In Human Accomplishment Charles Murray sets out to describe the main human achievements from 800 BC to 1950 in music, literature and the visual arts, as well as medicine and the physical sciences. He also tries to identify the institutions, beliefs and practices - the culture - that facilitate outstanding achievements.

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What has history taught? Murray's book is not a crude celebration of free-market capitalism. Above all, he says, human accomplishment has been greatest when humans have believed that their lives had a higher purpose. What was the purpose of life? We each had a vocation to add what we could to the sum of human achievement so far by seeking truth, beauty and the good - the three 'transcendental goods' identified by Murray. But in addition to being inspired by a higher purpose, the culture must also permit effective individual action. And this is where Western culture has proved more successful than some others.

Clan and tribal societies, for example, although they may have a high sense of moral purpose, do not permit individuals the freedom to single-mindedly pursue excellence against all the odds; nor do they facilitate the spirit of voluntary co-operation with people outside the confines of the family or clan, on which great achievements also rest.

Murray admits that he surprised himself when he considered the role that religion had played: 'The question that has emerged for me in the course of writing Human Accomplishment is why the greatest accomplishment in the arts has occurred in cultures where people believe the universe to have transcendental meaning.' In the West, Christianity taught individuals to have a purpose beyond their own immediate interests.

In our own time, we have the wealth and the freedom to act, but the idea of a higher purpose - of vocation - especially among our creative elites has fallen into disrepair. Here Murray finds a disparity between the arts and sciences. In the arts nihilism and relativism have become dominant. This may be the result of a double blow to the ideas in which many intellectuals put their faith. During the eighteenth century many put their trust in rationalism to replace lost religious belief, but towards the end of the nineteenth century this new faith was also challenged by writers such as Freud and Nietzsche who emphasised the irrationality of human conduct. The twentieth century seemed to justify their conclusions with the slaughter of the First World War, followed by the murderous regimes in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, and later by the threat of nuclear conflict.

It may well be, Murray speculates, that the period from the Enlightenment to the end of the twentieth century will be seen as 'a kind of adolescence of the species'. When humans were deprived of certain comforting simplicities and exposed to more complex knowledge about the world, they unwisely reacted by thinking that they were possessed of wisdom that invalidated all that had gone before. Perhaps earlier generations understood things we do not.

But the book is not a lament for a lost culture. It is a celebration of what has been accomplished by human civilisations, chastened by Murray's awareness that civilisation is a fragile thing that can be lost. Each generation has a responsibility to understand and preserve the best in human achievement so far, and to play its part in improving the heritage of accomplishment which awaits us as we grow up. Murray asks whether we are failing to play our part and concludes that in some respects we are.

He speculates on the decline in the arts after 1950 and suspects that few works will be considered great by later generations. He is optimistic that intellectual nihilism cannot survive and celebrates what has been accomplished - and continues to be achieved in the sciences - believing that the anti-achievement ethos of the arts will be remedied once enough of us realise the mistakes we have made: