This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Lessons of History" by Will Durant and Ariel Durant. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Do you wonder what we can learn from history? What can it tell us about the world and ourselves today?
In The Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant present the most compelling patterns they found in their extensive research of human history. These patterns teach us important lessons about human nature, society, economics, government, religion, war, and civilization itself.
Read more to see what we can learn from history.
What We Can Learn From History
What lessons do 5,000 years of history hold? Are we in truly novel times, or do we face the same problems that the Romans and Egyptians faced 2,000 years ago?
Will and Ariel Durant, Pulitzer Prize-winning historians, are famed for writing The Story of Civilization, a massive 9766-page, 11-volume treatise of the entirety of Western history. They compiled the most important patterns in this book, The Lessons of History. Ray Dalio, the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund Bridgewater, considers this one of his three must-read books.
The Durants are known for writing many volumes of history. With this book, they aimed to point out what we can learn from history.
What History Teaches Us About Equality
The laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history—humans are subject to the trials of selection and the struggle for existence, like all other animals. The group and nation merely inherits the will of the individual—after all, societies are made up of individuals.
Human nature has largely been unchanged throughout history—the means change, but the motives stay the same. The Lessons of History includes what we can learn from history about equality.
Humans are born with different abilities, and so inequality among humans is a natural consequence. This is magnified by the complexity of civilization, as each invention is seized by the strong to make themselves stronger, and the weak weaker.
- Freedom and equality are fundamentally opposed. If people are given freedom, their natural differences in ability will materialize in different outcomes. If people were forced to show equal outcomes and equal abilities, this reduces freedom.
- The best that egalitarians can hope for in a free society is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity.
- Society is made up of the imitative majority and the innovating minority. History in general is the “conflict of minorities” and the majority “applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment.”
What History Teaches Us About Social Stability
Culture, customs, and morals provide a useful social stabilizing force, and a dampening force on innovation. What practices survive to present day have survived over time because they worked. New changes need to be put through the crucible of criticism before overthrowing the result of centuries of experiment.
What History Teaches Us About Morals
Morals change with the times as a reflection of what is necessary to grow and survive.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Lessons of History summary :
- What we can learn from studying 5,000 years of history
- How human nature hasn’t changed over thousands of years
- Why all civilizations, including ours, fall, and why we shouldn’t cry about it
I am not sure I agree. We are here because of the success of our past which is our parents back through to antiquity. My understanding is as we near the end of civilization as is obvious to a small minority the majority remain ignorant and politically convenient. If we could learn from history and evolution we would learn that the minority rule and who to follow.