The Boasian School of Anthropology and the …

2 The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences If .. we were to treat Margaret Mead s Coming of Age in Samoa as uto-pia, not as ethnography, then we would understand it better and save a lot of pointless debate. (Robin Fox 1989, 3) Several writers have commented on the radical changes that occurred in the goals and methods of the social sciences consequent to the entry of Jews to these fields (Liebman 1973, 213; see also Degler 1991; Hollinger 1996; Horowitz 1993, 75; Rothman & Lichter 1982). Degler (1991, 188ff) notes that the shift away from Darwinism as the fundamental paradigm of the social sciences resulted from an ideological shift rather than from the emergence of any new empirical data. He also notes that Jewish intellectuals have been instrumental in the decline of Darwinism and other biological perspectives in American social science since the 1930s (p.)

The Boasian School and Decline of Darwinism 23 trying to preserve their difference. . . . [H]is writings would soon feed the suspicion among the new left . . . that all the universal ideas to which Europe claimed alle-

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