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Anton M. Matytsin, George Makari. Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1677–1678, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1677
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In Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, George Makari attempts to explain how the early modern theological concept of the soul transformed into the modern secular notion of the mind. Makari, whose Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (2008) examines the history of psychoanalysis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, goes further back in time in this ambitious and thoroughly researched book to uncover the origins of modern psychiatry. He tries to demonstrate how the material and fallible mind gradually replaced the immaterial and immortal soul as the seat of reason during the long eighteenth century. Such a historical exploration allows him to shed light on the underlying tensions that have shaped contemporary conceptions of an autonomous yet embodied mind.
Covering the period from about 1640 to 1815, Makari’s story features a panoply of major figures, including René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant, along with characters less familiar to non-specialists, such as Marin Mersenne, William Battie, Albrecht von Haller, and Franz Anton Mesmer, among many others. Makari is not an intellectual historian by training, but his lucid writing captures the essential ideas of a wide variety of thinkers from Britain, France, and Germany. He manages to offer a chronologically and geographically comprehensive synthesis that details a persistent debate between various materialist explanations of the mind’s operations (which he deems reductionist) and mentalist attempts to go beyond brain physiology. However, his interpretations of these authors are based largely on secondary sources. As a result, his analyses of complex figures such as Pierre Bayle, the Marquis de Sade, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte sometimes overlook their nuanced positions.
