Recovering a French Tradition: Ignace Meyerson in focus

Abstract

The paper is written on the occasion of a new French monograph by Noemi Pizarosso on Ignace Meyerson. This French mid 20th century intellectual has been one of the representatives of the early French non-individualistic social psychologies. Meyerson claimed that the mind undergoes radical changes during historical times. Relative to the other early historical psychologies, Meyerson was more radical and more relativistic in the historical sense. One great merit of the book of Pizarosso is to show that Meyerson and his followers attempted to prove this historical relativity thesis in analyzing changes in the concept of person, and changes in styles of art.