A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern, by Corinna Treitel
John Hopkins University Press, 0801878128, 366 pp. (incl. appendices, notes, bibliography and index), 2004

A Science for the Soul explores German occultism between the 1870s and 1940s, largely focusing on parapsychology, séances, mediumism, Theosophy and the spiritualist movement, their popularization, and what effects this had on the larger German culture.

Treitel opens with a look at how occultism brought science and the psyche together, helping to facilitate “the blossoming of psychological modernism circa 1900″, which she writes has been “largely ignored or underplayed in accounts of the era”. Continue reading »

I first came across Siva Vaidhyanathan‘s excellent and wonderfully lucid book, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System, via Wes Unruh‘s recommendation on Alterati.com.

It looks at the way we interact with information with a focus on ownership and distribution, arguing that the way we structure this can be boiled down into two essential forms: anarchistic and oligarchic systems.

Vaidhyanathan avoids cartoonish portrayals of anarchy, sticking largely to anarchy’s core definition: the absence of recognized authority, rules imposed or enforced.  Oligarchic forms use the rule of the few, the elite who decide how and where information is distributed, if at all.  They set the the rules, and they hold all the cards. Continue reading »