Human Nature and the Social Order

Publication of this abridgement returns to intellectual commerce a major statement by one of the founders of exact social research. An early attempt to effect an integration of the social sciences, the massive original of 1940 exceeded the attention span of many readers, and it is hoped that this more readable edition will spark a renewal of the debate over its ideas. These excerpts from the editor's introduction underline some of the main ideas:

"In Thorndike's own belief, individual salvation and public welfare lay most securely in the recourse to facts, a more trustworthy base than is character-building, given Thorndike's essentially pessimistic views of human nature in the abstract."

Most social thinkers "could not accept Thorndike's hereditarian conclusions. Their own professionalism, however, caused them to agree with the position that he accorded to trained leadership, to expert judgment—another of the key ideas of Human Nature and the Social Order..."

"Good genes, plus the scientific habits of the mind learned and powers trained, he believed to be the superior predictors of those who would function best as the impartial, objective benefactors of mankind—if only the men in power would share their monopoly on leadership, or at least consult seriously with them.... With the student radicals' demand that the professors do morethan describe and investigate society—that they engage their knowledge in efforts to improve society—E. L. Thorndike would agree."

The guiding principle in abridging Human Nature and the Social Order(a work which in the original numbered over one thousand pages) was that the repetitive exposition and excessive illustration be eliminated without depriving the reader of that opportunity to understand the workings and qualities of Thorndike's mind and the revealing aspects of his personality that obtained in the original volume. Many long quotations were removed altogether and the rest was drastically shortened; but so that the reader might be informed of all the authors and works originally quoted or referred to by Thorndike, the Bibliography has been left unaltered.