The Lessons of History

The Lessons of History is Will and Ariel Durant's distillation of a lifetime spent writing their eleven-volume The Story of Civilization. In barely a hundred pages, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historians step back from the detail of events to ask a larger question: what, if anything, does five thousand years of recorded human experience actually teach us?

Across a dozen short chapters, the Durants examine history through successive lenses -- geography, biology, race, character, morals, religion, economics, socialism, government, war, and the rise and decay of civilizations. Their conclusions are bracing and often unsentimental: human nature changes little, inequality is natural and recurring, freedom and equality pull against each other, war has been the rule rather than the exception, and wealth perpetually concentrates until it is redistributed by reform or revolution.

Written with the clarity and epigrammatic force that made the Durants popular historians for a general audience, the book is less a chronicle than a meditation on recurring patterns. It offers no easy optimism and no despair, arguing instead that the chief lesson of history is the value of learning from it -- so that we may "bear reality patiently, and respect one another's delusions." A compact classic of popular history and philosophy.