Gustav Jahoda. A History of Social Psychology: From the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment to the Second World War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 242 pp. $95.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-521-86828-0. $34.99 (paper). ISBN 978-0-521-68786-7

✍ Scribed by Henry L. Minton

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 114 KB
• Volume: 44
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.20330

✦ Synopsis

In historical treatments of social psychology, 1908 is typically cited as the year in which the discipline originated. This is because of the publication of the textbooks by psychologist William McDougall and sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross, the first to be exclusively devoted to social psychology. Yet, as Gustav Jahoda convincingly demonstrates, there is a rich history of social psychological thought that can be traced back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Jahoda provides a very readable and concise account of how the modern ideas of twentieth-century social psychology were anticipated and, in some cases, directly influenced by eighteenth-and nineteenth-century thinkers. His intent is not to produce an authoritative history, but rather to paint a broad picture of how social psychology is rooted in the past. He, therefore, appropriately concludes his historical analysis with the 1930s, a period in which the content and methods of social psychology are well established and the competing disciplinary claims by psychology and sociology are essentially resolved. Jahoda, however, also points to links between past ideas and later developments in the field. These include Fritz Heider's theoretical writing and such current alternatives to mainstream experimental social psychology as critical social psychology, evolutionary social psychology, and social neuropsychology.

The book is divided into three parts, beginning with the French and British Enlightenment. Among the figures considered are Etienne Bonnet Condillac, Marie Jean Condorcet, David Hume, and Adam Smith. These thinkers stressed how the human mind is shaped by culture, and Hume and Smith specifically pointed to the role of social interaction. The second part deals with the nineteenth-century gestation of social psychology in Europe. Jahoda's treatment of Germany is especially informative because much of the German work in social psychology is not cited in the English-language literature. Beginning with Johann Friedrich Herbart, German theorists were concerned with the nature of the relationship between individual and collective psychological functioning. The concept of Volk or shared identity is a prominent part of German thinking, and Jahoda gives ample treatment to both Moritz Lazarus's and Hajim Steinthal's early version and Wilhelm Wundt's later version of Völkerpsychologie. Also considered is the debate by Wundt and Wilhelm Dilthey over the methodology of psychology in general, since both thinkers were concerned with collective consciousness. More familiar material is covered in the chapters dealing with French and British developments, including Auguste Comte's positivism, John Stuart Mill's ethology (character), Herbert Spencer's evolutionary thought, French crowd psychology, and the contrasting versions of Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim on the relationship between the individual and society. Also included in Part II is a chapter on Darwinian social psychology in America, which focuses on James Mark Baldwin and George Herbert Mead.

The last part of the book covers developments in American social psychology from 1908 (the appearance of the first textbooks) to the Second World War. Jahoda highlights the work of Floyd H. Allport (experimental social psychology), Gordon W. Allport (attitudes), and, more briefly, Kurt Lewin. Interestingly, he also includes work dealing with culture, notably Franz Boas's cultural anthropology, which influenced Otto Klineberg's study of migration and intelligence, and the research on socialization by Gardner and Lois B. Murphy. Yet, as he indicates, such considerations of culture have had little lasting influence on the individualistic