Durant, W., & Durant, A. (1968). The Lessons of History. Simon and Schuster.
Chapter 1 – Hesitations
Chapter 2 – History and the Earth
Chapter 3 – Biology and History
- Life is competition.
- Life is selection.
- Inequality is an innate part of life, and it tends to grow as civilization increases in complexity
- Freedom and inequality are sworn enemies. When you leave people free, inequality increases
- Utopias where equality of outcomes are rampant are doomed to fail. The best one can hope for is an equality of legal justice and educational opportunity
- Life must breed
- If population growth overtakes food supply, nature uses famine, pestilence and war to restore equilibrium
Chapter 4 – Race and History
Chapter 5 – Character and History
- One lifetime isn’t sufficient to dismiss societal customs and institutions that contain generational wisdom
- Conservatives resist change, radicals push for change. Both are good for the development of society
Chapter 6 – Morals and History
- Written history is often different from lived history
Chapter 7 – Religion and History
- Masses desire a religion rich in miracles, mysteries and myth
- Nature doesn’t agree with our human conceptualization of good and evil. What is good is what survives
- If another war affects our civilization as it currently is, the church will be humanity’s saving grace
- Religion and puritanism prevails when morals maintain social order; skepticism and paganism prevails when the power of law arises and government permits decline of the church and family without undermining the stability of the state
- No society has ever maintained moral life without religion
Chapter 8 – Economics and History
- Roman Empire was invaded by barbarians because agricultural population which produced warriors who fought to obtain land had been replaced by slaves working on farms owned by one man
- History is inflationary and money is the last thing a wise man will hoard
- Every economic system relies on some form of profit to incentivize productivity
- Except in war, men are usually judged by their ability to produce
- When the strength in the number of poor rivals the strength in ability of the rich, an unstable equilibrium occurs which is often resolved via either legislation distributing wealth, or revolution distributing poverty
- Concentration of wealth is natural and is periodically changed by violent or peaceful partial redistribution
Chapter 9 – Socialism and History
- All other things being equal, internal liberty is inversely related to external danger
- Marx application of the Hegelian dialectic to economic systems was incomplete. Instead of the dialectic leading to the complete control of socialism, it should have been seen as: thesis – capitalism; antithesis – socialism; synthesis – a hybrid of capitalism and socialism
Chapter 10 – Government and History
- Leadership by a majority is often impossible since the majority is seldom organized around towards a unified course of action. Leadership by a minority is consequently unavoidable and revolts from the majority only leads to the replacement of one minority by another.
- Aristocrats are more concerned with the art of life, while artists are devoted to the life of art
- The sanity of the individual depends on the continuity of his memories, while the sanity of the community depends on the continuity of tradition. Disruptions in this continuity leads to neuroticism at the individual and communal levels as the case may be
- Wealth arises, not by the accumulation of goods or the value of paper money or checks, but by maintaining control over procedures of production and exchange, as well as building trust in men and institutions. As a consequence, revolutions destroy, rather than redistribute wealth
- The only true revolution is one that leads to the development of the mind and character
- The excessive increase of anything leads to a reaction in the opposite reaction
- Because of human nature and the impersonal nature of economic markets, advances in economic development leads to a higher demand in superior skills which ultimately leads to the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of few
- Education has spread, but intelligence is retarded by the fertility of the simple
- Although men cannot be equal, their access to opportunity can be made more nearly equal
Chapter 11 – History and War
- The causes of war between nations are the same as the causes of competition between individuals. The state has the natural instincts of the individual, without the restraints of the individual. That is, the individual can submit to moral and legal codes, while the state has nothing restraining its tendencies
Chapter 12 – Growth and Decay
- In organic periods, men build; in critical periods, men destroy
- Organic periods are characterized by centripetal organization where culture unifies into a coherent artistic form; critical periods are characterized by centrifugal disorganization where culture and tradition decompose and ends in the chaos of individualism
- What determines whether a challenge will be met by a society is the presence of initiative and creative individuals with the clarity of mind and energy of will to make effective responses in new situations
- When inequality grows in an expanding economy, its society finds itself divided between a cultured minority and a majority unable to develop sophisticated standards of excellence and taste
Chapter 13 – Is Progress Real?
- Rather than asking whether one generation is better than the other, we should be asking whether the average man has increased his capacity to control the conditions of his life
- Education is not merely the memorization of facts, but the transmission of our mental, moral, technical and aesthetic heritage to as many people as possible for the enlargement of man’s understanding, control, and enjoyment of life
