Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

In the huge body of scholarship that has emerged on the intellectual and institutional history of the human sciences in France, it has been more usual to treat academic philosophy as an obstacle than as an influence on social science. The eclectic philosophy of the nineteenth century is often discussed in order to be dismissed as the body of knowledge against which the first social scientists reacted in order to establish their more scientific views, and philosophers are held responsible for delaying or sabotaging careers or for excluding social-science courses from the curriculum. Historians have often preferred to emphasize an intellectual pedigree that originated with Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte, and Jean-Marie Charcot than the vague moral idealism taught in the official philosophical syllabus that reigned between 1832 and 1902 in French secondary education.

1

John I. Brooks III proposes in this book to reexamine the intellectual and pedagogic legacy of academic philosophy with an eye to revealing the substantial influence eclecticism had on the figures who are held to have put the human sciences on truly scientific and positive foundations: Théodule Ribot, Alfred Espinas, Pierre Janet, and Émile Durkheim. When one looks seriously at texts, Brooks argues, one discovers attributions and intellectual debts that have been obscured in the attention that has been paid by recent scholars to the politics of institutionalization and to the broader ideological implications of competing schools of sociological and psychological theory. By focusing more closely on the intellectual and rhetorical aspects of the official philosophical syllabus, Brooks is able to explain successfully not only how eclecticism was assimilated into French social science but why its influence was practically inevitable. In the process of demonstrating this important influence, Brooks provides the clearest account we possess in English of the content of the philosophical culture of nineteenth-century educated elites.

. . .