Not for nothing did the announcement of the publication by Harvard University Press of Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth appear as front-page news in The New York Times. At that time, Mead was one of the best known and most admired public figures in America. Such was Mead’s status as an American idol (in the pre-reality TV sense) that in 1969 she was described in Time magazine as the ‘Mother to the World’. A major media figure for decades, in 1974 Mead became the first woman elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A year after her death in 1978, President Carter posthumously awarded Mead the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Mead established her reputation with fieldwork described in her book Coming of Age in Samoa: A psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation (1928). Mead boldly claimed to have uncovered proof that norms of behaviour are determined by culture and not biology, and that the traditional Samoan society she observed made it much easier for adolescents to come of age than was the case in the United States at that time. Among the Samoa adolescents with whom she interacted in 1928, Mead discerned that the girls especially were permitted to experiment with sex free from guilt and shame, a licence denied most American teenagers. Mead’s findings were embraced within her discipline and were enormously influential in shaping postwar American attitudes towards parenting and education.

Mead’s Samoan research seemed to confirm that it was nurture rather than nature that accounted for human behaviour, and that the central claim of eugenics – that biology is destiny, a theory that was influential in the 1920s and informed fascist political ideology – was demonstrably false. Mead’s alternative vision, realised in her description of a remote Polynesian community of a few hundred people, held out the prospect to countless progressive American parents, educators, and lawmakers that human beings were perfectible.

According to Freeman, however, Margaret Mead’s utopian recreation of an idyllic society in the Pacific Islands was misleading. Anthropologists make much of ‘context’, and Freeman charged that Mead had succumbed to observer bias that distorted her appreciation of the true complexity of Samoan society, and led her to ignore or discount darker aspects of Samoan life, including the prevalence of male aggression and patriarchal control. In a subsequent book, published a few years before his death in 2001 at the age of eighty-four, Freeman further alleged that Mead had been hoaxed by two of her Samoan teenage informants, who he claimed had confessed that they simply told her what they thought she wanted to hear about their imaginary sex lives.

Whether the reader is aligned with Mead or Freeman, or has no commitment to either side, Truth’s Fool is a fine intellectual biography of Freeman that explores the subject’s lifelong struggle to fully understand human nature in parallel with an inner struggle to come to terms with his own drives, shortcomings, manias, and contradictions.

Apart from anything else, the book is a fascinating account of academic politics and the currents of twentieth-century intellectual history. The Mead–Freeman fracas erupted at a time when many on the American intellectual left felt besieged following the heady decades of the 1960s and 1970s. ‘The fragility of liberal cultural politics in the Reagan years of the 1980s and a whiff of American exceptionalism heightened the outrage against Freeman,’ writes Peter Hempenstall. In the backlash that followed his refutation of Mead’s Samoan research, Freeman was accused of misogyny and racism, and there were even some detractors who questioned his sanity. (Hempenstall reveals that Freeman was once diagnosed with bipolar disorder, though the diagnosis was never made public.)

Truth’s Fool is a portrait of a compulsive contrarian. Hempenstall, a historian who has written more than one biography about people of principle who stood apart from the intellectual or political orthodoxy of their time, is empathetic towards Freeman but also prepared to acknowledge that all idols, including iconoclasts, have feet of clay. The biography was supported by Freeman’s family, though direct access to his private diaries was denied.

The Derek Freeman that emerges from the pages of Truth’s Fool is a thinker more adept at critique than exposition. As suggested by the title Truth’s Fool, Freeman was inclined to cast himself as a kind of medieval court jester given licence to speak truth to power. At other times Freeman characterised himself as a heretic, a self-image which was reinforced by David Williamson in his 1996 play Heretic inspired by Freeman’s work. In the same year, Freeman was praised by the prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins as ‘one of the great scientific heroes of our age’.

Although Freeman is remembered, for better or worse, as the debunker of Margaret Mead, he nursed a much grander intellectual ambition. Freeman’s plan was to establish a unified theory of human behaviour that combined nurture with nature, and thus offer a new paradigm beyond the two opposing doctrines.

In debate, Freeman was formidable, yet away from professional disputation he became distracted by prospect of endless interesting new avenues of research. Too often, in the judgement of Hempenstall, Freeman spent time reading and ruminating when he should have been writing and publishing. Hempenstall laments the time Freeman frittered away in his later years that could have been spent completing his magnum opus.

In addition to being a research junkie and chronic procrastinator, Freeman was unable to bear not having the last word: ‘Freeman’s absolutist principle of replying to every written criticism was not a recipe for normal life and relationships, even within a scholarly community.’

None of us, and certainly no one in academia, ever quite gets to have the last word on any topic. Freeman copied into his notebook a quotation attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.’

True enough, with the example of Derek Freeman suggesting that it is wise to leave the table rather than pick over every last morsel.