The Lessons of History

by Will Durant

Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A society in which all potential abilities

are allowed to develop and function will have a survival advantage in the competition of groups.

she (here meaning Nature as the process of birth, variation, competition, selection, and survival) sees to it that a nation with a low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group.

so the superior organization, discipline, morality, fidelity, and fertility of Catholics may cancel the Protestant Reformation and the French Enlightenment.

Assumes ideologies pass from generation to generation. However, ideologies also obey natures laws of reproduction and survival of the fittest.

it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type. The Englishman does not so much make English civilization as it makes him;

“Racial” antipathies

are also generated, perhaps predominantly, by differences of acquired culture—of language, dress, habits, morals, or religion.

There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education. A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a c...

peoples have contributed to it; it is our common h...

No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

A little knowledge of history stresses the variability of moral codes, and concludes that they are negligible because they differ in time and place, and sometimes contradict each other. A larger knowledge stresses the universality of moral codes, and concludes to their necessity.

Even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for religion, since he sees it functioning, and seemingly indispensable, in every land and age.

Religion became the propitiatory worship of these forces through offerings, sacrifice, incantation, and prayer. Only when priests used these fears and rituals to support morality and law did religion become a force vital and rival to the state.

That states should attempt to dispense with theological supports is one of the many crucial experiments that bewilder our brains and unsettle our ways today.

Catholicism has sacrificed the adherence of the intellectual community, and suffers increasing defections through contact with secular education and literature; but it wins converts from souls wearied with the uncertainty of reason, and from others hopeful that the Church will stem internal disorder and the Communist wave.

One lesson of history is that religion has many lives, and a habit of resurrection.

In America the rationalism of the Founding Fathers gave place to a religious revival in the nineteenth century.

Generally religion and puritanism prevail in periods when the laws are feeble and

morals must bear the burden of maintaining social order; skepticism and paganism (other factors being equal) progress as the rising power of law and government permits the decline of the church, the family, and morality without basically endangering the stability of the state.

There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

they have had the help of religion in keeping social order.

“As long as there is poverty there will be gods.”

Not only economic poverty, but poverty of reason

“the disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances… seemed possible but despotic power.”

Good sense prevailed; moderate elements secured the election of Solon, a businessman of aristocratic lineage, to the supreme archonship. He devaluated the currency, thereby easing the burden of all debtors (though he himself was a creditor); he reduced all personal debts, and ended imprisonment for debt; he canceled arrears for taxes and mortgage interest; he established a graduated income tax that made the rich pay at a rate twelve times that required of the poor; he reorganized the courts on a more popular basis; and he arranged that the sons of those who had died in war for Athens

should be brought up and educated at the government’s expense. The rich protested that his measures were outright confiscation; the radicals complained that he had not redivided the land; but within a generation almost all agreed that his reforms had saved Athens from revolution.

The government of the United States, in 1933–52 and 1960–65, followed Solon’s peaceful methods, and accomplished a moderate and pacifying redistribution; perhaps someone had studied history. The upper classes in America cursed, complied, and resumed the concentration of wealth.

all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.

The capitalist, of course, has fulfilled a creative function in history: he has gathered the savings of the people into productive capital by the promise of dividends or interest; he has financed the mechanization of industry and agriculture, and the rationalization of distribution; and the result has been such a flow of goods from producer to consumer as history has never seen before.

Meanwhile competition compels the capitalist to exhaustive labor, and his products to ever-rising excellence.

Egypt under the Ptolemies (323 B.C. – 30 B.C.)

The revenue of this system made the Ptolemaic the richest state of the time.

Soon, however, the pharaohs took to expensive wars, and after 246 B.C. they gave themselves to drink and venery, allowing the administration of the state and the economy to fall into the hands of rascals who ground every possible penny out of the poor.

order was not restored until Octavius brought Egypt under Roman rule (30 B.C.).

The socialism of Diocletian was a war economy, made possible by fear of foreign attack. Other factors equal, internal liberty varies inversely as external danger.

Diocletian’s expanding, expensive, and corrupt bureaucracy.

taxation rose to such heights that men lost incentive to work or earn, and an erosive contest began between lawyers finding devices to evade taxes and la...

The longest-lasting regime of socialism yet known to history was set up by the Incas in what we now call Peru, at some time in the thirteenth century.

The Revolution took a Communistic form because the new state was challenged by internal disorder and external attack; the people reacted as any nation will react under siege—it put aside all individual freedom until order and security could be restored. Here too Communism was a war economy.

the third condition would be a synthesis of capitalism and socialism; and to this

reconciliation the Western world visibly moves.

The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality.

from the accession of Nerva to the death of Marcus Aurelius. Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.”54 In that brilliant age, when Rome’s subjects complimented themselves on being under her rule, monarchy was adoptive: the emperor transmitted his authority not to his offspring but to the ablest man he could find; he adopted this man as his son, trained him in the functions of government, and gradually surrendered to him the reins of power. The system worked well, partly because neither Trajan nor Hadrian had a son, and the sons of Antoninus Pius died in childhood. Marcus Aurelius had a son, Commodus, who succeeded him because the philosopher failed to name another heir; soon chaos was king.*

If the majority of abilities is contained in a minority of men, minority government is as inevitable as the concentration of wealth; the majority can do no more than periodically throw out one minority and set up another.

But in most instances the effects achieved by the revolution would apparently have come without it through the gradual compulsion of economic developments.

How long for economic-driven changes vs revolutionary changes? Examples?

America would have become the dominant factor in the English-speaking world without any revolution.

What support for this statement? History without the revolution....still a British power? How did recent nations gain independence from Britain? How long under imperial control?

the sanity of a group lies in the continuity of its traditions;

violent revolutions do not so much redistribute wealth as destroy it.

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction;… dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.

The poorer citizens captured control of the Assembly, and began to vote the money of the rich into the coffers of the state, for redistribution among the people through governmental enterprises and subsidies.