Genealogies of Genius

Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University, USA. She is the author of The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius and co-author of The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus.Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History at Dartmouth College, USA. He is the author of Divine Fury: A History of Genius; Happiness: A History, and the co-editor of Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History.

REVIEWER: Jerrold Seigel, Kenan Professor of History Emeritus, NYU This book proposal is both promising and troubling. The promise lies first in the impressive list of contributors the editors have assembled and in the excellent chapter contributed by Darrin McMahon (whose general book on the subject has now appeared, and of which the editors will have to take account in writing an introduction). What I find troubling about the project is the editors odd and off-target injunction to contributors to consider the history of thinking about genius in connection with 'ideas about human inequality...including racism, gender, feminism, radical politics...' These days it is highly likely that such perspectives will be brought to bear on discussions of genius as of many other things, since they have come to be so prominent in humanistic scholarship. But the fact that they are so much on people's minds is not a good reason to presume that they are everywhere relevant, or that discussions of every topic will benefit from being structured in order to highlight them. Genius is about a certain kind of difference to be sure, but one that lies between individuals, whereas the forms of difference to which the editors urge attention lie chiefly between groups. That the failure to recognize this distinction can have unfortunate consequences is shown by the two essays sent with the prospectus. McMahon's essay makes no reference to such things and I am tempted to say that one of the reasons it succeeds so well is precisely that it does not. By contrast Joyce Chapin's essay falls into swamps of confusion because it insists on making this preoccupation central to what she is writing about. Chapin's failure to recognize the crucial distinction between individual and group differences rears its head up on p 3 when she asks how anyone who 'disapproved of slavery because it used racist criteria to reduce human beings to a state of dependence' can 'applaud instances of genius, which similarly supposed that unequal abilities might be implanted in humans from their birth.' The notion that these two things are contradictory is a wholly illogical one, there is nothing that requires anti-racists to deny that some individuals are more intellectually endowed than others. To be sure recognizing the existence of genius among a 'race' said to be inferior causes trouble for those who believe in generalized group inferiority, but that is an obvious point and wholly separate from the false dilemma Chapin sets up, and on the basis of which she reads her evidence. It is also true to be sure that people susceptible to confusions about the meaning of 'all men are created equal' (such as Jefferson) might find themselves in a muddle faced with talented black people, but that too is a different issue and a sign that recognizing black talent creates problems for racist thinking, not that the idea of genius creates a difficulty for those who believe (or purport to believe) in equality. I don't think it my responsibility too point to all the places in the essay where these confusions cloud up its readings, but some of them have to do with her treatment of the ambiguities in the term, which as she recognizes still meant (and still means) more than one thing. I cannot really tell whether her reading of Long's comment on Williams on p 14 makes sense or not because she doesn't decipher the things in his quoted statement that remain unclear without more exposition. But overall, this essay suggests what kinds of dangers lie in the injunction the editors address to contributors in the prospectus. This is about all I can say about the project on the basis of the parts of it sent to me. It is possible that only a minority of the essays will be infected by this problem in the way Chapin's is, but I fear that the editors will be too wedded to their trendy notion of what all scholarship must be about to recognize the confusions it encourages, or to try to purge them from the texts of the individual pieces. If they don't, I think you will end up with a book that may well appeal to a certain part of the academy today, but that will be marked by a certain amount of confusing and illogical analysis and argument. That would be too bad since I expect that some of the other listed contributors will provide essays that compare in quality with McMahon's.

• 1. Introduction; Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon2. The Problem of Genius in the Age of Slavery; Joyce E. Chaplin3. Genius vs Democracy: Excellence and Singularity in Post-Revolution France; Nathalie Heinich4. Equality, Inequality, and Difference: Genius as Problem and Possibility in American Political/Scientific Discourse; John S. Carson 5. Genius and Obsession: Do You Have to Be Mad to Be Smart?; Lennard Davis6. Inspiration to Perspiration: Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius in Victorian Context; Janet Browne7. 'Genius must do the scullery work of the world': New Women, Feminists and Genius, circa 1880-1920; Lucy Delap8. The Cult of the Genius in Germany and Austria at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century; Julia Barbara Köhne9. Cultivating Genius in a Bolshevik Country; Irina Sirotkina10. Insight in the Age of Automation; David Bates11. Genius and Evil; Darrin M. McMahon