Vol. 8 No. 22 · 18 December 1986
pages 17-18 | 3418 words
Knowledge
Ian Hacking
- How institutions think by Mary Douglas
Syracuse University Press, 146 pp, $19.95, July 1986, ISBN 0 8156 2369 0
This is the delightfully short, exuberant, slightly jerky and certainly tumultuous product of five lectures that could have been advertised under the ponderous title ‘Human Knowledge and the Social Order’. The lectures were weighty, I think, but ponderous they were not. Douglas dances over an amazing array of topics. The effect is some sort of intellectual hopscotch; the reader hops from square to square, sideways, diagonally, sometimes landing with feet in different squares. The squares have amazing titles like ‘Institutions remember and forget’ or ‘Institutions do the classifying’. The second square is titled ‘Institutions cannot have minds of their own’, but only as a proposition to be rebutted. The assertion that institutions think is never seriously put in question. But what does it mean?
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[*] Routledge, 115 pp., £7.95, 6 November, 0 7102 1108 2.
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Letters
Vol. 9 No. 3 · 5 February 1987
From David Stafford-Clark
SIR: I was surprised and distressed to the point of anger to encounter an aside of such arrogantly unsupported presumption as to destroy my enjoyment of an otherwise generous, lucid and enlightening review by Ian Hacking (LRB, 18 December). Venturing ‘a colourful example’, he mentions ‘an officer cadre that would willingly follow orders at places singled out for the slaughter of colonials such as Gallipoli or Dieppe’. What a wantonly irresponsible assessment of appalling sacrifices inherent in major strategic blunders in both world wars – about which he presumably knows very little and cares, seemingly, even less. Blunders, even of this magnitude, are historically inseparable from warfare: but tragic as they undoubtedly are, they simply are not maliciously planned slaughters of courageous and invaluable voluntary allies. Why should they be? Desperate combatants need all the help and loyalty they can get. Like countless others, about half of whom survived, I served as a Volunteer throughout World War Two. Our ages then probably covered the same span as Mr Hacking is currently enjoying: which is perhaps one reason why his casually dismissive slander irks me so. He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
David Stafford-Clark
Consultant Emeritus, Guy’s Hospital
Vol. 9 No. 12 · 25 June 1987
From John Pepall
SIR: It’s rather late, I am afraid, but your delivery in this Dominion is very slow and I have just read Ian Hacking’s review of Mary Douglas’s How institutions think (LRB, 18 December 1986). Mr Hacking alleges that remittance men ‘damped down tendencies towards independence, encouraged complacency (and contributed to an officer cadre that would willingly follow orders at places singled out for the slaughter of colonials such as Gallipoli or Dieppe)’. I challenge Mr Hacking or any of your readers to name a single remittance man among the Canadian officers at Dieppe. The merits of the orders for Dieppe are controversial, but they will not be properly judged if those who followed them are supposed to have been cartoon characters. The common impression of remittance men in Canada has been that, as generally pretty feckless and disproportionately representative of their class, they encouraged contempt for that class and tendencies toward independence: exactly the opposite of what Mr Hacking supposes. The characterisation of the Dominions as ‘dour but loyal’ reveals a massive condescension toward countries that were not dour and whose loyalty was heavily qualified and more knowing and less easily manipulated than he allows.
John Pepall
Toronto
