argued that the dichotomy between the social and medical model is too strong, and that it does not account for the full variety and divergence within characterisations of disability. In her book, she offers an alternative account, called the value-neutral model, which reframes (physical) disability as ‘a way of being a minority body’. 70 Barnes thus argues for a moderate social constructivist view. To clarify this point, the social model is a version of social constructivism, but there are other socially constructed explanations of disability. For example, Kuhane
, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005) ; Robert Fox, ‘Fashioning the Discipline: History of Science in the European Intellectual Tradition’, Minerva 44.4 (2006) ; Harry Collins and Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007) ; Sven Widmalm (ed.), Vetenskapens sociala strukturer: Sju historiska fallstudier om konflikt, samverkan och makt (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2008) ; Jon Agar
, Joelle Abi-Rached and Ilina Singh, among many others. 54 Instead, my point here is to show that this shift towards friendlier cooperation between the life sciences and the human sciences is exposing the foundations of the old regime. This constructivism is not a denial of biology, as Steven Pinker has argued in his influential work The Blank Slate . 55 As Chris Renwick notes, Pinker disregards the fact that many social scientists simply have a different notion of the
, 1990). Another body of scholarship has focused on the social construction of medical knowledge. But some historians have failed to analyse scientific practices and procedures in medicine, or to recognise that male bodies were also pathologised. See in particular C. Benninghaus, ‘Beyond constructivism?: Gender, medicine and the early history of sperm analysis, Germany 1870–1900’, Gender & History , 24:3 (2012), pp. 647–76. 10 H
renouncing its heritage altogether. To them, Humboldt could be put forward as an alternative to the prevailing tendencies of the time. Obviously, then, the historical tradition may be adduced both for and against an existing order. The new, historicising research on the Humboldtian tradition that has taken shape during the last twenty years has adopted a kind of critical constructivism. Paletschek has spoken of ‘the invention of the Humboldtian university’; an important scholarly anthology was given the name Mythos Humboldt; and the designation ‘the Humboldt myth’ has been