The Culture of Critique

The Culture of Critique is the third and best-known volume of a trilogy of books by the American evolutionary psychologist Kevin B. MacDonald, published in 1998. The three volumes are A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and Its Discontents (1998) and The Culture of Critique itself. MacDonald, a retired professor at California State University, Long Beach, has been condemned by the academic community and by anti-racism organizations for promoting antisemitic theses, despite presenting his work as scientific research.

In this work, MacDonald argues that Judaism functions as a "group evolutionary strategy": a set of cultural practices that, in his view, favored endogamy, internal solidarity and certain intellectual traits in Jewish communities. From this premise he examines the involvement of Jews in twentieth-century intellectual and political movements, among them Franz Boas's anthropology, political radicalism, neoconservatism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School and the so-called New York Intellectuals. He contends that many of their leaders retained a strong Jewish identity and that their activities, in his opinion, advanced perceived ethnic interests. MacDonald explicitly rejects the existence of a unified conspiracy along the lines of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, although his arguments rest on a selective reading of sources.

The reception has been almost uniformly negative. Critics such as David Lieberman, John Tooby, founder of the field of evolutionary psychology, and Sander Gilman pointed to distortions of evidence, selective sourcing and a conception of natural selection now widely discredited. The Anti-Defamation League included MacDonald in its report on extremism in the United States, and the Southern Poverty Law Center described his work as antisemitism dressed in scholarly form. Even so, the trilogy circulated among far-right groups and continues to be cited in debates about contemporary antisemitism.