The Lessons of History

The Durants wrote this short book after completing the eleven volumes of The Story of Civilization, extracting what they considered the recurring patterns. It runs about a hundred pages across thirteen chapters covering history and biology, race, character, morals, religion, economics, socialism, government, war, growth and decay, and progress.

Their central positions are stated plainly. Competition is the first biological lesson of history, cooperation is the second and exists to make competition more effective, and the third is that life must breed. On economics they argue that the concentration of wealth is natural and recurring, and that history repeats a cycle in which concentration reaches a breaking point and is relieved either by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution redistributing poverty. On government they conclude that democracy is the most difficult form because it requires the widest intelligence, and that most societies have oscillated between forms according to conditions.

On morals they argue that moral codes vary with economic conditions, shifting through hunting, agricultural and industrial phases, so that condemning present moral change misreads it as decay when it is adaptation. On war they state that war is a constant of history and has not diminished with civilisation.

The book is a set of assertions rather than an argument with evidence, which is what its authors intended after eleven volumes of evidence elsewhere. The treatment of race and biology reflects mid-century thinking and reads badly now. The claims are broad enough to accommodate many counterexamples. Investors cite the wealth concentration chapter most often. Read it as compressed judgment from two people who read enormously, not as demonstrated history.