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Mythistory and Other Essays
McNeill, William H.
- GenresHistory
236 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1986
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About the author
William H. McNeill
122 books210 followersWilliam Hardy McNeill was a historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West (1963). He was the Robert A. Milikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987.
In addition to winning the U.S. National Book Award in History and Biography in 1964 for The Rise of the West, McNeill received several other awards and honors. In 1985 he served as president of the American Historical Association.
In 1996, McNeill won the prestigious Erasmus Prize, which the Crown Prince of the Netherlands Willem-Alexander presented to him at Amsterdam's Royal Palace.
In 1999, Modern Library named The Rise of the West of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the 20th century.
In 2009, he won the National Humanities Medal. In February 2010, President Barack Obama, a former University of Chicago professor himself, awarded McNeill the National Humanities Medal to recognize "his exceptional talent as a teacher and scholar at the University of Chicago and as an author of more than 20 books, including The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963), which traces civilizations through 5,000 years of recorded history".
In addition to winning the U.S. National Book Award in History and Biography in 1964 for The Rise of the West, McNeill received several other awards and honors. In 1985 he served as president of the American Historical Association.
In 1996, McNeill won the prestigious Erasmus Prize, which the Crown Prince of the Netherlands Willem-Alexander presented to him at Amsterdam's Royal Palace.
In 1999, Modern Library named The Rise of the West of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the 20th century.
In 2009, he won the National Humanities Medal. In February 2010, President Barack Obama, a former University of Chicago professor himself, awarded McNeill the National Humanities Medal to recognize "his exceptional talent as a teacher and scholar at the University of Chicago and as an author of more than 20 books, including The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963), which traces civilizations through 5,000 years of recorded history".
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 28, 2023
How wonderful it is, to read what I consider to be the most impressive historian of the second half of the twentieth century, even though these are only short essays and they are already 40 years old. Because William McNeill (1917-2016) can rightly be called the real father of world and global history. Agreed, some passages may be a bit dated, but many of McNeill's findings remain valid. I especially recommend essay 3, in which he clarifies his take on global history: “my approach, influenced by the anthropologists, assumed that borrowing was the normal human reaction to an encounter with strangers possessing superior skills (…) Such encounters thus appeared to me to be the principal motor of social change within civilized and simpler societies alike. A world history should, accordingly, focus special attention on modes of transport and the evidences of contact between different and divergent forms of society that such transport allowed.” Interaction, confrontation and entanglement have become basic elements in the global approach to history, mainly thanks to McNeill. More on that in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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October 21, 2024No greater advocate for a global view on history than the late William H. McNeill (1917-2016). He is the author of groundbreaking works such as The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, Plagues and Peoples, The Pursuit of Power, etc. Most of those books may be outdated by now, but the approach that McNeill launched has become commonplace. According to him, real world history is based on the interaction between regions and civilizations, which generate an increasingly complex dynamic that better explains many processes in history. Better, anyway, than simply juxtaposing local and regional histories. Only a global view can provide relevant insights: “new insights may arise with breadth of view; fallible and never completely provable perhaps, yet enormously stimulating to exact and careful study which may find new questions to ask of familiar data in the light of general ideas generated by men like Toynbee.(…) Interaction between large views, bold hypotheses, fallible intuitions , and exact, detailed scholarship is what we need. “
And that is pre-eminently an area in which historians can excel: “All the same it seems clear that unless historians seek actively and energetically to construct a credible portrait of the human past on a global scale, we will have failed to perform our professional function adequately . We cannot afford to make the world in which our fellow citizens live historically unintelligible. We cannot afford to obstruct the effort to achieve a credible view of the human past by insisting on excessive detail that merely obscures the global structure and patterns within which human communities exist and always have existed. I therefore commend world history to your serious attention. It is not a luxury but a necessity, both for our profession and for our time.”
I don't really have much to add to that. The past few decades, with the breakthrough of Global History, and in part Big History, have amply proved that McNeill was right.
And that is pre-eminently an area in which historians can excel: “All the same it seems clear that unless historians seek actively and energetically to construct a credible portrait of the human past on a global scale, we will have failed to perform our professional function adequately . We cannot afford to make the world in which our fellow citizens live historically unintelligible. We cannot afford to obstruct the effort to achieve a credible view of the human past by insisting on excessive detail that merely obscures the global structure and patterns within which human communities exist and always have existed. I therefore commend world history to your serious attention. It is not a luxury but a necessity, both for our profession and for our time.”
I don't really have much to add to that. The past few decades, with the breakthrough of Global History, and in part Big History, have amply proved that McNeill was right.
October 6, 2014
I read this book over the last 9 days and I loved it. I have previously read one other McNeill book and have had another that I have meant to read. The other book was The Pursuit of Power and I read it for one of Dr. Stivers' grad seminars and did my book review essay on it.
This book is divided into 3 sections: Truth, Myth, and History; The Need for World History; and Masters of the Historical Craft. It is a collection of essays and lectures dating from the 1960s to the 1980s. The first one is McNeill's presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1985 and is entitled, "Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians." I believe this was an excellent choice to open the book and set the stage for his views.
I especially like McNeill's emphasis on world history, his scolding of his fellow professional historians and his ethical stance regarding the need for world history and responsible mythmaking. I particularly adore his views on language and human communication. His main effort in this book is a rehabilitated view of myth.
I want to provide some quotes from the book to, hopefully, whet your appetite. I may or may not expound further on them, although I hope to allow most to speak for themselves.
"Really important texts are those susceptible of being richly and diversely misunderstood. An author can always aspire to that dignity" (ix).
Part One: Truth, Myth, and History
From "Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians":
"The principal source of historical complexity lies in the fact that human beings react both to the natural world and to one another chiefly through the mediation of symbols" (6).
This may well be the principal source of complexity in much of human life and living. The amount and sheer range of symbolic mediation is primarily what differentiates humans from other animals.
"Shared truths that provide a sanction for common effort have obvious survival value. Without such social cement no group can long preserve itself. Yet to outsiders, truths of this kind are likely to seem myths, ..." (7).
"The liberal faith, of course, holds that in a free marketplace of ideas, Truth will eventually prevail" (9).
This is one of the most sincere beliefs we have inherited from the Enlightenment. But it is also one that causes the most tension in our views of ourselves and the market as paragons of rationality as we see over and over that it is not necessarily the case that the Truth will win out.
"Group solidarity is always maintained, at least partly, by exporting psychic frictions across the frontiers, projecting animosities onto an outsider foe in order to enhance collective cohesion within the group itself" (16).
"We need to develop an ecumenical history, with plenty of room for human diversity in all its complexity" (17).
He claims that this is exactly what professional historians have shied away from.
"If we can now realize that our practice already shows how truths may be discerned at different levels of generality with equal precision simply because different patterns emerge on different time-space scales, then, perhaps, repugnance for world history might diminish ..." (18).
"The result might best be called mythistory perhaps ( ... ), for the same words that constitute truth for some are, and always will be, myth for others, who inherit or embrace different assumptions and organizing concepts about the world" (19 my empahsis).
From "The Care and Repair of Myth":
Argues that public myth provides the basis for collective action:
"A people without a full quiver of relevant agreed-upon statements, accepted in advance through education or less formalized acculturation, soon finds itself in deep trouble, for, in the absence of believable myths, coherent public action becomes very difficult to improvise or sustain" (23).
Equates all forms of knowledge, to include scientific knowledge, with his rehabilitated view of myth:
"It may seem whimsical to equate scientific theories to myth, but if one accepts the definition of myth offered at the beginning of this article, surely the shoe fits" (26).
Argues that we need generality, not more detail, and that all of the detail generated by microhistories has undermined inherited myth.
"They have consequently undermined inherited myths that attempted to make the past useful by describing large-scale patterns, without feeling any responsibility for replacing decrepit old myths with modified and corrected general statements that might provide a better basis for public action" (36).
Encounters with strangers, and the assorted things that implies, is the driver of history:
"... troubling encounter with strangers constitute the principal motor of change within human societies" (37).
On comradeship and relating to the Other:
"The most problematic of all these human aspirations is how to define the limits of comradeship, This, indeed, is where humanity's myth-making and myth-destroying capacity comes elementally and directly into play by defining the boundary between "us" and "them." Broadly inclusive public identities, if believed and acted on, tend to relax tensions among strangers and can allow people of diverse habits and outlook to coexist more or less peacefully. Narrowed in-group loyalties, on the other hand, divide humanity into potentially or actually hostile grouping" (41).
This serves as another reason for broadly general world histories.
To counteract these tendencies, he argues that:
"What humanity needs is balance between a range of competing identities. A single individual ought to be able to be a citizen of the world and hold membership in a series of other, less inclusive in-groups simultaneously, all without suffering irreconcilable conflict among competing loyalties" (41).
From "The Rise of the West as a Long-Term Process"
Early in this essay are several pages on varied aspects of language:
"The main function of words is to generalize experience, imposing categories and classes upon the flow of sensory inputs, and thereby allowing us to recognize useful objects, e.g., "table," in innumerable and sharply different encounters with things. Beyond that, our words create the social world we live in to a very large degree, permitting us to recognize and respond appropriately to a policeman, a professor, a foreigner, or a fellow citizen as the case may be. …" (46).
"Symbolic discourse thus gives human being their extraordinary capacity to transform the natural worlds by collective effort. It is, indeed, what makes us human" (47).
He argues that microhistorians use the language of those they write about while macrohistorians need a specialized, but generalized, language that still needs to be developed (50).
"Social process" as a topic for macrohistorians, and his primary view of "social process" and how that view has has changed in the 20 years since The Rise of the West was published occupy several pages at this point. His basic argument was and is that contact with strangers, especially those possessing superior skills, is the principal impetus to change in social life.
"A world history should, accordingly, focus special attention on modes of transport and the evidences of contact between different and divergent forms of society that such transport allowed" (57).
His updated view includes a greater role for communication. Intensified communication and cheapened transportation heightens the impact of tensions in social processes.
Part Two: The Need for World History
From "A Defense of World History":
On the importance of language groups:
"Since shared meanings, disseminated through communications networks, are what shape and govern collective human behavior, historians ought always to take language groups seriously into consideration" (73).
While discussing the quest for precision and exactitude he tells us:
"Epistemological exactitude is unattainable. To insist on it is an excuse for not thinking. For only by using inexact words to organize confusion, lumping together a range of particulars that differ from one another in some degree or other, can the intellectual enterprise proceed at all" (84).
I fully agree with these statements and they, in fact, clearly elucidate my concerns and doubts about ontologies and similarly highly structured abuses of words and concepts. This is not to say that they are not of use in limited, highly constrained, domains and contexts but that we must be careful of ontological "creep."
"Beyond Western Civilization: Rebuilding the Survey" is a call to reform the then dying (now dead?) Western Civ course.
Part Three: Masters of the Historical Craft
In this section, McNeill discusses 4 historians he has known in various ways and that have affected his views in 5 chapters. I am not quoting much from these but they do add another kind of value and dimension to the book as a whole.
"Lord Acton"
"Basic Assumptions of Toynbee's A Study of History"
"Historians I Have Known: Carl Becker"
"For myth-making is a high and serious business. It guides public action and is our distinctively human substitute for instinct. Good myths—That is, myths that are credible, because they are compatible with experience, and specific enough to direct behavior—are the greatest and most precious of human achievements. Why should we not aspire to make such myths? No nobler calling exists among humankind" (165-65).
"Historians I Have Known: Arnold J. Toynbee"
There is a fascinating section in here on not taking notes (192-94).
"Historians I Have Known: Fernand Braudel"
I highly recommend this eminently readable and erudite book.
This book is divided into 3 sections: Truth, Myth, and History; The Need for World History; and Masters of the Historical Craft. It is a collection of essays and lectures dating from the 1960s to the 1980s. The first one is McNeill's presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1985 and is entitled, "Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians." I believe this was an excellent choice to open the book and set the stage for his views.
I especially like McNeill's emphasis on world history, his scolding of his fellow professional historians and his ethical stance regarding the need for world history and responsible mythmaking. I particularly adore his views on language and human communication. His main effort in this book is a rehabilitated view of myth.
I want to provide some quotes from the book to, hopefully, whet your appetite. I may or may not expound further on them, although I hope to allow most to speak for themselves.
"Really important texts are those susceptible of being richly and diversely misunderstood. An author can always aspire to that dignity" (ix).
Part One: Truth, Myth, and History
From "Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians":
"The principal source of historical complexity lies in the fact that human beings react both to the natural world and to one another chiefly through the mediation of symbols" (6).
This may well be the principal source of complexity in much of human life and living. The amount and sheer range of symbolic mediation is primarily what differentiates humans from other animals.
"Shared truths that provide a sanction for common effort have obvious survival value. Without such social cement no group can long preserve itself. Yet to outsiders, truths of this kind are likely to seem myths, ..." (7).
"The liberal faith, of course, holds that in a free marketplace of ideas, Truth will eventually prevail" (9).
This is one of the most sincere beliefs we have inherited from the Enlightenment. But it is also one that causes the most tension in our views of ourselves and the market as paragons of rationality as we see over and over that it is not necessarily the case that the Truth will win out.
"Group solidarity is always maintained, at least partly, by exporting psychic frictions across the frontiers, projecting animosities onto an outsider foe in order to enhance collective cohesion within the group itself" (16).
"We need to develop an ecumenical history, with plenty of room for human diversity in all its complexity" (17).
He claims that this is exactly what professional historians have shied away from.
"If we can now realize that our practice already shows how truths may be discerned at different levels of generality with equal precision simply because different patterns emerge on different time-space scales, then, perhaps, repugnance for world history might diminish ..." (18).
"The result might best be called mythistory perhaps ( ... ), for the same words that constitute truth for some are, and always will be, myth for others, who inherit or embrace different assumptions and organizing concepts about the world" (19 my empahsis).
From "The Care and Repair of Myth":
Argues that public myth provides the basis for collective action:
"A people without a full quiver of relevant agreed-upon statements, accepted in advance through education or less formalized acculturation, soon finds itself in deep trouble, for, in the absence of believable myths, coherent public action becomes very difficult to improvise or sustain" (23).
Equates all forms of knowledge, to include scientific knowledge, with his rehabilitated view of myth:
"It may seem whimsical to equate scientific theories to myth, but if one accepts the definition of myth offered at the beginning of this article, surely the shoe fits" (26).
Argues that we need generality, not more detail, and that all of the detail generated by microhistories has undermined inherited myth.
"They have consequently undermined inherited myths that attempted to make the past useful by describing large-scale patterns, without feeling any responsibility for replacing decrepit old myths with modified and corrected general statements that might provide a better basis for public action" (36).
Encounters with strangers, and the assorted things that implies, is the driver of history:
"... troubling encounter with strangers constitute the principal motor of change within human societies" (37).
On comradeship and relating to the Other:
"The most problematic of all these human aspirations is how to define the limits of comradeship, This, indeed, is where humanity's myth-making and myth-destroying capacity comes elementally and directly into play by defining the boundary between "us" and "them." Broadly inclusive public identities, if believed and acted on, tend to relax tensions among strangers and can allow people of diverse habits and outlook to coexist more or less peacefully. Narrowed in-group loyalties, on the other hand, divide humanity into potentially or actually hostile grouping" (41).
This serves as another reason for broadly general world histories.
To counteract these tendencies, he argues that:
"What humanity needs is balance between a range of competing identities. A single individual ought to be able to be a citizen of the world and hold membership in a series of other, less inclusive in-groups simultaneously, all without suffering irreconcilable conflict among competing loyalties" (41).
From "The Rise of the West as a Long-Term Process"
Early in this essay are several pages on varied aspects of language:
"The main function of words is to generalize experience, imposing categories and classes upon the flow of sensory inputs, and thereby allowing us to recognize useful objects, e.g., "table," in innumerable and sharply different encounters with things. Beyond that, our words create the social world we live in to a very large degree, permitting us to recognize and respond appropriately to a policeman, a professor, a foreigner, or a fellow citizen as the case may be. …" (46).
"Symbolic discourse thus gives human being their extraordinary capacity to transform the natural worlds by collective effort. It is, indeed, what makes us human" (47).
He argues that microhistorians use the language of those they write about while macrohistorians need a specialized, but generalized, language that still needs to be developed (50).
"Social process" as a topic for macrohistorians, and his primary view of "social process" and how that view has has changed in the 20 years since The Rise of the West was published occupy several pages at this point. His basic argument was and is that contact with strangers, especially those possessing superior skills, is the principal impetus to change in social life.
"A world history should, accordingly, focus special attention on modes of transport and the evidences of contact between different and divergent forms of society that such transport allowed" (57).
His updated view includes a greater role for communication. Intensified communication and cheapened transportation heightens the impact of tensions in social processes.
Part Two: The Need for World History
From "A Defense of World History":
On the importance of language groups:
"Since shared meanings, disseminated through communications networks, are what shape and govern collective human behavior, historians ought always to take language groups seriously into consideration" (73).
While discussing the quest for precision and exactitude he tells us:
"Epistemological exactitude is unattainable. To insist on it is an excuse for not thinking. For only by using inexact words to organize confusion, lumping together a range of particulars that differ from one another in some degree or other, can the intellectual enterprise proceed at all" (84).
I fully agree with these statements and they, in fact, clearly elucidate my concerns and doubts about ontologies and similarly highly structured abuses of words and concepts. This is not to say that they are not of use in limited, highly constrained, domains and contexts but that we must be careful of ontological "creep."
"Beyond Western Civilization: Rebuilding the Survey" is a call to reform the then dying (now dead?) Western Civ course.
Part Three: Masters of the Historical Craft
In this section, McNeill discusses 4 historians he has known in various ways and that have affected his views in 5 chapters. I am not quoting much from these but they do add another kind of value and dimension to the book as a whole.
"Lord Acton"
"Basic Assumptions of Toynbee's A Study of History"
"Historians I Have Known: Carl Becker"
"For myth-making is a high and serious business. It guides public action and is our distinctively human substitute for instinct. Good myths—That is, myths that are credible, because they are compatible with experience, and specific enough to direct behavior—are the greatest and most precious of human achievements. Why should we not aspire to make such myths? No nobler calling exists among humankind" (165-65).
"Historians I Have Known: Arnold J. Toynbee"
There is a fascinating section in here on not taking notes (192-94).
"Historians I Have Known: Fernand Braudel"
I highly recommend this eminently readable and erudite book.
Read
July 21, 2022American History Professor William H. McNeill's "Mythistory and Other Essays" is very useful to think about history writing. We see William McNeill's questions, thoughts and knowledge on history studying in his "Mythistory and Other Essays". William McNeill's "Mythistory and Other Essays" is one of the books of a lot of Historians who wrote on their historiographical works, but one of the best, one of the most useful! Why? Because, William McNeill wrote the history of world, totally, completely, without any fear, equally, with the all sides, with the all dimensions, "Mythistory and Other Essays" is the summary of William McNeill's philosophy of history in one volume!
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