Introduction

Abstract

“Genius” is a seductive term and slippery too—used often, and frequently abused. Motivational speakers, magazine editors, and the authors of inspirational biographies have certainly grasped its appeal, to say nothing of the hopeful parents of tiny potential Mozarts, Austens, and Einsteins. But though genius’s allure helps to keep it in the public eye, popular fascination has tended to put scholars on guard. The late French philosopher Jacques Derrida acknowledged as much when he dared to broach the subject at a formal gathering among scholars in 2003. “In according the least legitimacy to the word ‘genius,” he confessed, “one is considered to sign one’s resignation from all fields of knowledge … This noun ‘genius,”’ he added, “makes us squirm.”¹ Some academic observers have doubted whether a word so commonly used can possess genuine meaning or intellectual merit. Others have worried about its associations with discredited theories of human superiority and inferiority. Social scientists and psychologists, meanwhile, respond by attempting to pin down the criteria of genius with greater rigor, hoping to detect its presence and understand its spread among populations for the benefit of humanity. As the psychologist Lewis Terman, a key architect of the IQ exam, put it in his landmark Genetic Studies of Genius (1925), “The origins of genius, [and] the natural laws of its development are scientific problems of almost unequaled importance for human welfare.”²