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For Their Own Good: The Transformation of English Working Class Health Culture, 1880–1970 (review)

Passing over the turbulent years of war and revolution, Beer finds in the 1920s a younger generation of specialists who had made peace with the Bolshevik regime and redefined deviance as a failure to adapt to the new conditions. Individuals who could not conform constituted a “social danger” and were prescribed the same coercive treatment that had been recommended for deviants under the old regime. Thus the liberal discourse of social degeneration took a decidedly illiberal turn, merging seamlessly with totalitarian impulses of the Soviet state. Purely as an analysis of discourse, Beer’s study is a welcome contribution. As a historical explanation, however, his argument is questionable. Seeking to portray a coherent and enduring discourse, Beer tends to oversynthesize, exaggerating elements of cohesion and downplaying contradictions. Thus, he minimizes ways in which the clinicians of the 1920s diverged from the theories of their predecessors while overstating the compatibility between biomedical theories of deviance and Marxist sociology. More fundamentally, Beer, with his exclusive focus on discourse, provides little evidence to document its broader impact in practice. Thus, Beer’s thesis that biomedical discourse enabled Stalinist repression is never really supported. The connection between his theorists, many of whose disciplines were liquidated in Stalin’s “great break,” and Soviet policy, in the absence of direct evidence, becomes purely a matter of speculation. So, although Beer has drawn attention to an important body of ideas, there is still ample room to investigate their historical impact.