Published in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 53(2), 2017, 211-214, doi:10.1002/jhbs.21843. PLEASE QUOTE FROM AND REFER ONLY TO THE PUBLISHED VERSION. Fernando Vidal 1 Review of: Stephen Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 402 pp. $50.00 (cloth). ISBN: 9780198757634. The “core concern” of Stephen Gaukroger's The Natural and the Human (henceforth NH) is “the naturalization of the human” (10). Naturalization is here defined as “an attempt to draw on the successes of empirical disciplines by posing in empirical terms questions that had not been posed in this way before” (68). Yet it “was not a single programme” (119); rather, it took place through a variety of procedures and depended “on what one identifie[d] as the naturalizing resources and what one identifie[d] as the appropriate sources of evidence” (305). NH first explores the “dichotomies of understanding,” the tensions between rationalism and empiricism, reason, and sensibility (chap. 1), then how in the eighteenth century matter ceased to be considered inert to be endowed with vital powers (chap. 2). It then examines several “naturalizing projects” (10), considered under the general headings of anthropological medicine, philosophical anthropology, the natural history of man, and social arithmetic (chaps. 3–6), to which is added the historicization of religion (chap. 7). The 350-page book closes with a one-page conclusion. Gaukroger's core concern and view of naturalization derive from the much larger question “of how the values of a scientific culture came to predominate in the West, something that was part of a transformation of Western culture that began in the thirteenth century” (v). NH embodies one aspect and moment of that broader story. It is the third of five planned volumes on “the discovery and consolidation of a scientific culture in the West in the modern era” (Gaukroger, 2013a) or, as reads the subtitle of each of the books, on “science and the shaping of modernity.” Although the discovery and consolidation narrative takes quite a few turns and parallel roads, it is essentially continuous and its terminus ad quem is today's West. Gaukroger's project is thus to be seen, and praised, as a determined and coherent attempt at making longue durée history relevant for today and for the future. 1 ICREA Research Professor (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) and CEHIC (Center for the History of Science, Autonomous University of Barcelona), fernando.vidal@icrea.cat.