The Lessons of History

Will and Ariel Durant distill decades of research into a compact series of essays examining what 5,000 years of recorded history can teach about human nature, society, and the prospects of civilization. Organized under themes including geography, biology, race, character, morals, religion, economics, socialism, government, war, growth and decay, and progress, the book ranges from ancient Sumeria to the twentieth-century Cold War.

The Durants open by questioning whether the study of history yields practical value. Historical knowledge is always incomplete and probably inaccurate, the acceleration of change makes past-to-future conclusions hazardous, and chance can upset any equation. They concede that historiography, the writing and interpretation of history, cannot be a science but argue it can serve as an industry in gathering facts, an art in ordering them, and a philosophy in seeking perspective.

Turning to geography, they argue that the physical earth sets the stage for civilization without determining it. Rivers drew settlers and shaped nations; the Mediterranean dominated Western civilization for 2,000 years until the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama shifted power to Atlantic nations after 1492. They speculate that the airplane will again alter the map by favoring large land-mass countries. Yet geographic influence diminishes as technology grows: "Man, not the earth, makes civilization" (17).

The Durants identify three biological lessons. Life is competition, peaceful when food abounds and violent when population outstrips supply; war is "a nation's way of eating" (19). Life is selection: Nature distributes abilities unequally, and freedom and equality are fundamentally opposed, since unchecked freedom multiplies inequality while enforced equality demands the sacrifice of liberty. Life must breed: Nations with low birth rates are periodically overtaken by more fertile groups. They discuss Thomas Malthus's argument that famine, pestilence, and war check population growth, and they speculate that differential birth rates could reshape political and theological landscapes.

The chapter on race dismantles theories of racial supremacy. The Durants summarize claims by Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Madison Grant that civilization derived from "Aryan," Teutonic, or "Nordic" racial stock. Against these theories they cite Chinese civilization's endurance from 2000 B.C. onward, the Mayan and Incan cultures of pre-Columbian America, the Dravidic temples of south India, and the Khmer shrine at Angkor Wat. Their conclusion is that race plays a preliminary rather than creative role: Geographic, economic, and political circumstances shape civilizations, which in turn shape their peoples.

On human character, the Durants argue that known history shows little change in human conduct. Means and tools change, but motives remain the same. Evolution in recorded history has been social rather than biological, transmitted through imitation, custom, and education. They reassert the importance of exceptional individuals while insisting such figures grow out of their times. Creative tension between conservative and radical drives human development.

The chapter on morals traces how moral codes shift with economic conditions. The hunting stage rewarded pugnacity and aggression; the agricultural stage demanded industriousness, thrift, and monogamy. The Industrial Revolution disrupted this code by pulling people into factories, delaying marriage, enabling contraception, and eroding religion's authority. The Durants suggest that current moral looseness may be a transition between the dying agricultural code and an industrial moral code not yet formed.

Religion, the Durants argue, has been functionally indispensable in every age, providing comfort, discipline, meaning, and social stability. They credit the Roman Catholic Church with moderating barbarian violence and expanding charity, while acknowledging its failures: corruption, the Inquisition, and religious wars. They trace the decline of belief from Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. Yet religion has a habit of resurrection, and no pre-modern society successfully maintained moral life without its aid. They conclude with a "reluctant negative" on whether history supports belief in a benevolent God.

On economics, the Durants present Karl Marx's view that history is economics in action, then qualify it by noting that noneconomic motivations often drive events and that military power sometimes precedes economic control. They argue that wealth concentration is natural and recurring, and that when it reaches a critical point the instability is resolved either by legislative redistribution or by revolution. They contrast Solon in Athens (594 B.C.), who enacted debt relief and graduated taxation to avert revolution, with the Roman Senate, which rejected reform and triggered a century of class war ending only when Augustus established one-man rule. They liken economic history to a slow heartbeat, "a vast systole and diastole" (57) of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.

The chapter on socialism surveys state-managed economies from Sumeria around 2100 B.C. through Ptolemaic Egypt, Diocletian's Rome, three Chinese experiments, the Inca empire, Jesuit communities along the Uruguay River, and communistic movements during the Protestant Reformation. These experiments ended through varied causes: Some collapsed under excessive taxation and bureaucratic corruption; others were ended by military conquest, as when Francisco Pizarro destroyed the Inca empire in 1533, or by territorial transfer. The Durants argue that capitalism and socialism are converging toward a synthesis. Applying the Hegelian dialectic, a model of historical change through the clash of opposing forces, they predict not socialism's total victory but a convergence in which capitalism retains private property while high taxation funds public services.

The Durants trace government from monarchy through aristocracy and democracy to dictatorship. They cite the Pax Romana, the long period of Roman peace, under the "adoptive" emperors (A.D. 96–180) as monarchy's greatest achievement, while noting hereditary succession often produces incompetence. Their analysis of Athenian democracy reveals a narrow franchise, class warfare, and collapse under Macedonian dictatorship; Rome followed a parallel path from oligarchy through civil war to Augustus's monarchy. They conclude that democracy has done less harm and more good than any other form, but warn that prolonged war, class division, or failure to distribute wealth could open the road to dictatorship.

On war, the Durants note that in 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war. They present a dialogue between a general and a philosopher. The general argues that war is natural and that the United States must defend the West against Communist expansion. The philosopher responds that modern weapons' destructiveness demands a break from precedent. The general has the last word: Some conflicts are too fundamental for negotiation, and global unity may come only when humanity faces a common external threat.

The Durants examine civilizational decline, arguing that civilizations fail not from any organic fatality but through failures of leadership: failing soil, shifts in trade routes, excessive taxation, wealth concentration, erosion of moral codes, and defeat in war. Yet civilizations never entirely die; each passes its tools, arts, and memories to successors. Civilizations are "the generations of the racial soul" (94).

The Durants conclude by defining progress not as increase in happiness but as the increasing control of the environment by life. Modern populations show lower infant mortality, longer life spans, and greater resistance to disease than preindustrial peoples. Famine has been eliminated in modern states; constitutions guarantee habeas corpus, the protection against unlawful detention, as well as trial by jury and religious freedom. Progress is real not because humans are born better but because each generation inherits a richer heritage, an "inexhaustible legacy" (102) of language, writing, art, agriculture, morality, and teaching. Education, the transmission of civilization, is the strongest evidence that progress endures.