The Lessons of History

It’s hard to write a first sentence to summarize this work considering the multitude of emotions and reactions it gives you at once. When I was recommended this book over and over again during the year, someone described the Durants as “omniscient” historians. I can see the draw to that description, however exaggerated it may be, but I think in some ways the opposite is true. It’s less the author’s clear mastery of thousands of years of history, historiography, and philosophy that makes this book so differentiated than anything of its kind I’ve read, but rather their ability to constantly plead ignorance and apply endless productive optionality to their interpretation of the human experience.

You realize this immediately in the introduction:

“Since man is a moment is astronomic time, a transient guest of earth, a spore of his speeches, and 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 solider 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 a 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.”

Yet these “hazardous conclusions,” ranging from grand interpretations of history through the apertures of war, economics, race, biology, growth and decay, in some cases connect the dots so clearly for the reader that it is almost a shocking experience. It’s the kind of book that you end up reading twice just by reading once — each page requires you to stop and re-read in order to appreciate and understand the connections the Durants make. There are certainly areas of disagreement I have with some of the author’s argumentation, and some areas of focus are slightly off-kilter to a 21st century reader, but the book’s value easily transcends them.

The final chapter, on whether we have truly achieved progress as a species during our collective development, is the most succinct explanation of the value of education on a large temporal scale that I’ve read.