In this timely, daring and challenging book Goodey traces the history of ideas surrounding intellectual disability. He takes the story, generated by the inherited philosophical and theological baggage of the ancient Greeks, via medieval scholastics, up to John Locke, who emerges as something of a pivotal character in Goodey’s narrative, and the emergence of an Enlightenment concept of man, which was based on ‘excluding a priori from that concept certain “men”’ (p. 346). Thus with ‘the positive establishment of the human mind as a natural and quasi-secular realm of its own came intellectual disability as its generalised negative. [L]ocke’s out-group, conceived out of a particular political conjuncture, has been taken by modern psychology to be a self-evident fact of nature’ (p. 346). It is with this central claim that Goodey concludes his book.

In the intervening 300-odd pages copious evidence is assembled for the main argument, which, in a nutshell, proposes that intelligence is a construct stemming from a subculture of professionals seeking to distance themselves from ordinary people, to establish an out-group in the ethnographic sense, and that, following Karl Popper, the modern human sciences have failed to emerge from their roots in late-medieval scholasticism and methods of social administration. Among the significant propositions, which Goodey leaves to future researchers to put to the test, is that the association between disability and permanence, in medical accounts of ‘idiocy’, only had the vital ingredient of incurability added as late as the end of the nineteenth century. Goodey posits that pre-Lockean thinkers believed that whatever part of one’s physical or cognitive structure failed to operate ‘properly’ in this world was immaterial and inconsequential vis-à-vis the theologically propounded perfection in the next world. Thus, at a level of personhood and identity, the ‘modern disabled person’ in the sense of someone whose physical or cognitive deviations determine ‘personality over a lifetime, is not only absent from medieval thought but inconceivable, moreover morally inconceivable’ (p. 338).

Another message one may take away from the central chapters of this book is that Protestantism apparently contributed to a development that by the twenty-first century had led to intellectual ‘ableism’. Under the old Catholic medieval system, most people were expected to be dutifully guided and to be obedient to their religious as well as secular superiors, so that one’s own initiative and effort in one’s conduct and ultimately one’s salvation were secondary compared to doing as one was told. After the Reformation everything became individualised: you, and only you, are personally responsible for your place on this earth, your conduct and your salvation. Calvinism above all ‘discovered in the catechism a substitute for the Catholic mass as the way of identifying value within the individual, and of enhancing that value with intellectual means’ (p. 178). The rise of Protestantism (in particular Calvinism) has already had the rise of capitalism ascribed to it, famously by Max Weber and subsequently in Richard Tawney’s seminal Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and now we can blame Protestantism for the development and deepening of concepts of intellectual dis/ability, too. Henceforth, the ‘simple’, ignorant or ‘underdeveloped’ could be beaten with yet another stick in the armoury of discriminatory weapons at society’s disposal. Furthermore, a belief in concepts of growth, both at a personal developmental level and an economic one, coupled with the emerging notion of meritocracy taking precedence over right of birth, laid ever greater emphasis in society on the individual and individual responsibility for one’s path in life. To achieve progress, growth and continual self-improvement became the positivist and progressivist dictats that are with us to this day. Extending Goodey’s arguments one is led to believe that in a liberal society like our own, where everyone has the meritocratic right (or duty) to achieve their full potential, the scientific/expert assessment of what the limits of one’s personal potential might be takes on greater meaning than for a pre-modern society, where the vast majority of the population (such as peasants or labourers) were never expected to fulfil any but the most basic personal potentials.

One of the highlights of this book lies in the interesting discussion of the figure known as the changeling (pp. 260–79), the ‘wrong’ or disabled child, believed to have been substituted for the ‘real’ or ideal child. Goodey draws illuminating parallels between the medical and psychological description of modern coping strategy, where parents are informed by the experts that their child is disabled and when those experts expect parents to go through a ritualised hierarchy of reactions, and the pre-modern version of such a ‘desanctification ritual’, in which supernatural agents such as devils, witches or fairies were blamed on causing the ‘wrong’ child.

If there is one major criticism it is that Goodey’s narrative is extremely sparse on chronology, so that few dates are mentioned in association with the authorities cited, especially for medieval writers like Avicenna (c. 980–1037), Averroes (1126–98) or Albert[us Magnus] (c. 1200–80); placing the key players in time would allow the reader to form a more comprehensive overall picture of normative developments as a process. The book is also not helped by the somewhat confusing structure of Goodey’s narrative. For instance, the very important point that Aristotle’s (in)famous statement ‘man is a rational animal’ did not stem from Aristotle himself in this format is spread out over two separate chunks of text (pp. 34 and 284 respectively), with a crucial part of the information – that it was actually transmitted to posterity centuries after Aristotle via a paraphrase by the third-century Neoplatonist Porphyry – only given at the later stage, thereby diminishing the main argument already presented some 250 pages earlier.

Overall this is a phenomenally ambitious, interesting and reflective interdisciplinary history of ideas. It may, after a fashion, make uncomfortable reading for those of a hardcore scientific persuasion, but for the humanist it assembles some convincing evidence for the processes by which changing sets of ideas, or an accident of historical contingencies, have come to shape allegedly incontrovertible universal truths. At the risk of turning a tautological phrase, this is a highly intellectual history of intellectual disability.