| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Rudolph Binion. Past Impersonal: Group Process in Human History. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 200. $38.00.
Rudolph Binion's book is a welcome change from historiographical trends that have stressed the micro, the local, and the individual. By contrast, Binion sees big. Packed within 148 pages of text, his book proposes a bold new approach with exciting interpretations in art history, literature, demography, and group psychology across Europe and America and from late antiquity to the present. Throughout, it is the history of collectives whose intricate twists, turns, and trajectories lay beneath and largely unknown to the individuals who comprised them. This investigation of "psychological facts" (to use Marc Bloch's phrase) is not, however, a return to the structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s, where events lay supposedly on the surface of history with revolutions and other datable occurrences such as the Black Death playing second fiddle to glacial conjunctures and geography. Instead, the shifts Binion charts are datable and often arose from political events such as the American and French Revolutions.	1
Binion examines three group processes in history: the adaptive, maladaptive, and cultural or symbolic. For each, he provides two case studies. The adaptive is not unlike the collective awareness seen in the animal world. For these Binion focuses on the upsurge of fertility limitation within the family: first with its leaders, the United States and France, spurred on by their eighteenth-century revolutions, and then a century later with its fast spread across Europe, when the continent was faced with a colossal Malthusian catastrophe because of the fall in infant mortality. With a rich array of literary examples across genres and from Ireland to Russia, Binion investigates the psychological adaptation to this radical departure in the moral doctrines of church and state and engrained biological behavior. With a single voice, fiction from 1879 to 1914 assailed the family, in Émile Zola's words, seeing it as the vehicle for the degeneration of the human species.	. . .

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