The asylum–at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse–touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million.
Using the writing of former asylum inmates, as well as other sources, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum reveals a history of madness and the asylum that has remained hidden by a focus on doctors, diagnoses, and other interventions into mad people’s lives. Although those details are present in this story, its focus is the hundreds of inmates who spoke out or published pamphlets, memorials, memoirs, and articles about their experiences. They recalled physical beatings and prolonged restraint and isolation. They described what it felt like to be gawked at like animals by visitors and the hardships they faced re-entering the community. Many inmates argued that asylums were more akin to prisons than medical facilities and testified before state legislatures and the US Congress, lobbying for reforms to what became popularly known as “lunacy laws.”
Michael Rembis demonstrates how their stories influenced popular, legal, and medical conceptualizations of madness and the asylum at a time when most Americans seemed to be groping toward a more modern understanding of the many different forms of “insanity.” The result is a clearer sense of the role of mad people and their allies in shaping one of the largest state expenditures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries–and, at the same time, a recovery of the social and political agency of these vibrant and dynamic “mad writers.”
Walter Bruno Henning spent part of the 1955-56 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His project at the time was described by him as “Analysis of the Khwarezmian language; collection of material for the Corpus Inscriptionem Iranicarum”. Khwarezmian is an eastern Iranian language, related to Sogdian. Henning was one of the first Western scholars of Sogdian, working with texts brought back from the German Turfan expeditions, initially under the direction of Friedrich Carl Andreas in Berlin, and later in London, where he had a post at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Henning was awarded a post at the IAS for the second term of the academic year, and was informed of this by the director Robert Oppenheimer on 12 October 1954.
Henning had been encouraged to apply by faculty at the IAS, including the medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz. Kantorowicz had solicited the advice of Richard N. Frye, Professor of Iranian Studies at Harvard University. Frye told Kantorowicz that five or six years ago he had described Henning as “the outstanding scholar in the world in Iranian Studies” who would benefit from time at the IAS, and would offer much too. “Since that time Henning has grown in stature and is without question the most outstanding scholar of all time in the Iranian field”. He noted that Henning was already so eminent, yet only in his mid-40s. Kantorowicz and his colleague Llewelyn Woodward therefore encouraged Henning to apply. Kantorowicz wrote to Woodward, then spending the summer in Oxford, to encourage this, and at the same time noted that Woodward had left Princeton for Oxford just before the 1954 hearing which revoked Oppenheimer’s US government security clearance. Kantorowicz was one of Oppenheimer’s IAS colleagues who sent him a telegram of support during the hearing (quoted in Abraham Pais with Robert P. Crease, J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life,260).
Oppenheimer remained director of the IAS until 1966, and Kantorowicz had had his own problems with anti-Communism, refusing to sign the loyalty oath in California in 1949, which is what led to his move from Berkeley to the IAS. (I write about that here.) Henning was keen on the idea of time in Princeton, describing the prospect of being at the IAS as “the scholar’s paradise”. But he did wonder if a visiting post there might require “a great deal of sociability”, noting that he was “somewhat of a retiring disposition” and hoped it would be more of a retreat to get some serious work done.
The reply to this question must have been sufficient to allay Henning’s fears. He was formally offered a position in October 1954, which came with a grant of $4000 and a suggestion to apply for a Fullbright grant to cover travel expenses. Once he had permission from SOAS to come to Princeton he did apply for a Fulbright grant, but was unsuccessful, because of the remuneration provided by the IAS. During the term he spent at the IAS in 1956, he produced a substantial treatment of Middle-Iranian for the Handbuch der Orientalistik.
Henning moved to a post at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. He applied for membership of the IAS again for 1964-65. He said in his research programme that he intended to complete his work on the Khwarezmian language, begun as far back as 1936.
This work consists of reading, interpreting, and compiling a dictionary of, the Khwarezmian words written in the Arabic script and included in various medieval Arabic books. Its result, reviving a late form of that lost Eastern Iranian language, will supply the key to the decipherment, hitherto tried without success, of the Khwarezmian documents written in indigenous script and excavated by Soviet archaeologists in Khwarezm, at the southern shore of Lake Aral in the heart of Soviet Central Asia.
He indicates the progress of the dictionary had been slowed by other duties, and that it was “just impossible to carry it forward amidst the distractions of ordinary academic life”. For the 25 years he was at the University of London he was not given a sabbatical, but now teaching at Berkeley he was due a semester’s leave in the second half of 1964-65. He was hopeful that he could get unpaid leave for the other half. He hoped that another period at the IAS would provide “sufficient time to reach a final conclusion of this work and to prepare the aimed-for comprehensive publication”.
Walter Bruno Henning by Walter Stoneman – bromide print, April 1957, National Portrait GalleryTitle page of A Fragment of a Khwarezmian Dictionary
Andrew Alföldi of the IAS’s School of Historical Studies warned Henning that there would be competition, but that they would treat his application sympathetically. His application was, however, rejected. Henning never completed work on the dictionary. He broke his leg in December 1966, developed pulmonary edema, and died in January 1967. He was just 58 years old. Only a small part of the planned dictionary was published posthumously in 1971 as A Fragment of a Khwarezmian Dictionary. It was edited by D.N. MacKenzie, who also did important work on the language. As well as publishing Henning’s fragment, MacKenzie was working on a dictionary of his own, but this was also never completed. Based on the extant manuscript in Hamburg it is now being developed by Adam Benkato – see the project website.
[Update March 2026: I write about Henning’s dispute with Franz Altheim here.]
W. B. Henning, “Mitteliranisch” in Bertold Spuler (ed.), Handbuch der Orientalistik Erste Abteilung Vierter Band: Iranistik, Erster Abschnitt: Linguistik, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1958.
Walter Bruno Henning, A Fragment of a Khwarezmian Dictionary, ed. D.N. MacKenzie, London: Lund Humphries, 1971.
W. B. Henning, Selected Papers, ed. J. Duchesne-Guillemin, Téhéran-Liège/Leiden: Bibliothèque Pahlavi/E.J. Brill, two volumes, 1977.
Abraham Pais with Robert P. Crease, J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 (while far from the best biography, this is the most detailed source I know on his role as IAS director).
Henning’s own archives are at the Deutsches Exilarchiv 1933-1945, part of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. For a detailed study, see Adam Benkato, The Nachlass of Walter B. Henning: An Annotated Inventory, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gc5755t (open access)
The Institute for Advanced Study archives in Princeton have Director’s Office and School of Historical Studies files on Henning.
My thanks to Caitlin Rizzo of the IAS archives for scanning materials relating to Henning’s visit and later application, and Adam Benkato for his interest.
This is the eighth post of an occasional series, where I try to post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. The other posts so far are:
In Judaism, meat is of paramount importance as it constitutes the very focal point of the dietary laws. With an intricate set of codified regulations concerning forbidden and permissible meats, highly prescribed methods of killing, and elaborate rules governing consumption, meat is one of the most visible, and gustatory, markers of Jewish distinctness and social separation. It is an object of tangible, touchable, and tastable difference like no other.
In All Consuming, historian John M. Efron focuses on the contested culture of meat and its role in the formation of ethnic identities in Germany. To an extent not seen elsewhere in Europe, Germans have identified, thought about, studied, decried, and gladly eaten meat understood to be “Jewish.” Expressions of this engagement are found across the cultural landscape—in literature, sculpture, and visual arts—and evident in legal codes and commercial enterprises. Likewise, Jews in Germany have vigorously defended their meats and the culture and rituals surrounding them by educating Germans and Jews alike about their meaning and relevance.
Exploring a cultural history that extends some seven hundred years, from the Middle Ages to today, Efron goes beyond a discussion of dietary laws and ritual slaughter to take a broad view of what meat can tell us about German-Jewish identity and culinary culture, Jewish and Christian religious sensibilities, and religious freedom for minorities in Germany. In so doing, he provides a singular window into the rich, fraught, and ultimately tragic history of German Jewry.
“A powerful case for limitarianism—the idea that we should set a maximum on how much resources one individual can appropriate. A must-read!” —Thomas Piketty, bestselling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
An original, bold, and convincing argument for a cap on wealth by the philosopher who coined the term “limitarianism.”
How much money is too much? Is it ethical, and democratic, for an individual to amass a limitless amount of wealth, and then spend it however they choose? Many of us feel that the answer to that is no—but what can we do about it?
Ingrid Robeyns has long written and argued for the principle she calls “limitarianism”—or the need to limit extreme wealth. This idea is gaining momentum in the mainstream – with calls to “tax the rich” and slogans like “every billionaire is a policy failure”—but what does it mean in practice?
Robeyns explains the key reasons to support the case against extreme wealth:
It keeps the poor poor and inequalities growing It’s often dirty money It undermines democracy It’s one of the leading causes of climate change Nobody actually deserves to be a millionaire There are better things to do with excess money The rich will benefit, too
This will be the first authoritative trade book to unpack the concept of a cap on wealth, where to draw the line, how to collect the excess and what to do with the money. In the process, Robeyns will ignite an urgent debate about wealth, one that calls into question the very forces we live by (capitalism and neoliberalism) and invites us to a radical reimagining of our world.
Michel Serres, Hermes II: Interference, trans. Randolph Burke – University of Minnesota Press, April 2025
Unveiling the hidden connections in the network of knowledge
Hermes II: Interference is the second in a series of works by philosopher Michel Serres using Hermes, god of communication, as an archetypal symbolic figure for reflecting on philosophy and the arts and sciences. Serres delves into the concept of interreferentiality, proposing that every node—whether it be knowledge, objects, or people—exists within a network where it both receives and transmits information. He argues against the existence of a dominant center or pole within these networks, emphasizing that each node can temporarily serve as a focal point depending on context.
Serres presents unique insights into topics such as the nature of knowledge, the world of objects, intersubjectivity, the origins of geometry, the interplay of music and background noise, and empiricism. By identifying parallel structures across these areas, Serres unifies them into a comprehensive theoretical framework, revealing hidden connections and potential future influences. Additionally, this work includes a critique of Gaston Bachelard’s The Formation of the Scientific Mind and concludes with an analysis of communication in Hergé’s The Castafiore Emerald.
Hermes II is a unique blend of ancient and modern perspectives, combining rigorous analysis with an optimistic outlook and highlighting the interconnectedness of knowledge and its implications for fostering peaceful relations within the network of life.
Out soon – “Foucault, Dynastics and Power Relations: Between Archaeology and Genealogy” – forthcoming in Philosophy, Politics and Critique
Update May 2025: it is now published here. The article requires subscription, but as ever please email me if you don’t have access and would like a copy.
Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities provides a spatial analysis of the anticolonial governmentalities that emerged in the colonial capital of British India. Reading across imperial and nationalist archives, newspapers, memoirs, oral histories, and interviews it exposes the subaltern geographies and struggles which have traditionally been overshadowed by the presence of national leaders in Delhi. It reads the new capital and the old city as one interconnected political landscape and tracks the efforts of the Indian National Congress to mobilise and marshal support for the mass movements of Civil Disobedience (1930-34), Quit India (1942-43), and beyond. This bottom-up analysis, focused on the streets, bazars, neighbourhoods, homes, and undergrounds of the two cities, emphasises the significance of the articulation of physical and political space; it highlights the pioneering role of women in crafting these spaces; and it exposes the micro-techniques that Congress used to encourage Gandhi’s nonviolence. Michel Foucault’s final lectures on parrhesia (courageous speech and actions) are used to analyse these spaces of anticolonialism as coherent governmentalities which were themselves rejected by those who turned to violence in the years before independence in 1947. This volume provides an innovative study of anticolonial geography and a restive history of the capital of contemporary India’s 1.4 billion people.
Knowledge, Ideology, Reproduction is the first book-length examination of the theses developed by Louis Althusser and his collaborators on the processes of class-based educational formation and the function of schools. Drawing largely on unpublished writings that have been overlooked by scholars of both Althusser and critical pedagogy, this study reveals that, for Althusser and the groupe Spinoza, educational formation and the position of knowledge are central, decisive issues in understanding the real forces driving the mechanisms of social reproduction. This perspective enables a critical interrogation of knowledge transmission and opens up new possibilities for transformative educational practices.
This has taken an age to reach this stage, but we now have proofs for Henri Lefebvre and Patrick Tort, “The Lukács Question”, translated by Federico Testa, edited and introduced by Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton, forthcoming in Historical Materialism.
A real pleasure to work with Federico and Adam. This developed out of the work that went into Henri Lefebvre, On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography, edited by Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton, translated by Robert Bononno with Matthew Dennis and Sîan Rosa Hunter Dodsworth, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
This piece obviously doesn’t fit that theme, but connects in particular to some of the work Adam and colleagues have been doing on Lukács in recent years – discussed and linked at the Progress in Political Economy site.
