Dealing with Differences

The Measure of Merit. Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750-1940. By John Carson. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2007. 421 pp. $39.50, £26.95. ISBN 9780691017150. Carson explores how two modern democracies have wrestled with the clash between their commitments to equality and scientific claims about disparities in human intelligence and talent.