Mitchell G. Ash - Böcker

This book presents new research on spaces for science and processes of interurban and transnational knowledge transfer and exchange in the imperial metropolis of Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapters discuss Habsburg science policy, metropolitan natural history museums, large technical projects including the Ringstrasse and water pipelines from the Alps, urban geology, geography, public reports on polar exploration, exchanges of ethnographic objects, popular scientific societies and scientifically oriented adult education. The infrastructures and knowledge spaces described here were preconditions for the explosion of creativity known as 'Vienna 1900.'

This book presents new research on spaces for science and processes of interurban and transnational knowledge transfer and exchange in the imperial metropolis of Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapters discuss Habsburg science policy, metropolitan natural history museums, large technical projects including the Ringstrasse and water pipelines from the Alps, urban geology, geography, public reports on polar exploration, exchanges of ethnographic objects, popular scientific societies and scientifically oriented adult education. The infrastructures and knowledge spaces described here were preconditions for the explosion of creativity known as 'Vienna 1900.'

Constructing Scientific Psychology, published in 1999, was the first full-scale interpretation of the life and work of the major American neuropsychologist Karl Lashley. It sets Lashley's research at the heart of two controversies that polarized the American life and human sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. These concerned the relationship between 'mind' and 'brain' and the relative roles of 'nature' and 'nurture' in shaping behaviour and intelligence. The book explodes the myth of Lashley's neuropsychology as a fact-driven, 'pure' science by arguing that a belief in the power of heredity and a nativist and deeply conservative racial ideology informed every aspect of his theory and practice.

Constructing the Subject traces the history of psychological research methodology from the nineteenth century to the emergence of currently favored styles of research in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Kurt Danziger considers methodology to be a kind of social practice rather than simply a matter of technique. Therefore his historical analysis is primarily concerned with such topics as the development of the social structure of the research relationship between experimenters and their subjects, as well as the role of the methodology in the relationship of investigators to each other in a wider social context. The book begins with a historical discussion of introspection as a research practice and proceeds to an analysis of diverging styles of psychological investigation. There is an extensive exploration of the role of quantification and statistics in the historical development of psychological research. The influence of the social context on research practice is illustrated by a comparison of American and German developments, especially in the field of personality research. In this analysis, psychology is treated less as a body of facts or theories than a particular set of social activities intended to produce something that counts as psychological knowledge under certain historical conditions. This perspective means that the historical analysis has important consequences for a critical understanding of psychological methodology in general.

The history of the social sciences has been marked by frequent and fierce debates on the rules of scientific methodology. Even the most general criteria - which are generally agreed upon in the natural sciences - are emphatically disputed in the social sciences. Presenting the history of psychology in the Netherlands as a case representative of Western social science, this book examines the divisive nature of social methodology more closely. The author scrutinises published books and articles, as well as archival material and taped interviews, to sketch a history in which psychologists call their colleagues semi-intellectuals who take lack of clarity for profundity or accuse them of undermining respect for men. As to the question of how such disagreements on the rules of sciences should be understood, this book contradicts the common picture in which social scientists only gradually came to understand how their profession should be scientifically practised.

This is a full-length historical study of Gestalt psychology - an attempt to advance holistic thought within natural science. Holistic thought is often portrayed as a woolly-minded revolt against reason and modern science, but this is not so. On the basis of rigorous experimental research and scientific argument as well as on philosophical grounds, the Gestalt theorists Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka opposed conceptions of science and mind that equated knowledge of nature with its effective manipulation and control. Instead, they attempted to establish dynamic principles of inherent, objective order and meaning, in current language, and principles of self-organization, in human perception and thinking, in human and animal behavior, and in the physical world. The impact of their work ranged from cognitive science to theoretical biology and film theory. Based on exhaustive research in primary sources including archival material, this study illuminates the multiple social and intellectual contexts of Gestalt theory and analyses the emergence, development and reception of its conceptual foundations and research programmes from 1890 to 1967.

The dismissal of civil servants on racist or political grounds in April 1933 marked the beginning of a massive, forced exodus of mainly Jewish scholars and scientists from Nazi Germany - a phenomenon unprecedented in the modern history of academic life. The essays in this volume examine whether that 'exodus of reason' lead to significant scientific change, and if so, how that change should be characterised. The volume challenges the focus of earlier work on the 'intellectual migration' on losses (for German science) and gains (for British and American science). Instead, the authors proceed from the assumption that the sciences are open, dynamic, and historically contingent systems, and explore the multiple, complex interactions of biographical, social, and cultural circumstances with changes - or lack of change - in the émigrés' scientific thinking and research.

The dismissal of civil servants on racist or political grounds in April 1933 marked the beginning of a massive, forced exodus of mainly Jewish scholars and scientists from Nazi Germany - a phenomenon unprecedented in the modern history of academic life. The essays in this volume examine whether that 'exodus of reason' lead to significant scientific change, and if so, how that change should be characterised. The volume challenges the focus of earlier work on the 'intellectual migration' on losses (for German science) and gains (for British and American science). Instead, the authors proceed from the assumption that the sciences are open, dynamic, and historically contingent systems, and explore the multiple, complex interactions of biographical, social, and cultural circumstances with changes - or lack of change - in the émigrés' scientific thinking and research.

During the 1930s, psychologists Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, and Lois Barclay Murphy emerged from the fields of social and personality psychology to challenge the neo-behavioralist status quo in American social science. Willing to experiment with the idea of 'science' itself, these 'rebels within the ranks' contested ascendent conventions that cast the study of human life in the image of classical physics. Drawing on the intellectual, social, and political legacies of William James' radically empiricist philosophy and radical Social Gospel theology, these three psychologists developed critiques of scientific authority and democratic reality as they worked at the crossroads of the social and the personal in New Deal America. Appropriating models from natural history, they argued for the significance of individuality, contextuality and diversity as scientific concepts as they explored what they envisioned as the nature of democracy, and the democracy of nature.

Psychologists on the March argues that the Second World War had a profound impact on the modern psychological profession in America. Before the war, psychology was viewed largely as an academic discipline, drawing its ideology and personnel from the laboratory. Following the war, it was increasingly seen as a source of theory and practice to deal with mental health issues. With the support of the federal government, the field entered a prolonged period of exponential growth. With this growth came major changes in the institutional structure of the field that spread to include the epistemological foundations of psychology. This book is a sustained study of this important era in American psychology. Moving back and forth between collective and individual levels of analysis, it provides a narrative that weaves together the internal politics and demography of psychology in relation to the cultural environment.

Constructing Scientific Psychology, published in 1999, was the first full-scale interpretation of the life and work of the major American neuropsychologist Karl Lashley. It sets Lashley's research at the heart of two controversies that polarized the American life and human sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. These concerned the relationship between 'mind' and 'brain' and the relative roles of 'nature' and 'nurture' in shaping behaviour and intelligence. The book explodes the myth of Lashley's neuropsychology as a fact-driven, 'pure' science by arguing that a belief in the power of heredity and a nativist and deeply conservative racial ideology informed every aspect of his theory and practice.

Inventing Our Selves proposes a radical new approach to the analysis of our current regime of the self, and the values of autonomy, identity, individuality, liberty, and choice that animate it. It argues that psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy and other 'psy' disciplines have played a key role in 'inventing our selves', changing the ways in which human beings understand and act upon themselves, and how they are acted upon by politicians, managers, doctors, therapists, and a multitude of other authorities. These mutations are intrinsically linked to recent changes in ways of understanding and exercising political power, which have stressed the values of autonomy, personal responsibility, and choice. This critical history diagnoses and destabilises our contemporary 'condition' of the self, to help us think differently about the kind of persons we are, or might become.

This is a full-length historical study of Gestalt psychology - an attempt to advance holistic thought within natural science. Holistic thought is often portrayed as a woolly-minded revolt against reason and modern science, but this is not so. On the basis of rigorous experimental research and scientific argument as well as on philosophical grounds, the Gestalt theorists Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka opposed conceptions of science and mind that equated knowledge of nature with its effective manipulation and control. Instead, they attempted to establish dynamic principles of inherent, objective order and meaning, in current language, and principles of self-organization, in human perception and thinking, in human and animal behavior, and in the physical world. The impact of their work ranged from cognitive science to theoretical biology and film theory. Based on exhaustive research in primary sources including archival material, this study illuminates the multiple social and intellectual contexts of Gestalt theory and analyses the emergence, development and reception of its conceptual foundations and research programmes from 1890 to 1967.

This Palgrave Pivot presents a new account of the social and epistemic processes that led to the creation of The Authoritarian Personality (TAP), a classic of political psychology published in 1950, which has been cited frequently in recent literature on authoritarian political parties and movements. Studies of the intellectual migration of European scholars and scientists to the United States have recognized TAP as one of the most successful results of the multiple efforts by émigrés and their American colleagues to reflect on the wider implications of the Nazi takeover of power, as well as the issue of whether and why elements of Nazi racism and antisemitism existed in America. However, the work is generally treated as part of the history of the Frankfurt School, and discussion has centered on the contribution of Theodor W. Adorno, whose chapters encompass less than one-fourth of the volume. This narrow perspective largely ignores the intensive collaboration between the Institute of Social Research in New York and the Public Opinion Study Group in Berkeley, California, and also among the four authors themselves. This is particularly true for the central contribution of the émigré Austrian psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik to TAP, which had little to do with the approach of the Frankfurt School. This book therefore investigates in detail the social circumstances that led to the creation of TAP, and pays equal attention to the work of all of TAP's authors, including the two Americans who wrote more than half the volume. It also considers whether and how the authors' ideas and methods interlinked in the volume itself, as well as how the approach of TAP relates to other research on antisemitism and ethnic prejudice in the USA during the 1940s.