ABSTRACT
Michael Billig’s The Hidden Roots of Critical Psychology is an outstanding exemplar of the last form of contextualisation. He delves in and out of history, sociology and philosophy in order to clarify the origins of both mainstream and critical forms of psychology. Billig’s central point is that both mainstream and critical psychologies have been around for far longer than the last few decades. Billig argues that a very modern understanding of ‘alienation’ runs through Shaftesbury’s work which is remarkably similar to K. Marx’s interpretation of the term. Billig’s work on ‘hot’ and ‘banal’ forms of nationalism is generally well founded and will stand the test of time. Putting further distance between himself and his early inclination towards cognitive psychology, Billig argues ‘against those cognitive theories of thinking, which tend to treat thinking as if it were the silent, internal processing of information’. Since ‘rhetoric’ has garnered a poor reputation over the centuries, Billig is fighting an uphill struggle.
