Eight Lessons of History

Husband and wife team Will and Ariel Durant spent forty years writing their celebrated eleven-volume history The Story of Civilization. In the process they made note of the recurring patterns of human behaviour so that they might illuminate “future probabilities, the nature of man and the conduct of states”. The result was an essay entitled The Lessons of History.

There’s nothing like a few thousand years of history to put today’s dilemmas into some perspective, so here’s a summary of the top...