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    The Lessons of History
    The Lessons of History
    The Lessons of History
    Ebook144 pages2 hours

    The Lessons of History

    By Will Durant and Ariel Durant

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    About this ebook

    A concise survey of the culture and civilization of mankind, The Lessons of History is the result of a lifetime of research from Pulitzer Prize–winning historians Will and Ariel Durant.

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateAug 21, 2012
    ISBN9781439170199
    The Lessons of History
    Author

    Will Durant

    Will Durant (1885–1981) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (1968) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977). He spent more than fifty years writing his critically acclaimed eleven-volume series, The Story of Civilization (the later volumes written in conjunction with his wife, Ariel). 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. 

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    Reviews for The Lessons of History

    4.5/5

    101 ratings22 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Cea mai frumoasa carte! Oare pentru a câtă oară o spun?
    • 5/5
      Witty, provocative, insightful. Ready to read more books wirtten by these authors
    • 5/5
      Great concise outline of the lessons of history from some of the greatest thinkers. Would recommend reading this
    • 5/5
      Interesting albeit a difficult read, I have to read it again
    • 5/5
      Must read to deepen one’s understanding of the brevity that is human history.
    • 3/5
      Found some interesting insights, but it was hard to read the last few topics. For me it was complicated
    • 5/5
      Delightful, succinct, readable essays on major topics that are germane to the major trends in history. Well referenced.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Highly insightful analysis that ties history to predictions, in an informal way

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Dit is een zeer merkwaardig boekje. Will Durant, Amerikaans filosoof en historicus, schreef samen met zijn vrouw Ariel tussen 1935 en 1975 een elfdelige wereldgeschiedenis. Dit boekje is een poging samen te vatten wat zij daar uit geleerd hebben. In de inleiding waarschuwt hij zelf al dat het om een erg subjectieve weergave gaat, en dat vooral twijfel of we echt iets kunnen leren uit de geschiedenis de hoofdtoon is, ?...only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.?.Die laatste, laconieke zin is erg typisch voor dit werk. De Durants schrikken er ondanks hun twijfels niet voor terug soms erg expressief en zelfzeker stellingen te poneren, vooral in zijn eerste hoofdstukken: ?life is selection. We are all born unfree and unequal!?/?Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows?. Het zijn maar enkele voorbeelden, maar ze maken onmiddellijk duidelijk dat de Durants ook kinderen van hun tijd waren: op tal van plaatsen wordt gesuggereerd dat de wereld anno 1968 duidelijk in moreel verval zit (homosexualiteit wordt expliciet als voorbeeld genoemd), dat de aantasting van gezag allesoverheersend is geworden en dat moderne kunst een totale aberratie is. Erg conservatief-reactionair dus. Maar op andere plaatsen zijn ze dan weer bijzonder voorzichtig en genuanceerd, zoals of oorlog gerechtvaardigd is, of religie een nuttige rol te spelen in de maatschappij, enz. Kortom de Durants zijn niet voor ??n gat te vangen. Ze hebben er een complexe, eigenzinnige kijk op de geschiedenis van gemaakt. Met soms ook heel verdienstelijke inzichten. Vooruitgang bijvoorbeeld is volgens hen niet echt meetbaar, want afhankelijk van welk criterium of invalshoek je kiest. Maar vooruitgang schuilt voor hen in elk geval op het kunnen bouwen op vorige generaties en beschavingen, en wat dat betreft staan we er beter voor dan ooit.
    • 2/5
      Dit is een zeer merkwaardig boekje. Will Durant, Amerikaans filosoof en historicus, schreef samen met zijn vrouw Ariel tussen 1935 en 1975 een elfdelige wereldgeschiedenis. Dit boekje is een poging samen te vatten wat zij daar uit geleerd hebben. In de inleiding waarschuwt hij zelf al dat het om een erg subjectieve weergave gaat, en dat vooral twijfel of we echt iets kunnen leren uit de geschiedenis de hoofdtoon is, “...only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.”.Die laatste, laconieke zin is erg typisch voor dit werk. De Durants schrikken er ondanks hun twijfels niet voor terug soms erg expressief en zelfzeker stellingen te poneren, vooral in zijn eerste hoofdstukken: “life is selection. We are all born unfree and unequal!”/”Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows”. Het zijn maar enkele voorbeelden, maar ze maken onmiddellijk duidelijk dat de Durants ook kinderen van hun tijd waren: op tal van plaatsen wordt gesuggereerd dat de wereld anno 1968 duidelijk in moreel verval zit (homosexualiteit wordt expliciet als voorbeeld genoemd), dat de aantasting van gezag allesoverheersend is geworden en dat moderne kunst een totale aberratie is. Erg conservatief-reactionair dus. Maar op andere plaatsen zijn ze dan weer bijzonder voorzichtig en genuanceerd, zoals of oorlog gerechtvaardigd is, of religie een nuttige rol te spelen in de maatschappij, enz. Kortom de Durants zijn niet voor één gat te vangen. Ze hebben er een complexe, eigenzinnige kijk op de geschiedenis van gemaakt. Met soms ook heel verdienstelijke inzichten. Vooruitgang bijvoorbeeld is volgens hen niet echt meetbaar, want afhankelijk van welk criterium of invalshoek je kiest. Maar vooruitgang schuilt voor hen in elk geval op het kunnen bouwen op vorige generaties en beschavingen, en wat dat betreft staan we er beter voor dan ooit.
    • 5/5
      Well written and very thought provoking. The Durants make history interesting and entertaining.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The lessons of history by Will and Ariel Durant. 1968 , 102pagesThis short book is an essay on important concepts of history.It has chapters on History of the earth and how biology, race, character ,morals, religion , economics, government and war. The writer is well versed in the classics and says in 3421 years there have been less than 268 years without war. In these terms the European Union deserves the Nobel Peace prize as the have kept peace in Europe for over 65 years.It points out that socialism existed in the ancient world Assyria, Egypt, in Rome Julius Caesar was assassinated because of his socialist policies which challenged vested interests. It also had different repeated periods in China. Free markets have always led to money being concentrated in the hands of a few.Many violent revolutions have taken place but instead of sharing weath they have destroyed it.Religion has had strong and weak periods and technology as well as leaders have made changes.But the conclusion shows that every civilization has growth and decay for many different reasons.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I?d give this 10 stars. It is that good!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      At first I was put off by the authors' use of 5 words where 2 would do. "a multitude of doubts assail our enterprise." And, "some young doctor of philosophy in physics...."

      But after pressing on I realized this book was like nothing I had read. It is a concise evaluation of how different actions and emotions affect history. It is strongly opinionated, but their opinions are worth wrestling with, as they do not come from a specific side of the political spectrum.

      I eventually got used to their verbosity, and even began to appreciate it, and realize how effectively it expressed their ideas. "Communist governments, armed with old birth rates and new weapons...."

      Highly recommended, especially for people who like to wrestle with ideas about history.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant. Much better book with more wisdom per page in comparison with some hyped authors on current bestseller lists. On certain passages I was amazed by the authors ability to condense statements and conclusions into single sentence or paragraph. This book inspires you to learn and research - I’ve spent more time researching around the subjects and names mentioned than actually reading the book.

      4 people found this helpful

    • 1/5
      This is rather the lessons of history that we need to avoid . I guess that's why the history repeats over and over , some people are teaching the wrong lessons !seek by yourself your own understanging of what history have to tell you if you don't want to be brainwashed by the others!
    • 3/5
      Short. There's a "lesson" in every chapter. The language dates it a bit, very few people use the word "homosexualism" anymore. In fact, it's so unused these days that LibraryThing's spell checker wouldn't leave it alone. You would think that a smart spell-checker would know enough to avoid spell-checking anything between quotation marks.
    • 3/5
      A very condensed version of the authors' writing. Has some insights that I found interesting, but overall the summary format doesn't work that well to be very informative or interesting.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A neat little read. Lots of good ideas and little gems. Likely this is the type of book that upon rereading one would find many new pieces of information and thoughts that stand out. At only 100 pages it doesn’t take much to get through. Definitely I’ll reread at some point.
    • 1/5
      The premise of this book is based on the idea that we can develop a worldview from looking back on history. I don't agree that this is the case. Our worldview rests on our experiences and our values. History is like the future; it contains an infinite number of possibilities. When we weave history into a comprehensible narrative, we're selecting fodder to support or refute a worldview. But history just is. Ultimately, it's not a willing party in each of our schemes.

      To get specific, Durant claims that history is the story of competition. And yet it is just as much the story of cooperation. Or maybe even of indifference. It's all based on the values of the historian.

      Just as stock traders say, past performance has little relationship with future returns. Things happened a certain way in the past [most of which isn't recorded or known]. They will happen similarly and differently in the future, in ways we can't predict.

      History does have utility. If you work in finance, learning about the history of finance can help you understand the present arrangement of things. But history can't decide our values for us, and determining our values might be the most important aspect of our lives.

      4 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      When you need advice about your car, you talk to a mechanic. If you need financial advice, you speak with a banker. What should you do if you want to learn from history? Read this essay from the husband and wife duo that produced a massive 10 volume history of civilization!The Lessons of History meanders through a variety of topics: religion, morality, war, and race to name a few. While I obviously don’t agree with all of their conclusions—the chapter on race was unnerving, and they viewed religion as a purely natural phenomenon—they approached each topic with respect and a wealth of illustrative knowledge.In the last chapter, the authors questioned whether or not progress is real. While the point could be argued both ways, each age is richer for having that much more history to explore.

      4 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      How remarkable to stumble across this slim volume; it made the day perfect. This is the final volume, a commentary (so to speak) of the truly remarkable work of Will and Ariel Durant. I'm grateful to have found it.No matter how small the bookshelf, this is a book that belongs on it.

      2 people found this helpful

    Book preview

    The Lessons of History - Will Durant

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    Contents

    PREFACE

    I. Hesitations

    II. History and the Earth

    III. Biology and History

    IV. Race and History

    V. Character and History

    VI. Morals and History

    VII. Religion and History

    VIII. Economics and History

    IX. Socialism and History

    X. Government and History

    XI. History and War

    XII. Growth and Decay

    XIII. Is Progress Real?

    ABOUT WILL AND ARIEL DURANT

    BIBLIOGRAPHICAL GUIDE

    NOTES

    INDEX

    Preface

    This postlude needs little preface. After finishing The Story of Civilization to 1789, we reread the ten volumes with a view to issuing a revised edition that would correct many errors of omission, fact, or print. In that process we made note of events and comments that might illuminate present affairs, future probabilities, the nature of man, and the conduct of states. (The references, in the text, to various volumes of the Story are offered not as authorities but as instances or elucidations so come upon.) We tried to defer our conclusions until we had completed our survey of the narrative, but doubtless our preformed opinions influenced our selection of illustrative material. The following essay is the result. It repeats many ideas that we, or others before us, have already expressed; our aim is not originality but inclusiveness; we offer a survey of human experience, not a personal revelation.

    Here, as so often in the past, we must gratefully acknowledge the help and counsel given us by our daughter Ethel.

    WILL AND ARIEL DURANT

    I. 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,¹ 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.² 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.³ — Again, our conclusions from the past to the future are made more hazardous than ever by the acceleration of change. In 1909 Charles Péguy thought that the world changed less since Jesus Christ than in the last thirty years;⁴ 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 understanding⁵—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.⁶ 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.

    II. History and the Earth

    Let us define history, in its troublesome duplexity, as the events or record of the past. Human history is a brief spot in space, and its first lesson is modesty. At any moment a comet may come too close to the earth and set our little globe turning topsy-turvy in a hectic course, or choke its men and fleas with fumes or heat; or a fragment of the smiling sun may slip off tangentially—as some think our planet did a few astronomic moments ago—and fall upon us in a wild embrace ending all grief and pain. We accept these possibilities in our stride, and retort to the cosmos in the words of Pascal: When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.⁷

    History is subject to geology. Every day the sea encroaches somewhere upon the land, or the land upon the sea; cities disappear under the water, and sunken cathedrals ring their melancholy bells. Mountains rise and fall in the rhythm of emergence and erosion; rivers swell and flood, or dry up, or change their course; valleys become deserts, and isthmuses become straits. To the geologic eye all the surface of the earth is a fluid form, and man moves upon it as insecurely as Peter walking on the waves to Christ.

    Climate no longer controls us as severely as Montesquieu and Buckle supposed, but it limits us. Man’s ingenuity often overcomes geological handicaps: he can irrigate deserts and air-condition the Sahara; he can level or surmount mountains and terrace the hills with vines; he can build a floating city to cross the ocean, or gigantic birds to navigate the sky. But a tornado can ruin in an hour the city that took a century to build; an iceberg can overturn or bisect the floating palace and send a thousand merrymakers gurgling to the Great Certainty. Let rain become too rare, and civilization disappears under sand, as in Central Asia; let it fall too furiously, and civilization will be choked with jungle, as in Central America. Let the thermal average rise by twenty degrees in our

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