In 1949, Clyde Kluckhohn published Mirror for Man: The Relation of Anthropology to Modern Life. His book, which won a $10,000 prize offered by McGraw-Hill for the best popular book on science, was a “manifesto” of “the New Anthropology.” Popularized by Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, the New Anthropology was, in the words of a critic, “anthropology with a message” – the message that anthropologists now commanded “the knowledge needed to reform the world.”

Anthropology, Kluckhohn announced, was “no longer just the science of the long-ago and far-away,” it was “an aid to useful action.” Thanks to the “all-embracing” or holistic character of their discipline, anthropologists occupied “a strategic position” to determine which “factors” would “create a world community of distinct cultures and hold it together against disruption.” Only those experts who were “singularly emancipated from the sway of the locally accepted” could surmount the apparently “unbridgeable gap” between “competing ways of life” by laying bare “the principles that undergird each culture.” On the heels of the publication of Mirror for Man, Kluckhohn appeared on the cover of the Saturday Review of Literature, proclaiming that anthropologists now possessed “the beginnings of a science whose principles are applicable to any human situation.”

As a prophet of the New Anthropology, Kluckhohn captured anthropologists' postwar exuberance and heady optimism, born of their wartime mobilization on behalf of an embattled democracy, that they would play prominent parts in rebuilding a shattered world.