Dr. Herbert J. Muller was an American historian, government official, and Distinguished Service Professor of English and Government at Indiana University, where he joined the faculty in 1956. Prior to this, he taught at Cornell, where he completed his undergraduate and graduate studies, until 1935. From 1935 to 1956, he was a faculty member at Purdue University. During this period, he spent two years as a visiting professor at the University of Istanbul. He studied the evolution of freedom in society and wrote a three-volume history of freedom. He also authored The Uses of the Past: Profiles of Former Societies (1952), a sweeping inquiry into the lessons of history, focusing Christianity and Judaism in Rome, Greece, the Byzantine empire, Russia, and China. He later wrote The Children of Frankenstein: A Primer on Modern Technology and Human Values (1970). A Queen’s Journal editorial called Muller “a man who can see a great many civilizations at once, and who does not rest his assumptions on the presumption that ours is superior.” He died in 1980.
Muller gave three lectures: The Basic Problems of Individuality: A Historical Perspective, The Pressures Against Individuality, & The Prospects of the Individual. As he examined the contemporary stage of the evolution of freedom in human society, he found much to be pessimistic about, though he maintained it was still possible to further the freedom of the individual. His first lecture began with an investigation of the complex nature of society in the contemporary West and the pressures facing the person who desired to live as a creative individual. Three modern phenomena threatened our understanding of the individual: social scientists who regarded humans as cells with no independent existence; anthropologists who claimed that culture developed by itself without individual input, and historians who saw history as an abstract process. Muller suggested that we understand the creative individual as the most apparent agent of social and cultural change, and restore the individual’s place in studies of past and present societies. His second lecture expanded upon these themes, arguing that the modern United States had the highest standard of low living ever, in which workers are employed at meaningless work. Jobs were mechanical and standardized through the 20th century’s organizational revolution, and so workers often felt insignificant and helpless, turning to consumption to try to create the illusion of individuality. Humans had evolved to the point where his main function is to be a consumer; Muller felt that these pressures towards conformity were dangerous threats not only to individuality, but also to freedom.
Listen to excerpts from his lectures or read the full transcripts below.