BOOK REVIEWS 261

He insists t ha t the master initiated any action which led to actual work by the
slave. Holiday and cash incentive payments are interpreted solely as techniques
of slave control. However, is it not possible that while the bondsman acquiesced to
his enslavement he attempted to bend the system by forcing concessions such as
these? A crucial point th at the author fails to make is to distinguish adequately
between skilled and common labor. Skilled industrial workers, as i\lIcManus pointed
out, could never be forced to work and therefore could demand certain privileges
in return for their labor.
Starobin’s book is excellent while it focuses on the economic aspects of slavery
but, as with so many others, it falls short when he attempts to view slavery from
the bondsmen’s point of view. Instead of evidence, so many authors have given us
their assumptions, predictions, prejudices, and even their wishful thinking. At the
turn of the 20th century writers who dealt with‘ slavery for the most. part tried to
prove that the bondsman was less than human. Today so many authors feel in-
clined t o attribute heroic proportions to their sketches of the average !Negro slave.
Unfortunately many authors have not heeded Eugene D. Genovese’s admonition
tha t the proper function of the scholar is “not to invent myths, but to teach each
people its own particular contradictory truth . . . [for] Until a people can and will
face its own past it has no future.”

ALFREDJ. MARROW, The Practical Theorist: The Life and Work of Kurt Lewin.
New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1969. Pp. 290. $8.50.
The PracticaE Theorist is a warmly appreciative biography of Kurt Lewin
written by his long-time friend and colleague Alfred J. Marrow. The author, writing
in a direct and economical style, traces the strands of Lewin’s thought and activity
from Stumpf’s laboratory a t Berlin to the Research Center for Group Dynamics
a t RUT. The main achievement of the biography lies in the skillful integration of
the many aspects of Lewin’s life. By demonstrating the continuity of his interests
as well as the growth of his ideas, Marrow has replaced the fragmentary sketch
which had previously existed with a convincing portrait.
Biography is a n especially effective approach to the evolution of Lewin’s
thought, as few psychologists have moved with such ease from the experiences of
everyday life t o the construction of theory, or from abstract schema to concrete
problem-solving. The continuity of Lewin’s interests is as striking as the inter-
action among them. His concern with social problems dates from his student
period as does his interest in psychology and the philosophy of science. Marrow
makes it clear t hat the basis of much of Lewin’s creativity was the continual inter-
action of these contrasting levels of abstraction and modes of thought.
Marrow has drawn on the reminiscences of almost fifty former students and
colleagues t o reconstruct Lewin’s life. I n addition, a careful reading of Lewin’s
published works is evident from the capsule summaries of significant experiments
which are woven into the text. Supplementing these two sources are some materials
from family records and from correspondence files relating mainly to the action-
research of the American years. Although Marrow has kept the scholarly apparatus
to a minimum in the text, he has appended forty-six pages of materials which will
delight the specialist: a bibliography of Lewin’s works, a summary of the Berlin
experiments, a list of the members of the Topology Group, annotated bibliographies
of the Iowa studies and the publications of the Commission Qn Community Inter-
262 BOOK REVIEWS

relations, and a list of the publications of the Research Center for Group Dynamics
to 1950.
It was Douglas McGregor who suggested to Marrow that he “seek out those
who had worlied and studied with Lewin, in the hope that their recollections would
reveal the reasons for his great impact on them and would provide a clearer idea
of what that impact was” (p. xi). The author diligently pursued this approach
and the portrait of Lewin as a professor a t Berlin, Cornell and Iowa benefits greatly
from the effort. However, the reminiscences also reveal some of the shortcomings
of this kind of biographical evidence: they are all friendly reports, usually couched
in fairly general terms, which are suffused with the warmth of nostalgia.
Although we can honor the decision of A4arrow to write mainly of the public
Lewin and exchew more than-a very brief allusion to his private life, we can still
ask for more detaiIs and explanation on some points. For example, as a student
Lewin helped set up classes for workers and he published one of his first papers in
Praktischer Sozialismus, and yet there is no real discussion of his political beliefs
at the time. Or again: Lewin volunteered as a private in World War I, rose to the
rank of Lieutenant, and received the Iron Cross, which must tell us something
about his sense of identity a t the time, yet the matter is passed by with little com-
ment. Certainly in the perspective of Lewin’s later life these events deserve more
attention than they received.
But however much more detail may be wanted by the historian, the book
clearly serves the purpose for which it was written: it portrays a wonderfully
creative man and records the lasting imprint of his work upon contemporary
psychology. And it may be cordially recommended to anyone seeking an intro-
duction to the Lewinian realm.
ROBERT C. DAVIS
Case Western Reserve University

DAVIDJ. ROTHMAN, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the
New Republic. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1971.
Pp. xx + 376. $12.50.
David Rothman forcefully reminds us that commonplace institutional land-
marks such as penitentiaries, workhouses, reform schools, mental hospitals and
orphanages, did not always exist. For the most part, these structures were the
creations of early nineteenth century reformers seeking to eradicate permanently
pauperism, vice, crime and insanity.
The reformers’ energy and optimism, as Rothman demonstrates in early
chapters, contrasted sharply with previously accepted ideas on deviance and de-
pendency. Colonial North Americans eschewed institutional incarceration because
of their quasi-Calvinistic belief that most men and certainly all criminals were
inherently depraved and thus scarcely improvable by society. Also, the common
expectation was that family government, reinforced by local authority, would
subsume most categories of need and deviance. Town officials “warned out”
wandering vagrants, and remanded orphans, apprentices and insane persons to the
care and control of individual ‘householders. Public almshouses, places of last
resort, were seldom required, the preference being to sustain impoverished families
and individuals within their own or other people’s homes. Strangely, Rothman does