The Reciprocal Relationship between Individuals and Social Structure

In October, 1994, the American Enterprise Institute, with great fanfare and not a little expense held a well-orchestrated conference of social scientists and journalists whom they deemed sympathetic to their decidedly conservative political philosophy, to herald the publication of a new book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1994). All the conferees had been given advance copies of the book, while others-- including book-review editors--found it difficult to obtain a copy until after the first wave of largely favourable reviews had been widely disseminated in the mass media (Clawson 1995). In due time--which is to say, a year or two later--the book was reviewed in many scholarly journals, almost all of these reviews critical of the book's poor scholarship and shoddy methodology. Although it is doubtful that most of the public ever learned of the negative evaluation of the book by social scientists, with the passage of time interest in the book died down.

The Bell Curve embodies a vision of a "meritocratic," albeit increasingly stratified, society in which a largely genetically determined "intelligence" is coming more and more to determine the attainment of occupational and social position. More than that, it argues that low intelligence accounts for many of the society's most distressing social problems. In making these arguments, The Bell Curve reinterprets all manner of complex social phenomena--stratification and mobility; race, class, and ethnicity; social problems; the family; you name it-in a consistently reductionist way.

In fact, it is doubly reductionist, for it not only sees all these social phenomena as psychologically determined, it sees the central psychological variable--intellectual functioning- -as biologically determined. In my appraisal of the book (Kohn 1996), I appraised the underlying assumptions that underlie Herrnstein and Murray's perspective, severely criticizing their methodological and conceptual ...