History Books!

A Symphony of History: Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization
https://www.theobjectivestandard.co...story-will-durants-the-story-of-civilization/

Eleven years ago, toward the end of my undergraduate years as a philosophy major at the University of Virginia, I was feeling dissatisfied with my knowledge of history. I had taken several history courses but wanted more. Because my immediate interest was ancient Greece, I decided to try a friend’s recommendation, The Life of Greece by Will Durant. Finding the book at the library, I was surprised to see that it was but one volume in a massive series called The Story of Civilization—eleven substantial volumes spanning two feet of shelving.1 Although I wanted to learn more about history, I wasn’t sure I wanted to learn that much. It turned out that I did. Reading those volumes—sometimes poring over large portions of them multiple times—would be one of the most enlightening and enjoyable experiences of my life.

First published between 1935 and 1975, The Story of Civilization is a work of great and enduring value. Exceptional for its masterful prose as well as its size and scope, the Story is a powerful combination of style and substance. An author of rare literary talents, Durant (1885–1981) won a wide readership through his ability to make history intriguing, lively, and dramatic. His volumes, intended for the general reader and each designed to be readable apart from the others, have sold millions of copies. Some even became best sellers, and the tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won a Pulitzer Prize. Individual volumes have been translated into more than twenty
languages

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Grand Overviews and a Philosophic Theme

As one would expect from so large a work, the Story contains a wealth of concrete and detailed information. But to understand history well, one must learn more than details. One must also be able to see the big picture, the forest and not just the trees. Durant is a master at helping his readers to see the forest. His skill in this regard is showcased most dramatically in what I call his “grand overviews.” In such passages, which appear perhaps several times in each volume and which range from a paragraph to a few pages in length, Durant covers, in an elevated style, centuries or millennia of history and often identifies the deep, philosophic trends that run through them. Consider, for instance, the following passage from the epilogue of volume 6, The Reformation:

“[D]espite its original intolerance, the Reformation rendered two services to the Enlightenment: it broke the authority of dogma, generated a hundred sects that would formerly have died at the stake, and allowed among them such virile debate that reason was finally recognized as the bar before which all sects had to plead their case unless they were armed with irresistible physical force. In that pleading, that attack and defense, all sects were weakened, all dogmas; and a century after Luther’s exaltation of faith Francis Bacon proclaimed that knowledge is power. In that same seventeenth century thinkers like Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke offered philosophy as a substitute or basis for religion. In the eighteenth century Helvetius, Holbach, and La Mettrie proclaimed open atheism, and Voltaire was called a bigot because he believed in God. This was the challenge that Christianity faced, in a crisis far more profound than the debate between the Catholic and the Protestant version of the medieval creed. The effort of Christianity to survive Copernicus and Darwin is the basic drama of the last three hundred years. What are the struggles of states and classes beside that Armageddon of the soul?”12 (vol. 6, pp. 939–40)

The fundamental clash between reason and faith, alternately described by Durant as a conflict between rationalism and mysticism, philosophy and religion, and science and religion, is one of the Story’s dominant themes. In the following overview from volume 2, The Life of Greece, Durant sees this theme spanning the entire history of the West:

Hardly any of these [nations] surrounding [ancient Greece] cared for what to the Greeks was the very essence of life—liberty to be, to think, to speak, and to do. Every one of these peoples except the Phoenicians lived under despots, surrendered their souls to superstition, and had small experience of the stimulus of freedom or the life of reason. . . . In the end the two conceptions of life—the mysticism of the East and the rationalism of the West—would fight for the body and soul of Greece. . . . The alternate victories of these . . . philosophies in the vast pendulum of history constitute the essential biography of Western civilization. (vol. 2, p. 70)

This is history in the grand manner. It is the story of man’s past told in essentials, through bold and deep philosophic generalizations.
(Continued)

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Flying Pig said:

I'm not sure that academic books make the best introductions. They're often quite inaccessible, not just in the sense of using long words but also in addressing issues that you only really want to know once you have a bit more of the basics in place. Personally, I look out for books on the everyday market which have won prizes (the Wolfson Prize hasn't let me down so far) or received very good reviews. Penguin seem to be quite good at picking up scholarly but introductory-level titles.

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Flying Pig said:

We really need to re-do the top recommendations thread: quite a few good books came out of it that never actually made it into the master post. Unfortunately we're at a low point for historians at the moment.

I picked up Norman Davies' Vanished Kingdoms, about European countries that no longer exist, a few days ago. Several I had never heard of before (can anybody else say that they know anything about Alt Clud, Sabaudia or Rosenau?) so should be interesting.

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Cheezy the Wiz said:

That's not hard. GG&S is the kind of rigid environmental determinism that accidentally slides into apologia for imperialism. Looking at the causes of long-term trends outside of human decision-making [which is kind of the pet project of the Annales historians and their kin] is and can be interesting insofar as it helps to understand how and why the civilizations that rise and fall in those areas have the priorities they do and make the decisions that they do. However, making the leap to using it as a basis to understand the origins of the modern world independent of human agency is the same thing as saying that Europeans were destined to rule and everyone else was destined to be ruled. And that effectively absolves imperialism of its terrible crimes.

If you want some good history written with those concerns, though [long-term trends], I recommend Fernand Braudel's, well, everything. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II is pretty great, as is his three-part "Civilization & Capitalism 15-18th Century," titled The Wheels of Commerce, The Perspective of the World, and The Structures of Everyday Life, respectively.

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Flying Pig said:

CFC's favourite work of military history seems to be Hew Strachan's The First World War, which is excellent.

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