Dimensions: 1.59'' x 9.40'' 688 pages HarperCollins Publication Date: November 2003 Hardcover ISBN: 006019247X

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October 2003
Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950
By Charles Murray

Human beings have discovered truths about the physical world, invented devices to improve their daily lives, produced works of art that inspire our deepest emotions, and arranged words in such a manner as to illuminate the mysteries of the human condition. This book details many of the greatest of those accomplishments and the people behind them.

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Fellow for Culture and Freedom at AEI. His books include Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 and The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (with Richard J. Herrnstein).

At irregular times and in scattered settings, human beings have achieved great things. They have discovered truths about the workings of the physical world, invented wondrous devices, combined sounds and colors in ways that touch our deepest emotions, and arranged words in ways that illuminate the mysteries of the human condition. Human Accomplishment is about those great things and the people who did them, from the age of Homer 2,800 years ago to our own time.

Part 1: A Sense of Accomplishment

The argument of the book is based on historiometric analyses that are long on numbers and graphs and short on good stories. But the underlying stuff of human accomplishment does indeed consist of good stories, and a sense of that stuff is essential if the numbers and graphs are to be kept in context. Conveying that sense is the task of Part 1.

Chapter 1 parses the span of time to be covered, the 10,000 years since the beginnings of agriculture in the Middle East. It makes two points. Ten thousand years is actually a very long time—an antidote to the tendency to think of human civilization as a figurative nanosecond relative to the history of human evolution, the history of the earth, or the history of the universe. Understanding how long ten thousand years really is also serves to remind us that we of the 21st century are beneficiaries of the half-dozen most recent centuries, ones that were spectacularly unlike the ninety-four that preceded them.

Chapter 2 sets the scene as we pick up the story in 800 B.C. Archaeologists have reconstructed a picture of the state of human accomplishment as of 800 B.C. that still needs to be amended now and then, but is unlikely to require a sweeping restatement. Alongside the secure story of 800 B.C. are some authentic mysteries about technology and knowledge in the millennia prior to 800 B.C. that, were they to be resolved, could radically change our understanding of human history.

Chapter 3 describes three concrete but very different settings in which human accomplishment has unfolded. The sites and times have been chosen to prefigure themes that will surface later in the book. Antonine Rome (138–180 A.D.) takes Western readers close to their cultural roots. The Chinese city of Hangzhou in the Song Dynasty (960–1279) serves as a window into an advanced civilization that developed apart from of the West. Samuel Johnson’s London (1737–1784) serves as a reference point for later questions about what has made the last 600 years so different from all the rest.

Chapter 4 discusses two blind spots that distort our view of the accomplishments of the past. The first is the tendency to forget how the problems of science looked to the people who had to solve them. Finding the answer was a much more daunting task than we are inclined to realize. The second blind spot is the tendency to confuse that which has been achieved with that which must inevitably have been achieved. Because A Winter’s Tale, The Night Watch, and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony exist, it is easy to take their existence for granted but in truth each is a priceless and unearned gift.

Part 2: Identifying the People and Events that Matter

The topic of Human Accomplishment is excellence, not mere fame. Chapter 5 presents the definition of excellence in the sciences (based on the discovery and application of truth) and the arts (based on high aesthetic quality—which in turn requires a discussion of aesthetics). Next comes a description of the reasons for concluding that standard historiometric methods do a good job of identifying excellence in the terms that have been set. Then comes an overview of the procedures used to compile the inventories of accomplishment based on these methods. The chapter concludes with short answers to basic questions about the validity of the inventories.

Chapter 6 lays out an empirical phenomenon that reappears whenever the eminence of artists and of scientists is studied: a surprisingly small number of people loom over all the rest. Among them, the people who are indispensable to the story of human accomplishment number in the hundreds. Even among those hundreds, a handful stand conspicuously above everyone else. Chapter 6 discusses alternative explanations for the phenomenon.

Chapter 7 presents the inventories of the 4,002 significant figures, describing how they were selected and what kinds of contributors make the cut. The chapter then presents the case that the set of significant figures includes 100 percent of all who have to be part of the story of their respective fields, nearly 100 percent of everyone who even comes close to that standard, and some large sample of everyone else who is authentically significant in the qualitative sense of that word.

Chapter 8 focuses on the giants, the figures who have dominated their fields. It begins by presenting lists of the twenty top-ranking persons in each inventory. The rest of the chapter is devoted to the question: why them? When we have painters as great as Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, Dürer, Picasso, and a few dozen other huge figures, what is it about Michelangelo that has led historians of Western art to pay the most attention to him? Why Aristotle instead of Locke or Descartes? Why Einstein instead of Bohr or Maxwell? The answers are strikingly different for the giants in philosophy, the arts, and the sciences.

Chapter 9 turns from people to events, discussing the ways in which identifying significant events poses different problems for the arts versus the sciences. It concludes with a compilation of the most important events in the sciences.

Chapter 10 shifts to another kind of event—not discrete discoveries, inventions, or works of art, but fourteen meta-inventions that expanded Homo sapiens’ cognitive repertoire. The fourteen, each discussed separately, are:

• Artistic realism
• Linear perspective
• Artistic abstraction
• Polyphony
• Drama
• The novel
• Meditation
• Logic
• Ethics
• Arabic numerals
• The mathematical proof
• The calibration of uncertainty
• The secular observation of nature
• The scientific method

Part 3: Patterns and Trajectories

Part 3 provides a wide array of material, much of it technical, as preparation for discussing why great human accomplishment arises and why it declines. 

Chapter 11 describes why anyone who tries to write about human accomplishment around the world and across the centuries must devote an overwhelming proportion of the analysis to Europe since 1400—because an overwhelming proportion of the significant figures come from that place and time. Is this an accurate reflection of the distribution of great accomplishment in the arts and sciences or a distortion produced by Eurocentrism? The question is subjected to analysis from triangulated perspectives. The conclusion is that modern Europe’s unique place is authentic.

Chapter 12 takes on a parallel issue with regard to males. Is the overwhelming preponderance of males—98 percent of the significant figures—accurate or a reflection of sexism among historians? The question is subjected to analysis from triangulated perspectives. The conclusion is that 98 percent is a fair estimation of male dominance in human accomplishment in the arts and sciences. Alongside the story of women is another story of a minority that was prevented from participating in the arts and sciences until the nineteenth century—the Jews. Their history is one of extraordinarily rapid contribution to the arts and sciences as soon as Jewish emancipation occurred. Chapter 12 concludes with a review of the alternative explanations for the disproportionately small contributions of women and disproportionately large contributions of Jews.

Even within Europe, the level of accomplishment has varied. A few countries, and a few regions within countries, have produced the bulk of the significant figures. Chapter 13 shows how the significant figures have been distributed across the landscapes of Europe and the United States during different eras. Chapter 14 presents the rate of accomplishment after taking the size of the population into account, showing how the rate rose and fell for different inventories across the centuries and across the world.

The discussion then turns to some basic potential explanation of the patterns and trajectories, using quantitative multivariate analyses to see what variables are important. Chapter 15 discusses the roles of peace and prosperity. Whether a country has been at peace or war has not made much difference to streams of accomplishment (perhaps because there have been so few prolonged periods of peace). Economic prosperity makes a difference. Richer is better, but part of the effect comes from being richer compared to other countries during the same time period, not from being richer in an absolute sense—which may reflect not the role of wealth per se, but an underlying vitality of a society that produces both economic growth and accomplishment in the arts and sciences.

Chapter 16 first discusses the single most important factor for explaining why a stream of accomplishment continues: the existence of great models in the prior generation. The evidence in Human Accomplishment’s inventories confirms previous analyses of this issue. The existence of what are called elite cities is also associated with accomplishment—not just because artists and scientists flock to them to do their work, but also because they are nurturing environments for the development of talent in the new generation. Finally, there is the role of freedom of action. Political freedom in the modern sense of that word has existed for only a few centuries, but governments of all kinds, including autocracies, have sometimes found ways to give their artists and scientists de facto freedom of action. Those are the governments that have also been associated with major streams of accomplishment.

Chapter 17 concludes the discussion of patterns and trajectories by asking what remains to be explained. The answer is a version of the problem that faces cosmologists trying to understand the history of the universe. They know a great deal about what happened nanoseconds after the Big Bang began. They just don’t know how it got started. The variables discussed in Chapters 15 and 16 explain much about the dynamics governing streams of accomplishment once they are underway. They do not tell us, however, what ignites the blaze or why it dies out.

Part 4: On the Origins and Decline of Accomplishment

Faced with the story of human accomplishment across time and cultures, what is a parsimonious set of elements that helps to explain what causes streams of accomplishment to begin and decline?

Chapter 18 states the case for what is argued to be the mainspring for human accomplishment, the inborn impulse of humans toward excellence. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is the source for this argument, distilled by philosopher John Rawls into what he labeled “the Aristotelian principle”: Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity. The rest of Chapter 18 makes the case that modern psychology is in the process of verifying the truth of Aristotle’s insight.

Chapter 19 discusses two personal stances toward life, labeled purpose and autonomy, that determine how insistently and effectively human beings with the potential for excellence will try to realize that potential, given the chance. The thesis regarding purpose is that a major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to fulfill that purpose. The thesis regarding autonomy is that a stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture that encourages the belief that individuals can act efficaciously as individuals, and encourages them to do so. The discussion first fleshes out the ways that purpose and autonomy are related to the acts of creation that go into great accomplishment, then turns to the historical record, comparing cultural characteristics of East Asia, the Arab world, and the West.

Chapter 20 takes up the elements that shape the content of human accomplishment: a rich organizing structure and a coherent understanding and use of transcendental goods. Organizing structure refers to the framework for the conduct of science or the arts. The scientific method is an organizing structure, for example, as are the rules that define a sonnet or a fugue. One key characteristic of structure is its richness, meaning the range and depth of options it offers. The other dimension for assessing organizing structures is age. The longer a structure has existed, the more it has been filled up with the best work that can be done within its confines. Transcendental goods refers to the classic triad of truth, beauty, and the good. They are transcendental in that they refer to perfect qualities that lie beyond direct, complete experience, even though they have referents in everyday experience. The thesis is that great accomplishment in the arts and sciences is anchored in one or more of these three transcendental goods. Art and science can rise to the highest rungs of craft without them and wonderful entertainments can be produced without them, but, in the same way that a goldsmith needs gold, a culture that fosters great accomplishment needs a coherent sense of the transcendental goods.

Chapter 21 takes up the question of how to interpret the declines in the accomplishment rate that were presented in Chapter 14. Do the declines represent real reductions in the density of accomplishment after the mid-nineteenth century, or are they artifacts of the way that accomplishment has been measured? After considering the various artifacts that might be involved, the conclusion is that the declines are real, but that they have different meanings for the sciences and for the arts. The explanation for the recent decline in the scientific inventories is benign, while the explanation for the decline in the rates for the arts inventories is more pessimistic.

Chapter 22 brings together threads from throughout the book and speculates about their meaning for accomplishment after 1950 and into the twenty-first century. Much of the evidence seems to point to a gloomy prognosis for the arts. Against that are the reasons for optimism that derive from the apparently inextinguishable human attraction to the true, the beautiful, and the good.

 This summary is available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.