The Adam Smith Institute on Race

My book, Neoliberalism and Race, contains a chapter on the race and IQ controversy that traces the enduring interest many neoliberal intellectuals had in psychometrics.

While researching this chapter, I came across a book published in 1983, authored by the two co-directors of the Adam Smith Institute, Madsen Pirie and Eamonn Butler. Titled Test Your IQ, the book mainly consists of four tests to help readers discover their IQ score.

However, the book also contains a 30-page discussion of what IQ is, how it works, and why it matters. Here, Pirie and Butler discuss a range of controversial topics, including the heritability of IQ and its relation to racial differences.

I decided to dig a little deeper and discovered that around this time, both Pirie and Butler held pretty extreme views on race, intelligence, and xenophobia. In this post I briefly outline my discoveries, which ended up on the cutting room floor for the final draft of the book.

 The IQ controversy

Pirie and Butler’s 1983 book Test Your IQ was the first in a three-part series. It was followed, in 1990, by Boost Your IQ and, in 1995, by The Sherlock Holmes IQ Book. Also in 1995, their publisher released IQ Puzzlers, which combined all three texts into a single volume.

Each of the first two books, Test and Boost, was prefaced by a theoretical meditation on the nature and importance of IQ. In both books, Pirie and Butler firmly sided with the hereditarian explanation of IQ differences, associated with the highly controversial work of figures like Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen (both of whom they cited) and, a decade later, with The Bell Curve. Hereditarianism posits that IQ is largely (though not wholly) determined by genes, and typically involves the follow-up argument that racial heritage directly impacts cognitive ability.

Pirie and Butler fully embraced this position. In Test, they claimed that genetics accounts for roughly 80% of an individual’s IQ (a high estimate even for the most ardent hereditarians). In Boost, they came to much the same conclusion—though they phrased it more cautiously, saying that ‘heredity is about twice as important as environment in shaping IQ scores.’

They also waded into the controversy over race and IQ. Again echoing Eysenck and Jensen, both of whom figured prominently in the book’s ‘further reading’ section, Test claimed that average IQ differences between groups were to a significant degree racial. After asserting that regional IQ variation in a country like Britain is likely due to a mix of factors, both racial and non-racial, Pirie and Butler asserted: ‘But the scores of the American Negro or Mexican American seem to be predominantly racial. Jews score higher than the average Caucasian; Orientals are similarly more intelligent than the white man, so the differences are not all one sided.’

Following this discussion of race, Pirie and Butler excitedly announced that, in the near future, ‘we might be able to obtain an accurate assessment of a person’s IQ by examining some of his physical characteristics.’ They had in mind a kind of test that could establish a direct relationship between intelligence and ‘brain size or simple reaction times’. In other words: phrenology revisited.

Although they presented these claims as simple facts rooted in robust science, in truth these were highly controversial ideas defended only by a small contingent of deeply partisan writers, most of whom had (by now well-documented) links to the eugenics movement.

Notably, these claims did not come out of nowhere. Both Pirie and Butler had previously written on questions of race. Their views are worth probing further.

Pirie on race and IQ

Pirie and Butler knew each other from having studied together as PhD students at the University of St Andrews in the 1970s. Pirie completed his PhD in 1973, Butler in 1978. Both did doctorates in philosophy.

Pirie’s doctoral thesis was titled Trial and Error and the Idea of Progress. It was awarded in 1973. Pirie published his thesis, largely unrevised, in 1978 with Open Court. In 2015, Pirie republished the book in open-access format, this time under the Adam Smith Institute’s in-house imprint.

Though chiefly a philosophical meditation on the nature of progress, Trial and Error contained a notable passage on the topic of race and IQ. In a section discussing the principles of scientific generalisation, Pirie took racial variation in intelligence as an example. He argued:

This passage contained two references, one to Jensen’s work and one to Eysenck’s.

Not long after he completed his PhD, Pirie was invited by Victor Serebiakoff to join Mensa, an international organisation for high-IQ individuals that has always had links to the eugenics movement. Serebriakoff, then Mensa’s Director, expressly defended eugenics, writing in a 1965 book that ‘Hitler’s worst disservice to man, among all his crimes, is that of discrediting eugenics by being associated with it.’ Pirie served as Mensa’s secretary for 13 years.

Pirie, in his turn, invited Serebriakoff to be on the editorial board of the Adam Smith Foundation, a position he occupied for the remainder of his life. In the final years of his life, Serebriakoff joined the Galton Institute, previously known as the Eugenics Society.

Butler on xenophobia and segregation

Butler’s doctoral thesis was awarded in 1978 and was titled The Ethological Roots of Morality. To my knowledge, it was never published in book form.

An exploration of the implications for normative theory of ethology, the study of animal behaviour, Butler’s thesis was in no small part a speculative essay on the limits imposed on culture by human biology.

In one section of the thesis, Butler discussed the occurrence of what he called ‘xenophobia,’ or aversion to other species or groups, in the animal kingdom and among humans. He argued that xenophobia often serves a clear biological purpose, ‘namely to prevent mating of different species or varieties whose offspring would be infertile or inadequately adjusted to the environment’ (p. 67). Butler then went on to suggest that among many species of animals, crossbreeding between genetically distinct groups often produces ‘maladaptive’ behaviour (p. 68). Then, quoting the work of eugenicist Theosodius Dobzhansky, Butler asserted that this principle also applies to the human species. Wrote Butler:

Xenophobia, in other words, has evolutionary advantages.

(It bears noting that this argument was in vogue among racialists at the time. As I describe in my book, in 1961, A. James Gregor, then a race theorist who helped establish the Mankind Quarterly, made the same argument in a paper published in the Eugenics Review.)

Butler returned to this theme later in the thesis. Drawing on the work of white supremacist and eugenicist Garret Hardin, he argued that ‘tribalism’ is an enduring trait of human behaviour that stems from pre-historical conditions, in which hostility to outsiders was necessary for survival. For Butler, tribalism is a two-edged sword. Strife between different groups, especially if they are racially distinct, can lead to social unrest or even violence. Yet tribalism also improves in-group cohesion and, by preventing inter-group reproduction, ‘preserves the concentration of genetically-determined or culturally-determined practices in the group, avoiding an influx of possibly disruptive individuals’ (p. 144).

The normative problem this raises is what, in modern societies, can be done to minimise the negative effects of our naturally occurring xenophobic tendencies. Butler mused:

Advocating the physical separation and selection of groups on the basis of racial traits, his was a de facto argument for racial segregation.

The Adam Smith Institute and race

Modelled more on the Heritage Foundation (where Pirie worked for a brief spell) than, say, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the ASI has always prioritised immediate policy influence over intellectual work. As such, it is not a good place to look for the twists and turns of neoliberal ideology.

In my view, the significance of the above findings lies less in the realm of theory than in confirming, if confirmation were needed, that links between the neoliberal intellectual movement and the world of race theory, eugenics, and pseudoscience have always been pronounced. That two men so immersed in eugenic theory would have gone on to establish a free-market think tank is revealing of the organic attraction those two intellectual traditions exerted on one another.