The misbehaviorists: Pseudo-science and the modern temper

About this book

Harvey Wickham’s The Misbehaviorists is a polemical work that interrogates the rise of materialist philosophy and behaviorist psychology in the early twentieth‑century intellectual climate. The book opens with a sweeping lament for the erosion of Christian doctrine after the Reformation, then pivots to a dialogue between Catholic writer H. Belloc and radical editor R. Krutch on how science has displaced poetry, mythology, and religion. Wickham proceeds to question whether the scientific picture of reality, couched in the language of psychologists such as John B. Watson and philosophers like Henry N. Wieman, offers a more faithful account than the older, “romantic” worldview. By citing contemporary articles and footnotes, he frames his inquiry around the claims of materialist thinkers, the mechanistic view of life advanced by Jacques Loeb, and the alleged “death of the mind” in behaviorist theory.

The prose is dense, essayistic, and unmistakably of its era, echoing the rhetorical style of early‑1920s scholarly debates. Wickham’s voice is erudite yet confrontational, weaving together theological, philosophical, and scientific references with a tone that oscillates between skeptical inquiry and nostalgic defense of tradition. Readers who relish historical examinations of the clash between faith and empiricism, or who are interested in the intellectual origins of behaviorism and its cultural backlash, will find this text a rewarding, if demanding, exploration of the period’s “modern temper.

Opening lines

“I think it foolish to disguise from ourselves the plain fact that, in the societies which abandoned the Faith in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the last supports of Christian doctrine are breaking down very rapidly indeed. Of the doctrines themselves there is little left ... while the minority, which still feel some attachment to some few of these doctrines, feel that attachment in a decreasing degree and more and more as a vague, dissolving sentiment; less and less as a principle. …

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