Murray K. Simpson is a reader and programme director in the School of Education and Social Work at the University of Dundee, leading courses on rethinking disability and social work. The present book, Modernity and the Appearance of Idiocy: Intellectual Disability as a Regime of Truth, is to be anchored within Simpson’s general line of study: the questioning of the concept of intellectual disability through the discursive formation of its field in order to highlight its contingent character (Simpson Citation2007a, Citation2007b, Citation2009, Citation2012). Simpson heavily draws on Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge to produce ‘an archaeology of intellectual disability’, which is ‘to be understood as a diagnostic of the present’ and not as a history of intellectual disability (8). Foucault (Citation1989) believed that the history of thought was punctuated by radical discontinuities brought by work of theoretical transformation. Following this idea, Simpson presents a corpus of both educational and medical texts in order to demonstrate the sharp break occurring within the field of ‘idiocy’ in the nineteenth century (2).
Starting his archaeology from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile ou de l’éducation which established the link between education and civilisation, Simpson shows how this new pedagogical technology was appropriated by medicine and applied to idiocy, notably through the work of Jean-Gaspard Itard and Richard Poole. Each author contributed to the idea that education should be tailored to the child’s mental capacities, leading to a division between normal and special education, as well as the fragmentation of the concept of idiocy into more manageable categories. This new discursive formation, which would focus on special education, would particularly be revealing through the development of the medico-pedagogical treatment, as thought and put into practice by Itard and especially Edouard Seguin. It targeted physical and physiological health as a primary task in the care and treatment of the idiot child before moving on to more intellectual stimulations and activities. It was also the first significant appropriation of pedagogy within the medical discourse, where the physician emerged as the figure of authority over the idiot body and mind and the asylum as a research centre and as a place of segregation between the normal and the abnormal individual. However, as the century progresses, Simpson notes that this medical discourse on idiocy would not come unchallenged. Indeed, in parallel to this development, a discourse on idiocy would start growing outside the medical field. Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon were among these non-medical pioneers. Their work accounts for the systematisation of the concepts of testing intelligence and the shift of focus of the discourse on idiocy from a medical and asylum-based perspective to a more psychological and school-related debate. Schools were now considered places of differentiation, between retardation of schooling and abnormality, with ‘social utility’ as a key concept in this division. Simpson also argues the concept of development in these discursive formations: based both on physiology and child studies, idiocy became to be seen as fundamentally linked to childhood. Therefore, a reorientation of the discourse on idiocy was indeed a discourse on the child mind as well. Simpson aims at pointing out the ideas and concepts that formed the discourse on idiocy in the nineteenth century in order to cast light on its complexity and plurality: there is no dominant institutional frame, no clear conceptual boundaries, no professional coherence. In other words, there was no single core to this discourse although it appeared to be a field stable enough that it would eventually be transposed into a social problem, raising the questions of governmentality, surveillance and assistance.
Modernity and the Appearance of Idiocy is a well-written and well-informed book, whose greatest strength lies in its ambition to provide – through past debates – a ‘diagnosis’ of contemporary debates around intellectual disability. In a very scholastic manner, Simpson transposes Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge into the domain of intellectual disability, using the formation of a discourse on idiocy as the set example or method on how the reader should direct a critical analysis of the today’s field of intellectual disability. From a historian’s perspective, however, the priority given to certain texts can be questioned and some contextual imprecision might be observed, although the main criticism may come from the method itself. Indeed, even though Foucault’s theories are crucial to any social study, moving beyond his influence to find new ways to research and think social and historical questions seems to be urgent.
School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
s1157871ms.ed.ac.uk
© 2017 Axelle Champion
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2017.1283837
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
References
- Foucault, M. 1989. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.
- Simpson, M. 2007a. “Developmental Concept of Idiocy.” Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 45 (1): 23–32.10.1352/1934-9556(2007)45[23:DCOI]2.0.CO;2
- Simpson, M. K. 2007b. “From Savage to Citizen: Education, Colonialism and Idiocy.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 28 (5): 561–574.10.1080/01425690701505326
- Simpson, M. 2009. “Séguin, Edouard.” In Encyclopedia of American Disability History, edited by S. Burch. Facts on File library of American history, Facts on File.
- Simpson, M. K. 2012. “Othering Intellectual Disability: Two Models of Classification from the 19th Century.” Theory and Psychology 22 (5): 541–555.10.1177/0959354310378375