Robert A. Nye

Feature ReviewRewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Ian Hacking

Readers familiar with the work of Ian Hacking will know that he does not write conventional history. He is interested in the past not for its own sake but, rather, for the light that historical knowledge can shed on the present, and in particular on the general ways knowledge is related to social practice. Despite this analytic focus, the past is nonetheless deeply important to his projects. In a manner that is reminiscent of the way Michel Foucault studied the concepts of madness, criminality, and sex, Hacking interests himself in this book in the historical moment when the sciences of memory first took shape. He explores the circumstances that called forth this new knowledge, describes the forms it took in human practices and institutions, and follows its patterns of growth and change into the present.