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PSYCHOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2009
Extract
It has long been argued by social theorists that psychology has played a pivotal role in the culture and politics of modern life. This argument was influentially developed in Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilisation, now nearly fifty years old, which showed how our modern embrace of rationality and normality depends on the psychological “enclosure” of the mad as outside the social pale. The philosopher Ian Hacking has looked at the role of psychology in “making up people”, through defining a series of mental problems (such as schizophrenia, neurosis and suchlike) which are then taken up by people so that they become powerful social labels. More recently, influential sociologists ranging from Anthony Giddens to Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Sennett have developed a rich account of the insecurities of the modern self as the need to live in a complex and uncertain world leads to people developing psychological defence mechanisms.
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References
1 Foucault, M., Madness and Civilisation (London: Tavistock, 1967)Google Scholar.
2 Ian Hacking, “Making up People”, London Review of Books, 17 Aug. 2006.
3 Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991)Google Scholar; Sennett, Richard, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998)Google Scholar; Bauman, Zygmunt, Lquid Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2005)Google Scholar.
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5 Mandler, Peter, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edward Burke to Tony Blair (London: Yale University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
6 Thus at 61 she notes that in the decade before 1914 three theoretical approaches were used—instinct theory, crowd psychology and theories of the self—but she does not discuss the last in any detail and insofar as she does this is conflated with subjectivity.
7 See Moretti, F., Atlas of the European Novel (London: Verso, 1999)Google Scholar; and his edited collection The Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Anderson, P. B., Imagined Community (London: Verso, 1983)Google Scholar.
8 Sluga nowhere discusses the contributions of economists, sociologists or political scientists, presumably because they were actually rather thin on the ground. She nowhere refers to Keynes's thinking, even though his Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1920) was one of the enduring intellectual legacies of the conference. She confusingly notes the importance of geographers as a sign of the importance of the social sciences at Versailles, but in this period they were much more closely allied with traditional forms of humanities learning.
9 This term is with apologies to Gilles Deleuze. One of the points of interest arising from Sluga's examination is her excavation of both Le Bon and also Gabrielle Tarde, a thinker who has become fashionable in recent years after a long period of neglect and is especially a source of inspiration to Bruno Latour.
10 At 195 we are told that “New Labour, driven by the Christianity of Blair and Brown, drawing from the call of writers like Marquand for a rediscovery of socialism's ‘moral’ tradition . . . have placed something of a new emphasis on qualities of mind”.
11 Black, L., The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–1964 (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2003)Google Scholar.
12 There were, of course, numerous socialist activists, such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams or Edward Thompson, whose ideas could have been elaborated to exemplify this view. The fullest account of the issues here is Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction (London: Routledge, 1985)Google Scholar.