From pre-normal to abnormal: the emergence of a concept in late eighteenth-century France

Abstract

This article explores the concept of ‘normal’ in the late-eighteenth century. It focuses on how these pre-normal meanings illuminate contemporaneous depictions of the role and importance of sexuality. The current sense of the term ‘normal’ enters the dictionaries relatively late in the period, having been a synonymous but less common alternative for ‘perpendicular’ in geometry. Indeed, ‘normal’ is so unfamiliar a word that the important late-nineteenth-century dictionary/encyclopaedia, the Grand Larousse du dix-neuvième siècle (1866–1877), draws attention to its novelty, explaining that it is initially hard to understand. So this article partly aims to deepen our understanding of the emergence of the term, and thus to fill in the context of Canguilhem's seminal work on The normal and the pathological (1989). It investigates the proliferation of terms that indicate a deviation from the norm, many of which (such as ‘enormous’)predate the idea of the ‘normal’ by many centuries. French and English sources such as Johnson, Comte and Fourier are drawn on to chart the progress and associations of the terms and in particular to investigate the proliferation of meanings immediately before its emergence in the ‘pre-normal’ materialist thinkers Diderot and Lamarck.

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