7THE MISMEASURE OF MANdiatribe); the second has prompted me to publish this revised ver-
sion.
Arthur Jensen launched the first of these recent episodes in 1969
with a notoriously fallacious article on the supposed innateness of
group differences in IQ (with emphasis on disparity between whites
and blacks in America). His chilling opening line belied all his later
claims that he had only published as a disinterested scholar, and not
as a man with a social agenda. He began with an explicit attack upon
the federal Head Start program: "Compensatory education has
been tried and it apparently has failed." My colleague Richard
Herrnstein fired a second major salvo in 1971, with an article in the
Atlantic Monthly that became the outline and epitome of The Bell
Curve, published with Charles Murray in 1994, and the immediate
prod for this revised version of The Mismeasure of Man.
As I stated above, articles on this subject by people of notoriety
appear every month in prominent places. In analyzing why Jensen's
piece became such a cause celebre, rather than one more ignored
manifesto within a well-known genre, we must turn to social context.
Since Jensen's article contained no novel argument, we must seek
the newly fertile soil that allowed such an old and ever-present seed
to germinate. As I also stated above, I am no social pundit, and my
view on this issue may be naive. But I well remember these politically
active times of my youth. I recall the growth of opposition to the
Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 (and
the fear inspired by attendant urban riots), the stepping down of
Lyndon Johnson, inside and outside strife at the Chicago Demo-
cratic Party Convention of 1968, and the resulting election of Rich-
ard Nixon as president—with the onset of a conservative reaction
that always engenders renewed attention for the false and old, but
now again useful, arguments of biological determinism. I wrote The
Mismeasure of Man at the apogee of this reaction, starting in the mid-
1970s. The first edition appeared in 1981, and the book has been
vigorously in print ever since.
I had no plans for a revised version. I am not a modest person,
though I do try to keep my arrogance to myself (not always success-
fully, I suppose). But I felt no need for an update because I had
made what I still regard as a wise decision when I first wrote the
book (and surely not because I view this flawed, but proud, child of
mine as unimprovable!). The Mismeasure of Man required no update