Review: Empire of Normality

Robert Chapman, a neurodivergent philosopher, published this book, “Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism“, in 2023. I have been reading this thought-provoking book over the last few weeks, and have a few comments.

A Historical Materialist Approach

The general thesis of Chapman’s book, as I understand it, is that the very concept of “normal human functioning” is intimately bound up with – and emerged from – the economic demands of capitalism. Their book takes the reader on a really interesting journey from ancient to modern views of disease and abnormality, taking in the rise and fall of eugenics, the anti-psychiatry movement and its cooption by neoliberal policymakers, Fordism and post-Fordist production and their impact on mental health, the rise of the neurodiversity movement, and Chapman’s views on neurodiversity and liberation. The book aims to take a historical materialist approach to these questions, emphasising the importance of material economic conditions throughout. I learnt a lot about the history of mental illness, disability, and neurodiversity.

Chapman makes the argument that modern capitalism is harmful to neurotypical and neurodivergent alike, with neurotypical workers facing extreme forms of alienation while neurodivergent potential-workers are often consigned to a “surplus class”. This term appears to be used to denote the idea that such people form a group which can be called on to re-enter the workforce during times of economic growth, akin to the traditional unemployed, but the mechanisms for this to actually happen are not fully drawn out. I’m familiar with the classical concept of a “reserve army of labour”, but not of “surplus class”; late in the book, Chapman cites Adler-Bolton and Vierkant for this concept.

Bodies as Machines, Measurement & Pathology

The metaphor of the body as a machine, and of both neurodiversity and mental illness as corresponding to “broken machines” is criticised heavily throughout the book. Yet I think the metaphor appears to be used in two ways by Chapman, one being machine meaning deterministic device which can be repaired or enhanced with appropriate technical skill, and a different one – machine as a mass-produced device with interchangeable parts and interfaces to the outside world. It is not always clear to me which Chapman is criticising, and I think sometimes arguments against the first view are used rhetorically to support arguments against the second.

There’s a very detailed and interesting discussion on the history of measurement and its link to identifying outlying individuals. What’s less well developed, in my view, is a clear understanding of the potential of clustering of certain traits. To my mind, labels like ADHD have meaning precisely because they define one or more clusters of observable phenomena. These clusters may themselves be very far from the mean, yet identifying such clusters as clusters, rather than as isolated atypical individuals can clearly be helpful. This point arises also much later in the book, where Chapman refers to “autistic customs”, when describing the rise of the neurodiversity movement; the very idea of “customs” seems to only apply to groups of individuals, so this focus on clustering rather than on individuals seems essential to any argument made on this basis, rather than solely around the need to accommodate each unique individual. A reference is made late in the book to Sartre’s notion of ‘serial collectives’, which may hold out a basis for further analysis of this point. “Far from the mean” is also often taken implicitly to correspond to “far below the mean”, and I think the explicit thesis of “the mean is ideal”, explicitly linked to middle-class values by Chapman, is missing a fleshed out discussion of where this leaves “far above the mean” in terms of valuation.

The “pathology paradigm” is introduced as a set of assumptions: that mental and cognitive functioning are individual (whereas, as Chapman convincingly argues, there is a clear social element), that they are based on natural abilities, and that they can be totally ordered (or, as Chapman states it, ‘ranked in ration to a statistical norm across the species’).

Chapman does an excellent job in explaining how modern production leads to separation and sorting by neurotype. The claim made that “increasingly, new forms of domination have less to do with social class, which now, to an extent, is more fluid than in the 19th century, and much more to do with where each of us falls on the new cognitive hierarchies of capitalism” seems weaker if – by domination – it is intended to mean that the separation is self-reinforcing, akin to the traditional Marxist view of capital accumulation. This conclusion is hinted at, but I don’t think the case is strongly made – nor am I sure it is correct.

Chapman’s Marxian argument is strong when utilising the concept of alienation in the “post-Fordist” service economies to argue that some traits that were typically relatively benign became associated with disablement as a result of this economic shift. What is less clear to me is whether the same could be said the other way round: are there traits we can identify that were disabling under a “Fordist” economy but are now relatively benign? I hear elsewhere, for example, much said about shift to home-working benefiting some autistic workers significantly, especially in the software engineering industries. Their linking of disability to capitalism’s historical growth is clear and well argued, though weaker I felt when looking to the future. For example, it is stated that “capitalist logics both produce and require disablement”; here I am unsure whether “require” is meant in the sense of directly flowing from commodification of labour or in the sense of requiring a disabled “surplus class”. I think the argument for the former appears much stronger. Similarly the term “physician class” is used at several points in the text, and I am not completely sure how physicians would constitute a class per se.

I found the discussion of the rise, and revision, of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) fascinating, especially the arguments for including – and then removing – homosexuality from the manual (it appeared in DSM-I and DSM-II but was eliminated under DSM-III) on the basis that it did not meet the new criterion that “the disturbance is not only in the relationship between the individual and society”. I also did not know that, according to Chapman, some 25% of the UK population has been prescribed psychotropic medication – a statistic I find extraordinary.

Some Thoughts to be Developed

I think that there is plenty that could be said about what I would describe as the scalarisation of value through the one-dimensional lens of price and how this potentially moves to limit and devalue variety, not only in neurotype but across political economy. The point hinted at here, via ideas around the commodification of labour, but perhaps Chapman or others could be convinced to develop it further.

Given my background in school governance, I was struck by the commentary around differences in development in comparison to one’s age group becoming increasingly salient during the Fordist period. There is, I suspect, a lot more to say also about the shift to ‘teaching-to-the-age’ in the education world, rather than ‘teaching-to-the-individual’, a trend that was in England markedly accelerated by the 2014 national curriculum.

I feel like I need to read more about behaviourism. As someone who has studied the behaviour of dynamical systems, there is a difference between the philosophical approach Chapman ascribes to Watson, “science should focus only on what can objectively be observed”, which strikes me as a call to extensionality, and the conclusions claimed to follow (whether the inference is by Watson or by Chapman, I am not clear due to my ignorance of the field), that behaviour can be usefully directly controlled (e.g. via Applied Behaviour Analysis, an approach with a very bad reputation in the autistic community). The first claim can hold without the second having any validity, in the presence of stateful behaviour.

Looking to the Future

In contrast to the history of neurodiversity, the history of the Soviet Union Chapman provides is weak and doesn’t really seem to follow the materialist approach set out in the earlier subject matter in the book. We are told that not being career politicians contributed to the Bolshevik failure. While much space is given to the ‘state capitalist’ nature of the early Soviet state, the almost absolutely discontinuity between that state and the Stalinist bureaucracy is not discussed, rather we are told that Stalin “gave up on shifting beyond state capitalism [and] simply declared that communism had been achieved”. The idea that Stalin inherited the post-revolutionary state whole seems very odd, and I am also pretty sure he never proclaimed that (full) communism had been achieved.

The arguments Chapman makes for liberation I find less convincing than their materialist analysis of the emergence of neurodiversity as a form of disablement. In particular, there appears to me to be a jump from the well argued case that capitalism brings about groups of disadvantaged neurodiverse, to the less well argued case that such groups can form agents of change by organising in those groups – as Chapman puts it, “neurodivergent workers organising as neurodivergents” and to “empower the surplus as surplus”. Despite the materialist approach taken to historical analysis of neurodiversity and disability, this materialism appears somewhat missing from the calls to “turn[…] everyday comportment and behaviour into forms of resistance” or the statement that “we [disabled] have collective cognitive power … that could be harnessed no less than the collective power of the working class”, or that envisioning the future requires “mass consciousness-raising, critique, and collective imagining”.

Overall

Despite my gripes above, I would recommend this book. I learnt a lot of history, and I think it’s great to see this being approached from a materialist perspective. I also get the sense of Chapman, a neurodivergent philosopher, being determined to live their philosophy, and this is definitely to be celebrated in my book.