The Bell Curve: A Symposium

The biggest intellectual-literary brouhaha in many years was triggered in October by the long-awaited publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Free Press). Its authors, Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein (who died of lung cancer in September) and American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray, had risked their substantial reputations by trespassing on the central taboos of modern liberalism: the relationships between intelligence and success. heredity, and race.

The Bell Curve is a long, complex, closely argued, immensely detailed book. It is inconceivable that all its loudest critics could have read it with care—indeed, it is often painfully apparent they have not. But the participants in this symposium have read the book attentively, and we believe their contributions to the debate will last.

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The biggest intellectual-literary brouhaha in many years was triggered in October by the long-awaited publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Free Press). Its authors, Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein (who died of lung cancer in September) and American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray, had risked their substantial reputations by trespassing on the central taboos of modern liberalism: the relationships between intelligence and success. heredity, and race.

The Bell Curve is a long, complex, closely argued, immensely detailed book. It is inconceivable that all its loudest critics could have read it with care—indeed, it is often painfully apparent they have not. But the participants in this symposium have read the book attentively, and we believe their contributions to the debate will last.