The significance and complexity of equality during the revolutionary era is commonly recognized, yet the underpinnings of this concept are often overlooked. John Carson's The Measure of Merit, therefore, makes a valuable contribution to understanding the role of merit and its impact on democracy, the organization of schooling, social stratification, and so forth. Even today, as Carson notes in his introduction, affirmative action cases illustrate die precarious relation that our beliefs about equality hold with concepts of merit. With this in mind, he examines France and the United States from 1750 to 1940, exploring how intelligence was linked to earlier notions of merit and social equality, achieved scientific status, subverted the longstanding questions central to the philosophy of mind, and became an integral part of contemporary society. This book is not simply a history of intelligence or merit but rather an ambitious examination that helps to unravel the matrix ofbeliefs intertwined in the science, theory, and social impUcations of merit as it infused modern democracies, as well as beliefs about race, class, and gender. Using an impressive range of sources, including philosophic and scientific texts, newspaper articles, and asylum reports, this intellectual history examines the influence of key figures as well as disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, and biology. In his own words, Carson argues that, "The Measure of Merit tells the story of how the American and French republics turned to the sciences of human nature to help make sense of the meaning of human inequality" (p. 1). In addition, a more complex theme runs throughout the book, captured in Carson's suggestion that, "Examining and understanding the public discourses that have framed concepts such as talents, merit, and intelligence, ... helps to unearth a culture's presuppositions, the boundaries within which individuals operate while persuading one another, or themselves, to act on or think about the word in particular ways" (pp. xni-xiv). The book is organized chronologically but also has a thematic structure, dividing six chapters and an epilog into three sections. Chapters switch back and forth, comparing and contrasting France and the United States Part one, Mental Abilities and Republican Cultures, centers on the ideology of merit and the formation of modern democracies. This section, which explicates dynamics of early Republican culture and the philosophical underpinnings of mental ability from figures such as Locke and Rousseau, as well as the social implications seen in the debates of individuals such as Mary Wollstonecraft, DuBois, Jefferson, and others. This does not lend