A01=Anne Harrington
Adolf Hitler
Alternative medicine
Author_Anne Harrington
Behavior
Biologist
Biology
Career
Category=JBCC
Category=JHM
Category=NHD
Category=P
Cognitive science
Consciousness
Darwinism
Disease
Epistemology
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eq_history
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eq_isMigrated=2
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Ernst Haeckel
Ethics
Eugenics
Existentialism
Explanation
Germans
Gestalt psychology
Hans Driesch
Henri Bergson
Holism
Houston Stewart Chamberlain
Ideology
Konrad Lorenz
Kurt Goldstein
Lecture
Literature
Martin Heidegger
Materialism
Max Wertheimer
Modernity
Monograph
Narrative
Natural science
Nazism
Neurosis
Organism
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Phenomenon
Philosopher
Philosophy
Physician
Physiology
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Positivism
Potentiality and actuality
Psychoanalysis
Psychology
Publication
Racial hygiene
Reality
Reason
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Rhetoric
Romanticism
Science
Scientist
Self-actualization
Sigmund Freud
Superiority (short story)
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The Philosopher
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Product details
- ISBN 9780691050508
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 31 Jan 1999
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism among intellectuals that natural science had "disenchanted" the world, and in particular had reduced humans to mere mechanisms, devoid of higher purpose. But could a new science of "wholeness" heal what the old science of the "machine" had wrought? Some contemporary scientists thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, "holistic" science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to "reenchant" even as it explained. Critics since have linked this holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race, healing and death into a common framework. Before 1933, holistic science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the costs of modernization.
It attracted not only scientists with Nazi sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring humanistic legacies. Neither a "reduction" of science to its politics, nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to the "internal" work of science, this story instead emphasizes how metaphor and imagery allow science to engage "real" phenomena of the laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour.
Anne Harrington is Professor of History of Science at Harvard University. She is the author of Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain (Princeton).
