John Warne Monroe. Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France .Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France by JohnWarne MonroeReview by: By Elizabeth A.   WilliamsIsis, Vol. 100, No. 2 (June 2009), pp. 425-426Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/605259 .

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tingen, having completed his thesis for the Ha-bilitation.

Soon after he was called up for military ser-vice. He was a radio operator based in westernGermany, but nonetheless he came to sufferfrom nervous exhaustion. He was hospitalizedfor some time and in 1942 was discharged asunfit for military service. That fall he began aposition as Dozent (lecturer) in Prague, appar-ently brought there by the wish of the professor,Hans Rohrbach, that he participate in mathemat-ical work for the war effort. He led a team doingcomputations, apparently for the V-rocketproject based in Peenemunde.

Gentzen made no attempt to escape fromPrague in 1945, although many others at theGerman university did, including Rohrbach. Atthe time of the final collapse, he was arrested bythe Czechs and interned under awful conditions.Chapter 6 narrates this harrowing story. Gentzendied on 4 August, apparently of starvation, al-though typhus was also ravaging the prison.Menzler-Trott does not say how soon he couldhave hoped to be released had he survived.

I find Gentzen’s attitude toward National So-cialism elusive, and I believe the author doestoo. He was certainly outwardly conformist: hejoined several Nazi organizations, including theParty in 1937; he signed letters “Heil Hitler!”;he collaborated with Ludwig Bieberbach’s pro-Nazi Deutsche Mathematik. But the author de-flates rumors that he was an enthusiastic Nazi.Clearly he tried to keep mathematics free ofideology; for example, before the war he kept upa correspondence with Bernays, offering sug-gestions for Volume 2 of Grundlagen der Math-ematik and helping with proofreading. He wasclearly interested in contact with foreign schol-ars. There are indications of extreme politicalnaıvete.

Gentzen was evidently physically somewhatfrail and also prone to depression. Menzler-Trottremarks at one point that he was passive withrespect to everything except mathematics. Thatmay summarize his stance toward the Nazi re-gime, as well as suggesting an explanation forhis failure to escape from Prague in time.

Chapter 4 concerns the politics of mathemat-ical logic in Nazi Germany. Most of it does notdirectly concern Gentzen, and although it is in-formative to a lay reader it is probably out ofplace in a biography.

Logic’s Lost Genius is in general not wellorganized and relies heavily on quotations fromdocuments, not only letters and other archivalsources but published items such as reviews ofGentzen’s papers or reviews by him of publica-tions by others. I am not sure how reliable

Menzler-Trott is as an interpreter, but some mat-ters he does know (e.g., the thought of Bernays)raise questions.

The book has extensive appendixes, those ofgreatest interest being translations of three gen-eral lectures on foundations by Gentzen and anessay by Jan von Plato, “From Hilbert’s Pro-gramme to Gentzen’s Programme,” which of-fers an interpretation of Gentzen’s place in thehistory of proof theory.

The translation generally reads well but isoften stylistically awkward and sometimes inac-curate even on elementary matters. The transla-tors seem to be defeated by the German word“promovieren” (“to complete a doctorate”),which is rendered “promote” or “be promoted,”and by the preposition “bei,” which is rendered“by” even in cases where this is clearly inap-propriate.

In spite of its deficiencies, the book is a mineof information, and those interested in the his-tory of logic in Gentzen’s time are greatly in theauthor’s debt.

CHARLES PARSONS

John Warne Monroe. Laboratories of Faith:Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in ModernFrance. xi � 293 pp., bibl., index. Ithaca, N.Y./London: Cornell University Press, 2008. $35(cloth).

Historians have long regarded the conflict be-tween science and religion as one of the centralthemes, perhaps the theme, of modern Frenchhistory. In older constructions of that conflictattention focused on the waning power of Ca-tholicism as it parried attacks made against it bypositivists, materialist scientists, and partisansof a militant anticlericalism. Such histories left apowerful image of “two Frances”—the one con-servative, Catholic, and obscurantist, the otherrepublican, anticlerical, and enlightened. In re-cent years, as the old certainties of both scienceand religion have faltered, historians haveshifted attention away from what were long per-ceived as stable and readily identifiable culturalantagonists to actors functioning at the bound-aries, including some long regarded as marginaland of little significance. John Warne Monroe’sstudy is positioned within this new historiogra-phy of the culturally liminal. Focusing on mes-merism, spiritism, and occultism, he argues thatsuch movements embodied an intense desire onthe part of many French men and women tocross the borders of religion and science, faithand reason, and that, in so doing, they createdcultural traditions that have shown remarkable

BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 2 (2009) 425

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staying power into our own era. Even skepticswill be impressed with Monroe’s opening refer-ence to recent studies indicating that “in theperiod between 1982 and 2000 . . . a relativelyconstant 47 to 54 percent of the French popula-tion professed belief in the curative powers ofMesmerism” (p. 9).

Although he offers many glances backwardand forward, Monroe focuses his study on thedecades between the 1850s and the 1930s. Hisnarrative opens with a series of incidents begin-ning in 1853, in which French men and womeninspired by trans-Atlantic tales of mysteriousphenomena achieved by American spiritualistsbegan conducting experiments with tables tour-nantes. These were tables that, under some in-fluence emanating from people who were seatedaround them and joined finger to finger, turned,“slowly at first, and then with steadily increasingspeed,” ultimately “leading the experimenters in acircuitous path around the room” (p. 19). From thiscurious beginning unfolded a decades-long historythat encompassed the emergence of French spiri-tualism and its challenge to mesmerism (Ch. 2);the “invention and development of spiritism” bythe one-time teacher H. L. D. Rivail, known underthe pseudonym Allan Kardec (Ch. 3); challengesin turn to spiritism, including judicial prosecutionof some of its adepts in the 1870s and 1880s (Ch.4); and the emergence in the fin-de-siecle of whatMonroe terms “the multivalent self,” a new con-struct positing a human psyche divided betweenconscious and “subconscious” elements that drewon both the “heterodox” currents of preceding de-cades and a hard-headed experimental psychologypursued by establishment scientists (Ch. 5). Thebook closes with an “Epilogue” that briefly sur-veys spiritualist, occultist, and assorted “NewAge” movements of the interwar and postwaryears and the “cultic milieu” emergent from thecultural upheavals of the 1960s.

Monroe’s study is theoretically sophisticated,taking as its analytical point of origin CliffordGeertz’s still evocative definition, enunciated inthe 1960s, of “religion” as “a system of symbols”that surrounds its central “conceptions with suchan aura of factuality that [its] moods and motiva-tions seem uniquely realistic” (p. 4). Workingfrom such a view, Monroe makes strong assertionsabout the importance of the cultural phenomena hestudies, which some might be inclined to catego-rize as purely crackpot but which he approachessympathetically with the help of his anthropolog-ically inspired posture of “epistemological agnos-ticism” (p. 14). He urges that the marginalizedelements of “French religious life” on which hefocuses indicate a powerful drive in French cultureto reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable claims of

faith and science and, in the process, enabled ad-epts to achieve myriad forms of emotional conso-lation, creative stimulus, and intellectual freedomfrom the narrow strictures of orthodox science.Engagingly written, Laboratories of Faith is wellgrounded in an extensive body of largely ne-glected primary sources. Cultural historians willwelcome this addition to a growing literature onwhat we might regard as a “third France” long leftin the shadow of the great combatants of the warbetween religion and science.

ELIZABETH A. WILLIAMS

Peter D. Norton. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn ofthe Motor Age in the American City. (InsideTechnology.) xii � 396 pp., illus., figs., index.Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2008.$35 (cloth).

During the early 1960s, as the Golden Age ofthe automobile in America began to wane,several commentators, including Lewis Mum-ford, raised the critical question of whetherthe automobile existed for the modern city orthe city for the automobile. How and when theautomobile became central to urban life isdeftly addressed in Peter Norton’s FightingTraffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in theAmerican City. This study is certainly one ofthe most important monographs focusing onthe place of the automobile in American so-ciety within a historical context to appear inrecent times; it interestingly supplementsDavid Blanke’s Hell on Wheels: The Promiseand Peril of America’s Car Culture, 1900 –1940 (Kansas, 2007). In the process of tellinghis story, Norton convincingly demonstratesthat it was people acting within interestgroups who decided how the automobilewould be used; this is not a tale of a technol-ogy having an irrepressible effect on the mar-ketplace.

Norton, who teaches in the Department ofScience, Technology, and Society at the Univer-sity of Virginia, blends an empirical study of abattle for urban streets with a theoretical analy-sis based on social constructivist theory. Hiseffort is well balanced, clearly articulated, andfundamentally successful, with little of thedense abstract analysis that tends to drive a goodnumber of general readers away from this kindof scholarship.

Above all, Fighting Traffic is an engaging storythat pits a number of diverse constituencies in astruggle over who would control city streets.These groups included pedestrians, safety reform-ers, police, street railway and trolley interests,

426 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 2 (2009)

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