Talents, intelligence, and the constructions of human difference in France and America, 1750-192

This dissertation seeks to answer a deceptively simple question: why have judgments of individual intelligence become matters of consequence, especially within American culture? The dissertation analyzes, through a comparison of developments in France and the United States, both the changing meaning of and status accorded to intelligence, paying particular attention to its various scientific formulations. A comparative approach is employed to demonstrate that even such a seemingly fundamental characteristic as the nature of intelligence gained its definition and significance largely from the cultural needs that it was deemed able to fulfill.;The dissertation is organized around two narrative threads. The first examines how Americans came to understand by intelligence a singular, innate, inheritable mental entity that different individuals possess to different degrees. It contrasts the language of talents and faculties pervasive at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the discourse of intelligence that emerged early in the twentieth century, and analyzes the ways in which the new sciences of psychology and anthropology contributed to this transformation.;The second story investigates how the unidimensional conception of individual intelligence became dominant in America while achieving a more modest influence in France. It identifies the articulation within political theory of a new basis for governmental authority--meritocratic democracy--in the 1750s to 1790s as the critical moment when notions of human nature became linked to languages of political justification, and then describes how that connection evolved through the very different political histories of the United States and France. Especially in the United States, this story argues, intelligence became by the early twentieth century virtually a necessary component of the definition of merit, able to unify the democratic and the meritocratic, the demands for social stability and the calls for equality of opportunity.;The dissertation thus examines how a particular conception of the nature of human beings, intelligence, was created, legitimated, and disseminated through the interplay of science, technology, and culture, and how individual experiences both shaped and were shaped by the construction of this new box to house them.