial to our troubled times.

Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine but fully neither.George Makari shows how writers, philosophers, doctors and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing but a natural one. This became the basis of the mind sciences, liberal politics, secular ethics and radically new visions of the self, society, the ordering of knowledge and the sources of unreason. Boldly original and synthetic, Soul Machine is a masterful new history of the mind, madness and the emergence of psychological man in the Western world.

Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine but fully neither.George Makari shows how writers, philosophers, doctors and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing but a natural one. This became the basis of the mind sciences, liberal politics, secular ethics and radically new visions of the self, society, the ordering of knowledge and the sources of unreason. Boldly original and synthetic, Soul Machine is a masterful new history of the mind, madness and the emergence of psychological man in the Western world.

By 2016, it was impossible to ignore an international resurgence of xenophobia. What had happened? Looking for clues, psychiatrist and historian George Makari started out in search of the idea’s origins. To his astonishment, he discovered an unfolding series of never-told stories. While a fear and hatred of strangers may be ancient, he found that the notion of a dangerous bias called "xenophobia" arose not so long ago.Coined by late-nineteenth-century doctors and political commentators and popularized by an eccentric stenographer, xenophobia emerged alongside Western nationalism, colonialism, mass migration, and genocide. Makari chronicles the concept’s rise, from its popularization and perverse misuse to its spread as an ethical principle in the wake of a series of calamites that culminated in the Holocaust, and its sudden reappearance in the twenty-first century. He investigates xenophobia’s evolution through the writings of figures such as Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus, and Richard Wright, and innovators like Walter Lippmann, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon. Weaving together history, philosophy, and psychology, Makari offers insights into varied, related ideas such as the conditioned response, the stereotype, projection, the Authoritarian Personality, the Other, and institutional bias.Masterful, original, and elegantly written, Of Fear and Strangers offers us a unifying paradigm by which we might more clearly comprehend how irrational anxiety and contests over identity sweep up groups and lead to the dark headlines of division so prevalent today.

How did Freudian Theory come together as a body of ideas, and how did these ideas attract followers who spread this model of mind throughout the West? Makari contextualises Freud's early psychological work amid the great changes occurring in late-nineteenth-century European science, philosophy, and medicine, showing how Freud was a creative, inter-disciplinary synthesizer whose immersion in pre-existing domains of study led to the creation of Freudian Theory.He looks at how Freud's followers built a heterogeneous movement in the years leading to 1914, at the growth of the movement, and its subsequent collapse with the departures of Bleuler, Jung and Adler. Finally, Makari examines the critical, but neglected, Weimar period, when there was an attempt to rebuild a more pluralistic psychoanalytic community. This reformation resulted in the broader theoretical reach of psychoanalysis and its greater acceptance across the Western world outside Europe, where the rise of fascism was to lead to the destruction of psychoanalysis and the culture that once sustained it.