Nachman Ben-Yehuda

The European Witch Craze of the 14th to 17th Centuries: A Sociologist's Perspective'

From the early decades of the 14th century until 1650, continental Europeans executed between 200,000 and 500,000 witches, 85% or more of whom were women. The character and timing of these executions and the persecutions which preceded them were determined in part by changed objectives of the Inquisition, as well as by a differentiation process within medieval society. The which craze answered the need for a redefinition of moral boundaries, as a result of the profound changes in the medieval social order. The fact that these executions and the accompanying demonological theories enjoyed widespread and popular acceptance can be explained through the anomie which permeated society at that time. While these conditions provided the intellectual, cognitive background for the witch-hunts,economic and demographic changes, together with the emotional need for a target, explain why the witch-hunts were directed at women.

Book ReviewsThe Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State.By Zeev Sternhell. Translated by David Maisel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii + 419.

apeutic ethos and a utilitarian ethos become conjoined and how these admixtures mediate the relationships between a Giddensian “high modern” state and an increasingly postmodern culture. Given countertendencies such as the backlash among religious fundamentalists against therapeutic intrusions, Nolan is no doubt wise to hedge his conclusions about how long therapeutic justifications of the state will endure. Instead, he closes by invoking Michel Foucault and expressing concern about a “postmodern padded cage” (p. 306). Nolan writes well and within a distinguished tradition of analysts who have sought to discern the basic cultural contours of American life, from Tocqueville to Daniel Bell, Philip Rieff, and Robert Bellah and his colleagues. Yet readers will want to reflect carefully on how far his analysis shows the therapeutic ethos to have “infused the modern American state, thus offering the state an alternative source of legitimation” (p. 21). Nolan rightly poses this as a question, not a claim. Yet The Therapeutic State sometimes portrays the therapeutic ethos as an almost free-floating geist, to be discerned in various discourses that invoke it, but having an autonomous telos of its own. Though Nolan shows the agency of people who employ therapeutic discourse, he does not much explore the kinds of power gained (and by whom) when it is invoked (for this question, bringing in Foucault more strongly and much earlier would have been useful). Moreover, justification is a slippery concept that can slide away from legitimation: therapeutic discourse within government programs is different from the rhetorics of justification for those programs, and these “local” rhetorics of government do not always work as proxies for justificatory legitimation of the nation state as a whole. On this front, the choice of sites in which to examine legitimating discourse loads the analysis in favor of demonstrating the rise of therapeutic discourse. The book gives scant attention to state legitimations in commerce, geopolitics, national security, environmental pollution credits, and corporate antitrust law— arenas that do not seem especially prone to therapeutic justifications. But these considerations should not overshadow the substantial contribution of Nolan’s book. The Therapeutic State documents an important emergent underpinning of legitimation in emotions talk. Anyone interested in state power today ought to read it.