Review of the Book

The Lessons of History
by Will and Ariel Durant

Edward J. Dodson

[January 2014]

The historian is challenged with presenting as objectively as possible a record of the events of the past. The best historians are also excellent story-tellers, weaving together the vast diversity of human experiences according to a broad theory of history. Some come to a theory of history at a young age and spend the remainder of their lives sorting through the record to support their theoretical perspectives. Others come to a theory of history only after decades of research and trying to make sense out of records that may or may not be accurate accountings of the actions by individual participants and the events in which they were involved.

Two of the most prolific historians of the twentieth-century attempted in this 1968 volume, The Lessons of History, to convey to readers what they thought they had learned after a half century of revisiting the broad scope of recorded history. However, they described this book as an essay only, advising readers:

"It repeats many ideas that we, or others before us, have already expressed; our aim is not originality but inclusiveness; we offer a survey of human experience, not a personal revelation." [Preface]

Almost anyone who has written on history or has a penetrating interest in history certainly possesses the eleven volume work by the Durants, The Story of Civilization. The first volume was published in 1935; the final volume appeared in 1975. In my own writing, these volumes proved extremely valuable for cross-checking of facts when quoting from other historians and other writers. No historian who has committed to writing the history of one society at one period in time, let alone every society in every age, can be expected to hold all of the details of these stories to be recalled when desired. However, the historian who is open to the possibility of discovering truths revealed in the rise and fall of civilizations provides an important service to the present and future generations. In The Lessons of History, the Durants shared with us their perspectives derived not from revelation but from prolong investigations.

They admit to the limitations self-imposed by a "secret predilection in [the] choice of materials, and in the nuances of … adjectives."[p.12] Equally important, "conclusions from the past to the future are made more hazardous than ever by the acceleration of change."[p.12] While this is certainly true, what I find in the story of past and current civilizations is a remarkable continuum. Regardless of what part of the planet we inhabit, given enough time we come to very similar patterns of social, political and economic organization. These patterns are frequently interrupted, however, by contact with other groups who are either far ahead or far behind in their organizational development.

One factor the Durants reflect upon is our physical environment and the changes that have occurred over just the few thousands of years of human civilization:

"Every day the sea encroaches somewhere upon the land, or the land upon the sea; cities disappear under the water… Mountains rise and fall in the rhythm of emergence and erosion; rivers swell and flood, or dry up, or change their course; valleys become deserts, and isthmuses become straits." [p.14]

And with these changes came great and small migrations, of many or few survivors. Civilizations rose and fell slowly or rapidly. And, in 1968, the Durants raised a very interesting question about the future:

"Will [the course of empire] continue across the Pacific, exporting European and American industrial and commercial techniques to China, as formerly to Japan? Will Oriental fertility, working with the latest Occidental technology, bring the decline of the West?" [p.16]

This intriguing question they posed based on the connection they saw between the laws of biology and the fundamental lessons of history. They concluded that what motivates us to cooperate with one another is a desire to strengthen the group with which we identify in our competition with other groups. Our behavior is, they offer, consistent with "millenniums through which our forebears had to chase and fight and kill in order to survive." [p.19] This is how they begin the third chapter, titled "Biology and History," in which they go on to explain that in nature, there is a "passion for quantity as prerequisite to the selection of quality." [p.21] They remind readers that throughout history less advanced groups with greatly superior numbers have consistently, eventually, displaced those with much lower rates of population increase. And, in 1968 they saw this occurring where Catholicism was expanding at the expense of Protestant sects. Today, the divide seems to be between those who embrace fundamentalist religious doctrines and those who either no longer describe themselves as religious or declare themselves to be agnostic or atheist.

Because we are born with unequal life potentials attached to heredity, parental and family wealth and even place of birth (what they refer to as "geographical opportunity"), the Durants acknowledge the need for societal interventions. Migration results in an eventual new mixture of peoples, softening racial and ethnic differences. One outcome is that the descendants of immigrants are eventually assimilated and become important contributors to the advance of the group.

There remained a long road ahead in 1968 where the racial divide was concerned; the Durants placed their hope in "a broadened education" [p.31] to convey the contributions all peoples had made to the advance of civilization. We see this happening in some societies, as historians examine and report on the discoveries and accomplishments of minorities previously ignored or even credited to members of the majority. Nevertheless, they see inequality as a permanent aspect of the human condition. "To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed," [p.20] they wrote. And yet, they warn of trying to accomplish too much too quickly.

The Durants have a deep respect for the social mores, institutions and systems of law that "are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history." [p.35] As a self-described socialist, Will Durant believed that what might be called "best practices" emerge out of tension between "the conservative" and "the radical" -- over time:

"It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole." [p.36]

Just such a tension has also existed throughout the ages over belief in the existence and role of a conscious creator. As our understanding of the physical world expanded, that of superstition and the supernatural ebbed. As the Durant's state:

"The growing awareness of man's miniscule place in the cosmos has furthered the impairment of religious belief." [p.46]

Another factor was the dramatic shift in human activity away from a subsistence existence gained from nature to work in the factories of the Industrial Revolution. Lives of misery, poverty and oppression had created for millions the circumstances of "temporary acceptance of Communism as … religion," [p.51]. The failure of Communism (or, more accurately I suggest, state-socialism) to rip poverty from the human experience has generated (to use the Durant's phrase) "a religious revival" that has also spread wherever the weight of imperial or colonial oppression has been shred. There own travels to Soviet Russia in the 1932 provided the evidence that the Russian revolution had failed. Even if Marx was right about capitalism, he would have been greatly disillusioned by what was being done in Russia under his name.

Those of us who have come to embrace the principles embraced by Henry George will find the book's chapter titled "Economics and History" of particular interest. For example, they make this important point regarding the decline of the Roman empire:

"We observe that the invading barbarians found Rome weak because the agricultural population which had formerly supplied the legions with hardy and patriotic warriors fighting for land had been replaced by slaves laboring listlessly on vast farms owned by one man or a few." [p.54]

Unfortunately, rather than pointing to the increasing power of rentier classes in every society that followed, the Durants attach a cause and effect relationship to the introduction of new machinery and the demise of the landowner as farmer. They acknowledge the rising economic power of bankers who extended the credit to the new agricultural industrialists but make no further comment on the destructive consequences of the concentrated control over land once frontier lands are settled.

Reflecting on the distribution of wealth existing in 1968, the Durants ask us to believe this "is a natural result of [the] concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history." [p.55] The only answers, they say, are "legislation redistributing wealth" or "revolution distributing property." [p.55] They recount the failed proposal by Tiberius Gracchus to redistribute land and limit the amount of land one could own; but, again, they do not offer a general observation linking land monopoly with entrenched poverty. And, they see no way to achieve sustainable economic growth accompanied by an equitable distribution of wealth:

"In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation." [p.57]

And, in the debate over what ought to be done, the Durants point to the essentially instinctive reaction to embrace socialism, even with the historically-known risks of power concentrated in the state, characteristic as they point out of ancient Babylonia and Egypt. Will Durant writes in the couple's autobiography, published in 1977:

"I am still a socialist, but with some cautions. I do not relish the control of economic lives by vast corporations. To keep the benefits and check the power of these mastodons I would favor public ownership of natural resources, including the land and all its minerals, fuels, and other subsoil wealth; also of transportation, banking, insurance, and medical and hospital care." [A Dual Autobiography, p.402]

Yet, his principles did not interfere with his career and broad acceptance. Will Durant lectured at universities all around the world during his life. He was invited to the White House by Lyndon Johnson, and the Durants each received a Medal of Freedom from President Gerald Ford in 1977.

The Durants applauded leaders from the past who intervened on behalf of their citizens, as did the Roman emperor Diocletian in A.D. 301. Facing an empire unraveling before him, Diocletian introduced measures modern socialists would recognize:

"He issued … an Edictum de pretiis, which denounced monopolists for keeping goods from the market to raise prices, and set maximum prices and wages for all important articles and services. Extensive public works were undertaken to put the unemployed to work, and food was distributed gratis, or at reduced prices, to the poor. The government - which already owned most mines, quarries, and salt deposits - brought nearly all major industries and guilds under detailed control." [p.60]

The Durants go on to describe the long list of other experiments with state-socialism and how social democracy emerged in the last century:

"The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality." [p.67]

What they do not explore in this writing is the evidence that the system defended as capitalistic,/i> has always been based not on competitive forces but on the struggle to overcome entrenched landed privilege. The Durants were familiar with the Physiocratic origins of laissez-faire, but did not describe in any depth the Physiocratic argument that land ownership was a form of privilege. In their volume The Age of Voltaire, they defer to Hume's judgment concerning the fundamental Physiocratic principle:

"He rejected the view of the French physiocrats that all taxes fall ultimately upon land; they fall at last, he believed, upon labor, for … 'everything in the world is purchased by labor'." [p.155]

There is in The Age of Voltaire no presentation or analysis of patterns of land ownership. They do allude to the destruction of rural communities in England caused by enclosure of the commons:

"…by a process begun in the sixteenth century, most of the 'commons' had been enclosed by the owners, and the peasants found it hard to make ends meet. There was no serfdom left, and no formal feudal dues; but enterprising landlords, and city merchants investing in land, were farming on a larger scale, with more capital, better implements, greater skill, and wider markets than were available to yeomen tilling their narrow areas. …The fatter landlords were buying up the thinner tracts; the small homestead … was giving place to larger farms …; the farmer was becoming a tenant or hired 'hand'." [p46]

And, here, in this volume they had offered their perspective that all of this could not be avoided:

"The natural concentration of wealth was in some measure mitigated by taxation and organized charity." [p.48]

They leave to political economists and moral philosophers to debate whether the privatization of land and the elimination of the commons should be described as progress or as a usurpation of natural rights benefiting a privileged few. They acknowledge in The Lessons of History that the people of a society might reach a point where only a violent uprising against "outworn and inflexible institutions" will potentially change their lives for the better. But, the need for revolution is rare, they tell us:

"[I]n most instances the effects achieved by the revolution would apparently have come without it through the gradual compulsion of economic developments." [p.71]

Unexpectedly, they point to the unique circumstances that led to the uprising by Britain's colonial subjects in North America and to the creation of a new nation-state:

"The rebellion was eased and quickened by an abundance of free land and a minimum of legislation. Men who owned the soil they tilled, and (within the limits of nature) controlled the conditions under which they lived, had an economic footing for political freedom; they personality and character were rooted in the earth." [pp.76-77]

,br> By 1968 they could write:

"Many of these formative conditions have disappeared. …Free land is gone, though homeownership spreads - with a minimum of land." [p.77]

But, still, they fail to make the most important connection between the concentrated ownership of land and the concentration of wealth generally:

"And all of this has come about not … through the perversity of the rich, but through the impersonal fatality of economic development, and through the nature of man. Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon superior ability, and intensifies the concentration of wealth, responsibility, and political power." [p.77]

Had the Durants devoted time to a thorough study of Henry George's works, they might have come to very different conclusions. They were certainly familiar with Henry George as an historical figure, and Will Durant had a long professional relationship with the philosopher John Dewey. What Henry George observed and what remains true across time and space is that every improvement in the technologies of wealth production, improvements that yield greater output with less inputs of labor and capital goods, is capitalized into a higher stream of rent attached to locations. The Lessons of History concludes with a chapter on "Growth and Decay," in which the Durants offer their insights into the reasons behind success and failure of civilizations. Most importantly, they say, is "the failure of … political or intellectual leaders to meet the challenges of change." [p.92] Nature often brings on severe challenges, causing widespread death and destruction of what we have constructed. The Durants fear that severe inequality "may compel a government to choose between enfeebling the economy with a dole and running the risk of riot and revolution." [p.92] Common patterns emerge as one studies history:

"A failure of leadership may allow a state to weaken itself with internal strife. At the end of the process a decisive defeat in war may bring a final blow, or barbarian invasion from without may combine with barbarism welling up from within to bring the civilization to a close." [p.93]

Was this a warning to us in the social democracies? The Durants express doubt that scientific discoveries will consistently come to our rescue. They wonder whether our species has in some ways been weakened by our successes against ancient diseases. And, they worry that "our emancipation from theology" has not been replaced by a strong moral compass. They ask: "Have we given ourselves more freedom than our intelligence can digest?" [p.96] The philosopher Mortimer J. Adler would ask, similarly, whether our laws and societal norms embrace the exercise of freedom to the detriment of liberty. Locke would question whether our laws and societal norms secure and protect licence at the expense of liberty. These distinctions escape the attention of these two historians.

The Durants were clearly remarkable scholars possessed of remarkable intellect. Yet, even they never came to a clear understanding of what constitutes just socio-political arrangements and institutions. In the end, they satisfy themselves with the hope that every society will eventually devote sufficient resources to "the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man's understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life." [p.101]

In 1977, Will Durant responded as follows to a question from the press about his life's work and what he had learned:

"One gift of age is reconciliation. You learn to accept and forgive. You perceive that since the basic challenges of life remain the same from generation to generation, from century to century, our basic responses remain the same; consequently progress repeatedly improves our means without altering our ends. You don't expect human nature to change appreciably in the foreseeable future, and you are grateful that it is not worse. …After studying history for sixty years, and coming out of it with my hair singled with wars, massacres, Inquisitions, superstitions, famines, and plagues, I am grateful that I have not yet been burned at the stake.

"Every effort has been made to poison me with smog, antibiotics, and radiation, and I may be canceled out at any moment by some marvelous bomb; but I will take my chances with the present as against the past. I believe that the same intelligence that split the atom will find some way of ending our blundering and blustering hostilities with the mutual consideration and brave compromises indispensable to peace." [A Dual Autobiography, [p.343]

Forty-six years later, too many of us seem to have stepped backward to embrace moral relativism over universal human rights. Clearly, the lessons of history have not been sufficiently learned by enough of us to purge cruelty, torture, murder, barbarism, racial and ethnic hatreds, intolerance and privilege in all its forms from everyday life.