The Lessons of History

Will and Ariel Durant spent forty years writing eleven volumes about civilization. When they were finally done, in their seventies, they sat down and tried to say what all of it meant in roughly a hundred pages. That book is The Lessons of History, and it reads like the closing argument of a brilliant lawyer who has stopped trying to impress anyone. The Durants are not building a system. They are not chasing originality. They wrote, in their own words, to offer a survey of human experience, not a personal revelation. What they produced is the rarest thing in nonfiction: an old couple's hard-won, slightly disenchanted view of what people actually do, told in prose so clean you can hear it.

The promise of the book is modest and enormous at the same time. If you take 5,000 years of behavior and look at it through the right lenses, certain patterns repeat. Trade, war, religious revival, sexual revolution, the rise and fall of wealthy classes, the swing between freedom and equality — none of it is new, and very little of it is accidental. The Durants will not tell you the future. They will tell you that the future will rhyme with what has already happened, because the creature making the future has not changed much. The book's quiet warning is that any generation which believes itself unprecedented is about to repeat something old.

I. Hesitations

The book opens with a confession that most readers skip. Most history, the Durants say, is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. The historian always oversimplifies, hastily selecting a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose complexity he can never quite embrace. This is the chapter where the Durants kick the legs out from under their own project before anyone else can. Before they will offer a single lesson, they want you to know what kind of statement a lesson of history can be.