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The task of the historian in writing about his subjects, says Tacitus, is to do this ‘sine ira et studio’—that is, without hatred and self-centredness. Dr Sengoopta has admirably fulfilled this obligation. He gives us a very interesting study of one of the most peculiar, even bizarre, authors of the turn of the last century—a philosopher who wrote one book, Sex and Character, which proved immensely influential, though pernicious in its effects. The book was begun when Weininger was still only a late adolescent—an immensely gifted and erudite young writer, but of a fiercely ideological bent and full of prejudice, who, though himself of Jewish origin, was so profoundly anti-Semitic that he was liked by the Nazis. He was deeply influenced by, and sympathetic to Freud and Breuer, but was the ostensible cause for the break between Fliess and Freud. He was respected by many early on, yet committed suicide at the age of 23, after having completed his book and converted to Protestantism, by shooting himself in a room he had rented in the house where Beethoven had died.
Dr Sengoopta is lecturer at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Manchester, but began this work at Johns Hopkins University. His book is well written, thoroughly researched, critical and fascinating. It opens up for the present reader an illuminating view of the attitude prevailing at that time in Central Europe and exposed in the pernicious equation of the triple ‘dangers’ of sex, femininity and Judaism: Weininger's book is ‘a mélange of science, bigotry, philosophy, personal anxiety, and cultural politics … a disorganised, fragmented, and cacophonous text’, as Sengoopta describes it (p. 156). And yet, Weininger also ‘was a more