International Journal of Comparative Psychology

My endorsement on the dust jacket of Lerner's book states, "Professor Lerner tells a story we need to know and presents a perspective we need to consider." As Lewontin makes clear in the foreword: Final Solutions is a book about the extreme horrors that arise when people take seriously the proposition that there are racial and national characters from which we cannot escape. Unlike other books on Nazi race theory, Final Solutions extends ideas of determinism beyond the purely biological into the cultural as well. Cultural determinism—the doctrine that our cultural heritage passed down by a process of unconscious acculturation is inescapable—differs only in a trivial mechanical detail from biological determinism, the doctrine that we cannot escape our genes. Both biological and cultural determinism deny essential freedom to human consciousness.