Reviews

“In this cogently argued work Richard Lerner scrutinizes deterministic views of human nature and documents the pernicious uses to which they have too often been put. He also presents the scientific rationale for a more flexible view of human potential.”—Howard Gardner,Harvard University

“Professor Lerner tells a story we need to know and presents a perspective we need to consider.”—Jerry Hirsch,University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Final Solutions is a book about the extreme horrors that arise when people take seriously the proposition that there are racial and national characters from which we cannot escape. Unlike other books on Nazi race theory, Final Solutions extends ideas of determinism beyond the purely biological into the cultural as well. Cultural determinism—the doctrine that our cultural heritage passed down by a process of unconscious acculturation is inescapable—differs only in a trivial mechanical detail from biological determinism, the doctrine that we cannot escape our genes. Both biological and cultural determinism deny essential freedom to human consciousness.”—R.C. Lewontin,from the Foreword