To the European intelligentsia, Mead's social science is faintly ridiculous and the grounds of her fame are fairly unintelligible. Impatient with European observers of the United States, who were too haunted by their feudal past, Mead once wrote that ''it is possible to describe the American system without mentioning class, and to talk instead of the premium on success, and go back directly to the dynamics of character formation which lie back of the American will to succeed.'' In this country the tradition of all past generations does not weigh like Marx's ''nightmare on the brain of the living.'' Here men make their own history just as they please, or at least just the way they are brought up. Nor is there any society that is not fully constructed in the individual, or fully reconstructable by the individual - if we but put purpose in our hearts and the right ways of child care into practice. MEAD'S anthropology is in the classic tradition of American individualism. Just like orthodox economic science, it supposes that the kingdom of social ends resides in each person's own ends.
Society then appears as the institutional sum of personal desires.
Others had been writing for centuries about political institutions or social structures, modes of production or concepts of divinity. But for Mead, the character of the people rather than of their institutions, hence the way children were raised, was the strategic way to understand a society. Such anthropology was essentially structureless as well as unhistorical, an intellectual counterpart to laissez- faire economics and politics since it translated social forms into modes of individual expression. In this connection, during the recent brouhaha about Derek Freeman's book on Margaret Mead and Samoa, few seem to have noticed how vulnerable Mead's anthropology has been to that kind of empirical attack. YET Mead was undeniably a keen observer, which suggests that something more than a tendency to hasty generalization is at issue.