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  • Political Culture and the Therapeutic Ideal
  • David Farber (bio)
Ellen Herman. The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. xiii 406 pp. Notes and index. $35.00.

As political history has become reinvigorated over the last decade, so too has the “odd-job” term, political culture. 1 This often casually invoked term has, of late, been richly reworked by historians — mostly non-Americanists. Their sophisticated work is heavily influenced by post-structuralist concerns about how political claims are symbolically structured, by theories of public life and the public sphere, and by contemporary ethnographic debates about the relationship between structure and event. 2 French historian Keith Baker, a leading practitioner, nicely sums up this historical school of thought: “It sees politics as... the activity through which individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce the competing claims they make upon one another and upon the whole. Political culture is, in this sense, the set of discourses or symbolic practices by which these claims are made.” Baker goes on to argue that political culture “shapes the constitutions and powers of the agencies and procedures by which contestations are resolved, competing claims authoritatively adjudicated and binding decisions enforced.” 3 Political culture, as used by sophisticated contemporary historians, refers most generally to the historically contingent practices and beliefs that give legitimacy to political structures and political authority to individuals and “interests,” and which, in turn, political actors use creatively to affect public policy or, more generally, public life.

Ellen Herman enjoins this methodological and theoretical discussion with an animated, multifaceted examination of how psychological understandings and psychologically inclined experts influenced aspects of American politics and public life in the 1940 to 1975 period. Subtitling her book, “Political Culture in the Age of Experts,” Herman argues, “From World War II through the Vietnam era, psychological experts decisively shaped Americans’ understandings of what significant public issues were and what should be done about them” (p. 6). Herman carefully examines the roles that both psychological approaches and behavioral scientists played in American state [End Page 681] management of World War II, the Cold War, and racial conflict in the 1950s and 1960s. She also examines, in less detail, the federal government’s funding and institutionalization of “mental health” apparatuses, the political meanings of the development of humanistic psychology and the effect psychological understandings of gender had on the women’s liberation movement and feminist thought in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Herman approaches the historical role of her experts in American political life in a different manner than most historians of the Progressive Era did a historiographical generation ago. Those historians often debated the motives of “expert” reform activists: were they “true” reformers interested in attacking “real” social problems or were they actually bourgeois apologists for the industrial capitalist order? Herman explicitly rejects this formula: “The point is not to chose whether psychological experts continuously served a master of democratic progress or antidemocratic social control, but to see how they extended the reach of government and purposes of public policy to include the subjective and emotional realities of power” (p. 237). In this formalization, Herman persuasively links together two different research agendas: a Foucauldian concern for how specific discursive regimes (in this case, the “science” of “the subjective and emotional”) discipline the body politic, and the inquiry of more traditional political historians into the development of the American State. Through this linkage, Herman offers readers vital insights into how policymakers, policy operatives, and political activists formulated critical governmental and political projects in the World War II to Vietnam War period.

Herman’s most successful chapters outline the key governmental roles American psychologists and behavioral scientists played in managing World War II and the Cold War. Herman argues cogently that World War II brought a series of practical tasks to the disciplinary doorsteps of American psychology and the behavioral sciences. Military and civilian war managers felt they needed expert scientific advice on how to select and train recruits, maintain morale on the home front, understand and demoralize the enemy, and care for American “neuropsychiatric” casualties. Herman gives several underlying reasons for why war managers in...

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