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Article ID: CBB858807649

‘Ghastly Marionettes’ and the Political Metaphysics of Cognitive Liberalism: Anti-Behaviourism, Language, and the Origins of Totalitarianism (2020)

Carr, Danielle Judith Zola (Author)

History of the Human Sciences
Volume: 33
Issue: 1
Pages: 147-174
Publication date: 2020
Language: English

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695119874009

DOI: 10.1177/0952695119874009

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While behaviourist psychology had proven its worth to the US military during the Second World War, the 1950s saw behaviourism increasingly associated with a Cold War discourse of ‘totalitarianism’. This article considers the argument made in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism on totalitarianism as a form of behaviourist control. By connecting Arendt’s Cold War anti-behaviourism both to its discursive antecedents in a Progressive-era critique of industrial labour, and to contemporaneous attacks on behaviourism, this paper aims to answer two interlocking questions: Why was behaviourism overtaken by cognitivism as the dominant theoretical orientation of psychologists in the 1960s, and what role did the concept of language play in this shift?

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Article Stefanos Geroulanos; Leif Weatherby (2020) Cybernetics and the Human Sciences. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 3-11). unapi

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