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Franz Boas is among the most important public intellectuals in American history because the authority of his expertise was joined with the purposes to which he applied his citizenship. His contributions to the discipline of anthropology were as towering as anyone has ever made; he also tapped his scholarly credentials to fight for good causes, such as civil rights and civil liberties. His origins as a Jewish immigrant and his political ideals as a cosmopolitan liberal predisposed him to reject the racialism that dominated late-nineteenth-century thought, and to advance an alternative social science that would be unpolluted by condescension towards lesser breeds. So persuasive was his research that a paradigm shift occurred; and buttressed with the authority of scholarship, Boas was decisive in changing public discourse on the often radioactive subject of race. He honored the ideal of the scholar as activist and as social conscience, and virtually no one in modern American history came closer to satisfying that standard. Keywords Boas, Franz * Brown v. Board of Education * Clark, Kenneth B. * culture * cultural relativism * Herskovits, Melville J. * Hurston, Zora Neale * Lowie, Robert H. * Mead, Margaret * nativism * Nazism * Racism, Franz Boas (1858-1942) is among the supreme public intellectuals in American history because the authority of his expertise was entwined with the purposes to which he applied his citizenship. His [...]

Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift (2011) stand as bookends. Between them rests a generation of college graduates. Together, they chronicle the crisis in higher education. This paper argues: (1) Adrift's employment of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) may serve in part to corroborate Bloom's contention that popularized moral and cultural relativism have devitalized the love of learning. Students stripped in such fashion might be expected to show little increase in the general collegiate skills that the CLA measures and on which basis Adrift critiques higher education. (2) Adrift may be taken to support Bloom's case that the higher-education reform that matters most is restoring a required core curriculum consisting of common courses in the sciences and liberal arts. The paper concludes with some reflections on the limits and possibilities of the reforms pointed to by the two books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current widespread renewed interest in the development of grand military-political strategies is a function of a rapidly changing global configuration of powers. From the bipolarity of the Cold War, which by its very construction limited either the United States or the Soviet Union from constructing much less implementing a unilateral framework, we have moved to a political and economic environment in which a variety of nations in parts of the world that did not figure into the power equations of the past century, invites such analysis. This article draws attention to factors profoundly limiting a grand strategy at the global level. It further indicates that the source of such push for grand strategy derives from inherited doctrines, largely of 19th European origin, which continue to emphasize absolutist doctrines based on theology, history and ideology. They are increasingly dysfunctional formulas in a relativistic universe of political systems and military technologies. The emergence of economic Diaspora in place of 'three worlds of development' also serves to weaken approaches derived from imperial doctrines and political approaches that are no longer the monopoly of conventional armed forces. The essay concludes with the belief that one older element that continues to display cachet is diplomacy and face to face human initiatives. Bargaining rather than blustering may be the order of the age. In this, it is Metternich rather than Hegel that may prove a better source of negotiating a complex multi-national world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The celebrity cult has to be sharply distinguished from hero worship as its precondition is to be well known, no matter for what reason. It has been a product of American culture and is closely associated with modernity, individualism, egalitarianism and a moral, cultural and aesthetic relativism. It is part of popular culture and is also stimulated by the pervasive entertainment orientation of American society. Celebrity worship may provide vicarious gratification to people who seek to escape anonymity and believe that they do not get sufficient amounts of attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern democracies increasingly confuse civic or political equality with a radical relativism that calls into question legitimate principles of hierarchy and the very idea of reasonable value judgments. This confusion reflects a “corruption,” in Montesquieu’s sense, of democracy rooted in a refusal to recognize distinctions that are integral to both human nature and social life. A moderate form of cultural relativism is a genuine intellectual achievement that helps combat ethnocentrism and allows one to better appreciate the full range of human experience. But criteria of meaning and truth are by no means entirely dependent upon cultural context. Our contemporary awareness of the “relativity” of cultures and historical experiences must be complemented by a robust appreciation of the universality of Reason and citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I agree with Roger Sandall’s opposition to the ‘culture cult’ in broad outline, but wish to register three reservations. First, he is too sweeping in apparently attacking the whole of ‘multiculturalism’, and unfair in condemning claims on the basis of the motives allegedly behind them. Second, his relativist interpretation of Berlin and Herder needs qualification, since their work also contains the idea of value pluralism, which should be distinguished from relativism. Third, the political implications of pluralism support a commitment to liberal universalism and liberal multiculturalism, which may not be far removed from Sandall’s own position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karl Popper’s equation of the closed society with tribalism is reviewed and modified. The German origins of the anthropological concept of culture and its related ideas of the folk culture and cultural relativism are explored. The vicissitudes of the idea of The Folk and its swing from Right to Left are related to contemporary neo-primitivism. The open society and high culture are defended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The meanings and implications of cultural relativism have been debated for decades. Reprising this debate, Roger Sandall offers a pointed critique of the anthropological concept of culture and identifies relativism as the internal and corrosive enemy of the open society. I challenge his reading of our predicament. Considering the work of Franz Boas and his debts to the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, I distance the social science concept of culture from positions—the rejection of standards of truth, beauty, and morality; the belief that cultural value systems and practices are all equally true (or untrue); the valorization of primitivism—that are not intrinsic to it. Next, I consider the use of culture in the “philosophy of primitivism” and its meanings in multiculturalism and identity politics. I argue that many ostensibly relativist claims are used to serve non-relativist agendas, or hide universalistic claims in unstated but essential premises and background assumptions. Rather than a world dominated by relativism, where cultural differences are held to be inviolable and cross-cultural judgments have been rendered impossible, I see something like the reverse. Our problem is not that we overvalue cultural differences but that we underestimate them. Even in our multiculturalism, we imagine a sameness of outlook and aspiration, an unwitting projection of ourselves in the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the implications of ethnocentric-based political development on Third World countries. It suggests that the models of development most familiar in the literature are all derived from the Western experience, of a particular time and place, and therefore have but limited relevance to today's Third World nations. The study emphasizes the efforts of various Third World areas to devise indigenous models of development or to blend these with the Western and presumably more universal models. It suggests that Western foreign assistance programs, largely based on the older ethnocentric understandings, have seldom been successful; yet it concludes pessimistically that because Western policymakers lack the comprehension and knowledge base to understand the Third World on its own terms, mistakes of the past are likely to be repeated.

Commentaries on Peter Lawler's article about contemporary Western culture are presented. Lawler's lament about contemporary Western culture identifies numerous symptoms of moral disorientation and illiteracy. The force of cultural relativism and the manner in which it discourages people from making judgments of value about the key issues that confronts people in their everyday life are described. Lawler is particularly concerned with the influence of a promiscuous pro-choice ideology that apparently dominates intellectual and political life. Pro-choice rhetoric can be used to avoid taking responsibility for one's action as it can be to evade the making of moral judgments.

Comments on the article by J. Michael Brittain about the issue of information transfer system for the social sciences. Historical roots of social science; Difficulty in retrieving and disseminating information in the field of social science; Distinction between narrow-gauged relativism and total or extreme cultural relativism.

Presents a response by Robert Weissberg to a letter to the editor about his article "The Abduction of Tolerance," in the November/December 1999 issue.

Presents a letter to the editor in response to the article "The Abduction of Tolerance," by Robert Weissberg in the November/December 1999 issue.

Presents a letter to the editor in response to the article "The Abduction of Tolerance," by Robert Weissberg in the November/December 1999 issue.