The Lessons of History

The question

Will Durant and his wife Ariel spent about four decades writing The Story of Civilization, eleven volumes published between 1935 and 1975 that traced the history of Western civilisation, with its roots in Asia and the ancient Near East, from the earliest times to the age of Napoleon. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968. That same year, before the final volume, they published The Lessons of History, a short book of about a hundred pages.

Its question is what all that history amounts to. The Durants were aware that historians are wary of drawing lessons, since every situation is unique and evidence is partial. They begin by admitting that much of what we call history is guesswork, and that our knowledge of the past is always incomplete. But they ask anyway what patterns a lifetime of study suggests.

The path through it

The book is a series of thirteen short essays, each approaching history from a different angle.

History and the earth: geography shapes history, but its influence diminishes as technology grows. Human beings, not geography, make civilisation.

Biology and history: history is a fragment of biology. Life is competition, selection and reproduction, and those laws apply to societies as well as species. The Durants note that nature has little regard for equality, which is why freedom and equality are often at odds: the more freedom people have, the more their unequal abilities produce unequal results.

Race and history: they argue that civilisations are made by peoples, not races, and that every great culture has drawn on many sources. This was a deliberate rejection of the racial theories that had been prominent earlier in the century.

Character and history: human nature has changed little in recorded history. The same impulses, acquisitive, sexual, aggressive and social, appear in every age. What changes is the means of expressing them.

Morals and history: moral codes adapt to economic conditions. The morality of an agricultural society, with large families and strict control, eased as societies became industrial and urban. The Durants note that every age laments the moral decline of its youth.

Religion and history: religion has been one of the strongest supports of moral order. The Durants, though sceptics themselves, could find hardly any earlier society that had kept its moral life together without it, and they leave open whether modern societies will be the first.

Economics and history: the concentration of wealth, they argue, is a natural result of differences in ability, and it recurs throughout history. It is periodically relieved, sometimes by peaceful reform and sometimes by revolution. They give examples from ancient Athens, where the reforms of Solon cancelled debts, and from Rome.

Socialism and history: they survey attempts at collective economies across history and conclude that both capitalism and socialism have moved toward each other.

Government and history: monarchy has been the most common form of government, and democracy the most difficult. The Durants see democracy as having done less harm and more good than any other form, while warning that it depends on education and restraint.

History and war: war is one of the constants of history. The causes of war are the same as the causes of competition between individuals, magnified.

Growth and decay: civilisations rise when a creative minority responds well to a challenge, and decline when leaders lose the capacity to respond. Here they draw on Arnold Toynbee.

Is progress real? Their final essay answers with care. Progress is not inevitable, and in many ways people are no wiser or kinder than their ancestors. But the accumulation and transmission of the cultural heritage, of knowledge, art, technique and moral insight, is real progress, and each generation can add to it if it absorbs what came before.

Where it arrives

The Durants arrive at a view that is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Human nature is constant, and history repeats its patterns. But the heritage of civilisation grows, and education, the transmission of that heritage, is the means by which each generation can become more civilised than the last. They describe the heritage as something to be received gratefully and passed on enriched.

What remains open

The book’s brevity means that each claim is stated rather than demonstrated, and many historians would contest some of them. Its views on inequality and ability, on religion and morality, and on the constancy of human nature reflect particular assumptions, and later research in history and the social sciences has complicated several. The Durants’ own work, written for general readers and covering vast ground, was respected for its synthesis and sometimes questioned by specialists for its detail.

The deepest question it leaves is whether history teaches lessons at all, or whether the patterns we see are imposed by the observer. The Durants acknowledged the difficulty and offered their lessons as reflections, not laws.

What it asks of someone deciding

The book asks what patterns your situation shares with others in the past. Most new problems have older relatives. Leaders who know history can recognise the shape of a situation sooner.

It asks how you treat inherited knowledge. The Durants’ account of progress rests on transmission: each generation must learn what the previous one knew before it can add. Organisations that lose their institutional memory repeat old mistakes. The site’s idea page We Know More Than We Can Tell explores what is lost when experience is not passed on.

And it asks about inequality and stability. Their observation that concentrations of wealth are periodically relieved, peacefully or violently, is a warning to any system that lets imbalances grow unchecked.