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Clio on the Couch

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

H. N. Hirsch
H. N. Hirsch
Affiliation:
Harvard
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Abstract

An analysis of six recent works of psychohistory. A scheme is presented for classifying such works. Four different types of psychohistory are discussed; this typology is offered as a means of understanding and controlling the methodological difficulties inherent in the genre.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , April 1980 , pp. 406 - 424
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1980

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References

1 Barzun, , Clio and the Doctors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 14Google Scholar.

2 I am dating “modern” psychohistory from the publication of two seminal works: Alexander and Juliette George's Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House in 1956, and Erikson's Young Man Luther in 1958. In this review essay, I am limiting myself to work dealing with figures in American politics.

3 See esp. Erikson, , Gandhi's Truth (New York: Norton, 1969), 266Google Scholar.

4 George, “Assessing Presidential Character,” review of James David Barber, The Presidential Character, in World Politics, xxvi (January 1974), 234–82.

5 Ibid., 253; emphasis added.

6 Ibid. See also George, Alexander L., “Some Uses of Dynamic Psychology in Political Biography: Case Materials on Woodrow Wilson,” in Greenstein, Fred I. and Lerner, Michael, eds., A Sourcebook for the Study of Personality and Politics (Chicago: Markham, 1971)Google Scholar.

7 George (fn. 4), 263 ff.

8 George (fn. 6), 80; emphasis and footnote omitted.

9 Greenstein, , Personality and Politics: Problems of Evidence, Inference, and Conceptualization (New York: Norton, 1975), 65 ffGoogle Scholar.

10 Ibid., 66; emphasis added.

11 Ibid.

12 George (fn. 6), 85.

13 For example, see p. 396: “When Hamilton passionately sought an objective, he moved like a missile that pulls all air currents into patterns that will serve its flight.”

14 Flexner writes:

That James Hamilton had broken with his family and was exiled from his birthright seems clear. Did he depart as a gesture of independence that left him subsequently too proud to ask for help? Had he fled from a disastrous love affair, a hated marriage, conduct considered unbecoming a gentleman, an irreconcilable difference with his father and brothers, debts he could not pay, or a yawning of prison gates? If little Alexander was ever told, he never recorded what he knew (p. 18).

15 Flexner seems to base his interpretation largely on a single letter. See pp. 21–22.

16 See esp. pp. 73–74. For another example of Adams's incorporation of the principles of an authority figure he had rejected, see the discussion of Thomas Hutchinson on p. 228.

17 For a recent example, see Wills, Garry, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978)Google Scholar.

18 Indeed, Brodie herself points to such a conclusion. See pp. 92 and 234–35.

19 For a brief but excellent discussion of Jefferson's attitude toward race, see Peterson, Merrill D., Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 256–65Google Scholar. “Jefferson's basic assumptions toward race were liberal and enlightened,” Peterson writes, “but they were upset by his observation from the post of a Virginia planter.”

20 In a recent article, Kearns has indicated that she has had second thoughts about her organization of the book. See The New Republic, March 3, 1979, pp. 27–29.

21 On the need to consider alternative hypotheses, see Greenstein (fn. 9).