camus and sartre: the story of a friendship and the quarrel that ended it

B O O K R E V I E W S

Laurent Carrer (Ed. and Trans.). Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault: The Hypnological Legacyof a Secular Saint. College Station, TX: Virtualbookworm.com Publishing, 2002. 323pp. $49.95 (paper). ISBN 1-58939-259-0.

Laurent Carrer (Ed. and Trans.). Jose Custodio de Faria: Hypnotist, Priest and Revolutionary.Victoria, BC: Trafford Publishing, 2004. 307 pp. $35.00 (paper). ISBN 1-41204488-X.

A scant 25 years ago, the history of mesmerism and its offshoots was a neglected field.The true significance of the work of Franz Anton Mesmer and the Marquis de Puységur wasknown to only to a few experts, and the considerable influence of mesmerism on the historyof medicine, psychology, and psychotherapy had, for the most part, gone unrecognized. Eventhe greatest of the early pioneers of “hypnotism” (a sanitized and somewhat watered-downform of mesmerism), James Braid and Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, were cited only in ob-scure footnotes in the textbooks. Although a fairly sophisticated knowledge of these traditionswas current at the end of the nineteenth century, it did not survive long into the twentieth, withthe result that, for the English-speaking world in the decades following the Second WorldWar, Henri Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) stood alone as an author-itative and penetrating analysis of this chapter in the history of Western psychologicalthought. This situation began to change in the 1980s, and the publication of Alan Gauld’s AHistory of Hypnotism (1992) and my From Mesmer to Freud (1993) helped to focus long-overdue attention on this neglected area.

Although some of the primary sources in this field appeared in German and English, thevast majority were written in French. This fact has had its part to play in the slow rate of ab-sorption of the importance of the history of mesmerism and early hypnotism by the English-speaking world. I believe that the publication of the two books that are the subject of this re-view signals the growing awareness, on the part of students of psychology and related areas,of the significance of this tradition.

Despite their titles, which make them sound like biographies, the two books are transla-tions. Both are edited and translated by Laurent Carrer, a French-born American who holds aPhD in clinical hypnotherapy. By his own description, Carrer has an interest in making impor-tant French works in psychology available to the English-speaking world. For his first twotranslations, he has chosen the principal books of two very different characters in the historyof mesmerism and hypnotism. The Abbé Faria was a Roman Catholic priest, born in thePortuguese colony of Goa on the Indian subcontinent, who eventually settled in Paris and de-veloped a markedly idiosyncratic form of mesmeric treatment, publishing an outline of his the-ory in 1819. The book, titled De la cause du sommeil lucide ou étude de la nature de l’homme(On the Cause of Lucid Sleep, or Study of the Nature of Man), was meant to be the first of anumber of volumes on his new approach to healing based on suggestion, but the others werenever published. Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault was a physician of Nancy, who devoted his lifeto a medical practice that was unique in making hypnotism the healing method of choice.Liébeault wrote several books, the most important being his first: Du sommeil et des états ana-logues considérés surtout au point de vue de l’action du moral sur le physique (On Sleep andStates Analogous to It, Considered Especially from the Point of View of Its Effects on the Mindand the Body) published in 1866. Carrer has chosen to make his translation of Liébeault’s book

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 43(1), 91–92 Winter 2007Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002 /jhbs.20212© 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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from the 1889 version, which is substantially the same as that of 1866, but, as Carrer puts it,benefits from “the author’s hindsight.” As a bonus, the translator has included two additionalwritings by Liébeault: “Confessions of a Physician Hypnotist” and “Chapter III of SuggestiveTherapeutics: Lucidity.” Carrer’s translation of Faria’s book is based on the 1906 edition, whichis described as a reprint of the original 1819 edition. The reader benefits from the fact that thetranslation includes the informative preface and introduction to the 1906 edition contributed byDaniel Gelasio Dalgado of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Lisbon.

The translation of both books is vigorous and readable, and the additional material pro-vided also makes them a goldmine of information. Carrer’s introductory comments on Fariaand Dalgado’s discussion of his life and ideas provide more information about this eccentricbut influential thinker than I have found in any other source. Carrer’s discussion of the unique-ness and pioneering quality of Faria’s ideas about suggestion is most insightful and helps toplace him in the context of his time. It also traces the lines of influence of Faria’s approachup to Liébeault and beyond. Carrer’s examination of Liébeault’s view of hypnosis as a formof sleep will be particularly stimulating for hypnotherapy practitioners, and his discussion ofLiébeault’s vacillation between accepting and rejecting the reality of “magnetic fluid” will beof special interest for historians of the mesmeric tradition. According to Carrer’s Web site, heis now working on a translation of Puységur’s Mémoires pour servir B l'histoire et B l'étab-lissement du magnétisme animal (Memoirs to Aid in the History and Establishment of AnimalMagnetism), a foundation work in the history of modern psychology and a much-needed re-source for modern students.

REFERENCES

Crabtree, A. (1993). From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic sleep and the roots of psychological healing. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press.

Ellenberger, H. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. NewYork: Basic Books.

Gauld, A. (1992). A history of hypnotism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Reviewed by ADAM CRABTREE, Faculty of the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy, Toronto,ON, Canada.


Theodore Ziolkowski. Clio the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 215 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0-8014-4202-8 (cloth).

It is prudent to approach projects touted as “interdisciplinary” with at least a modicumof suspicion, for this term is sometimes used to lend a veneer of credibility to arguments lack-ing sufficient clarity and cohesion. Happily, Theodore Ziolkowski maps out a path of inquirythat promises to be interdisciplinary in the best sense of the word: by focusing on the notionof “history” as it was taken up, respectively, by the four German academic faculties (philos-ophy, theology, law, and medicine) around the beginning of the nineteenth century, he at-tempts to highlight broad aspects of the Romantic period’s Weltanschauung that would likelyhave remained invisible to a more narrowly disciplinary approach (p. xi).

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs

Clio the Romantic Muse is both a balanced, well-wrought piece of scholarship and an en-joyable read. The synchronic and diachronic connections Ziolkowski makes are fascinatingand plausible, and he deftly weaves together general historical factors and specific biograph-ical detail into a clear and compelling narrative. His goal is to show how, despite their manydifferences, the dominant figures in the German faculties (e.g., Hegel in philosophy,Schleiermacher in theology, Savigny in law, and Oken in medicine) shared a conception ofhistory that made it possible to envision human knowledge as a “unified whole in contrast tothe discrete taxonomies of the earlier polymath encyclopedism” (p. 172). For Ziolkowski, thisshared conviction, which “[temporalized] every facet of human thought, within the facultiesand without” (p. 181), gave determinate shape and unity not only to the University of Berlin,established in 1810, but also to a uniquely Romantic conception of the university as such.

Unfortunately, the book’s primary strength is also its weakness. One of Ziolkowski’s ac-knowledged methodological presuppositions is that we can best apprehend the Romantic para-digm operative in the faculties by “considering the intellectual development of specific leaders ineach field” (p. x), and he claims further that, in order to grasp this development, we must assessthese thinkers’ ideas and arguments in light of their concrete biographical context (p. xi). Whilethis makes sense in principle, it calls for a delicate balance between biographical detail and closeattention to ideas. Too often, Ziolkowski sacrifices the latter for the sake of the former.

A case in point: the very idea of “history” is left indeterminate throughout the text. Forinstance, one of Ziolkowski’s primary goals is to show that Hegel “marks the first time in thehistory of philosophy that history constituted the essential basis for philosophy itself ” (p. 43).While Hegel certainly examines the theme of history in an unprecedented manner, there arefew Hegel scholars today who would take this claim seriously as it stands. What Ziolkowski’sargument seems to cry out for—in lieu of his sweeping, and at times inaccurate, sketch ofHegel’s Phenomenology—is close consideration of what Hegel himself actually says, directlyand indirectly, about history and its place within his philosophical system.

In fairness, asking Ziolkowski to consider the idea of history closely, within all four facul-ties, would be to demand a very different and much more cumbersome book. Yet perhaps this isunavoidable. Again, Ziolkowski’s thesis is plausible. But, as it stands, his text does not analyzethe idea of history closely enough, in its permutations within the four faculties, to assure us thatthe leading intellectual figures he discusses share as much common ground as he claims.

Such weaknesses notwithstanding, however, Clio the Romantic Muse is, overall, an im-pressive and timely piece of scholarship. If, at points, it seems like the first step in what shouldbe a more substantive engagement of ideas, it at least accomplishes this step admirably well.

Reviewed by JAMES GILBERT-WALSH, Professor of Philosophy, Saint Thomas University,Fredericton, NB, Canada.

THEODORE ZIOLKOWSKI RESPONDS:

I appreciate Prof. Gilbert-Walsh’s generous and understanding review of my book—in-cluding his reservation. He has put his finger on the principal problem confronting any authorof an interdisciplinary project: a book written broadly enough to interest the nonspecialist willinevitably disappoint the specialist. In this case, the professional philosopher is unhappy with

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my treatment of Hegel. Obviously, I could have written at greater length about that fascinat-ing thinker. Indeed, I could well have written a four-volume work, devoting one each, respec-tively, to philosophy, theology, law, and natural science/medicine. But in that case—leavingaside the issue of my own competence—I suspect that interested readers would have turnedto one or another of the volumes without seeing the common theme that most mattered to me.In such cases, I prefer to face the criticism of the specialist in the hope of engaging the inter-est of nonspecialists in fields where they might otherwise not bother to roam.

THEODORE ZIOLKOWSI, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.


Ronald Aronson. Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel ThatEnded It. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 291 pp. $32.50(cloth). ISBN 0-226-02796-1. $19.00 (paper). ISBN 0-226-0024-9.

“Camus, no doubt, will remain the more sympathetic of the two men” (p. 261). Thusopines Ronald Aronson near the end of this important study. He goes on to offer some rea-sons for this, notably the fact that Camus died young (at 46), whereas Sartre in a sense “out-lived himself.” Moreover, he continues, although Camus had some serious flaws (a combina-tion of arrogance and rancor), he displayed an appealing vulnerability as a human being, bycontrast with “Sartre’s incredible intellectual gifts.”

The brief paragraph that I have just summarized is a fair distillation of Aronson’s ap-proach throughout. A writer of important earlier works on Sartre, the author tries to be even-handed in his judgments by acknowledging Sartre’s intellectual superiority while criticizingthe alleged “naïveté” of the latter’s “ambition to influence [Communism] for the better” (p.171). Rather than taking the easy, not uncommon road of saying that, according to the judg-ment of history (that is, of history up to now), Camus’ visceral anti-Communism has beenvindicated and Sartre’s ambitions entirely repudiated, Aronson sees their split as incarnating“the Left’s defeat in the twentieth century . . . the tragedy of the Left” (p. 5).

The book faithfully chronicles the details of the earliest personal encounters betweenSartre and Camus during the 1940s and then leads us into the Cold War period, documentingthe complementary influences of ex-Communist Arthur Koestler and French Communist Partydogmatism on Camus, and the effects on Sartre of the arrest of PCF leader Jacques Duclos (thepigeons that he was taking home to be eaten were suspected of being vehicles of secret com-munications with Moscow) and the imprisonment of Communist sailor Henri Martin for op-posing the French war in Indochina. A summary of “The Explosion”—that is, FrancisJeanson’s highly critical review of Camus’ The Rebel in Sartre’s revue, Les Temps Modernes,followed by the deeply offended Camus’ “Letter to the Director of Les Temps Modernes” andSartre’s ultra-polemical reply—occupies the middle chapter (Chapter 7) of Aronson’s chroni-cle. The remainder concerns the historical dénouement as Aronson sees it, involving Camus’increasing personal isolation, in part due to his unpopular neutral stance concerning the Frenchwar in Algeria, and Sartre’s ultimate disillusionment with the Communists. Such a brief sum-mary can hardly do justice to a work that is a model in the history of ideas.

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One small quibble of mine has to do with Aronson’s slightly too facile linkage (p. 137)of Sartre’s “help in the Henry Martin affair” with his “moving toward open support ofCommunism.” After all, the issue had more to do with the war in Indochina than with Martin’sParty membership, and Aronson himself notes later that Camus, while refusing to join inSartre’s protest, wrote a separate protest of his own. As it happens, I attended a conference inParis a couple of years ago at which Henri Martin, then a graceful septuagenarian, spoke withneither rancor nor any apparent sense of disillusionment about his continued political workon the Left, his occasional visits to the new Vietnam, and his measured gratitude to Sartre. Hedid not appear “defeated.” Camus’ death was indeed a tragedy; along with others, I saw thistragedy etched on the face of his long-time mentor, Jean Grenier, when we attended the firstuniversity class he taught at the end of the winter vacation during which Camus’ fatal auto-mobile accident had occurred. But if there is one major discomfiture that I feel concerningAronson’s book, besides my more positive “take” on what Sartre stood for and accomplishedpolitically, it concerns Aronson’s sense, to me problematic, of “the tragedy of the Left.” Infact, these two discomfitures are linked: while official Communism, to which Sartre neverwholeheartedly subscribed, has died a deserved death, the global failures of the Right, fromIndochina to Algeria to Vietnam to Iraq, strike me as vindicating his overall stance.

Reviewed by WILLIAM L. MCBRIDE, Arthur G. Hansen Distinguished Professor of Philosophy,Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.


Steve Fuller. Kuhn vs. Popper: Prophets of the End of Science. London: Icon Books, 2003.227 pp. £9.99 (paper). ISBN 1-84046-468-2.

Steve Fuller’s Kuhn vs. Popper is an interesting and provocative short book (the pagesare very small). It is full of ideas—and of striking and sometimes contentious claims aboutintellectual history. Fuller’s initial point is that it was strange that Kuhn was taken up by in-tellectual radicals when his view of science is at heart deeply conservative and elitist. Fullerlooks back to the discussion between Kuhn and Popper at the 1965 conference out of whichcame Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (he refers to this as a “debate” or an “en-counter,” when in fact Popper simply made some brief remarks about a paper of Kuhn’s, in asession that Popper chaired). Fuller argues that while Kuhn is typically considered to havewon the argument with Popper, the wrong side came out on top. Making common cause withHacohen’s reading in his Karl Popper: The Formative Years, Fuller wishes to reclaim Popper’sside of the argument for political radicalism, and even suggests that Popper’s notoriously un-productive exchange with Adorno (cf. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology) served toconceal some common concerns about the importance of an overall understanding of whatwas going on in science.

Fuller takes us on a swiftly moving tour through a range of issues. He is exciting to read,but he covers so much ground that I would be surprised if any reader possesses the back-ground needed to engage with all his ideas (to fully understand some of them, one needs tolook at Fuller’s other work). Some of his claims (e.g., about intellectual influences on Popper)

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seem to me far-fetched, with Weber’s essays on politics and science as vocations, and HenriBergson, lined up as “decisive” influences. But Popper does not even refer to Weber’s essaysin his Die beiden Grundprobleme, Logic of Scientific Discovery, Open Society, or Poverty ofHistoricism. As to Bergson, Fuller tells us, “Popper was inspired to characterize science as the‘open society’ by Bergson’s last major work, The Two Sources of Religion and Morality” (p.104), while Popper actually wrote of “a considerable difference between Bergson’s way ofusing these terms [closed and open society] and mine” (Open Society, note to theIntroduction). As Popper does qualify his point slightly, Fuller’s claim might be arguable; buthere, as in the case of Weber, Fuller does not offer any argument.

It would, however, be a mistake to make too much of such matters. For this would de-tract from the real merits of Fuller’s book, and from the important issues with which itdeals. Fuller is in part concerned with a problem that one might trace back to at leastAuguste Comte: Adam Smith had argued that the advanced division of labor produces in-tellectual myopia on the part of its practitioners. The same, Comte suggested, is true of spe-cialization in science. Comte’s problem, in J. S. Mill’s words, was that “the present race ofscientific men, . . . unlike their predecessors, have a positive aversion to enlarged views,and seldom either know or care for any of the interests of mankind beyond the narrow in-terests of their pursuit” (Mill, 1865/1961, p. 91). For Thomas Kuhn, such a scientist be-comes “normal,” while for Fuller and Popper, he or she is pathological, and poses problemsfor the wider society.

Fuller also argues that under the impact of Kuhn, much work in the history, philosophy,and sociology of science has turned from the aspiration of critically assessing science to awish simply to understand its practices; to the analysis of conceptual issues internal to par-ticular scientific specialisms; or to the practice of an arcane specialism of its own. Fuller con-siders that what is needed is a critical sociology of knowledge and of social epistemology, andthat the latter represents Popper’s side of the disagreement with Kuhn (Popper did not saymuch directly about institutional issues, either concerning science or politics, but Ian Jarviehas argued in his Republic of Science that Popper’s view of science is in fact strongly socialin its character).

Fuller makes an interesting case for taking a Popperian rather than a Kuhnian view ofscience, and for us to look critically at both intellectual and institutional issues. However,while this diagnosis, and argument for it, is offered in Fuller’s book, there is a risk that it getsdrowned by the sheer flow of interesting speculative ideas and provocative asides on figuresfrom Heidegger to Dobzhanski.

Fuller’s plea for a critical approach might be interpreted at various different levels. Thefirst of these relates to the critical assessment of the internal coherence of science itself. Thishas been attempted by Nicholas Maxwell, but his enterprise has not in general been well re-ceived by philosophers or scientists. Second, there is the relationship between scientific insti-tutions, their incentives and practices, and the wider intellectual goals of science. Third—andthis seems dear to Fuller’s heart—there is the holding of the practice of science, and of its ap-plications, open to wider democratic accountability. But there is also a fourth dimension: theissues within political economy and politics that have led to the kinds of problems that weface, and the underlying social issues behind the tensions between pressures toward special-ization and our need for wider critical reflection.

In the face of these (interrelated) problems, one big question is: How are we best to un-derstand our situation, and what kinds of possibilities for addressing our problems are opento us? Fuller does not offer many suggestions here about how to resolve the interesting prob-lems that he opens up. At best, there is a (touching?) suggestion that a return to a kind of left

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radicalism will help. I am skeptical about that, for reasons that I have discussed in myPolitical Thought of Karl Popper. Readers interested in Fuller’s own more substantive viewsabout these matters will have to pursue them in his other writings.

REFERENCE

Mill, J. S. (1961). August Comte and positivism. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. (Original work pub-lished 1865)

Reviewed by JEREMY SHEARMUR, Philosophy, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts,Australian National University.


Martin Fichman. An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2003. 416 pp. $40.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-24613-2.

At the time of his death in late 1913, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) may well havebeen the most famous scientist in the world. Within months, however, a world war was rag-ing, and the collective memory of Wallace quickly faded. Little attention was given to Wallacestudies for 45 years, at which point several celebrations of the centennial of the Darwin-Wallace natural selection papers of 1858 and a doctoral dissertation by Gerald Henderson gotthings going again. Over the past ten years, around 20 monographs wholly or in large part de-voted to Wallace have appeared, making him, save (as always) Darwin and von Humboldt, themost investigated nineteenth-century naturalist through that period.

Most of these analyses have centered on his travels and evolution and biogeographywork, and rightfully so. But it is usually forgotten that Wallace was also one of the most po-tent social critics of his time, a leading spiritualist, and a respected anthropologist and ethno-grapher. Indeed, the origins of his Owenist humanitarian leanings predate even his early sur-veying efforts, and though these leanings evolved into a full-blown socialism only rather laterin Wallace’s life (ca. 1889, when he was 66 years of age), there can be no question that relatedissues were flavoring his thinking even as he collected natural history objects in the field inthe 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s and subsequently ground out reams of descriptive and theoreti-cal writings on them.

Martin Fichman’s new monographic study is the first by a professional historian to giveWallace his full due as a leading social force, and Fichman manages to accomplish this with-out giving short shrift to Wallace’s natural science triumphs. The book is in fact both a full-scale biography and a social/intellectual history; Fichman cleverly meets his twin objectivesthrough the fruitful employ of a contextualist format that allows him to wander away from themain chronology of events to ponder related settings and issues as appropriate. For example,he draws attention to the interplay in Wallace’s thought between socialism and spiritualism,concluding that the concerns expressed (if not always the theist underpinnings) remain validin our own time. He also gives considerable attention to Wallaceian thought as it might be re-lated to, and might even have influenced, the intellectual development of the two leadinglights of philosophical pragmatism, William James and Charles Peirce.

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Fichman has been so bold as to adopt this writer’s revisionist interpretation of Wallace’sintellectual development: my argument that Wallace never in fact had a “change of mind” re-garding the applicability of natural selection to humankind (as a result, it had been claimed,of his Owenist or spiritualist beliefs) but instead maintained throughout a teleological cos-mology within which both the survival of the fittest and moral inertias fit naturally. This is afar cry from earlier views, the more extreme of which simply took Wallace for a crank. Onthe other hand, I take some exception to Fichman’s claim that Wallace was in any real sensea theist; certainly Wallace was a devoted advocate of spiritualism, but to him its domain ap-parently represented more an extension of the natural world (i.e., was “law-based” in its op-eration, just like physical existence) than it did religious belief. While the intellectual major-ity has come to take a rather dim view of Wallace’s approach in this regard, it seems moreaccurate to dismiss the theism tag and to instead regard his position as a rather rigid, all-ex-tending naturalism: at most, as a brand of scientism. And while this perspective may well infact turn out to be a naïve one, it also seems that we should remain mindful that to this point,at least, we have yet to prove it so.

Reviewed by CHARLES H. SMITH, Department of Library Public Services, Western KentuckyUniversity, Bowling Green, KY.

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camus and sartre: the story of a friendship and the quarrel that ended it

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