The grandest and most powerful sociological theories are theories of modernity – its rise, its structure and its consequences. Indeed, the classical works of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel – to name the most influential – not only created new epistemological and methodological frameworks for understanding society, but made their major contributions to the understanding of modernity. One might say, in fact, that the classical sociologists were actually fixated on the great transformations of the modern world and its multiplex processes.
With the publication of this voluminous book, Liah Greenfeld completes a trilogy began over 20 years ago, and places herself squarely in the tradition of great sociological theorists of modernity. In this work, Greenfeld shows herself to be one of the most accomplished living heirs to the tradition of grand sociological theorizing about modernity and its discontents. It is – as the best works of that tradition are – historically, comparatively and philosophically complex, brilliant at times and enticingly labyrinthine at others.
The first two volumes of Greenfeld's the trilogy, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1993) and The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (2003) established Greenfeld as one of the leading theorists of nationalism and its central role in modern history. These works laid the cornerstone for viewing nationalism as the master process of modernity, focusing on its origins in the status ressentiment of early modern Europe and America, and the role of nationalism and its culture as the major engine of economic growth in industrial societies. Greenfeld has done more than anyone to challenge the hegemony of rational choice models of nation formation and economic development by making culture the central determining force in the story of modernity. In this volume, Greenfeld becomes more of a diagnostician of modernity, in quite a literal sense: she aims to shown us that modernity, and the nationalism that gave rise to it, dramatically transformed not only the nature of mind, but brought about new disorders of the mind that are a distinct product of the modern world.
As in her previous books, Greenfeld's thesis is deliberately provocative and ambitious. Very simply, she argues that madness is modern. There is nothing particularly new about the idea that modernity makes us mad, sad, disjunctive, disassociated, fractured and alienated. All great theorists of modernity made this point and concepts such as Entzauberung (Weber), alienation (Marx), the blasé attitude (Simmel), anomie (Durkheim), are all cognate terms that aim to capture the phenomenological consequences of modernity. Greenfeld argues for a much more expansive view of the relation between mental illness and modernity, tracing ‘madness’ to the very process of nationalism, which is itself the driving force of modernity. She argues that madness, or ‘schizophrena and depressive illnesses (bipolar and unipolar) illnesses are caused by the values of equality and self-realization which make every individual one's own maker’. The price of being ‘one's own maker’ is high, giving us so much choice among so many possibilities that mind, as a category, itself becomes fractured and, increasingly, in more intense and pathological ways. For most, the quandaries of modernity are faced as we take what modernity has to offer in order to actualize an individual and unique self. We all struggle with the pains and perils of too much choice. But according to Greenfeld, modernity pushes us more and more beyond the boundaries of what we can tolerate and exacts its toll in the increasing prevalence of schizophrenia and depression, which are characteristically modern, and unlike all previously existing states of madness.
This claim of the uniqueness of modern madness is likely to irk historians of psychiatry and mental illness (and especially of psychoses), who have provided detailed descriptions of historical cases that are easily recognizable to us as schizophrenia or bipolar illness. Her book is not likely to gain any traction with psychiatrists, and not just because she vociferously rejects the biological, organic models of brain disorders. Indeed, she does not see such disorders as brain disorders, and she has firm ground to stand on because, as she points out, there is simply no known biological cause of, or cure for, schizophrenia. Greenfeld claims that these are diseases of the mind and fundamentally related to the way that mind has been transformed by modernity. In order to make this argument, she offers a long and philosophically complex theory of mind in the first section of book, the aim of which is to establish a sociology of the mind that allows her to develop the thesis of the connection of modern madness to modernity. This chapter, and indeed the task itself, seems more elaborate than necessary to come to the conclusion that ‘mind is social’ (or in her terms, ‘emergent’) and the reader could, without great detriment to the core thesis of the book, skip this philosophical foundation, and proceed to the second section of the book, where the central thesis of the book is formulated.
Greenfeld has mustered significant empirical evidence to show that schizophrenia (especially) and manic-depressive illness are intimately tied to the level of development of a particular society. The research is exhaustive and the book is clearly persuasive in respect to connecting modernity to madness. This view has its limitations, which are mainly methodological. It is difficult to argue that schizophrenia and bipolar illness are distinctly modern mental disorders, since there is no real empirical basis for comparison with the past. We have written accounts of ‘madness’ and, for as long as there has been writing, we have a record of symptoms that sound like those of the disorders which Greenfeld painstakingly describes from the medical literature. It seems unnecessary to argue these disorders are purely modern, that the ‘madness’ discussed in, say, eighteenth century France was something entirely different than what existed before. It is a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy to argue that, since these conditions appear more in modernity, it is the latter that is the cause of it.
The recognition of these disorders, their descriptions, debates about aetiology and their increasing manifestations across time and space in Europe may have had as much to do with the emergence of new vocabularies and forms of scientific cognition that made them ‘discoverable’ and able to be brought into the discursive field of the emerging nations of Europe. This is an issue in the sociology of knowledge and science, and given Greenfeld's erudition across so many fields of sociology, this approach is strangely absent. Perhaps schizophrenia did not ‘exist’ because we simply did not have a vocabulary to describe it. Once that language existed, it was possible that schizophrenia and bipolar illness became more real and more prevalent precisely because they could be called into being by a language that could describe and explain them (and a generalized scientific ethos of discovery as well – it is no coincidence that England was the cradle of the scientific revolution, and at the same time the country which Greenfeld calls ‘the cradle of madness’.
But let us say that Greenfeld's thesis correct, that there was some new kind of madness that did not exist before and was brought into being by modernity, which itself was brought into being by nationalism. It is entirely plausible to consider the fundamental causal relation between modernity and mental illness in the same way that Weber described the relation between rationalization and the experience of Entzauberung. Or in the same way that Durkheim saw anomie as the consequence of differentiation and loss of common normative frameworks and the effacement of the sacred. The strongest section of the book, as we should expect from Greenfeld, the comparative-historical sociologist extraordinaire, is the section on the history of the emergence of the modern ‘pure’ form of madness, from its beginnings in England to other European countries and thence to America. It is in this third section of the book that Greenfeld's arguments are strongest and support for her thesis the most compelling, and it is this section of the book that commands the most favourable attention.
Ironically, the point on which Greenfeld should be strongest – on the principal role of nationalism in the emergence of particular forms of madness – is where the book is sometimes thinner than one might like. In her earlier work, in particular in Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Greenfeld established an important link between status anxiety and ressentiment on the one hand, and nationalism on the other. At various points in the book, she evokes this earlier understanding, but these relations are not made as explicitly or systematically as they could be. For instance, it would be most intriguing to relate madness more specifically to status anxiety, and, in particular, to ressentiment, which Nietzsche more than anyone showed was, quite literally, a poisoning of the mind. Modernity is the age of resentment, and these resentments, as Rousseau reminded us, involve invidious comparisons to our fellows and the development of a pathological, obsessive-compulsive state of status anxiety that is an inevitable consequence of the social mobility and fluidity in modern social hierarchies. Greenfeld might have made more of the fact that we make each other mad by a constant, recursive mental comparison that leaves us unsatisfied with what we are, resentful of what others are, and, therefore, live in a constant state of disassociation from our own selves. And for more and more people, as Greenfeld might agree, this ‘normal’ part of modernity is increasingly taking on more extensive and intensive abnormal expressions. Greenfeld is correct to note that, in ever increasing numbers in the modern world, there has been a rise of mental illness precisely because of the unrelenting juggernaut of modernity, which both rewards and punishes the mind as an elemental part of its design.
Clearly, Greenfeld recognizes that nationalism and madness go hand in hand, not only in the worst forms of collective madness that we see in ethno-religious nationalism, but in the way we live our everyday lives with others and in relation to ourselves. For Greenfeld seems to be arguing, quite passionately and persuasively, that the fractured condition of modernity is finding its way deeper and deeper into our consciousness, not as a means of liberation (modernity's original promise), but as a new form of psychic distress and enslavement. It is a notable quality of Greenfeld's thinking that, in the midst of her displays of interpretive historical and sociological virtuosity, she articulates a strong concern for the real condition of real people around her. Her book offers several important cultural observations and critiques that emanate from the powerful theoretical frameworks she provides. The book has a strongly empathetic character, in keeping with the humanistic tradition of the best classical theorists of modernity, who always, above all, expressed a lament for the darker sides of the human condition and the reality of human pain.
This last volume of Greenfeld's trilogy ought to be read in relation to the other two volumes in order to understand the true power of her sociological mind. As a trilogy, we have a vision that surely will take its place in the history of thought on modernity. Intriguingly, Greenfeld has written an entire book on madness, on schizophrenia and depressive illness, and claimed specifically that it is not a book about mental illness. One has to read the book in its complex and contentious entirety to understand exactly what she means by that. But upon doing so, it is possible to say that she is entirely right. It is a book about madness and modernity, and modernity is madness. This is, at least, one conclusion that one might draw from this fascinating, important and engaging work.
Thomas Cushman is Deffenbaugh de Hoyos Carlson Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College, Massachusetts.
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