Justin's Archive
Topics
This collection assembles primary documents, organizational records, and scholarly analyses bearing on a set of coordinated efforts, launched during and immediately after the Second World War, to alter the attitudes and beliefs of large populations through institutional means. The materials fall into three overlapping clusters. The first concerns the American Jewish Committee's Department of Scientific Research, established in 1944 under Max Horkheimer and continued under Samuel Flowerman, whose Studies in Prejudice series culminated in the publication of *The Authoritarian Personality* in 1950.
The modern claim that race is a social rather than biological category did not emerge spontaneously from laboratory findings; it was in significant part manufactured by an international organization. Poul Duedahl's archival study documents how UNESCO, from 1945 onward, placed the redefinition of race at the center of its "mental engineering" program, with the explicit aim of dismantling doctrines of racial inequality in the wake of the Holocaust. Julian Huxley, UNESCO's first Director-General, deliberately privileged the social sciences over the natural sciences on the grounds that social scientists "mastered the arguments" needed to combat inequality.