Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

by Charles Murray

Book Overview

A sweeping cultural survey reminiscent of Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence . "At irregular times and in scattered settings, human beings have achieved great things. Human Accomplishment is about those great things, falling in the domains known as the arts and sciences, and the people who did them.' So begins Charles Murray's unique account of human excellence, from the age of Homer to our own time. Employing techniques that historians have developed...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006019247X
• ISBN13: 9780060192471
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 668 Pages
• Weight: 2.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Surprisingly unsurprising

Charles Murray presents three questions in this book. First, can historiometric techniques be used to produce a survey of human accomplishment in the arts and sciences over time and across cultures? Second, are there any obvious patterns in the data? And third, why are those patterns present?The answer to the first question is certainly "yes". Murray uses the extent of coverage of scientists and artists in standard reference works on each field that he investigates. Basically he counts the number of times figures are mentioned and the amount of space their work is given. He makes a heroic effort to ensure that the results are not skewed by reliance on single works or works in a single language. His inventories include: astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, physics, mathematics, medicine, technology, Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, western philosophy, western music, Chinese painting, Japanese art, western art, Arabic literature, Chinese literature, Indian literature, Japanese literature, and western literature.While many may deride this methodology as bunk, the surprising thing is that the listings "look right". Who will argue that Galileo and Kepler do not belong at the top of the astronomy list, that Newton and Einstein do not belong at the top in physics, or that Shakespeare and Goethe should be lower on the western literature list? We may quibble about minor differences in rankings, but few would assert that obviously significant figures have been completely misplaced. Some readers with extensive statistics backgrounds may attack the techniques used, especially those used later in the book in determining rates of accomplishment, but with my limited background (one year of undergraduate statistics courses at MIT, and a semester of statistics for research in grad school) Murray's methodology looks bulletproof.To this point, even multiculturalists should be happy, since no attempt is made to compare the accomplishments of western and non-western civilizations. Now, however, he lobs the baseball into the hornets' nest. He concludes that dead European white guys have done the best work in the sciences, that Jews are dramatically overrepresented as a percentage of total population, that women have not contributed at the expected rates even after sexist barriers were removed, and that significant contributions in non-western arts have not been made at the same rates as in the west. While Murray's observations on the sciences seem indisputable, his coverage of non-western art is probably the weakest part of the book.Murray next tries to extract some explanations from the data. His first conclusions are fairly obvious and noncontroversial to anyone with some knowledge of the history of sicence and the arts: war does not disrupt accomplishment, but economic health is required. Next, he points out that models of accomplishment provide behavior reinforcement for aspiring achievers. He also concludes that accomplishment requires freedom of

The Meaning and the Pursuit of Excellence

This book is much more than cataloguing accomplishments of the arts and sciences and adjudicating their relative greatness. More importantly, this is a book about the meaning and the pursuit of excellence.Murray has an important message, which crystallizes toward the end of the book. An important part of the human spirit, after the basic needs of survival and procreation are met, is its natural attraction to truth, beauty and good. (This is the best elaboration I have seen of what is meant by the "pursuit of Happiness" in our Declaration of Independence) Given the right cultural climate, the emergence of excellence in the pursuit of truth, beauty and good, will thrive. I do not know if Murray had that message in mind and used the data to support it, or that he analyzed the data to conclude on that message. Either way, the message is powerful.Murray also made the point the religion (not organized religion, but a mature contemplation of truth, beauty and good) and its contagiousness is what is behind the waves of achievements and discoveries in history, entailing superhuman efforts and sacrifices that produced the greatest art and the articulation of the most insightful truths.There is in this book a detail list of "inventories" of great and significant figures and an elaboration of how they are selected, with special consideration -- allowing quotas, if you will -- for non-Western achievements. The inventories will undoubtedly generate a lot of debate from the PC crowd. Murray anticipated that and did quite a bit of that debate within the book. If you are a serious reader of the book, you will find that the inventories, despite the amount of space devoted to them, are mere launching pad for the thesis of what is the meaning of excellence.Like "The Bell Curve", this book is not for everybody. But for those who are drawn to the pursuit and appreciation of greatness and deference to truth, this book resonates powerfully with the mind.

Brilliant but controversial.

This is the first attempt to quantify the accomplishment of individuals and countries worldwide in the fields of arts and sciences by calculating the amount of space allocated to them in reference works. This is quite an achievement, as the writing no doubt requires a lot of reading, analyses, and work.Although the book is very instructive, I have problems with the methodology used. It is very difficult to compare Shakespeare to another writer like Homer, or Voltaire and Rousseau, as they were from different times and wrote about different topics, some in verses others in prose. It is even more difficult to compare the achievements of Newton to those of Galileo, Faraday, Laplace or Euclid. It would be difficult to make the assertion that Pasteur or Fleming are more or less influential than inventors in other fields.It is also difficult to compare Chinese achievements to those of the Europeans for two simple reasons: 1) western inventions are well publicized in the English literature while eastern works are rarely translated into English, 2) westerners are more dynamic and outgoing than their Chinese counterparts who in the last two millenia are more interested in moral issues than sciences. It should be noted that for many centuries, the Chinese have made tremendous advances in sciences and arts (gunpowder, ink, wheel, and so on) only to suddenly decide to achieve moral perfection rather than pursuing scientific achievements. The world would have been different had they not changed their minds.I have learned a lot from the author: his work gives me a visual and global assessment, although somewhat biased, of the achievements of the giants in history. It is also one of the most original and probably controversial books I have ever read. It will certainly cause a lot of ink to flow; therefore, it will have its own place in history.

Wow.

What an excellent book. Charles Murray is a wonderfully clear and gripping writer, regardless of whether he is giving a brief overview of human advancement from 800 B.C. to the modern age or explaining the more tedious aspects of his method for sifting through the histories to find the essential artistic and scientific elite.While the overwhelming majority of these are men, he takes feminist concerns seriously and goes to great lengths to present both social and biological explanations for the underrepresentation of women. He also discusses the acheivements of other cultures with fair-mindedness, pointing out where, when and in what way other civlizations surpassed our own while unflinchingly exploring the reasons behind the overwhelming dominance of Westerners in the arts and sciences from 1400 on. To accuse him, as some will, of chauvinism and ethnocentricism is grossly unfair, as any open-minded person who reads this book must concede.Truly, this is an excellent and important work which lives up to its incredible ambition. Buy it now.

Charles Murray's Super Human Accomplishment

Once a decade, Charles Murray drops a bombshell book on American intellectual life. In 1984, it was his devastating assessment of welfare programs, "Losing Ground," which helped inspire the famous 1996 welfare reform act.In 1994, Murray coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein the enormous bestseller "The Bell Curve." It ignited controversy by arguing that IQ scores are one of the most overlooked tools for understanding how American society is structured.Now, after a half-decade of work, Murray, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, is back with another massive book, 688 pages full of graphs and tables. "Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950" (HarperCollins, $29.95) is a fascinating attempt to rank the 4,000 most important artists and scientists in human history.Murray meticulously measured how much attention the leading scholars in their fields pay to the top creators and discoverers. Reading "Human Accomplishment" is a little like browsing through the statistics-laden "Baseball Encyclopedia," except that instead of being about Ruth, Di Maggio, and Bonds, Murray's book is about Picasso, Darwin, and Edison.Murray took some time to discuss "Human Accomplishment" with me.Q. Who came out on top of big categories like Western Literature, Western Art, Western Philosophy, and Combined Sciences? A. Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aristotle, and Newton -- the people you'd expect.In Western music, Mozart and Beethoven were in a dead heat, with Bach third. A rather vocal minority is upset about Bach not being on top. I'm not. I love Bach, but it's awfully hard to listen to Beethoven's later symphonies and string quartets and figure out how anybody could possibly be ranked above him. However, let me stress: I'm not the one who made those decisions. And occasionally I had to grin and bear it when things didn't come out according to my druthers. Rousseau and Byron are way too high in Western literature for my taste, for example.Q. Can you truly quantify objectively which artists and scientists were the most eminent?A. Sure. It's one of the most well-developed quantitative measures in the social sciences. (The measurement of intelligence is one of its few competitors, incidentally.)My indices have a statistical reliability that is phenomenal for the social sciences. There's also a very high "face validity" -- in other words, the rankings broadly correspond to common-sense expectations.Q. Who was the most accomplished person who ever lived?A. Now we're talking personal opinion, because the methods I used don't work across domains, but I have an emphatic opinion. Aristotle.He more or less invented logic, which was of pivotal importance in human history (and no other civilization ever came up with it independently). He wrote the essay on ethics ("Nicomachean Ethics") that to my mind contains the bedrock truths about the nature of living a satisfying human life. He made huge contributions to aesthet