Biographical entry for A. Montagu

Abstract

Ashley Montagu was one of those rare men of learning who succeeded in making substantive scholarly contributions to their academic disciplines while at the same time maintaining contact with the educated layman. In addition, he was a dedicated and articulate social critic, concerned with bringing the findings of the social and biological sciences to bear upon the betterment of man's lot, while subjecting some of those very findings to critical social scrutiny. His accomplishments in these three domains, the scientific, the public-educational, and the socioethical, are treated as a unity in this biographical sketch, in accordance with what was clearly the spirit of the program that guided his life's work.