“Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950”, by Charles Murray

688 pages, HarperCollins, ISBN-13: 978-0060192471

A blurb on the dust jacket for Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 suggests that it is for the general reader, but this is simply not so; rather, Charles Murray’s book is for that minority who can be defined as a discriminating readership. It is not an easy book: to quote author Charles Murray himself, his “Human Accomplishment describes what we [that is, society] have achieved, provides some tools for thinking about how it has been done, and celebrates our continuing common quest” (Oh. Is that all). It might be said that our common quest is to discover truth and beauty. Perhaps this book can best be described as a kind of “Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Arts and Sciences” as determined by experts in the various fields in which these great people worked. Some of the winners will be surprising, others not so much; for instance, in the combined sciences, the man who experts think had the most important contribution was Sir Isaac Newton, while in Western philosophy Aristotle beat Plato by almost ten percentage points. The giants of Western music are Beethoven and Mozart (who basically tied for first place), and in Western Art the most significant figure is Michelangelo.

But just how were these giants of Western Art and Thought determined? Well, I’ll tell ya: Murray did a statistical analysis across both English-printed and foreign-printed textbooks in the arts and sciences, calculated who the most frequently cited were and the amount of pages that were devoted to those figures, and determined that these were the dominant figures who emerged. It’s a pretty cool concept, you must admit, and it makes for a pretty fun read (it’s also difficult to argue with the results). And it took someone like Charles Murray to come up with this mind-boggling task, being the gutsy social scientist that he is: back in 1994 he co-wrote the excellent The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life with Richard Herrnstein, and the onslaught of controversy from our Politically Correct betters virtually killed Herrnstein (he died not long after the release of the book); but Murray has kept on trucking, and a decade later released another Politically Incorrect bombshell with this outstanding book. Being aware of his topic’s controversial nature, Murray spends nearly as much time explaining his statistical methodology as he does analyzing results, and after reading Murray’s exhaustive disclosure you’d be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed by his data gathering effort…and, you’d be hard pressed to think how a researcher could have been more objective in this endeavor.