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Trilogy of Nationalism #3
Zihin, Modernlik, Delilik : Kültürün İnsan Deneyimi Üzerindeki Etkileri
Kültürün İnsan Deneyimi Üzerindeki Etkileri
Greenfeld’in milliyetçilik üçlemesinin doruk noktası olan Zihin, Modernite, Delilik; insan toplum ve büyük dönüşümler arasındaki bağlantıyı yeni tartışmalara açıyor. Modern insanın zihinsel hastalıkları ve modern yaşam arasındaki çift yönlü ilişkiyi çok disiplinli bir katmanda inceliyor.
"Greenfeld, delilik, zihin ile toplum arasındaki ilişkiye dair kapsamlı, sosyolojik temelli bir teori sunuyor... Bu, akıl hastalığı ve zihin, benlik ve toplum arasındaki daha genel etkileşimi anlamaya önemli bir katkı sağlıyor." –S.C. Ward, Choise
"Greenfeld'in kitabını bu kadar cüretkâr yapan şey, deliliği kültürel terimlerle açıklamak. Kitap, yaratıcı düşüncenin zaferini temsil ediyor.” –Peter Baehr
“Liah Greenfeld, ağırlık (mecazi ve gerçek anlamda) ve güç üzerine bir kitap yazdı. Kitap, çığ misalı okuru kendisiyle birlikte yeni bir manzaraya çekiyor." –Charles Lindholm
Greenfeld’in milliyetçilik üçlemesinin doruk noktası olan Zihin, Modernite, Delilik; insan toplum ve büyük dönüşümler arasındaki bağlantıyı yeni tartışmalara açıyor. Modern insanın zihinsel hastalıkları ve modern yaşam arasındaki çift yönlü ilişkiyi çok disiplinli bir katmanda inceliyor.
"Greenfeld, delilik, zihin ile toplum arasındaki ilişkiye dair kapsamlı, sosyolojik temelli bir teori sunuyor... Bu, akıl hastalığı ve zihin, benlik ve toplum arasındaki daha genel etkileşimi anlamaya önemli bir katkı sağlıyor." –S.C. Ward, Choise
"Greenfeld'in kitabını bu kadar cüretkâr yapan şey, deliliği kültürel terimlerle açıklamak. Kitap, yaratıcı düşüncenin zaferini temsil ediyor.” –Peter Baehr
“Liah Greenfeld, ağırlık (mecazi ve gerçek anlamda) ve güç üzerine bir kitap yazdı. Kitap, çığ misalı okuru kendisiyle birlikte yeni bir manzaraya çekiyor." –Charles Lindholm
752 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
About the author
Liah Greenfeld
28 books31 followersCalled “one of the most original thinkers of the current period” and “the great historian of Nationalism,” Liah Greenfeld is University Professor and Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology at Boston University. She is the author of “Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience” (Harvard University Press, 2013) and other books about modern society and culture, including the ground-breaking “Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity” (Harvard University Press, 1992) and “The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Harvard University Press, 2001; Donald Kagan Best Book in European History Prize). Greenfeld has been the Distinguished Adjunct Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong and a recipient of the UAB Ireland Distinguished Visiting Scholar Award, fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C., the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, Israel, and grants from Mellon, Olin, Earhart, The National Council for Soviet & East European Research, and The German Marshall Fund of the United States. In 2004, she delivered the Gellner Lecture at the London School of Economics on the subject of "Nationalism and the Mind," launching the research connecting her previous work on modern culture to a new perspective on mental illness.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 1, 2014
Liah Greenfeld's work of historical sociology rings truer for me as a humanities scholar interested in psychology than any book about modernity I've read since Joyce's Ulysses, back in 2006. "The mind is individualized culture" supported and conditioned by human bodies, Greenfeld claims, in the boldest sentence I've read all year. In prose that crackles with novel propositions that seem self-evident, she says what many of us in the humanities and social sciences who reject both physicalist theories of mind and nominalist accounts of mental illness have been trying to argue for a few decades. All who write about mental disorders, treat them, have them, or know people who do owe it to themselves to read this book, as does everyone interested in Western modernity, Protestant England onward, as well as all who want to understand a cause of the opioid epidemic.
By madness, Greenfeld means the three major conditions that can feature psychosis induced by neither mind-altering substances nor brain degeneration: major depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. These three disorders, she claims, are real disorders of real minds, though imperfectly explained by biomedical, psychodynamic, and social constructionist theories. Her theory of mental disorder resembles those by revivers of existential-phenomenological psychiatry like Louis Sass, Matthew Ratcliffe, Josef Parnas, Giovanni Stanghellini, and Rene Rosfort, but with an emphasis on historical breadth rather than the descriptive depth characteristic of that field. Mind, Modernity, Madness thus supplements that holistic tradition of understanding madness with an explanation of madness's emergence, from sixteenth-century England to the twentieth-century United States and the current epidemic of anxiety and depression in the liberal developed world.
Drawing on ample archival research and a thorough understanding of psychiatry and psychology, Greenfeld claims that madness is the price paid by the developed world for replacing communities knitted together by traditions with nation-states organized by the liberal values of equality, liberty, and religious tolerance. For a significant minority of these nation-states' populations, the identity-formation responsibilities and pressures inherent in such societies, such as an ever-expanding array of choices and the reflexive thinking it promotes, combines with biological predispositions to result in madness.
Greenfeld organizes her argument as follows:
1. Matter, an expanding set of physical and chemical processes, is the most fundamental level of reality.
2. The hard sciences provide the most desirable explanations of matter because of their explanatory power, prevention of solipsistic and chaotic worldviews, and mitigating effect on violence motivated by religion.
3. Science depends on logic.
4. Logic depends on belief in the principle of non-contradiction.
5. Science arose in Europe and its colonies most quickly because Thales of Miletus encountered monotheism in Hebrew scriptures and formulated the principle of non-contradiction in response to the idea of a universe ordered by a single will, thus giving rise to Plato's Demiurge and Aristotle's Prime Mover, then the orderly forces theorized by modern physics.
6. Life, a set of organic processes, emerges from matter.
7. Darwinian evolution is the best explanation of life.
8. Culture, a system of symbolic processes, emerges from life.
9. The social sciences provide the best explanations of culture when they're not distorted by ideology.
10. "The mind is individualized culture."
11. The abovementioned disorders are diseases of the mind.
12. They involve the brain, as all mental processes do.
13. More specifically, these disorders are diseases of the will, as distinct from the thinking self and the relational self, i.e. identity, though they affect these other two components of the mind in increasing degrees of complexity, from depression to bipolar to schizophrenia.
14. Depression impedes the will's motivation of the body and control over the content of thought.
15. Bipolar disorder impedes the will's motivation and restriction of the body and control over the content of thought.
16. Schizophrenia impedes motivation and/or restriction but also loosens the will's grip on the structure of thought, thus resulting in hyper-reflexive thinking with either a shallow but rigid sense of identity, as in paranoia, a precarious sense of identity, as in the delusions of alienation and putrefaction/immortality/deadness called Capgras syndrome and Cotard's syndrome, respectively, or no sense of identity at all, in which case the mind disintegrates. In the latter case, "schizophrenics, in a way, have culture, always multi-perspectival, think for them and language, always multivalent, speak for them" (27).
17. Modern nation-states make stable identity formation difficult and precarious for many of their members.
18. Modern nation-states, often reinforced by families and other institutions that help individuals form their identities with varying levels of success, combine with the biology of individuals to cause madness.
This argument demonstrates that Foucault's 50-year-old monograph, Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique (abridged as Madness and Civilization, later published in English translation as History of Madness), has lost whatever explanatory power it once had. Future intellectual historians will regard it as an exemplar of the political currents of post-World-War-II France affecting academia in the late twentieth century, then losing their intellectual appeal in the twenty-first.
Greenfeld has refuted contemporary anti-psychiatrists' explanations of mental disorder until and unless someone comes up with a persuasive libertarian theory of mind, which seems unlikely given the inherently social nature of language and its crucial role in constituting human experience. Sometimes, helping those who suffer simply matters more than radical politics, and, Greenfeld argues, cultural reform provides a more realistic means of helping such people and reducing the rate of madness. Drugs and psychotherapy can help those with mental disorders, but they're not enough to solve the larger cultural problem. To do so, other institutions must become more therapeutic and humane.
Rather than judging the mentally disordered as insufficiently strong and revolutionary, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari do in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Greenfeld takes a pragmatic approach by advocating the continuing reform of psychiatry and psychology, and the reconceptualization of education as a tool for helping members of modern nation-states form livable identities with as much awareness of the advantages and pitfalls of such societies as possible. Greenfeld's position entails a model of humanistic education focused on neither technical training as an end in itself nor an anachronistically Romantic idea of Great Books written by geniuses, but rather on understanding incompatible means of identity-formation. In this model, a radicalization of Alasdair MacIntyre's and Gerald Graff's, ancient and medieval texts archive not only beliefs and practices different from modern ones, but minds structured differently from ours.
The price paid by ancient and medieval cultures for their unity and stability was the unnecessary suffering and stunted potential of most people touched by their power: women, slaves, barbarians, sinners, idolaters, heretics, infidels, Untouchables, serfs, and peasants. The price paid by modern liberal cultures for their lack of unity and stability is the unnecessary suffering and stunted potential of people with mental disorders: a minority, but a significant and growing one. Greenfeld's book asks us moderns to set aside our hubris and work toward creating new syntheses of traditions and modern values.
By madness, Greenfeld means the three major conditions that can feature psychosis induced by neither mind-altering substances nor brain degeneration: major depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. These three disorders, she claims, are real disorders of real minds, though imperfectly explained by biomedical, psychodynamic, and social constructionist theories. Her theory of mental disorder resembles those by revivers of existential-phenomenological psychiatry like Louis Sass, Matthew Ratcliffe, Josef Parnas, Giovanni Stanghellini, and Rene Rosfort, but with an emphasis on historical breadth rather than the descriptive depth characteristic of that field. Mind, Modernity, Madness thus supplements that holistic tradition of understanding madness with an explanation of madness's emergence, from sixteenth-century England to the twentieth-century United States and the current epidemic of anxiety and depression in the liberal developed world.
Drawing on ample archival research and a thorough understanding of psychiatry and psychology, Greenfeld claims that madness is the price paid by the developed world for replacing communities knitted together by traditions with nation-states organized by the liberal values of equality, liberty, and religious tolerance. For a significant minority of these nation-states' populations, the identity-formation responsibilities and pressures inherent in such societies, such as an ever-expanding array of choices and the reflexive thinking it promotes, combines with biological predispositions to result in madness.
Greenfeld organizes her argument as follows:
1. Matter, an expanding set of physical and chemical processes, is the most fundamental level of reality.
2. The hard sciences provide the most desirable explanations of matter because of their explanatory power, prevention of solipsistic and chaotic worldviews, and mitigating effect on violence motivated by religion.
3. Science depends on logic.
4. Logic depends on belief in the principle of non-contradiction.
5. Science arose in Europe and its colonies most quickly because Thales of Miletus encountered monotheism in Hebrew scriptures and formulated the principle of non-contradiction in response to the idea of a universe ordered by a single will, thus giving rise to Plato's Demiurge and Aristotle's Prime Mover, then the orderly forces theorized by modern physics.
6. Life, a set of organic processes, emerges from matter.
7. Darwinian evolution is the best explanation of life.
8. Culture, a system of symbolic processes, emerges from life.
9. The social sciences provide the best explanations of culture when they're not distorted by ideology.
10. "The mind is individualized culture."
11. The abovementioned disorders are diseases of the mind.
12. They involve the brain, as all mental processes do.
13. More specifically, these disorders are diseases of the will, as distinct from the thinking self and the relational self, i.e. identity, though they affect these other two components of the mind in increasing degrees of complexity, from depression to bipolar to schizophrenia.
14. Depression impedes the will's motivation of the body and control over the content of thought.
15. Bipolar disorder impedes the will's motivation and restriction of the body and control over the content of thought.
16. Schizophrenia impedes motivation and/or restriction but also loosens the will's grip on the structure of thought, thus resulting in hyper-reflexive thinking with either a shallow but rigid sense of identity, as in paranoia, a precarious sense of identity, as in the delusions of alienation and putrefaction/immortality/deadness called Capgras syndrome and Cotard's syndrome, respectively, or no sense of identity at all, in which case the mind disintegrates. In the latter case, "schizophrenics, in a way, have culture, always multi-perspectival, think for them and language, always multivalent, speak for them" (27).
17. Modern nation-states make stable identity formation difficult and precarious for many of their members.
18. Modern nation-states, often reinforced by families and other institutions that help individuals form their identities with varying levels of success, combine with the biology of individuals to cause madness.
This argument demonstrates that Foucault's 50-year-old monograph, Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique (abridged as Madness and Civilization, later published in English translation as History of Madness), has lost whatever explanatory power it once had. Future intellectual historians will regard it as an exemplar of the political currents of post-World-War-II France affecting academia in the late twentieth century, then losing their intellectual appeal in the twenty-first.
Greenfeld has refuted contemporary anti-psychiatrists' explanations of mental disorder until and unless someone comes up with a persuasive libertarian theory of mind, which seems unlikely given the inherently social nature of language and its crucial role in constituting human experience. Sometimes, helping those who suffer simply matters more than radical politics, and, Greenfeld argues, cultural reform provides a more realistic means of helping such people and reducing the rate of madness. Drugs and psychotherapy can help those with mental disorders, but they're not enough to solve the larger cultural problem. To do so, other institutions must become more therapeutic and humane.
Rather than judging the mentally disordered as insufficiently strong and revolutionary, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari do in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Greenfeld takes a pragmatic approach by advocating the continuing reform of psychiatry and psychology, and the reconceptualization of education as a tool for helping members of modern nation-states form livable identities with as much awareness of the advantages and pitfalls of such societies as possible. Greenfeld's position entails a model of humanistic education focused on neither technical training as an end in itself nor an anachronistically Romantic idea of Great Books written by geniuses, but rather on understanding incompatible means of identity-formation. In this model, a radicalization of Alasdair MacIntyre's and Gerald Graff's, ancient and medieval texts archive not only beliefs and practices different from modern ones, but minds structured differently from ours.
The price paid by ancient and medieval cultures for their unity and stability was the unnecessary suffering and stunted potential of most people touched by their power: women, slaves, barbarians, sinners, idolaters, heretics, infidels, Untouchables, serfs, and peasants. The price paid by modern liberal cultures for their lack of unity and stability is the unnecessary suffering and stunted potential of people with mental disorders: a minority, but a significant and growing one. Greenfeld's book asks us moderns to set aside our hubris and work toward creating new syntheses of traditions and modern values.
November 3, 2026
Just fascinating!
May 15, 2026
This book physically angered me. For as far as I got, every sentence filled me with rage out of the sheer lack of interest and curiosity, it overflows with such blatant Eurowhite, Eurocentric arrogance, the active omission of anything even remotely contradictory, even with a whiff of systemic critique of any sort is just extinguished. The only thing she could not actively ignore is, of course, Michel Foucault, so she just spends a half page with concluding it is "null and void" and even slyly mentioning he suffered from depression, hence repeating her own bizarre gesture of individualising minds and culture.
This book should enrage anyone with even the slightest interest in any of the concepts, and the best consolation is that in writing this small review, I found the avalanche of criticism. Here some pulled from her Wikipedia page. Thank God!
This book should enrage anyone with even the slightest interest in any of the concepts, and the best consolation is that in writing this small review, I found the avalanche of criticism. Here some pulled from her Wikipedia page. Thank God!
"Referring to Mind, Modernity, Madness, Ann Goldberg wrote: "as a comprehensive history of the long-term development of mental illness, Mind is deeply problematic." Goldberg criticized Greenfeld's approach: "Greenfeld repeatedly invokes 'logic' and 'empiricism' as the basis for her analysis. In fact, Mind is a highly selective reading of the historical record based on the superimposition of a master narrative of modernization theory onto the sources and onto a theory of mental functioning."Referring to the book, Andrew Scull remarked: "It seemed to me so bizarre, so solipsistic, so lacking in connections to any substantial knowledge of the relevant subject matter, so convinced of its own validity though heedless of any systematic review of relevant evidence or any knowledge of what insanity has meant across time and place, that I was at a loss to understand how it had appeared under the imprint of a major university press." Scull went on: "Its historical portraits of early modern England, let alone European nation states in the same period, would baffle and infuriate any historian with even the most elementary knowledge of the periods she purports to discuss."
Want to Read
August 28, 2024Mentioned in Escape into Meaning by Evan Puschak. Sounds very interesting.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews