The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940 (review)

Virtually every American over a certain age knows that the Stanford Binet test provides a numerical assessment of something called "intelligence," and most can tell you what their "I.Q." is. Few French men and women have even heard of Alfred Binet, let alone realize that he was the inventor of the test. By the time of his death in 1911, he himself had largely lost interest in applying it. This irony lies at the heart of John Carson's remarkable book.

Carson's project is nothing less than to explain how the world's two oldest democracies came to grips with the problem of social inequality in polities arising from revolutions that abolished "artificial" social hierarchies and proclaimed equality for all. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen laid the groundwork for the solution in 1789: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded upon the general good." The general good required that excellence in all aspects of life be nurtured and that leadership by the most able be allowed to flourish. The idea was that each individual's talents should not be impeded by any barrier other than the limits of his or her own ability. In short, economic success; academic, scientific, and artistic achievement; political and administrative authority; and social position had to arise from a single standard—merit.

Carson's principal task, admirably pursued, is to survey the history of ideas, increasingly classified as "scientific," that underlay the evolution of education's efforts to clear the pathways of merit and provide equality of opportunity (or not) in France and the United States from the eighteenth century to World War II, the point at which he believes each nation's standards were thenceforth set. The central question is, What is "intelligence" and how can it be measured? Carson's main concern—and target—is the American mania for standardized tests, not only of intelligence but of "achievement" as well. France's educational history operates as a foil for his central story, though he does not make the mistake of viewing it as any sort of democratic model. But since the United States and France were sharply divergent in this context, attention to the French way might be a rewarding pursuit for U.S. policymakers.

American philosophy of mind and psychology had, by the twentieth century, embraced a unitary notion of intelligence (without ever really attempting to explain its constitution) as something that could be measured and assigned a number, whereas the French—despite the later nineteenth-century triumph of positivism and Binet's pioneering efforts to codify differences in individual intelligence—continued to view intelligence as a multivalent array of capacities. The dominant thread of American psychology viewed intelligence as largely inborn and inheritable, but the French gave greater weight to the possibility of tapping potential talents among the disadvantaged through proper training and encouragement, as their arguments for affirmative action attested. American opponents of affirmative action called upon sat scores to justify their cause.

Carson shows brilliantly how this outcome was reached, beginning with an overview of Enlightenment philosophy of mind and the dilemma posed by "natural talent" in a new polity based in "natural rights." Race and gender differences were raised immediately, but at that point, the only response to Condorcet's logic of full access to equal opportunity for all was a reversion to essentially theological or "natural" social-role arguments like those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.¹ In both countries, new educational systems arose from their revolutionary experiences. The French version was highly centralized. It stressed the training of a (male) elite through a system of rigorous competitive examinations, theoretically open to all classes. It culminated in state-sponsored grandes écoles reserved for the best students and teachers. Crucially, a student's measure of success came in the...