| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Stephen Kern. A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. 437. $29.95.
"It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things," Aristotle said, and in Stephen Kern's new book, that class of things is breathtakingly broad. Causality, Kern concedes, is hard to define and harder to prove. As an interpretive model Kern posits the "increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability, and uncertainty of causal knowledge across 170 years," from 1830, when his study begins, to the present (p. 13). Kern's history of causality explores not only the major scientific and philosophical ideas of modernity, but a sampling of its literary texts as well: his goal is to integrate a history of science with a history of literature. To help organize all this causal chaos, Kern focuses on the act of murder because it so vividly reflects its cultural ethos; because it registers intentionality, motivation, and significance like few other behaviors; and because "after 1830 it attracted increasing attention to its causal circumstances and motives among ... criminologists, sociologists, detectives, statisticians, and forensic psychiatrists, as well as writers of detective fiction ... and crime novels" (pp. 2–3).	1
As a history of science and ideas, Kern's study succeeds brilliantly. Gathering the disparate knowledge systems of nearly two centuries into discrete categories, Kern produces a taxonomy of causality that is cogent and convincing. Chapters devoted to ancestry, childhood, language, sexuality, emotion, mind, society, and ideas do more than organize the history of causal thought; they offer elegant synopses of the major theories, thinkers, and epistemological shifts underwriting that history. From Enlightenment positivism to quantum discontinuity; from religion to existentialism, and phrenology to cybernetics; from Freud to Nietzsche to Foucault, and from Darwin to Durkheim to Derrida: Kern ranges comfortably (and profitably) among them all. Specialist and novice alike will find much here to learn and admire.	. . .

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