From the Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic  for Time magazine comes the  tremendously controversial, yet highly persuasive,  argument that our devotion to the largely  unexamined myth of egalitarianism lies at the heart of the  ongoing "dumbing of America."

Americans have always stubbornly clung to the  myth of egalitarianism, of the supremacy of the  individual average man. But here, at long last,  Pulitzer Prize-winning critic William A. Henry III  takes on, and debunks, some basic, fundamentally  ingrained ideas: that everyone is pretty much alike  (and should be); that self-fulfillment is more  imortant thant objective achievement; that everyone  has something significant to contribute; that all  cultures offer something equally worthwhile; that  a truly just society would automatically produce  equal success results across lines of race,  class, and gender; and that the common man is almost  always right. Henry makes clear, in a book full of  vivid examples and unflinching opinions, that  while these notions are seductively democratic they  are also hopelessly wrong.

• philosophy