ABSTRACT
Occasionally, very occasionally, big books appear in the social sciences that make both scholars and the lay public take notice. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s (1994) The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life was one of those publishing events. The Bell Curve is big both in size (more than 850 pages) and in scope. It draws on diverse social science databases and deals with themes of broad social significance. The book became an immediate best-seller, reaching far beyond the community of behavioral and social science researchers. The authors provoked a counterliterature of criticism, qualification, and confrontation that has advanced the enterprise of social research.
