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The Lessons of History Paperback – February 16, 2010
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With their accessible compendium of philosophy and social progress, the Durants take us on a journey through history, exploring the possibilities and limitations of humanity over time. Juxtaposing the great lives, ideas, and accomplishments with cycles of war and conquest, the Durants reveal the towering themes of history and give meaning to our own.
- Print length128 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateFebruary 16, 2010
- Dimensions8.66 x 5.91 x 0.98 inches
- ISBN-10143914995X
- ISBN-13978-1439149959
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--Dana D. Kelley, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
About the Author
Will and Ariel Durant, after spending over fifty years completing the critically acclaimed series The Story of Civilization, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968. In 1977, the Durants were presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Champions of human rights and social reform, the Durants continue to educate and entertain readers the world over. For more information on their work, visit www.willdurant.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Hesitations
As his studies come to a close the historian faces the challenge: Of what use have your studies been? Have you found in your work only the amusement of recounting the rise and fall of nations and ideas, and retelling "sad stories of the death of kings"? Have you learned more about human nature than the man in the street can learn without so much as opening a book? Have you derived from history any illumination of our present condition, any guidance for our judgments and policies, any guard against the rebuffs of surprise or the vicissitudes of change? Have you found such regularities in the sequence of past events that you can predict the future actions of mankind or the fate of states? Is it possible that, after all, "history has no sense," that it teaches us nothing, and that the immense past was only the weary rehearsal of the mistakes that the future is destined to make on a larger stage and scale?
At times we feel so, and a multitude of doubts assail our enterprise. To begin with, do we really know what the past was, what actually happened, or is history "a fable" not quite "agreed upon"? Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. "Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice." Even the historian who thinks to rise above partiality for his country, race, creed, or class betrays his secret predilection in his choice of materials, and in the nuances of his adjectives. "The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend." -- Again, our conclusions from the past to the future are made more hazardous than ever by the acceleration of change. In 1909 Charles Peguy thought that "the world changed less since Jesus Christ than in the last thirty years". and perhaps some young doctor of philosophy in physics would now add that his science has changed more since 1909 than in all recorded time before. Every year -- sometimes, in war, every month -- some new invention, method, or situation compels a fresh adjustment of behavior and ideas. -- Furthermore, an element of chance, perhaps of freedom, seems to enter into the conduct of metals and men. We are no longer confident that atoms, much less organisms, will respond in the future as we think they have responded in the past. The electrons, like Cowper's God, move in mysterious ways their wonders to perform, and some quirk of character or circumstance may upset national equations, as when Alexander drank himself to death and let his new empire fall apart (323 B.C.), or as when Frederick the Great was saved from disaster by the accession of a Czar infatuated with Prussian ways (1762).
Obviously historiography cannot be a science. It can only be an industry, an art, and a philosophy -- an industry by ferreting out the facts, an art by establishing a meaningful order in the chaos of materials, a philosophy by seeking perspective and enlightenment. "The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding" -- or so we believe and hope. In philosophy we try to see the part in the light of the whole; in the "philosophy of history" we try to see this moment in the light of the past. We know that in both cases this is a counsel of perfection; total perspective is an optical illusion. We do not know the whole of man's history; there were probably many civilizations before the Sumerian or the Egyptian; we have just begun to dig! We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities; in history, as in science and politics, relativity rules, and all formulas should be suspect. "History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules; history is baroque." Perhaps, within these limits, we can learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another's delusions.
Since man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of his species, a scion of his race, a composite of body, character, and mind, a member of a family and a community, a believer or doubter of a faith, a unit in an economy, perhaps a citizen in a state or a soldier in an army, we may ask under the corresponding heads -- astronomy, geology, geography, biology, ethnology, psychology, morality, religion, economics, politics, and war -- what history has to say about the nature, conduct, and prospects of man. It is a precarious enterprise, and only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.
Copyright © 1968 by Will and Ariel Durant
Product details
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster (February 16, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 128 pages
- ISBN-10 : 143914995X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1439149959
- Item Weight : 4.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 8.66 x 5.91 x 0.98 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
William James Durant was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, in 1885. He was educated in the Roman Catholic parochial schools there and in Kearny, New Jersey, and thereafter in St. Peter’s (Jesuit) College, Jersey City, New Jersey where he graduated in 1907, and Columbia University, New York. For a summer in 1907 he served as a cub reporter on the New York Journal, but finding the work too strenuous for his temperament, he settled down at Seton Hall College, South Orange, New Jersey, to teach Latin, French, English, and geometry (1907-11). He entered the seminary at Seton Hall in 1909, but withdrew in 1911 for reasons which he has described in his book Transition. He passed from this quiet seminary to the most radical circles in New York and became (1911-13) the teacher of the Ferrer Modern School, an experiment in libertarian education. In 1912 he toured Europe at the invitation and expense of Alden Freeman, who had befriended him and now undertook to broaden his borders. Returning to the Ferrer School, he fell in love with one of his pupils, resigned his position, and married her (1913). For four years he took graduate work at Columbia University, specializing in biology under Morgan and Calkins and in philosophy under Woodbridge and Dewey. He received the doctorate in philosophy in 1917, and taught philosophy at Columbia University for one year. Beginning in 1913 at a Presbyterian church in New York, he began those lectures on history, literature, and philosophy which, continuing twice weekly for over thirteen years, provided the initial material for his later works. The unexpected success of The Story of Philosophy (1926) enabled him to retire from teaching in 1927, and is credited as the work that launched Simon & Schuster as a major publishing force and that introduced more people to the subject of philosophy than any other book. Thenceforth, except for some incidental essays and Will’s lecture tours, Mr. and Mrs. Durant gave nearly all their working hours (eight to fourteen daily) to The Story of Civilization. To better prepare themselves they toured Europe in 1927, went around the world in 1930 to study Egypt, the Near East, India, China, and Japan, and toured the globe again in 1932 to visit Japan, Manchuria, Siberia, Russia, and Poland. These travels provided the background for Our Oriental Heritage (1935) as the first volume in The Story of Civilization. Several further visits to Europe prepared for Volume II, The Life of Greece (1939) and Volume III, Caesar and Ch
Volume III, Caesar and Christ (1944). In 1948, six months in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, and Europe provided perspective for Volume IV, The Age of Faith (1950). In 1951 Mr. and Mrs. Durant returned to Italy to add to a lifetime of gleanings for Volume V, The Renaissance (1953); and in 1954 further studies in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France, and England opened new vistas for Volume VI, The Reformation (1957). Mrs. Durant’s share in the preparation of these volumes became more substantial with each year, until in the case of Volume VII, The Age of Reason Begins (1961), it was so great that justice required the union of both names on the title page. And so it has been on The Age of Louis XIV (1963), The Age of Voltaire (1965), Rousseau and Revolution (1967), for which the Durants were awarded the Pulitzer Prize (1968), and The Age of Napoleon (1975). The publication of The Age of Napoleon concluded five decades of achievement and for it they were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977). Throughout his life, Will Durant was passionate in his quest to bring philosophy out of the ivory towers of academia and into the lives of laypeople. A champion of human rights issues, such as the brotherhood of man and social reform, long before such issues were popular, Durant’s writing still educates and entertains readers around the world, inspiring millions of people to lead lives of greater perspective, understanding, and forgiveness.
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Durant deals, in this very readable book, with real history and various aspects of life that are revealed thru history.
Among those are Morals, History, Biology, Race, Character, Religion, Economics, Socialism, Government, War, Growth and Decay, Progress (is it real?)
Concepts and Ideas based on the historical background surrounding almost all key elements that Durant and his wife Ariel researched and wrote mssive tomes surrounding (The Story of Civilization - 10 volumes & perhaps 11,000 pages!!...Beginning in volume I (almost a summary of what is to come for 9 more)) will engage and open our world from before a time when mankind was still just off the savannas and wondering what was over the next hill, mountain, river and ocean.
Very readable prose, engaging, humorous and playful in it's dealings with human activity (Volume I sneaks up in so many ways...as in when we encounter the statement "When the Gods became useful they became numerous"
Having gifted or loaned the first of Durant's Story of Civilization it soon became apparent that there is a deep yearning for this depth of inquiry and explanation...Since have given this little book (Lessons of History) to many....old and young. Revealing, humorous, challenging, and rewarding....
Lessons of History is such....coupled with Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness....are Human Nature revealed ... jcmb
And they succeed! The book packs a wealth of insights into a hundred pages. The authors discuss, in turn, the forces that have shaped history. The forces considered include natural (geography, biology), human behavior (character, morality), and human constructs (religion, economic systems, and government). The last essay considers the question "Is progress real?".
The essay on economics argues that wealth inequality is a natural and inevitable consequence of the "concentration of ability" within a minority of a society, and this has occurred regularly throughout history. The authors state: "The relative equality of Americans before 1776 has been overwhelmed by a thousand forms of physical, mental, and economic differentiation, so that the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest is now greater than at any time since Imperial plutocratic Rome."
This leads into the essay on socialism, which strives to counteract the forces that drive wealth inequality. The authors survey "socialist experiments" in ancient Sumeria, Egypt, Rome, China, and South America - all centuries before the industrial revolution. It was fascinating to read this history which contains a mixture of failures and successes. The authors argue that the trend is towards a synthesis of capitalism and socialism (rather than one system winning outright).
The next essay discusses the various forms of government and descibes the special circumstances that enabled democracy to take root and flourish in the American colonies. The authors argue that many of the favorable conditions that were present in the years following the American Revolution have disappeared. The essay ends with the haunting warning: "If race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political argument into blind hate, one side or other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all; and a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world."
Hopefully this review has provided a flavor for how the authors have distilled the insights they have gained from years of study. It should not come as a surprise that the lessons gleaned from several thousand years of recorded history continue to ring true today.
This is a book that I wish I'd read in high school or perhaps Freshman year of college. It's a wonderfully written study of how we got to where we are today.