Introduction

Intelligence stands at the core of modern lives. It marks us out from the rest of nature. This chapter argues that intelligence and intellectual disability, likewise intelligent people and intellectually disabled people, are not natural kinds but historically contingent forms of human self-representation and social reciprocity, of relatively recent historical origin. Even among historians who write about “social constructions” and “inventions,” the content of the analysis rarely matches the aim: for example, Paul Michael Privateer’s Inventing Intelligence presupposes the natural reality of its opposite, “mental disability,” while James Trent’s Inventing the Feeble Mind, despite its title, does not challenge the transhistorical psychological identity of the population it describes. Positivism and social constructionism share a common problem, as we can see from the fact that they often drift across each other’s flight paths.