Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction, 1836. via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Simon & Schuster
The Lessons of History
A century of civilisation in a hundred pages.
$16.00
Available · worldwide delivery
- Author
- Will Durant; Ariel Durant
- Publisher
- Simon & Schuster
- Published
- January 2010
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Hardcover
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
The Long View, Kept Short
Will and Ariel Durant spent over four decades writing The Story of Civilization, eleven volumes that won them a Pulitzer Prize near the end, and then did the harder thing, compressing what they had learned into a hundred pages. The Lessons of History, published in 1968, runs the great themes in turn, geography, biology, morals, religion, economics, government and war, asking in each what the record actually supports.
Their conclusions are unsentimental: inequality recurs because abilities differ, freedom and equality pull against each other, war has been the norm and peace the interlude, and civilisation is not inherited but must be relearned by every generation. The book's economy is its authority; two lifetimes of reading stand behind each unhurried page.
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