The Aggression Debate: Human Nature, Science Popularization, and Politics in Late 20th Century America

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SES 00-02057 - Nadine Weidman (Independent Scholar) - "The Aggression Debate: Human Nature, Science Popularization, and Politics in Late Twentieth-Century America"The project is a historical study of the debate over the origins and nature of human aggression that took place in the 1960s and 1970s between the Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) and the British-born American anthropologist M. F. Ashley Montagu (1905-1999). In a series of widely popular books, Lorenz and his followers argued that aggressiveness in humans was an instinct, an innate and unavoidable tendency, while Montagu maintained in writings also aimed at a lay audience that aggression resulted primarily from environmental stimuli. By examining popular writings, television, radio, and film productions, scientific papers, and the archival record, and by conducting interviews with several of the participants, the principal investigator plans to show how the Lorenz-Montagu aggression debate and the public responses to it affected conceptions of human nature, techniques and goals of scientific popularization, and political liberalism in late twentieth-century America. The analysis will consist of four parts: (1) of the Lorenz--Montagu debate; (2) of its relation to its scientific and intellectual contexts; (3) of the audience response to the debate; (4) of the relation of the debate to the biological determinisms of succeeding decades.