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A Question of Intelligence, by Daniel Seligman
- Abstract
In the tight and sometimes nervous world of people who write about IQ, this book has been a topic of conversation for a long time. It was originally commissioned as one of the Whittle books, a series of short works popularizing a scholarly topic for wide readership, published with advertising, for which well-known authors (George Gilder, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., et al.) are paid a flat fee. Daniel Seligman, a senior editor at Fortune and author of its popular column, “Keeping Up,” had for twenty years been an avid lay student of the intelligence-testing controversy. The Whittle corporation asked him to write a book on IQ.
Seligman submitted the manuscript in 1990, and it proceeded uneventfully through the editing. Then, as the book reached page proofs, the word came down: thanks, it’s a fine piece of work, you will get your fee—but the book will not be published. Seligman was left free to publish his book elsewhere, which he has now done in a new version that is about twice the length of the original.
About the Author
Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author most recently of In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State (2006). This article has been adapted from a presentation at the annual Herzliya Conference in Israel in January.
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