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The Human Condition - An Ecological and Historical View (Hardcover)
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The Human Condition - An Ecological and Historical View (Hardcover)
Series: Princeton Legacy Library
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A distinguished scholar and the well-known author of The Rise of
the West and Plagues and Peoples, William McNeill has won
widespread recgonition for his ideas on the role of disease in
history. In this elegantly and incisively written work, originally
delivered as the Bland-Lee Lactures at Clark University, he
provides a provocative interpretation in world history using the
concept of parasitism. By comparing the biological organisms that
compete with human beings for food or feed directly upon them
("microparasites") with those people or groups who seize goods or
compel services from other human beings ("macroparasites"),
Professor McNeill shows how changes in the patterns of parasitism
have affected human populations in different regions of the world
throughout history. The author identifies three landmarks of human
ecological history when systematic changes in the balances between
microparasites and macroparasites occured: the advance of our
ancestors to the apex of the food chain, the human penetration of
the colder and dryer zones of the earth, and the establishment of
the agriculture. In an espeically revealing discussion of this last
landmark, he shows how human efforts to achieve successful farming
increased human vulnerability to infection. Irrigation and the use
of the plow created sewage and water supply problems that in turn
brought on new and intensified forms of parasites. In addition,
food harvested and store for use throughout the year became
vulnerable to rats, mice, insects, and molds. These advances not
only increased the number and variety of microparasites; they also
opened the way for macroparasites, that is, the transfer of food by
those who produce it to those who produce it to those who consume
it without themselves having worked in the fields. What then began
as a symbiotic relationship quickly became an exploitative one. As
the author points out, the high yield and dependability of
irrigation plowing tied farmers to the land quite effectually and
made such populations easy targets for tax and rent collectors.
Hence human society in its civilized form came to be fundamentally
divided between hosts and parasites, the ruled and the rulers.
Against this conceptual background of the enveloping balances
between microparasites and macroparasites that have limited human
access to food and energy, Profesor McNeill draws a new historical
picture of the human condition. In doing so, he considers the
development of command versus market economics in the mobilization
of human and material resources, and speculates about the direction
in which these resources are coordinated today. William H. McNeill
is Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor of History at
the University of Chicago. Originally published in 1980. The
Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology
to again make available previously out-of-print books from the
distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These
editions preserve the original texts of these important books while
presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The
goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access
to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books
published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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