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villyidol's review against another edition
Always difficult to say whether it makes sense to read such an old book about human history. I enjoyed it in the beginning, but soon some doubts crept in. At some point it became a back and forth between enjoying and disliking the text; nicely illustrated by the following paragraph:
Intellect is therefore a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and destructive power. Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. 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 youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.
What a rollercoaster. I think the main problem here is just that this is a book written by old people with a dated perspective.
I could look past this— to some extent. But a book of merely 120 pages of course is not going to provide a comprehensive overview of human history. And this is also not what this book is about. It’s about what we have learned from all of it (hence the title). And I’m not sure it makes sense for me to read such a book when it was written by someone that, in my humble opinion, doesn’t understand human nature. This table here of positive and negative human instincts was the nail in the coffin:
DNF at 24%
I did read the last chapter, though, because a GR-friend of mine said it would be good; and it was. But I think I’d prefer to read a book written by someone with a more modern view on humanity and human history.
marcusbuffett's review against another edition
3.0
Started off solid but the context/examples really thinned out as the book continued. It’s hard to believe a claim about the lessons history teaches us when a single civilization is the basis of the argument. Some sections were much stronger than others in this regard, like the inequality section.
heyfarahey's review
4.0
Pultizer Prize-winning historians Will and Ariel Durant spent their entire lives studying and writing about history. The Lessons of History is a distillation of all of their works and lessons learned in one, short 120-pages book. They presented a crux on how history events are affected/related by/with several factors/themes. The factors/themes include biology, race, morals, religion, economics, government and war and several examples were quoted to support their conclusion. It's short, concise, profound and poetic in parts. What follows is some of my favorite takeaways from the book:
1. So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it — perhaps as much more as the roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. 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.
2. Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple. A cynic remarked that "you mustn't enthrone ignorance just because there is so much of it." However, ignorance is not long enthroned, for it lends itself to the manipulation by the forces that mold public opinion. It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that "you can't fool all the people all the time," but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
3. Since inequality grows in an expanding economy, a society may find itself divided between a cultured minority and a majority of men and women too unfortunate by nature or circumstance to inherit or develop standards of excellence and taste. As this majority grows it acts as a cultural drag upon the minority; its ways of speech, dress, recreation, feeling, judgment, and thought spread upward, and internal barbarization by the majority is part of the price that the minority pays for its control of educational and economic opportunity.
4. Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.
1. So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it — perhaps as much more as the roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. 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.
2. Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple. A cynic remarked that "you mustn't enthrone ignorance just because there is so much of it." However, ignorance is not long enthroned, for it lends itself to the manipulation by the forces that mold public opinion. It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that "you can't fool all the people all the time," but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
3. Since inequality grows in an expanding economy, a society may find itself divided between a cultured minority and a majority of men and women too unfortunate by nature or circumstance to inherit or develop standards of excellence and taste. As this majority grows it acts as a cultural drag upon the minority; its ways of speech, dress, recreation, feeling, judgment, and thought spread upward, and internal barbarization by the majority is part of the price that the minority pays for its control of educational and economic opportunity.
4. Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.
toddgrotenhuis's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
fast-paced
3.0
This is the abbreviated accumulated commentary from the Durants’ careers. While there were some very interesting quotable tidbits in here (which I don’t have since I listened to this book), it was mostly disappointing due to being largely unsubstantiated within the text. Some of the lessons are not showing their age well, either.
aych's review
4.0
"The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints."