Who they are
Steve Silberman (1957–2023) was an American journalist and author whose book NeuroTribes (2015) did more than any other single work to bring the concept of neurodiversity to a mainstream, non-specialist audience. He was a long-form journalist at Wired before turning to autism history and advocacy. He died in August 2023.
Silberman was not autistic. His contribution was as a historian and storyteller who placed autism within the history of science, psychiatry, and human rights, making the case for neurodiversity accessible to people who would never read a philosophy paper or a clinical journal.
Key contributions
NeuroTribes and the history of autism
NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (2015, Penguin/Avery) is a comprehensive history of autism — from Kanner and Asperger through institutionalisation, parent activism, the neurodiversity movement, and the present. Its core narrative is that autism is not a modern epidemic but a longstanding form of human cognitive variation that has been alternatively pathologised, ignored, instrumentalised, and (eventually) recognised.
The book won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction (2015) and is widely credited with shifting public discourse from “what causes autism and how do we cure it?” to “autistic people have always existed — how do we build a society that includes them?”
Asperger’s Nazi-era complicity
One of the most significant historical claims in NeuroTribes is Silberman’s recovery of the extent of Hans Asperger’s involvement with the Nazi regime, including his role in referring children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic where they were killed. This history had been largely sanitised in English-language accounts. While subsequent historians (notably Edith Sheffer in Asperger’s Children, 2018) have deepened and complicated the picture, Silberman brought it to wide attention and contributed to the decision to retire “Asperger syndrome” as a diagnostic term.
Popularising neurodiversity
Silberman did not coin the term “neurodiversity” (Judy Singer did, in 1998), but he made it legible to a general audience. He framed neurodiversity not as a niche identity-politics claim but as a scientific and historical observation: human brains have always varied, that variation has always included what we now call autism, and the question is not how to eliminate it but how to accommodate it.
Critical assessment
- Silberman was a journalist, not a researcher. NeuroTribes is a work of narrative non-fiction, not a peer-reviewed contribution. Some of its historical claims have been refined or contested by subsequent scholarship.
- The book focuses heavily on autistic people without intellectual disability — the “quirky genius” archetype dominates the narrative. Autistic people with high support needs and co-occurring intellectual disability are less visible. This is a significant gap for this wiki’s focus.
- The Asperger history is contested in its details. While the broad claim of Asperger’s complicity is well established, some historians argue Silberman initially presented too sympathetic a reading of Asperger (before the full archival evidence was available), and that Sheffer’s later work is the more rigorous source.
- The “always existed” framing is an argument, not a proven fact. The historical evidence for autism in pre-modern populations is necessarily thin. Silberman marshals it persuasively, but “autism has always existed” is a claim about an unobservable past, not a directly verifiable statement.
Selected works
- Silberman, S. (2015). NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. Allen & Unwin / Avery. — The defining popular work on the history of autism and the neurodiversity concept.
- Silberman, S. (2001). “The Geek Syndrome.” Wired, December 2001. — The Wired article that seeded NeuroTribes, exploring the concentration of autism diagnoses in Silicon Valley.
Last reviewed
2026-04-12. Note: Silberman died in August 2023. This page covers his legacy rather than ongoing work.
Related pages
- Robert Chapman — the philosophical articulation of the neurodiversity paradigm Silberman popularised
- Temple Grandin — another key figure in public awareness of autism, from a different angle
- Evolutionary origins of neurodivergence — the “always existed” historical claim meets genomic evidence