Fernand Hallyn: Les structures rhétoriques de la science: De Kepler àMaxwell,Les structures rhétoriques de la science: De Kepler à Maxwell by Fernand  HallynReview by: rev. by Greg MyersIsis, Vol. 97, No. 2 (June 2006), pp. 339-340Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/507353 .

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BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 97 : 2 (2006) 339

investigating alternative or auxiliary objectives,or how the evaluative practices of industrial-or-ganization psychology itself shaped the work-place and the worker, even if inadvertently.

A Social History of Psychology differs in sev-eral aspects. Edited and written by Europeans,this textbook incorporates historical events inboth the United States and Europe, which makesit more thematic in orientation. However, this isa relatively minor difference between the twohistories; a more important distinction arisesfrom Jeroen Jansz and Peter van Drunen’s aimto “examine critically the impact of modern psy-chology on society” (p. 3). This critical stance isarticulated through several premises shared bythe contributors. First, applied psychology is ex-amined in terms of its social effects, which aretaken to be complex. The relations between so-ciety and psychological practices are dynamic,not linear or progressive; instead, the contribu-tors consider how the social embeddedness ofpractical psychology yields methods and theo-ries—even “new concepts about man” (p. 5)—that, in turn, influence academic psychology.Further, the realist epistemology of science (andits associated “cognitivist” approach to scientificdiscovery) is questioned, not presumed, whichallows the authors to explore the heterogeneityof psychological practices as well as the conceitsof scientism. Finally, the authors address the dy-namic operation of several key historical con-cepts, notably “individualization,” or NorbertElias’s proposed “civilizing process,” wherebypsychology has participated in the naming, mea-suring, and promotion of a shift from collectiveto individual life, an increased awareness of in-dividual differences, and psychologization—“the development of a sense of ‘inwardness,’presupposing that every individual possessessome form of private ‘inner space’ of motives,thoughts and feelings, constitutive of his verybeing as a unique person” (p. 7). Another keyconcept is “social management,” particularly theexpansion of social management to address theorganization and regulation of features of sociallife, the shift of agencies of management fromprivate to public, and the scientizing of socialmanagement rhetoric and techniques. The firstchapter of A Social History of Psychology elu-cidates these concepts via a general overview ofpractical psychology from 1400 to the present.Subsequent chapters are dedicated to specificsubjects, including madness, work, culture andethnicity, delinquency, and social psychologicalmodels. The historical specificity of these chap-ters is sometimes blurred by the transcontinentaland theoretical foci, but the shared historiogra-

phy affords a compelling case for understandingpsychology’s evolution as a dynamic play of po-litical economy, scientific rationality, and pro-tean human kinds.

Together these two projects chart new do-mains as they challenge the history textbook tra-dition in American psychology. Their attentionto psychology as a cultural practice as well as athriving profession affords readers a rich per-spective on the history of practical psychology.Their differences invite future textbook authorsto consider integrating the structural, scientific,political, and critical-theoretical facets of psy-chology’s history in a single volume.

JILL G. MORAWSKI

Fernand Hallyn. Les structures rhetoriques dela science: De Kepler a Maxwell. 322 pp., index.Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2004.

This book is not, as the title might suggest—andas some readers might fear—a theoretical over-view of the rhetoric of science or a proposal ofa new system. Instead, as the subtitle suggests,it is a series of closely argued case studies ofrhetoric “in the contemporary sense of analysisof ways of influencing others in communication”(p. 12). Fernand Hallyn notes that his examplesare familiar, “celebrated cases, problems, or pas-sages” (p. 13). But he does not just assert thatthey involve rhetoric, or illustrate rhetoricalterms with texts; his project is to find how oneor another rhetorical device emerges, serves thepurposes of the author, and links to the thoughtof the time, a poetics or “deep rhetoric” that “ex-plores the formation of representation” (p. 12).This formation is to be found in careful attentionto what historians have shown about science inthe making.

The book consists of a series of chapters(some of which have appeared in earlier forms)arranged in order of the periods studied. Thereis little attempt to develop an overall argument,and there are few cross-references. But a consis-tent approach runs through all the studies: a fa-miliar case is reframed in terms of rhetoric, andthat reframing leads on to larger issues of tex-tuality in science. For instance, Galileo’s inter-pretation of the moon as seen through a telescopeis framed in terms of the metaphor of the moonseen in terms of earthly relief. Then Hallyn pur-sues this metaphor through the scientific disputesin which it was employed, the theories of paint-ing then current, and, finally, to a shift in whichthe lens is no longer seen as an eye but the nakedeye is seen as a lens. Underlying all this is the

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340 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 97 : 2 (2006)

basic issue of witnessing, of how far one canpersuade by what one has seen.

Later chapters are on very different themes butmake similar links between one system and an-other. Recurring themes include the analogy be-tween the interpretation of texts and of the physi-cal world (in terms of Galileo’s and Kepler’s useof anagrams or Maxwell’s use of the “book ofnature” trope), the visual representation as meta-phor or metonymy for the physical world (Ga-lileo’s shadows on the moon, diagrams in Des-cartes, the frontispiece of the Encyclopedie), andthe uses of possible worlds, thought experi-ments, and fictions (Descartes’s tourbillions,Maxwell’s demon). Running through the chap-ters are issues of abstraction, calculation, obser-vation, and analogy—all familiar topics in thehistory of science, but here seen in terms of rhe-torical strategies current at the authors’ times.

There are some disappointing passages (thechapter on Sadi Carnot offers more of a pro-grammatic demonstration of what can be donewith rhetorical theory than a new view of Car-not). But, in general, each study is surprising andrevealing—and supported by a wide range ofreference to recent historical work. I was struckby insights into works I thought I knew and im-pressed by the aptness of the quotations fromworks I didn’t know, and I was prodded intorethinking some rhetorical and semiotic distinc-tions I had been using conventionally. Les struc-tures rhetoriques de la science is a pleasure toread, even for someone with rusty French; but Ihope some enterprising academic publisher ispreparing a translation.

GREG MYERS

Gerard Jorland; Annick Opinel; GeorgeWeisz (Editors). Body Counts: Medical Quan-tification in Historical and Sociological Per-spective. x � 417 pp. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. $80 (cloth).

There are lots of studies of medicine and num-bers. Histories of medical statistics immediatelycome to mind. This vast field alone incorporatesepidemiology and therapeutic trials. But with alittle lateral thinking we can come up with clini-cal quantification, as in blood pressure measure-ment, and medical laboratory determinations, asin biochemical estimations. Cell counting is cru-cial to various hematological diagnoses. Drugdosage has almost always had a quantitative di-mension. In many countries people are weighedand measured at birth and throughout their lives.These things are obvious enough on a moment’sreflection. The odd thing is that all these areas

are compartmentalized by historians and no onehas written a book that looks at how numberspermeate all aspects of modern medicine, the re-lations between these different uses of numericaldata, and how these things have come about.Body Counts is not such a book, but at least bycollecting essays on different ways of countingin medicine it makes a first attempt at delineatinga subject area.

Seventeen essays follow an introduction bytwo of the editors (Gerard Jorland and GeorgeWeisz). Five are in French. The essays are di-vided unevenly into five parts. Part 1, “MedicalArithmetic,” contains three pieces on eighteenth-century counting, by Ulrich Trohler, AndreaRusnock, and Harry Marks. Trohler’s insistenceon the importance of quantification in Britishclinical medicine is reaffirmed here, but his over-tures to “societal context” (p. 45) take into ac-count only struggles within a changing medicalprofession. Like Trohler, Rusnock (on infantmortality) and Marks are interested in the poten-tial power of statistical rhetoric to bring aboutchange, although Marks’s analysis of a Frenchinoculation debate also takes in resistance to theargument from counting. Nevertheless, the vol-ume as a whole might leave the reader with theimpression that numbers were usually instru-ments deployed in the cause of reform. “Count-ing” and “modernity” start to sound like syno-nyms. Reference to a key text, John Brewer’sThe Sinews of Power (Century Hutchinson,1988), which addresses the day-to-day deploy-ment of numbers in the bureaucracy of a pow-erful, conservative state (Britain), is missingfrom the eighteenth-century section.

Part 2 draws the reader’s attention to “Quan-tification and Instrumentation.” All the essayshere merit inspection. Volker Hess’s breakdownof ways to think about thermometry is particu-larly valuable. Characteristically, Ilana Lowyfinds a relatively unknown figure from the pastto use as an interesting case study—in this in-stance, in the history of pedology (dealing withchildren, not feet or soil). Part 3 presents twostudies, on Semmelweis and lung cancer, thatinvestigate statistics and evidence for theory.Part 4 is something of a mixed bag, containing,for example, papers on William Farr’s publichealth work and the British streptomycin trial.Still, all these chapters are up to the generallyhigh quality of the book. Bringing up the rear,in Part 5, are two essays. The first is a most use-ful survey, by GeorgeWeisz, of work that doubtsthe gold standard of evidence-based medicine.Finally, there is an equally valuable sketch map,by Theodore Porter, of why the counting of bod-

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