| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Chandak Sengoopta. Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna. (The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000. Pp. x, 239. $29.00.

Otto Weininger, briefly famous in his own time, has become infamous in ours for parallel but opposite reasons. The fin-de-siècle was, as we are, obsessed with issues of gender and racial identity; it is the opposed values of the two eras that account for the different valence of their judgments. As Chandak Sengoopta points out, the tragic "genius" of fin-de-siècle literary sexology has today become the symbol of its ugliest misogyny and racism. In his book, however, Sengoopta wants to go beyond psychological explanations of Weininger's pathology and condemnatory judgments of his ideology—neither of which he rejects—to a more informative understanding of the historical contexts of Weininger's ideas. While acknowledging, indeed insisting, that the paramount purpose of Weininger's Sex and Character (1903) was combating the women's movement, Sengoopta wants to show that Weininger's thought, far from being "mad" or irrational, not only shared in prevailing cultural discourses but was solidly rooted in the biomedical science of its time. . . .

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