In Defense of Sociological Mentalism: A Reply to My Critics Open Access

Forty-three years ago, when, freshly out of the Soviet Union, I attended preparatory classes in Hebrew and English at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where I intended to study history of art, finding myself unexpectedly with some free time on my hands, I walked into a class on sociology, given in Russian. It was the word ‘sociology’ that attracted my attention: in my previous life I encountered it only in the conjunction ‘bourgeois sociology’, which had connotations of black magic and forbidden knowledge. I was naturally curious what it could be in actual fact. This was in the middle of a term. The subject of the day's lecture was the work of Durkheim, but I did not know any of the names mentioned. As I understood it, sociology was the general science focused on the reality constituted by distinctly human ways of thinking and acting and subject to causality of its own kind. It was to humanity what biology was to life and physics to matter. I realized that I found my calling.

Later I found that the view of sociology as the science of humanity, methodologically autonomous because the reality of meaningful representations it focused on was irreducible to the realities studied by the other two autonomous sciences, physics and biology, was also shared by the other founding father of my chosen discipline: Max Weber. I also found that the world in general did not share this view. This was obvious in the very organization of the faculties of social sciences in the universities, where sociology was just one of a row of completely separate disciplines and a marginal one at that, covering what was not already expertly covered by economics, political science, anthropology and psychology, history in many cases being lodged in the division of humanities among the disciplines altogether uninterested in objective knowledge and contending themselves with speculative and subjective interpretation of their haphazardly partitioned subject-matter.

This organization has never made any sense to me, and it would not have made sense to Durkheim and Weber. Neither of them could imagine sociology separate from history, which, for both, would mean a science separate from its data. Before accepting ‘sociology’ as a proper name for the work he was doing, Weber believed he was engaged in cultural history. Political and economic processes being unquestionably areas of meaningful action, his subjects today would be considered those of political science and economics. For Durkheim, these, as well as anthropology, were special sociological disciplines, that is, subfields of sociology, just as genetics or ecology are subfields of biology, and inorganic chemistry or mechanics are subfields of physics. Committed from the outset to their view of sociology and interested in understanding precisely the reality they wanted to understand, I, throughout my career, have insisted on the freedom to roam across the arbitrary (sociologically and historically established, but not logically justified) divisions between all these disciplines, sceptical of strictly disciplinary authorities and literatures in each, which obscured the commonality and, therefore, the very nature, of our subject.

Within the framework of American research universities, with their graduate departments dedicated to the training of the next generation of professionals and in the social sciences and humanities of necessity rigidifying into guild-like bureaucracies, such intellectual independence exacts a steep price. While political scientists, historians, anthropologists, even economists, and now psychologists and psychiatrists often enough welcome me as a guest in their discussions and indulge my cogitations of an outsider on subjects they consider their own, sociologists, naturally in control of my working life and fate, have shown themselves quite resentful of my sticking among them as a sore thumb, impossible to categorize and fit within any particular subfield where, in a properly collegial manner, I would do my thing and not interfere in the business of others. For a while, after nationalism emerged as a special field of study, this central subject of my work seemed to offer the possibility of such categorization, but problems remained. It was not clear what kind of sociology nationalism studies represented: historical, political? My colleagues found it difficult to square this with my interest in teaching sociological theory. What did nationalism have to do with theory, after all? And, if this were not confusing enough – what possessed me to write about economic growth? Once I have volunteered to participate on the search committee for a ‘position in culture’. One of my colleagues responded: ‘Oh, I did not know you were interested in culture. Aren't you in nationalism?’ Another remarked: ‘You – culture? Ah, yes, I remember you wrote that book on art’.

For my part, while the division of the science of humanity into separate self-enclosed disciplines did not make sense to me, even less, if possible, did the way in which sociology as one of these separate disciplines was divided into subfields. Of course, specializations focusing on major institutions – politics, economy, family, religion and science – are necessary: this is what Durkheim had in mind, speaking of political science or legal history as sociological sciences. But what is the logic behind sociological theory as a subfield? How can there be a political or any other sociology which is not historical, when the reality we study is historical itself? The same can be said of culture: all sociology is cultural by definition, just as all biology is organic – because the reality sociology studies is cultural and the reality studied by biology is organic. Now the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association is divided between proponents of ‘cultural sociology’ and ‘sociology of culture’. To speak of cultural sociology is redundant, but to imagine culture as a separate institutional sphere, similar to politics or family or law, and deserving its own sub-discipline, is analogous to imagining a specialization in the ‘biology of life’ as distinct from all other biological sub-disciplines which presumably deal with something else.

It was these considerations that led me to write Mind, Modernity, Madness. As its subtitle indicates, the book is explicitly about culture. The two earlier books on nationalism and modernity, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity and The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth, in which I traced how the specifically modern consciousness embedded in nationalism shaped the major public – social, political and economic – institutions and ways of life, already embodied the vision of sociology as the science of humanity, shared by Durkheim and Weber. In this third volume, extending the argument to the most personal and individual experiences and spheres of psychology and psychiatry, I wanted to articulate and logically justify this vision. Neither Durkheim nor Weber did so. Durkheim's greatest contribution to sociological thinking was the recognition, which still escapes so many, and explicit postulation that social reality is a reality sui generis, but he never committed himself as to the nature of this reality. Moreover, though it was exclusively human social reality that he was preoccupied with, his emphasis on the social obscured the distinctiveness of the human reality which he attempted to understand and it was not clear why mental representations were so central in his thinking. Durkheim's seemingly contradictory attitude to psychology further complicated matters, leading him to insist strenuously that sociology was concerned only with collective representations and not individual ‘ideas’ and that, although it was itself ‘a special psychology’, this had nothing in common with the psychology developed and upheld by psychologists and psychiatrists of his time. A glance at Annales Medico-Psychologiques, with which Durkheim kept up and on which he relied heavily in Suicide, would explain the mystery: like today, the dominant position in psychology and psychiatry was biological, focused on the organ of the brain. To prove that collective consciousness was irreducible to the brain was feat enough; Durkheim let psychologists have the individual.

While Durkheim's argument in France, which celebrated science, was mainly with scientists who doubted the scientific credentials of sociology, the difficulty that Weber faced in ‘the philosophical nation’ of Germany had to do chiefly with philosophy: to pursue his research agenda he needed to place himself outside the materialist-idealist dispute. Materialism was identified with the realm of the real, and claimed all science that studied the empirical as its own. Action belonged to the real, but Weber's interests lay with the empirical study of motives and ideas, which, philosophers would say, being ideal, could be, perhaps, intuited, but not empirically studied and, from the materialist point of view were only epiphenomenal, thus also deserving no such study. Weber declared action as the subject of sociology, and defined action as action and inaction, overt and covert, as thought, publicly expressed in action, and decision not to act (i.e. publicly unexpressed thought), all this insofar as it was subjectively meaningful for the actor. As we know, while enormously productive in the sense of directing so much of Weber's work, this stratagem was not successful. Weber's sociology is still most commonly interpreted as an idealist opposition to the historical materialism of Marx.

But, of course, Weber was no more an idealist than a materialist. The problem is that these are still the two only categories we have for classifying philosophies underlying our scientific positions. Thinking how to characterize Weber in a lecture prepared for a conference marking the centennial of the publication of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, I came up with the term mentalist. Disembodied ideas had never been of importance to him. What interested Weber insofar as they were concerned, as much as in what concerned material phenomena such as population, natural resources, death, etc. – was their meaning for the relevant actors, that is, the way they were reflected and refracted in, interpreted by, the way they interacted with the individual mind. But the mind, populated as it was with ideas from the outside, was at every moment connected to the collective consciousness on which focused Durkheim, who as well as Weber knew that individuals were the only active element of his sui generis reality. Durkheim's collective representations, interacting with the mind, created subjective meanings – the central subject of Weber's sociology. Both founding thinkers of sociology were mentalists without calling themselves so. Both thought of sociology as the science whose subject-matter was the specifically human mental phenomena.

In The Historian's Craft, Marc Bloch stresses how much in science – and in the human sciences – depends on nomenclature. Perhaps because of this he persisted in calling his science history, even though his vision of it (a science whose subject was human mind) was identical to Durkheim's and Weber's vision of sociology. ‘Collective representations’ and ‘social action’ were vague new terms which suggested many things to many people, so much so that neither of the two founding fathers of sociology had an inkling of the closest affinity between their projects. Not being able, because of the dominant intellectual trends in their respective countries, to name their subject clearly, they were not able to determine its nature, properly analyse it, or to argue convincingly why it, and only it, justified the establishment of a new, independent science alongside physics and biology. The realization that both ‘collective representations’ and ‘social action’ defined by subjective meaning had as a referent the sui generis reality of the essentially connected mind and culture allowed me to do so. This is what I tried to accomplish in the third volume on nationalism and modernity. Functional mental disease offered the crucial (thought) experiment – the radical test – for the mentalist sociological interpretation of humanity I set out to develop in it. It played in the book the role finches’ beaks played in The Origins of the Species. The interpretation itself was to provide the framework, the paradigm, within which sociology as envisioned by Durkheim and Weber could progressively develop, allowing for ever increasing numbers of questions to be asked and answered, just as the evolutionary theory did for biology. The fact that a number of my readers and critics actually recognized that this was the direction of my argument and were sympathetic to it has been very encouraging, and, given how shockingly ambitious the project is, I cannot blame those who did not for overlooking it: they may have literally refused to believe their eyes.

The only thing that justifies the existence of sociology as an autonomous science is indeed the irreducibility of the reality it presumes to study to the organic and material realities, that is, its not being either organic or material. Not to predicate sociology on this reality being sui generis would automatically make sociology a biological or physical discipline and classify all of us, sociologists, as a rule biologically and physically illiterate, as unqualified to be sociologists. But what proves such irreducibility? Clearly, this is not society, social structure – structured social relations or behaviour, because all of these we share with the overwhelming majority of animal species, and as a corollary of life, these social elements obviously belong within the province of biology. Can one imagine a more rigidly structured social life, or one more governed by shared, immutable collective representations, than that of, for instance, bees? For all the persuasiveness of Durkheim's lucid prose, it was not the existence of collective representations as such that explained the need for and justified sociology. Neither did Weber's insistence on subjective meanings – in this case, not because of the evidence that animal actions, oriented to the behaviour of others as they are, are also based on subjective meanings, but precisely because there is no such evidence: the very subjectivity of these meanings making it impossible for us to access it. We must find positive evidence of a qualitative distinction between humanity and the rest of the animal world, something evidently affecting all human life, to which biology has no access.

Comparative zoology offers us this evidence: all the other animals transmit their ways of life (their social structures, their collective representations) primarily genetically; we happen to be the only one that does so primarily by means of symbols. It is not, therefore, the existence of society and collective representations that provide the justification for the existence of the autonomous science of sociology, but the symbolic manner in which human society is regulated and transmitted, the symbolic nature of our collective representations. Unlike signs, symbols exist only in interpretation, the interpretation of symbols is their meaning, which constantly changes with the changing context, that is, depending, among other things, on the interpreter. These are the subjective meanings orienting our social actions that Weber talks about. Again, the central point here is that they are symbolic: signs require no interpretation and thus presuppose no subjectivity, they are what they are and are simply emitted and read, these processes being regulated by the brain. In distinction, though the brain is necessarily involved at every stage in the processing of symbols as well, it regulates this processing only at the stage of their translation into signs, while the interpretation of symbols or the assignment to them of subjective meanings is regulated symbolically, according to the rules established in collective representations. The process of symbolic transmission and regulation on the collective level (i.e. the process of transmission, modification and maintenance of collective representations) is what we commonly refer to when we use the word ‘culture’. It is clear that it actually occurs by means of the interpretation of symbols (regulated as it is by collective representations) and creation of subjective meanings on the individual level. This cultural process on the individual level, with the necessary involvement of the brain, is the mind, which led me to define it in the book as ‘culture in the brain’. Since the human mental process is essentially symbolic and cannot occur without collective representations, culture itself is a mental process. It is this one and the same symbolic mental process, going on simultaneously on the collective and individual levels (as mind and as culture) that sharply distinguishes humanity from the animal world and shapes our social reality (autonomous and irreducible to the processes of life as such), which requires and justifies a separate science, independent of biology – our science sociology.

In constructing the argument that would take me beyond Durkheim and Weber, I took my cue from Darwin. For it was only with Darwin that it became possible to imagine an empirical science that was not (a part of) physics. All of the empirically accessible reality – that is, the entire world of experience was believed to be physical. This followed logically from the philosophy underlying all our intellectual pursuits. Western philosophy pictured reality as a universe composed of two heterogeneous elements, spirit and matter, which, derived from one source and thus assumed to be fundamentally consistent, in all appearances were contradictory. Both were to some extent accessible to reason, one through faith, the other through observation, but for over 2500 years their assumed consistency escaped either logical or empirical proof. By 1859, the defeat in this enterprise was acknowledged and in the resulting division of intellectual labour, the realm of the spirit went to speculative philosophy, while empirical science became the authority over (and limited itself to) material reality.

For biology, this presented a colossal problem. Life could be approached scientifically only through physics – the science of material reality. But it was impossible to explain its regularities through physical laws. Thus, the science of biology did not develop: despite the intricate typologies elaborated in the eighteenth century, our understanding of living phenomena by 1859 had hardly advanced beyond Aristotle. Western philosophy – our fundamental, ontological, vision of reality – did not allow for an autonomous science of biology. What was needed was a new ontology. This is what Darwin provided in The Origins of the Species. By demonstrating a form of comprehensive causality operative in life that was in no way reducible to the laws of physics but logically fully consistent with them, Darwin in fact established life as an autonomous, sui generis, empirically accessible reality, dependent for its existence on material elements, but irreducible to them and as concerns its causal mechanisms not material. Thus he transcended the dualist, spiritual-material, ontological vision and liberated empirical science from the hold of materialist philosophy. It was possible now to imagine empirical reality, which one could access through observation, as consisting of heterogeneous, though logically perfectly consistent, layers, material and organic, and, within this new ontological framework, biology, unchained from physics, proceeded to advance by leaps and bounds. In effect, though the concept was created later, Darwin gave us the possibility to think of empirically accessible reality, open to scientific investigation, in terms of emergence, an upper layer existing within the boundary conditions of the lower one to which it is causally irreducible.

The first part of Mind, Modernity, Madness was devoted to the task of defining the subject-matter of sociology as the science of humanity, existing alongside physics and biology. This subject-matter is the upper, symbolic, layer of the three-layer empirical reality, the emergent layer of mind and culture, existing within the boundary conditions of organic and, by extension, material realities but irreducible to either. It is an autonomous reality (i.e. one with its own laws or type of causality), a reality of its own kind. The mind (and, therefore, culture) is obviously involved in every variety of specifically human activity, behaviour and relationship – political, economic, religious, personal, professional, etc. – as a result, the central preoccupation of our science remains the same, whatever the specific focus. The causal mechanisms also remain the same and have to do with the constant give-and-take between the mind and culture, or the individual and the collective levels of the process – the interpretation of collective representations and the assignment to them of subjective meanings, the translation of these subjective meanings into modified collective representations, the effect of the latter on individual experiences, the contribution of these experiences to the interpretation of collective representations. It becomes clear how different institutional spheres are connected and why it is unproductive to study them in isolation (why, that is, such isolated studies must contend themselves with the production of typologies, taxonomies or wholly unrealistic models). It also becomes clear that psychology, no less than political science or economics that focus on particular institutions, should be included among sociological disciplines. The mind does not exist outside culture, therefore the human, in distinction to the animal, mental process cannot be studied at all outside its cultural context. This applies to psychoanalysis as much as to biological psychology, which, reducing the mind to the brain, in addition altogether misses its symbolic nature and, moving farther and farther in the direction of neurology, moves farther and farther away from its human subject. Animal psychology is, of course, a legitimate and fascinating biological sub-discipline. But insofar as psychology is concerned with specifically human mental processes, it must approach them as a part of sociology and pay at least as much attention to culture (i.e. to the context or environment) as to the individual whom, as a human being, culture creates.

Understanding that the mind (though obviously supported by the brain and existing within its boundary conditions) is created and recreated by culture allowed me to hypothesize an articulate structure, or anatomy, of the mind, which I deduced from the requirements of the cultural environment. Because, in distinction to animals in the wild, humans must, above all, adjust to their symbolic intra-species environment, I postulated the necessity for the cognitive mapping of this symbolic environment, indicating under changing circumstances the position of the individual in relation to other elements of the socio-cultural terrain so mapped – an identity or relationally-constituted self – analogous to spatial mapping in the brains of rodents and achieved, possibly, by means of something similar to place cells. Identity would allow the individual to adjust to a particular cultural environment. The very nature of symbols, in addition, necessitated a decision-making mechanism arbitrating – choosing – between possibilities of interpretation. This necessary decision-making mechanism was, I concluded, the seat of subjectivity and agency, our acting self or what we call the will. The function of this mental process immediately explained why the will is experienced as, and is in fact, free. Identity and will, working in tandem, assure individual functioning and ultimately survival in the cultural environment. Finally, what I named ‘the I of Descartes’ in recognition of the concept's paternity, which every one of us knows directly and which we know to operate with explicit symbols, assures the cultural process on the collective level, making possible the transmission of human ways of life across generations and distances. In recognition of this functional requirement for an explicitly symbolic process, I refer to it also as ‘the thinking I’.

Introspection was one way to test the hypothesis of the mind's anatomy; comparisons, cross-cultural and between humanity and animals, provided another. But I thought the crucial test would be an examination of the hypothesized structure presumed to assure the adjustment, or normal, effortless functioning of the individual in the cultural environment against empirical evidence of severe maladjustment or mental dysfunction. Unfortunately, modern Western society, and the USA, in particular, offered plenty such evidence, which, for someone like me, familiar with a number of quite different cultural environments, already suggested that the problem was, at least in part, social and not, as commonly believed, entirely a matter of biology. Whatever the predisposing factors in individuals who succumbed as against those who resisted, the different rates at which symptoms occurred characterized cultures, not individuals (just as Durkheim argued in Suicide), and signified mental dysfunction on the collective, rather than individual, level.

The main reason for focusing on functional mental illness, diseases of uncertain organic origin, was to test my vision of mentalist sociology, supporting the claim that culture is what makes us human, what makes humanity a reality sui generis, and therefore represents sociology's subject-matter. But there were, of course, other reasons: for instance, almost universal maladjustment, discomfort, and all too often, undeniable suffering of young people around me, my students. I wished to help them and I wanted to understand why in the most prosperous, secure and open society in the world, offering its denizens the most choices for self-realization, young people with the future full of possibilities before them were so hopeless and disaffected.

The second part of Mind, Modernity, Madness was dedicated to testing my fundamental theory and finding the solution to the mental health problem among young Americans. There is no need for me to return to the way in which I arrived at my interpretation of schizophrenia and major depressive disorders as both (the interpretation and the way) have been, to my great joy, vetted in the central organ of the American Psychiatric Association. Suffice it to say that the symptoms of these terrible diseases lent themselves easily to the interpretation in the terms of the anatomy of the well-functioning mind I postulated, as diseases of the will, provoked by malformation of identity and involving different degrees of disintegration of the three constitutive elements of the self. The ‘I of Descartes’ would take on itself the function of disabled will with, in the minority of cases of full-fledged schizophrenia, the terrifying consequences of complete deindividualization of the individual process.

This comprehensive interpretation contradicts and leaves of account none of the features of these functional illnesses, this comprehensiveness distinguishing it from partial and contradictory interpretations that were offered earlier, and certain new therapies logically follow from it. I did not elaborate on individual therapy. Instead, I suggested how it might be possible to prevent the very high and increasing rates of these diseases – which characterize them on the collective level as diseases of a culture. Itself necessarily cultural, aiming to change the culture through education, it is not a quick fix. But there are no quick fixes and, at the very least, it is not just a palliative which may alleviate symptoms in some individuals (often at the cost of ill-understood side-effects), but do not address the causes of their malady. I am not arguing against palliative medication: every means to reduce individual suffering is justified, if the individual concerned so desires. In fact, the efficacy of such medication on the individual level is likely to be enhanced by the identity-centred education.

The rest, literally, is history, and this history is, obviously, grist for the mill of sociology. The third, Historical, part of Mind, Modernity, Madness traced how nationalism, as the cultural framework of modernity, made the formation of individual identity problematic (with the problem continuously growing more severe as national consciousness penetrated deeper into the social strata and reached larger and larger population, and as the choices for self-definition increased) and thus led to the ever increasing rates of functional mental disease in the affected societies. It was this part that, so far, attracted most attention. Evidence supporting my argument came from numerous levels of the cultural process – the level of various institutions in separate societies both before and after they were defined and reconstructed as nations (on the basis of the new image of reality introduced by nationalism), the level of several nations (England/Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the USA), to a certain extent, the level of civilizations (the comparison between Western and South-East Asian societies), and the level of individual reflection and experience. That the argument proved persuasive to most reviewers, as I already mentioned, is to be attributed, above all, to the consistency of this historical evidence across all levels and comparisons, and indeed all the objections raised reflected the privileging of one particular context among the multitude with which I was concerned. It is impossible to appreciate the significance of any factor out of comparison, and the broader is the comparative perspective, the more accurately one perceives the causal significance of particular links. This historical argument, however, was also buttressed by the arguments developed in the philosophical and psychological parts of the book and thus by the consistency across the concentric circles of philosophical, psychological and historical levels of analysis.

The idea of sociology as the science of human reality, focused on what makes humanity a reality sui generis – culture and the mind, which I developed and defended in the first two parts of the book, made the argument in the Historical part possible and plausible. It made me see causal connections that neither I nor anyone could imagine before, it led me to examine sources no one would consider, because outside this framework they would never seem relevant, it allowed me to claim confidently, despite the overwhelming disbelief (and giggles) with which this claim was initially met, that the undeniably real diseases of schizophrenia and depression must be connected to nationalism, because this followed logically – because one's identity, one's individualized cultural map, could not be anything other than the individualized version of the image of reality within the particular culture. It was this vision of sociology which turned Mind, Modernity, Madness into the third volume of a trilogy on nationalism.

The fecundity of the mentalist paradigm was evident to me throughout the work. New hypotheses continued to pop up, new causal possibilities reveal themselves. It was impossible for me to follow through with them in this one book; I therefore only pointed to them as possibilities for further research, as Weber did in the end of The Protestant Ethic. The most important of these causal possibilities, in my view, had to do with the role of functional mental illness in shaping modern violence, in general, and, in particular, modern politics. So many of otherwise inexplicable current events, so shocking that they make us lose the ability to be shocked anymore, promised to be explained from this perspective that I chose to end the book by positing these political implications of my argument in a series of hypotheses. The study of functional mental disease changed and considerably augmented my understanding of the political significance of nationalism and I came to see it not simply as an extremely important factor in modern politics, but as the cardinal factor in them, forming them in a complex, as it were, double helix manner. In the world reached by it (which, until recently, excluded South-East Asia), nationalism, I proposed, has been behind all political violence and all the major political events in the last several hundred years, including revolutions and great international conflicts, motivating political action either directly by ideologies reflecting particular national consciousness and identity (group definitions) or, what is far less obvious and less explored, indirectly, through the mental discomfort, clinical and mostly sub-clinical, affecting significant sectors of national populations because of the problems in personal identity formation as a result of national consciousness in general. The explicit motivations, or motivating ideologies, in this latter case are delusional in the precise sense in which psychotic thinking is so characterized and, just as in schizophrenia or depressive psychotic disease, develop and are used as a defense mechanism (spontaneous self-therapy) against other disabling symptoms of such psychotic disorders. The two kinds of influences, direct and indirect, necessarily interact and political action that results cannot be understood unless all the dimensions of the cultural and mental process (the historical and the psychological/psychiatric), occurring simultaneously on the collective and the individual levels, are taken into account.

These hypotheses can be tested against numerous historical examples and the world today does its best to offer us additional opportunities for such testing. They may help us explain, for example, why so many of the home-grown, or so called ‘lone wolf’ perpetrators of violent acts identified as ‘terrorism’ because of their professed devotion to the radical fundamentalist version of political Islam have a history of acute maladjustment and very often of a diagnosed functional mental illness. There is the troubling similarity between the actions of such ‘terrorists’ and those of random campus shooters, somebody like Adam Lanza who shot 20 little children in Newtown, CT, or the GermanWings pilot, who wilfully crashed a plane with 149 people on board into a mountain. Finally, there is the puzzle of the broad appeal of the medieval ideology and actions of ISIS (in its pursuit of an Arab Caliphate), which presents social and political reality in terms bearing more resemblance to the created world of role-playing games than to the actual experience of its participants, to young people with the most secular education in the Middle East or from secular (or Christian) background across the West. Madness (in its specific meaning) and politics are clearly brought together in these distressing phenomena. We can choose to disregard this as a matter of appearances only, still reflecting hidden forces which conventional wisdom declares true, or we can suspend these inherited beliefs in the name of critical judgment and test these hypotheses, however counterintuitive they seem.

The success of Mind, Modernity, Madness will ultimately depend on whether its readers will continue my work, testing these hypotheses, trying to explore research venues I proposed, and, above all, asking numerous other questions contained in the mentalist paradigm. Neither Durkheim nor Weber, whose works became classics, were successful in this most important sense, and I can well imagine that in a hundred years from now, another sociologist not yet born, dreaming of sociology as the science of humanity, might conclude that neither was I and that the project has to be – yet again – begun anew.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Liah Greenfeld has worked on a wide range of topics in the social sciences with a constant focus on the role of culture in organizing human life. She is the author, among numerous other publications, of Nationalism: Five roads to modernity (HUP, 1992) and The spirit of capitalism: Nationalism and economic growth (HUP, 2001), which, together with Mind, modernity, madness: The impact of culture on human experience (HUP, 2013) constitute a trilogy. Since 1994 she has been a University Professor at Boston University, where she is currently also a Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology. E-mail: [email protected]