Richard Herrnstein Writing Styles in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

Richard Herrnstein
This Study Guide consists of approximately 23 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Bell Curve.

Richard Herrnstein Writing Styles in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

Richard Herrnstein
This Study Guide consists of approximately 23 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Bell Curve.
This section contains 835 words
(approx. 3 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life Study Guide

Perspective

The perspective of the Bell Curve is - notoriously for some, and heroically for others - unabashedly conservative/libertarian. The authors affirm the values of individual responsibility, merit-based social institutions, bourgeois virtues, unbroken homes, limited government and free markets. They also emphasize innate biological features of human nature and recommend that society accept natural inequalities between the abilities of individuals rather than attempt to deny or repress them.

One of the reasons the reaction to The Bell Curve was so vehement was in part because it was perceived to be a right-wing response to social problems. And in some ways, it is. By emphasizing the partial heritability of IQ and then attempting to show that low IQ explains much of the variance in crime, poverty, abuse, undereducation, etc. between individuals and even races, the authors tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) deny a large role for government in altering social...

(read more)

This section contains 835 words
(approx. 3 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life Study Guide
Copyrights
BookRags
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life from BookRags. (c)2024 BookRags, Inc. All rights reserved.