Pii: S1369-8486(99)00016-3

In 1870, a thirty-one-year-old professeur at a French provincial lycée published a work whose goal was no less than to foment a revolution within the tradition of French psychological investigation. La psychologie anglaise contemporaine (1870), by normalien Théodule Ribot, might seem an unlikely title for a piece of intellectual bomb throwing. Under the guise of surveying developments within England, however, this extremely ambitious academic-on-the-make sought to challenge contemporary French psychological practice and to usher in a wholesale revamping of the discipline. At the heart of his manifesto lay the claim that traditional French mental philosophy, or