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The Story of Civilization #10
Rousseau and Revolution
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1092 pages, Hardcover
Published July 1, 1967
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About the author
Will Durant
842 books2,987 followersWilliam James Durant was a prolific American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for the 11-volume The Story of Civilization, written in collaboration with his wife Ariel and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for his book, The Story of Philosophy, written in 1926, which was considered "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy."
They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1967 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.
They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1967 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.
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June 20, 2022
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The tenth volume of The Story of Civilization covers the events from the Seven Years’ War up to the French Revolution.
The triumph of imagination over reality is one of the humors of history.
This volume centers on Les philosophes, specifically on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his life, his ideology and his contemporaries such as Voltaire, Goethe, Kant, Haydn, Gluck, Johnson, Goya, Queen Maria Theresa of Austria, King Frederick II of Prussia, Empress Catherine II of Russia and many other well-known and not so well-known personalities of the 18th century, anatomizing the circumstances and events which led to the Revolution of 1789.
Nothing is lost, but everything has to be paid for.
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The tenth volume of The Story of Civilization covers the events from the Seven Years’ War up to the French Revolution.
The triumph of imagination over reality is one of the humors of history.
This volume centers on Les philosophes, specifically on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his life, his ideology and his contemporaries such as Voltaire, Goethe, Kant, Haydn, Gluck, Johnson, Goya, Queen Maria Theresa of Austria, King Frederick II of Prussia, Empress Catherine II of Russia and many other well-known and not so well-known personalities of the 18th century, anatomizing the circumstances and events which led to the Revolution of 1789.
Nothing is lost, but everything has to be paid for.
August 30, 2018
Finally we come to the Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of the series. Even compared to the other excellent volumes of The Story, this one is notable for the range of brilliant actors who march across its stage. In art we have Canaletto, Tiepolo, Houdon, Goya; in music Scarlatti, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart (and Rousseau); in literature Schiller, Goethe, Sterne (and Rousseau); in biography Casanova, Boswell, Johnson (and Rousseau); in economics Smith; in history Gibbon; in political theory Burke (and Rousseau); in philosophy Beccaria, Vico, Kant (and Rousseau); and for Enlightened despots we have Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, and Joseph II. What other author offers such a feast for admiration?
Having come to this book after finishing William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I find myself amazed once again at Durant’s ability to present history. Though Shirer is no mean writer himself, Durant is infinitely easier and more pleasant to read; and despite this book’s hefty bulk—one of the biggest in the series—it is so enjoyable and covers so many topics that it hardly feels taxing. Granted, Durant achieves this fluid grace by writing something that is arguably not history, but rather an interconnected series of biographies with a bit of context thrown in. The industrial revolution is dealt with in a few pages, the storming of Bastille seems like an afterthought, while Robert Burns is covered and quoted in detail.
For my part I prefer that Durant write this way, since as a historian, strictly speaking, he is weak and unconvincing. By this I mean that he is not adept at showing how events developed from what came before; and he seems bored when talking of causes, factors, trends, processes. But that is not the point of these books. It is not history for historians—amateur or professional—but rather history for travelers and readers. Durant weaves the stories of famous writers, painters, sculptors, architects, philosophers, and scientists into a fascinating tapestry that adds crucial context and meaning to their works. I always come away from Durant with more books to read and more places to see.
Having come to this book after finishing William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I find myself amazed once again at Durant’s ability to present history. Though Shirer is no mean writer himself, Durant is infinitely easier and more pleasant to read; and despite this book’s hefty bulk—one of the biggest in the series—it is so enjoyable and covers so many topics that it hardly feels taxing. Granted, Durant achieves this fluid grace by writing something that is arguably not history, but rather an interconnected series of biographies with a bit of context thrown in. The industrial revolution is dealt with in a few pages, the storming of Bastille seems like an afterthought, while Robert Burns is covered and quoted in detail.
For my part I prefer that Durant write this way, since as a historian, strictly speaking, he is weak and unconvincing. By this I mean that he is not adept at showing how events developed from what came before; and he seems bored when talking of causes, factors, trends, processes. But that is not the point of these books. It is not history for historians—amateur or professional—but rather history for travelers and readers. Durant weaves the stories of famous writers, painters, sculptors, architects, philosophers, and scientists into a fascinating tapestry that adds crucial context and meaning to their works. I always come away from Durant with more books to read and more places to see.
December 20, 2023
What a way to end a century: Washington crossing the Delaware. Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette. Insane George III on the throne of England. Mozart, Goethe, Gibbon, Johnson. Peter the Great. Voltaire. Clive of India. Bonaparte. And, Will and Ariel Durant manage to make all of it seem trivial! Revoke their Pulitzer Prize at once. This voluminous but not luminous 1,000-page plus book devotes more ink to Boswell's venereal disease than to the London working class. Rousseau's mysterious UTI gets more mileage than the Seven Years' War. The slave trade is sugar-coated. The parts of ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION that are true are not good, and the good parts are not true. Banalities about Russia ("Pious and Barbaric, mighty yet unfrightening"), and stupid generalizations on "the Spanish character" ("devout and courageous") are paired with laundry lists of the causes of the English Industrial Revolution and why France faced a revolution in 1789. This is a travelogue to wow the middlebrow, not serious history or literature. I want my Pulitzer right now!
December 11, 2019
One more to go. I'll write my review in the next few.
May 3, 2023
Rousseau and Revolution is the penultimate volume of the Story of Civilization series. By the time I finished I had highlighted almost three hundred passages, and when copied into a draft review they totaled 70,000 characters, far above Goodreads’s maximum of 15,000. As such I had to decide what to focus on, and since this was an age of great men, I kept those citations, though it meant leaving out the Durants’ informative and insightful commentaries on history, music, art, architecture, politics, societies, religion, and more. Like all great history books the authors explain the past in a way that illuminates the reader’s present, as if they could have anticipated the world we are living in today. As I have done with the previous volumes of this series, I am going to let them speak for themselves.
Rousseau
Rousseau, said Mme. de Staël, “invented nothing, but he set everything on fire.” First of all, of course, he was the mother of the Romantic movement.
Rousseau had expressed a problem that appears in every advanced society. Are the fruits of technology worth the haste, strains, sights, noises, and smells of an industrialized life? Does enlightenment undermine morality? Is it wise to follow science to mutual destruction, and philosophy to disillusionment with every fortifying hope?
There is a social contract, says Rousseau, not as a pledge of the ruled to obey the ruler (as in Hobbes’s Leviathan), but as an agreement of individuals to subordinate their judgment, rights, and powers to the needs and judgment of their community as a whole. Each person implicitly enters into such a contract by accepting the protection of the communal laws. The sovereign power in any state lies not in any ruler—individual or corporate—but in the general will of the community; and that sovereignty, though it may be delegated in part and for a time, can never be surrendered.
“With what simplicity I should have demonstrated that man is by nature good, and that only our institutions have made him bad!” That last sentence was to be the theme song of his life, and those tears that streaked his vest were among the headwaters of the Romantic movement in France and Germany.
Emotionally Rousseau remained always a child, resenting conventions, prohibitions, laws; but when he reasoned he came to realize that within the restrictions necessary for social order many freedoms can remain; and he ended by perceiving that in a community liberty is not the victim but the product of law.
Rousseau perceived that the Archbishop was particularly offended by the doctrine that men are born good, or at least not evil; Beaumont realized that if this were true, if man is not tainted at birth by inheriting the guilt of Adam and Eve, then the doctrine of atonement by Christ would fall; and this doctrine was the very heart of the Christian creed.
Voltaire
He did not share Rousseau’s enthusiasm for equality; he knew that all men are created unfree and unequal.
The most profound and lasting influence of Voltaire has been on religious belief. Through him and his associates France bypassed the Reformation, and went directly from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Perhaps that is one reason why the change was so violent; there was no pause at Protestantism.
To Voltaire, more than to any other individual, we owe the religious toleration that now precariously prevails in Europe and North America.
He accepted monarchy as the natural form of government. “Why is almost the whole earth governed by monarchs? … The honest answer is: Because men are rarely worthy of governing themselves.”
Voltaire’s politics stemmed partly from a suspicion that many people would be incapable of digesting education even if it were offered them. He referred to “the thinking portion of the human race—i.e., the hundred-thousandth part.”
He saw in the Old Testament hardly anything but a record of murder, lechery, and wholesale assassination. The Book of Proverbs seemed to him “a collection of trivial, sordid, incoherent maxims, without taste, without selection, and without design.”
He was tolerant of sexual irregularity, but rose in fine fury against injustice, fanaticism, persecution, hypocrisy, and the cruelties of the penal law. He defined morality as “doing good to mankind”; for the rest he laughed at prohibitions, and enjoyed wine, woman, and song in philosophical moderation.
Voltaire marked his copy of [The Social Contract] with marginal rejoinders; so, on Rousseau’s prescription of death for active unbelief: “All coercion on dogma is abominable.”
Voltaire was as sensitive and excitable as Jean-Jacques, but usually he thought it bad manners to let passion discolor his art; he sensed in Rousseau’s appeal to feeling and instinct an individualistic anarchic irrationalism that would begin with revolt and end with religion.
Voltaire: “All history, in short, is little else than a … collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes.”
Whereas Rousseau’s moral influence was toward tenderness, sentiment, and the restoration of family life and marital fidelity, the moral influence of Voltaire was toward humanity and justice, toward the cleansing of French law and custom from legal abuses and barbaric cruelties.
Kant
He inherited the subtle psychology of Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume, and used it in an attempt to save science from Hume and religion from Voltaire.
he offered to philosophy and psychology the most painstaking analysis of the knowledge process that history has ever known.
Kant inverted the usual procedure: instead of deriving the moral sense and code from God (as the theologians had done), he deduced God from the moral sense.
God is not a substance existing outside me, but merely a moral relation within me. … The categorical imperative does not assume a substance issuing its commands from on high, conceived therefore as outside me, but is a commandment or a prohibition of my own reason.
Kant already laid down his basic theses: that space and time are not objective or sensible objects, but are forms of perception inherent in the nature and structure of the mind; and that the mind is no passive recipient and product of sensations, but is an active agent—with inherent modes and laws of operation—for transforming sensations into ideas.
All attempts to demonstrate the truth or falsity of religion by pure reason were, to Kant, forms of dogmatism; and he condemned as “the dogmatism of metaphysics” any system of science or philosophy or theology that had not first submitted to a critical examination of reason itself.
Perception is sensation interpreted by the inherent forms of space and time; knowledge is perception transformed by the categories into a judgment or an idea. Experience is not a passive acceptance of objective impressions upon our senses; it is the product of the mind actively working upon the raw material of sensation.
Every individual (Kant argues) has a conscience, a sense of duty, a consciousness of a commanding moral law. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe: the starry heavens above, and the moral law within.”
The first Critique had tried to bring all ideas under the a priori universal categories; the second had sought to bring all ethical concepts under a universal a priori moral sense; the third undertook to find a priori principles for our aesthetic judgments—of order, beauty, or sublimity in nature or art.
How did the “radical evil in human nature” begin? Not through “original sin”; “surely of all the explanations of the spread and propagation of this evil through all members and generations of our race, the most inept is that which describes it as descending to us as an inheritance from our first parents.”
He distrusted the wild impulses of unchained men, and feared universal suffrage as the empowerment of unlettered majorities over progressive minorities and nonconforming individuals.
Goethe
Goethe was especially averse to the Christian emphasis on sin and contrition; he preferred to sin without remorse.
He had no enthusiasm for democracy; if ever such a system should actually be practiced it would be the sovereignty of simplicity, ignorance, superstition, and barbarity.
He distrusted democracy, for “nothing is worse than active ignorance”; and “it is unthinkable that wisdom should ever be popular.”
Mephistopheles (who is not Satan but only Satan’s philosopher) is the devil of denial and doubt, to whom all aspiration is nonsense, all beauty a skeleton wearing skin.
Goethe recognized the need many souls have for supernatural support, but he felt no such need until his final years. “He has religion [enough] who has art or science; who has not art or science needs religion.”
“Resolutely pagan” in religion and morals, he had no sense of sin, felt no need of a god dying to atone for him, and resented all talk of the cross. He wrote to Lavater, August 9, 1782: “I am no anti-Christian, no un-Christian, but very decidedly a non-Christian.”
Abuses should be reformed, but without violence or precipitancy; revolutions cost more than they are worth, and usually end where they began.
“No revolution is the fault of the people, but always the fault of the government.”
Frederick the Great
He agreed with Voltaire in believing that the “masses” bred too fast, and worked too hard, to allow time for real education. Disillusionment with their theology would only incline them to political violence. “The Enlightenment,” said Frederick, “is a light from heaven for those who stand on the heights, and a destructive firebrand for the masses.”
“it seems to me that if this universe had been made by a benevolent being, he should have made us happier than we are. … The human mind is weak; more than three fourths of mankind are made for subjection to the most absurd fanaticism. Fear of the Devil and of hell fascinates their eyes, and they detest the wise man who tries to enlighten them....”
Frederick concluded that to allow governments to be dominated by the majority would be disastrous. A democracy, to survive, must be, like other governments, a minority persuading a majority to let itself be led by a minority.
He did not share the philosophes’ trust in the enlightenment of mankind. In the race between reason and superstition he predicted the victory of superstition.
Having accepted religion as a human need, Frederick made his peace with it, and protected all its peaceful forms with full toleration.
He concluded that history is an excellent teacher, with few pupils. “It is in the nature of man that no one learns from experience. The follies of the fathers are lost on their children; each generation has to commit its own. Whoever reads history with application will perceive that the same scenes are often repeated, and that one need only change the names of the actors.”
Edward Gibbon
“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
How had Christianity made for the decline of Rome? First, by sapping the faith of the people in the official religion, and thereby undermining the state which that religion supported and sanctified.
“the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions [since Constantine], have inflicted far greater severities on each other than they have experienced from the zeal of infidels”; and “the Church of Rome defended by violence the empire she had acquired by fraud.”
Cruelty, suffering, and injustice have always afflicted mankind, and always will, for they are written in the nature of man. “Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow creatures than from the convulsions of the elements.”
In the final chapter [Gibbon] summarized his labors in a famous sentence: “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.”
in less amiable moments—and perhaps because he had taken war and politics (and theology) as the substance of history—he judged history to be “indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”
Samuel Johnson
He called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel,”
Contemplating the London populace, Johnson judged that democracy would be a disaster. He laughed at liberty and equality as impracticable shibboleths.
When the [American] colonists talked of liberty, justice, and natural rights, Johnson scorned their claims as specious cant, and asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
Edmund Burke
The doctrines, myths, and ceremonies of a religion may not conform to our present individual reason, but this may be of minor moment if they comport with the past, present, and presumed future needs of society. Experience dictates that the passions of men can be controlled only by the teachings and observances of religion.
“The development of laws was a degeneration.” History is a record of butchery, treachery, and war; and “political society is justly charged with much the greater part of this destruction.”
All governments follow the Machiavellian principles, reject all moral restraints, and give the citizens a demoralizing example of greed, deceit, robbery, and homicide.
Democracy in Athens and Rome brought no cure for the evils of government, for it soon became dictatorship through the ability of demagogues to win admiration from gullible majorities. Law is injustice codified; it protects the idle rich against the exploited poor, and adds a new evil—lawyers.
He had no trust in the universal male suffrage that Price pleaded for; he thought the majority would be a worse tyrant than a king, and that democracy would degenerate into mob rule.
Adam Smith
Smith defined the wealth of a nation not as the amount of gold or silver it possessed, but as the land with its improvements and products, and the people with their labor, services, skills, and goods. His thesis was that, with some exceptions, the greatest physical wealth results from the greatest economic liberty.
His achievement lay not so much in the originality of his thought as in the mastery and co-ordination of data, the wealth of illustrative material, the illuminating application of theory to current conditions, a simple, clear, and persuasive style, and a broad viewpoint that raised economics from a “dismal science” to the level of philosophy.
Horace Walpole
“This world,” he said, “is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”
Walpole agreed with most of what Voltaire said, but would have gone to the stake to prevent him from saying it; for he trembled to think what would happen to Europe’s governments if Christianity collapsed.
All mankind seemed to Walpole a menagerie of “pigmy, short-lived, … comical animals.”
Rousseau
Rousseau, said Mme. de Staël, “invented nothing, but he set everything on fire.” First of all, of course, he was the mother of the Romantic movement.
Rousseau had expressed a problem that appears in every advanced society. Are the fruits of technology worth the haste, strains, sights, noises, and smells of an industrialized life? Does enlightenment undermine morality? Is it wise to follow science to mutual destruction, and philosophy to disillusionment with every fortifying hope?
There is a social contract, says Rousseau, not as a pledge of the ruled to obey the ruler (as in Hobbes’s Leviathan), but as an agreement of individuals to subordinate their judgment, rights, and powers to the needs and judgment of their community as a whole. Each person implicitly enters into such a contract by accepting the protection of the communal laws. The sovereign power in any state lies not in any ruler—individual or corporate—but in the general will of the community; and that sovereignty, though it may be delegated in part and for a time, can never be surrendered.
“With what simplicity I should have demonstrated that man is by nature good, and that only our institutions have made him bad!” That last sentence was to be the theme song of his life, and those tears that streaked his vest were among the headwaters of the Romantic movement in France and Germany.
Emotionally Rousseau remained always a child, resenting conventions, prohibitions, laws; but when he reasoned he came to realize that within the restrictions necessary for social order many freedoms can remain; and he ended by perceiving that in a community liberty is not the victim but the product of law.
Rousseau perceived that the Archbishop was particularly offended by the doctrine that men are born good, or at least not evil; Beaumont realized that if this were true, if man is not tainted at birth by inheriting the guilt of Adam and Eve, then the doctrine of atonement by Christ would fall; and this doctrine was the very heart of the Christian creed.
Voltaire
He did not share Rousseau’s enthusiasm for equality; he knew that all men are created unfree and unequal.
The most profound and lasting influence of Voltaire has been on religious belief. Through him and his associates France bypassed the Reformation, and went directly from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Perhaps that is one reason why the change was so violent; there was no pause at Protestantism.
To Voltaire, more than to any other individual, we owe the religious toleration that now precariously prevails in Europe and North America.
He accepted monarchy as the natural form of government. “Why is almost the whole earth governed by monarchs? … The honest answer is: Because men are rarely worthy of governing themselves.”
Voltaire’s politics stemmed partly from a suspicion that many people would be incapable of digesting education even if it were offered them. He referred to “the thinking portion of the human race—i.e., the hundred-thousandth part.”
He saw in the Old Testament hardly anything but a record of murder, lechery, and wholesale assassination. The Book of Proverbs seemed to him “a collection of trivial, sordid, incoherent maxims, without taste, without selection, and without design.”
He was tolerant of sexual irregularity, but rose in fine fury against injustice, fanaticism, persecution, hypocrisy, and the cruelties of the penal law. He defined morality as “doing good to mankind”; for the rest he laughed at prohibitions, and enjoyed wine, woman, and song in philosophical moderation.
Voltaire marked his copy of [The Social Contract] with marginal rejoinders; so, on Rousseau’s prescription of death for active unbelief: “All coercion on dogma is abominable.”
Voltaire was as sensitive and excitable as Jean-Jacques, but usually he thought it bad manners to let passion discolor his art; he sensed in Rousseau’s appeal to feeling and instinct an individualistic anarchic irrationalism that would begin with revolt and end with religion.
Voltaire: “All history, in short, is little else than a … collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes.”
Whereas Rousseau’s moral influence was toward tenderness, sentiment, and the restoration of family life and marital fidelity, the moral influence of Voltaire was toward humanity and justice, toward the cleansing of French law and custom from legal abuses and barbaric cruelties.
Kant
He inherited the subtle psychology of Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume, and used it in an attempt to save science from Hume and religion from Voltaire.
he offered to philosophy and psychology the most painstaking analysis of the knowledge process that history has ever known.
Kant inverted the usual procedure: instead of deriving the moral sense and code from God (as the theologians had done), he deduced God from the moral sense.
God is not a substance existing outside me, but merely a moral relation within me. … The categorical imperative does not assume a substance issuing its commands from on high, conceived therefore as outside me, but is a commandment or a prohibition of my own reason.
Kant already laid down his basic theses: that space and time are not objective or sensible objects, but are forms of perception inherent in the nature and structure of the mind; and that the mind is no passive recipient and product of sensations, but is an active agent—with inherent modes and laws of operation—for transforming sensations into ideas.
All attempts to demonstrate the truth or falsity of religion by pure reason were, to Kant, forms of dogmatism; and he condemned as “the dogmatism of metaphysics” any system of science or philosophy or theology that had not first submitted to a critical examination of reason itself.
Perception is sensation interpreted by the inherent forms of space and time; knowledge is perception transformed by the categories into a judgment or an idea. Experience is not a passive acceptance of objective impressions upon our senses; it is the product of the mind actively working upon the raw material of sensation.
Every individual (Kant argues) has a conscience, a sense of duty, a consciousness of a commanding moral law. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe: the starry heavens above, and the moral law within.”
The first Critique had tried to bring all ideas under the a priori universal categories; the second had sought to bring all ethical concepts under a universal a priori moral sense; the third undertook to find a priori principles for our aesthetic judgments—of order, beauty, or sublimity in nature or art.
How did the “radical evil in human nature” begin? Not through “original sin”; “surely of all the explanations of the spread and propagation of this evil through all members and generations of our race, the most inept is that which describes it as descending to us as an inheritance from our first parents.”
He distrusted the wild impulses of unchained men, and feared universal suffrage as the empowerment of unlettered majorities over progressive minorities and nonconforming individuals.
Goethe
Goethe was especially averse to the Christian emphasis on sin and contrition; he preferred to sin without remorse.
He had no enthusiasm for democracy; if ever such a system should actually be practiced it would be the sovereignty of simplicity, ignorance, superstition, and barbarity.
He distrusted democracy, for “nothing is worse than active ignorance”; and “it is unthinkable that wisdom should ever be popular.”
Mephistopheles (who is not Satan but only Satan’s philosopher) is the devil of denial and doubt, to whom all aspiration is nonsense, all beauty a skeleton wearing skin.
Goethe recognized the need many souls have for supernatural support, but he felt no such need until his final years. “He has religion [enough] who has art or science; who has not art or science needs religion.”
“Resolutely pagan” in religion and morals, he had no sense of sin, felt no need of a god dying to atone for him, and resented all talk of the cross. He wrote to Lavater, August 9, 1782: “I am no anti-Christian, no un-Christian, but very decidedly a non-Christian.”
Abuses should be reformed, but without violence or precipitancy; revolutions cost more than they are worth, and usually end where they began.
“No revolution is the fault of the people, but always the fault of the government.”
Frederick the Great
He agreed with Voltaire in believing that the “masses” bred too fast, and worked too hard, to allow time for real education. Disillusionment with their theology would only incline them to political violence. “The Enlightenment,” said Frederick, “is a light from heaven for those who stand on the heights, and a destructive firebrand for the masses.”
“it seems to me that if this universe had been made by a benevolent being, he should have made us happier than we are. … The human mind is weak; more than three fourths of mankind are made for subjection to the most absurd fanaticism. Fear of the Devil and of hell fascinates their eyes, and they detest the wise man who tries to enlighten them....”
Frederick concluded that to allow governments to be dominated by the majority would be disastrous. A democracy, to survive, must be, like other governments, a minority persuading a majority to let itself be led by a minority.
He did not share the philosophes’ trust in the enlightenment of mankind. In the race between reason and superstition he predicted the victory of superstition.
Having accepted religion as a human need, Frederick made his peace with it, and protected all its peaceful forms with full toleration.
He concluded that history is an excellent teacher, with few pupils. “It is in the nature of man that no one learns from experience. The follies of the fathers are lost on their children; each generation has to commit its own. Whoever reads history with application will perceive that the same scenes are often repeated, and that one need only change the names of the actors.”
Edward Gibbon
“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
How had Christianity made for the decline of Rome? First, by sapping the faith of the people in the official religion, and thereby undermining the state which that religion supported and sanctified.
“the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions [since Constantine], have inflicted far greater severities on each other than they have experienced from the zeal of infidels”; and “the Church of Rome defended by violence the empire she had acquired by fraud.”
Cruelty, suffering, and injustice have always afflicted mankind, and always will, for they are written in the nature of man. “Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow creatures than from the convulsions of the elements.”
In the final chapter [Gibbon] summarized his labors in a famous sentence: “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.”
in less amiable moments—and perhaps because he had taken war and politics (and theology) as the substance of history—he judged history to be “indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”
Samuel Johnson
He called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel,”
Contemplating the London populace, Johnson judged that democracy would be a disaster. He laughed at liberty and equality as impracticable shibboleths.
When the [American] colonists talked of liberty, justice, and natural rights, Johnson scorned their claims as specious cant, and asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
Edmund Burke
The doctrines, myths, and ceremonies of a religion may not conform to our present individual reason, but this may be of minor moment if they comport with the past, present, and presumed future needs of society. Experience dictates that the passions of men can be controlled only by the teachings and observances of religion.
“The development of laws was a degeneration.” History is a record of butchery, treachery, and war; and “political society is justly charged with much the greater part of this destruction.”
All governments follow the Machiavellian principles, reject all moral restraints, and give the citizens a demoralizing example of greed, deceit, robbery, and homicide.
Democracy in Athens and Rome brought no cure for the evils of government, for it soon became dictatorship through the ability of demagogues to win admiration from gullible majorities. Law is injustice codified; it protects the idle rich against the exploited poor, and adds a new evil—lawyers.
He had no trust in the universal male suffrage that Price pleaded for; he thought the majority would be a worse tyrant than a king, and that democracy would degenerate into mob rule.
Adam Smith
Smith defined the wealth of a nation not as the amount of gold or silver it possessed, but as the land with its improvements and products, and the people with their labor, services, skills, and goods. His thesis was that, with some exceptions, the greatest physical wealth results from the greatest economic liberty.
His achievement lay not so much in the originality of his thought as in the mastery and co-ordination of data, the wealth of illustrative material, the illuminating application of theory to current conditions, a simple, clear, and persuasive style, and a broad viewpoint that raised economics from a “dismal science” to the level of philosophy.
Horace Walpole
“This world,” he said, “is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”
Walpole agreed with most of what Voltaire said, but would have gone to the stake to prevent him from saying it; for he trembled to think what would happen to Europe’s governments if Christianity collapsed.
All mankind seemed to Walpole a menagerie of “pigmy, short-lived, … comical animals.”
December 26, 2017
"Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr Durant?" Another one of these fat books - the last one, ostensibly, before the couple came out of retirement for one final, eleventh gig (wasn't that a movie plot?) Overall I love the Durants: their calm view of history, seeing the extremes of each age in context as just swings of the pendulum really helps me find sang-froid in the current political climate (and in life). Their respect for and interest in almost everything makes them wonderful guides. But there are drawbacks. For one, they tend toward very exact pronouncements on people and artistic works. This one is good, this one is the weakest, this one fails because of x. Astonishing as their scholarship is, I would prefer if they just described rather than rated most of the time. I'm no full-throated relativist but the idea that there is some objective Eye of History giving a verdict on wildly different works of art throughout the world over centuries is patently absurd. And in fact, their idea of synoptic history is predicated on the idea that a civilisation can be summarised by a gentleman (and lady) scholar with sufficient time on his hands, because there is a Artistic Canon comprised of what was good in that time. But a civilisation will always elude synoptic summation, because the social history, the legal history, the folklore history, the ethnological and culinary and climatic history et cetera will always represent too much to summarise in a finite book, an ever-unfurling coastline of knowledge mostly lost to the mists of time, or the veil of Clio. This is not to say that, say, studying the queer history of 18th c. France is a better use of time than studying Voltaire or Watteau, just that both are aspects of an infinitesimally large tapestry.
Also, this book contains an enormous amount, the great age of English rhetoric (Dr johnson, Walpole, Gibbon, Pitt, Burke, Charles Fox), the birth of liberalism (waddup Locke) and Romanticism and basically the seeds of all contemporary Western political discourse so, if you're going to just read one of these, maybe read this one. But honestly, read 'em all - you'll get your edgy modern history takes by reading the right sort of intellectual magazines, but you won't get the crusty old basis contained herein: on which the entire edifice resides.
Also, this book contains an enormous amount, the great age of English rhetoric (Dr johnson, Walpole, Gibbon, Pitt, Burke, Charles Fox), the birth of liberalism (waddup Locke) and Romanticism and basically the seeds of all contemporary Western political discourse so, if you're going to just read one of these, maybe read this one. But honestly, read 'em all - you'll get your edgy modern history takes by reading the right sort of intellectual magazines, but you won't get the crusty old basis contained herein: on which the entire edifice resides.
June 2, 2017
This 10th volume of the Durant's magnificent History of Civilization is the most enjoyable so far. The device of framing the history of the XVIII century with the twin avatars Voltaire (vol. 9) and Rousseau (vol. 10) worked perfectly, even better than in previous volumes about Louis XIV and Caesar and Christ. This volume is full of ideas, art and literature. The sections on Mozart, Sterne and Beaumarchais were all heartwarming and heartbreaking. So many talented, yet so few happy people. The story begins with the Seven Years War and it ends with the storming of the Bastille. The extensive discussions about how the French Revolution came about are thorough and compelling. Sad as that may be for those of us without special sympathy for vandals and pillagers, the French monarchical state had run out of steam, the established powers, notably the royal household, the aristocracy and the clergy were unable to overcome their immediate interests and the system was irredeemable. Revolution was the only way forward in 1789. Yet one may feel sorrow at the barbarians taking power for a decade in Europe's most civilized state.
The authors assumed this was the end of their work, as they wrote in a very moving afterword. Fortunately it wasn't the case. I am looking forward to volume 11, The Age of Napoleon.
The authors assumed this was the end of their work, as they wrote in a very moving afterword. Fortunately it wasn't the case. I am looking forward to volume 11, The Age of Napoleon.
January 3, 2022
Not a bad entry in the series, but nowhere near as good as its preceding works. Perhaps the closer the Durants got to contemporary times, the less distinct their vision was of what truly distinguished that particular period of history.
The sole unifying theme would appear to be the confrontation of Rousseau's emphasis on feeling and sentiment in contradistinction to the rational reliance on reason of the philosophes in general and of Voltaire in particular. But this is less of an interpretation than a description of what was going on. Still, as a description, it takes aim at being a truly exhaustive one: the polarity is between Romanticism vs. Enlightenment, the 19th century vs. the 18th century, 1760-1859 vs. 1648-1760, feeling vs. reason, instinct vs. intellect, sentiment vs. judgment, subject vs. object, subjectivism vs. objectivism, solitude vs. society, imagination vs. reality, myth and legend vs. history, religion vs. science, mysticism vs. ritual, poetry and poetic prose vs. prose and prosaic poetry, neo-Gothic vs. neo-Classical, feminine vs. masculine, romantic love vs. marriage of convenience, natural and natural vs. civilization and artifice, emotional expression vs. conventional restraint, individual freedom vs. social order, youth vs. authority, and man vs. the state.
Their summary of the complex interaction of events, ideas, actions and personalities leading to the epochal French Revolution is masterfully done. In one sentence, they summarize it: 'The essence of the French revolution was the overthrow of nobility and the clergy by a bourgeoisie using the discontent of the peasants to destroy feudalism, and the discontent of urban masses to neutralize the armies of the king.'
Besides these two concise summaries, the near thousand pages of the book resonate with interesting character after interesting character. Again and again, I felt myself drawn to read a biography devoted to one personality and/or read the works written by them. This focus on the specific individual meant that by half way through the book, I got into the habit or reading it like a collection of short stories, rather than a continuous history. In no particular order, one is encouraged to explore more deeply the biographies of Rousseau, Grimm, Frederick the Great, Catherine II, Maria Theresa of Austria, Joseph II, d'Alembert, Louis XV, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Pompadour, Quesnay, Turgot, Necker, Morelly, Mme. d'Epinay, Vivaldi, Vico, the Marquis de Pombal, Charles III, Goya, Goethe, Casanova, Winkelmann, Viotti, Boccherini, Alfieri, Gluck, Piccini, Haydn, Mozart, Prince Radziwill, Ignacy Krasicki, Christian van Wolff, Lessing, Klopstock, Rudolph Raspe, Kant, Wieland, Herder, Schiller, Moses Mendelssohn, Boswell, Johnson, Holberg, Gustavus III, Burke, Pitt (both of them),North, Fox, Wilkes, Sheridan, Clive, Hastings, Garrick, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Hawkins, Chippendale, Wedgewood, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Macpherson, Burns, Sterne, Burney, Walpole, Chatterton, Cowper, Goldsmith, Franklin, Washington, Lafayette, Beaumarchais, de Sade, Condorcet, Houdon, Bernadin, Retif, Boissel and Mme. de la Motte-Valois.
Books to read: Rousseau's Julie, Goethe's Werther, Schiller's Robbers, Kant's Critique, Raspe's Baron Munchausen, Herder's History, Holberg's Niels Kilm, Sheridan's Rivals, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Macpherson's Ossian, Burney's Evelina, Sterne's Tristram Shandy (reread), Fielding's Tom Jones (finish). Walpole's Otranto, Chatterton's poetry, Goldsmith's Vicar, Johnson's Rasselas, de Sade's Justine, Bernadin's Paul et Virginie, Beaumarchais's Figaro and Retif's Nicolas.
Interestingly, the Durants often gave into a penchant for generalizations. I guess after writing ten weighty volumes of the history of civilization, they could be allowed to draw a conclusion here and there. Examples of such: 'the disappearance of structure - of the organic relation of parts to a whole, or of beginning to middle and end - is the degeneration of art', ' the secret of success is to seize a propitious chance', 'without intervals of lethargy, genius would slip into insanity', 'wisdom has no nationality', 'limitation [of powers] is the essence of liberty, for as soon as liberty is complete, it dies in anarchy', 'nearly all plots are absurd', 'but who of us, in the trial and error of love, has not wounded one or who hearts before winning one?', 'it is not natural for writers to like one another: they are reaching for the same prize', 'there are happy moments in history behind the drama of tragedy, and beneath the notice of historians', 'the romantic spirit, unless it is religious, is helpless in the face of death', 'justice is not only blind, it limps'; 'there is a secret pride in surviving our contemporaries, but we are punished with loneliness', and finally, in which more than a little self-analysis is apparent: ' one of the laws of composition is that a pen in motion, like matter in Newton's first law, continues in motion unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it from without'.
The postscript indicated that this was the final volume in the work. However, they did write a follow up volume on Napoleonic times.
Good book, but more so in its individual parts than in the overall impression it makes.
The sole unifying theme would appear to be the confrontation of Rousseau's emphasis on feeling and sentiment in contradistinction to the rational reliance on reason of the philosophes in general and of Voltaire in particular. But this is less of an interpretation than a description of what was going on. Still, as a description, it takes aim at being a truly exhaustive one: the polarity is between Romanticism vs. Enlightenment, the 19th century vs. the 18th century, 1760-1859 vs. 1648-1760, feeling vs. reason, instinct vs. intellect, sentiment vs. judgment, subject vs. object, subjectivism vs. objectivism, solitude vs. society, imagination vs. reality, myth and legend vs. history, religion vs. science, mysticism vs. ritual, poetry and poetic prose vs. prose and prosaic poetry, neo-Gothic vs. neo-Classical, feminine vs. masculine, romantic love vs. marriage of convenience, natural and natural vs. civilization and artifice, emotional expression vs. conventional restraint, individual freedom vs. social order, youth vs. authority, and man vs. the state.
Their summary of the complex interaction of events, ideas, actions and personalities leading to the epochal French Revolution is masterfully done. In one sentence, they summarize it: 'The essence of the French revolution was the overthrow of nobility and the clergy by a bourgeoisie using the discontent of the peasants to destroy feudalism, and the discontent of urban masses to neutralize the armies of the king.'
Besides these two concise summaries, the near thousand pages of the book resonate with interesting character after interesting character. Again and again, I felt myself drawn to read a biography devoted to one personality and/or read the works written by them. This focus on the specific individual meant that by half way through the book, I got into the habit or reading it like a collection of short stories, rather than a continuous history. In no particular order, one is encouraged to explore more deeply the biographies of Rousseau, Grimm, Frederick the Great, Catherine II, Maria Theresa of Austria, Joseph II, d'Alembert, Louis XV, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Pompadour, Quesnay, Turgot, Necker, Morelly, Mme. d'Epinay, Vivaldi, Vico, the Marquis de Pombal, Charles III, Goya, Goethe, Casanova, Winkelmann, Viotti, Boccherini, Alfieri, Gluck, Piccini, Haydn, Mozart, Prince Radziwill, Ignacy Krasicki, Christian van Wolff, Lessing, Klopstock, Rudolph Raspe, Kant, Wieland, Herder, Schiller, Moses Mendelssohn, Boswell, Johnson, Holberg, Gustavus III, Burke, Pitt (both of them),North, Fox, Wilkes, Sheridan, Clive, Hastings, Garrick, Adam Smith, Gibbon, Hawkins, Chippendale, Wedgewood, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Macpherson, Burns, Sterne, Burney, Walpole, Chatterton, Cowper, Goldsmith, Franklin, Washington, Lafayette, Beaumarchais, de Sade, Condorcet, Houdon, Bernadin, Retif, Boissel and Mme. de la Motte-Valois.
Books to read: Rousseau's Julie, Goethe's Werther, Schiller's Robbers, Kant's Critique, Raspe's Baron Munchausen, Herder's History, Holberg's Niels Kilm, Sheridan's Rivals, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Macpherson's Ossian, Burney's Evelina, Sterne's Tristram Shandy (reread), Fielding's Tom Jones (finish). Walpole's Otranto, Chatterton's poetry, Goldsmith's Vicar, Johnson's Rasselas, de Sade's Justine, Bernadin's Paul et Virginie, Beaumarchais's Figaro and Retif's Nicolas.
Interestingly, the Durants often gave into a penchant for generalizations. I guess after writing ten weighty volumes of the history of civilization, they could be allowed to draw a conclusion here and there. Examples of such: 'the disappearance of structure - of the organic relation of parts to a whole, or of beginning to middle and end - is the degeneration of art', ' the secret of success is to seize a propitious chance', 'without intervals of lethargy, genius would slip into insanity', 'wisdom has no nationality', 'limitation [of powers] is the essence of liberty, for as soon as liberty is complete, it dies in anarchy', 'nearly all plots are absurd', 'but who of us, in the trial and error of love, has not wounded one or who hearts before winning one?', 'it is not natural for writers to like one another: they are reaching for the same prize', 'there are happy moments in history behind the drama of tragedy, and beneath the notice of historians', 'the romantic spirit, unless it is religious, is helpless in the face of death', 'justice is not only blind, it limps'; 'there is a secret pride in surviving our contemporaries, but we are punished with loneliness', and finally, in which more than a little self-analysis is apparent: ' one of the laws of composition is that a pen in motion, like matter in Newton's first law, continues in motion unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it from without'.
The postscript indicated that this was the final volume in the work. However, they did write a follow up volume on Napoleonic times.
Good book, but more so in its individual parts than in the overall impression it makes.
June 29, 2014
This review applies to all Durant's History of Civilization. The author does not follow a strictly chronological approach, but emphasizes those events/personages that have developed our Western civilization. He tends to emphasize certain personalities - some of whom I take exception to - but he stresses those things which make Western man unique. The arts have a prominent place in developing our culture and Durant convinces the reader how important they are.
July 16, 2013
Like many of the volumes of the Durants' Story of Civilization, this one is strongest on political philosophies and ideologies--reflective of Will Durant's strong background in philosophy, of which he was an accomplished popularist.
September 30, 2019
Unparalleled scholarship defines this stunning work. The Durants’ talent for anecdotes and their quiet humor kept the book from becoming a slog of dates and names. The history is holistic, using the personalities, arts and social conditions of the time to present a grand arc. Very absorbing.
September 29, 2024
If Voltaire was the embodiment of rationalist philosophers looking to bring reason to government and society then Rousseau was the embodiment of Romantic impulse for self-exploration and social revolt, they lived at the same time and died the same year without known their two visions would influence Europe’s most famous Revolution. Rousseau and Revolution is the tenth—the planned concluding but eventually penultimate—volume of The Story of Civilization by Will Durant and for the fourth time joined by wife Ariel Durant which reveals how Jean-Jacques Rousseau brought forth the Romantic counterpoint to Voltaire’s Enlightenment and how it played into the development of Europe in the late 18th century.
Unlike the previous volume, Rousseau is not as prominent throughout but his influence if felt as the chronology of the various parts of Europe are covered politically and culturally especially as the underpinnings of the Romantic movement begin appearing. The decline and fall of the French Ancien régime bookend the volume as Durant signals the fall of the absolute monarchy with Louis XVI putting the cockade of the Revolution on his hat, yet the history behind the collapse is and how each Estate had a ‘revolution’ of their own before being overtaken by the next until that moment. Between the rest of Europe is covered either from where they were politically and culturally left off in either of the last two volumes. As the Durants originally planned that this would be the final volume of the series, they ignored their 1789 ending point to finish out the lives of various individuals and take a glance at various movements—political and cultural—that began in the focused-on decades, and they did not believe they would fully cover. If this had been the final volume as planned it was a good ending to the overall series, but with another volume to go it will be interesting how the Durants write it given how they wrote this one.
Rousseau and Revolution finds Will and Ariel Durant revealing the countering of Voltaire’s emotionless rationalism in Jean-Jacque Rousseau as well as the consequences of his undermining of the Church that help prop up the absolute monarchy leading to the latter’s fall.
Unlike the previous volume, Rousseau is not as prominent throughout but his influence if felt as the chronology of the various parts of Europe are covered politically and culturally especially as the underpinnings of the Romantic movement begin appearing. The decline and fall of the French Ancien régime bookend the volume as Durant signals the fall of the absolute monarchy with Louis XVI putting the cockade of the Revolution on his hat, yet the history behind the collapse is and how each Estate had a ‘revolution’ of their own before being overtaken by the next until that moment. Between the rest of Europe is covered either from where they were politically and culturally left off in either of the last two volumes. As the Durants originally planned that this would be the final volume of the series, they ignored their 1789 ending point to finish out the lives of various individuals and take a glance at various movements—political and cultural—that began in the focused-on decades, and they did not believe they would fully cover. If this had been the final volume as planned it was a good ending to the overall series, but with another volume to go it will be interesting how the Durants write it given how they wrote this one.
Rousseau and Revolution finds Will and Ariel Durant revealing the countering of Voltaire’s emotionless rationalism in Jean-Jacque Rousseau as well as the consequences of his undermining of the Church that help prop up the absolute monarchy leading to the latter’s fall.
January 4, 2022
History's Dictionary
History is an excellent teacher, with few pupils. After finishing this book I can understand why. 10 volumes into the Story of Civilization, the Durants have struggled to find narrative thread in the haystack of personalities and surviving documentation.
While this book begins and ends with Rousseau, it is not a biography, and it certainly does little to tell about the epoch defining French Revolution, analysis left for book 11. Yet is also not a history of civilization nor even a history of Europe. It overlaps with volume 9 in timeline, and only vaguely splits the political and economic history of the times. Instead, the fundamental building block of this book is short biographies proto-wikipedia style entries of the great thinkers, politicians and artists of the time.
We hear about Rousseau, Burke, Smith, Wilderforce, Pitt, Kant, Goethe, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, Louis XV, and more details about the great salons in France than I would ever care to remember. Yet I've forgotten the majority of biographies covered in the book and with only minimal narrative threads to connect them doubt I will ever remember.
This seems to be an ongoing problem with the series. What was once a story of civilization, turned into a kaleidoscope of short stories. Then the sheer number of stories overflowed my mind's ability to absorb detail, blending every color into a brown mess of history. It's like trying to read the dictionary from A to Z. There is a mass of important information. Yet consuming it in one go is neither enjoyable nor conducive to retention.
There are highlights, which to me are almost always the parts of the book that draw threads together. When comparing Rousseau to Voltaire:
This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. Or quoting de Tocqueville on America and the French philosophies: The Americans seem to have executed what our writers have conceived.
And for all this complaining, is there a better way to learn about the enlightenment short of taking a college course? Durant practically begs the reader to refer to primary sources, (and I've found many solid pointers along the way), but even reading Voltaire and Rousseau would leave me scratching my head about the period. Few historians dare take on such a massive scope, and Hobsbawm only started his story, at a completely different abstraction from detail, at the beginning of the French revolution. So here you have it, a flawed western-Eurocentric retelling of history that still seems after a few decades the best there is.
Other Notes:
Commerce between france and her colonies dropped from 33 million livre in 1755 to 4 million in 1760
He suggested a clarification: there are no good laws, except simple laws.
1st book of 22
History is an excellent teacher, with few pupils. After finishing this book I can understand why. 10 volumes into the Story of Civilization, the Durants have struggled to find narrative thread in the haystack of personalities and surviving documentation.
While this book begins and ends with Rousseau, it is not a biography, and it certainly does little to tell about the epoch defining French Revolution, analysis left for book 11. Yet is also not a history of civilization nor even a history of Europe. It overlaps with volume 9 in timeline, and only vaguely splits the political and economic history of the times. Instead, the fundamental building block of this book is short biographies proto-wikipedia style entries of the great thinkers, politicians and artists of the time.
We hear about Rousseau, Burke, Smith, Wilderforce, Pitt, Kant, Goethe, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, Louis XV, and more details about the great salons in France than I would ever care to remember. Yet I've forgotten the majority of biographies covered in the book and with only minimal narrative threads to connect them doubt I will ever remember.
This seems to be an ongoing problem with the series. What was once a story of civilization, turned into a kaleidoscope of short stories. Then the sheer number of stories overflowed my mind's ability to absorb detail, blending every color into a brown mess of history. It's like trying to read the dictionary from A to Z. There is a mass of important information. Yet consuming it in one go is neither enjoyable nor conducive to retention.
There are highlights, which to me are almost always the parts of the book that draw threads together. When comparing Rousseau to Voltaire:
This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. Or quoting de Tocqueville on America and the French philosophies: The Americans seem to have executed what our writers have conceived.
And for all this complaining, is there a better way to learn about the enlightenment short of taking a college course? Durant practically begs the reader to refer to primary sources, (and I've found many solid pointers along the way), but even reading Voltaire and Rousseau would leave me scratching my head about the period. Few historians dare take on such a massive scope, and Hobsbawm only started his story, at a completely different abstraction from detail, at the beginning of the French revolution. So here you have it, a flawed western-Eurocentric retelling of history that still seems after a few decades the best there is.
Other Notes:
Commerce between france and her colonies dropped from 33 million livre in 1755 to 4 million in 1760
He suggested a clarification: there are no good laws, except simple laws.
1st book of 22
January 18, 2016
Ah! Finally finished the last book of Durant's "History of Civilization" series. A veritable marathon of reading well researched, well thought out, and well written history. He (and in the later volumes, his wife also) do a wonderful job of taking all the different strands of the history they are writing about and tying them together within an understandable context. I feel like this was a major achievement, kind of like completing a master's level class. Very well worth the hundreds of hours I spent on finishing it, and now I can get back into current affairs.
November 16, 2019
Once again Will and Ariel prove wonderful guides, this time through the tumultuous period before the French Revolution. I'm satisfied with the framework they've given me here to understanding this period, and look forward to digging deeper into its main events and personalities.
September 3, 2014
Rousseau! The American Revolution! The philosophes! Samuel Johnson! The French Revolution! Edmund Burke! Yeah!!
July 6, 2022
I have to admit that this was like reading through an encyclopedia.This is Will and Ethel Durant’s second book on the Enlightenment and this one seems a lot less focused, the reason being that the first book was centered around France and England in the first half of the eighteenth century, while this one covers all of the rest of Europe for almost the entire eighteenth century, along with France and England’s history in the latter half. The book ends with the storming of the Bastille, essentially marking off the point when official French reform efforts actually started turning into a violent revolution.
The book could have been called the Age of Rousseau, though it had already been previously designated by the Durants as the Age of Voltaire. They shared the century between them, despite having many disagreements and having very contrasting lives. Voltaire was the enemy of Christianity and an advocate for religious toleration, but his politics defended the rich, of which he was a part, and kings as well, famously remarking that under a monarchy you only have to convince one individual in order to change things. Rousseau was born into poverty and was the sentimental if not entirely consistent champion of the masses. If his political philosophy has since then been demolished by more clever and consistent thinkers, he still stands out as the poet announcing the dawn of the age of democracy.
Jean Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712 with his mother dying shortly after his birth. He received some education tinted through with Calvinism but became a sort of transient, his adventures revealing an emotional young man prone to melancholy, unstable employment, and even a strain of masochism and exhibitionism. By his own admission he was “a young stranger… whose mind was deranged..” The alpine scenery leaves a tremendous impact on him and so does his older lover Madamoiselle Warens.
He was a poor unknown through many years to the point of experiencing homelessness. His first bridge to fame came about in 1740 when Mme. Warens found him a job as a tutor to the Mably family who had connections to Paris high society, and who eventually granted Rousseau letters of introduction before a trip to Paris. There he meets Fontenelle, Miravaux, and Diderot, befriending the latter. He was almost forty when he finally gained national fame by winning a competition held by the Academy of Dijon by submitting an essay the Discours sur les arts et les sciences, arguing that civilization has had a corrupting influence on humanity. So began the barrage of writings that became an essential part of the Enlightenment and the literary preface to the French Revolution.
His political philosophy was a patchwork of inconsistent sentimentalism held together by a yearning for social justice. The inherent goodness of man, the corrupting influence of institutions, the attack on private property, the state of nature, the social contract, the noble savage, the general will, have all since been enshrined in the history of modern political thinking. He considered democracy to be the full participation of citizens in legislating through public assemblies, a state of affairs by his own admission only possible in small nations. He looked down upon representative democracy as leading to the representatives legislating for their own interests rather than for the people’s and thought that ideally, representatives would hold administrative and judicial posts, but not have the power to legislate, which should belong to public assemblies including all citizens.
Everything he wrote was ridiculed and critiqued even by other Enlightenment thinkers. His philosophy managed to offend both conservatives and liberals. Rousseau at times seems to change his mind on property, civilization, and religion, and Durant can’t help but rush to his defense: “The contradictions in his works lay between his character and his thought.” In the end it was not the minute details of what he wrote that mattered. In his overall sentiments, he captured the zeitgeist perhaps better than anyone else at the time, and through slogans such as ‘the general will,’ the ‘consent of the governed’ and the ‘social contract’ managed to give if not a scientific at least a powerful, poetic basis for the rising bourgeoisie to justify their desired emancipation of their ambition and prestige from the restrictions placed upon them by the landed aristocracy of the ancien regime.
After his pedagogical Emile is condemned by the Council of Geneva for attacking orthodox religion, Rousseau fires back in Lettres de la montagne, accusing the Calvinist leadership of privately sharing in his doubts and heresies, and condemning them as hypocrites. Voltaire is dragged into the Lettres in a manner he finds unpleasant, and he responds to Rousseau with the Sentiments des citoyens in which Rousseau’s character is excoriated “as a man who still carries the tragic marks of his debauches, and who...drags along with him...the unhappy woman whose mother he made die, and whose children he exposed at the door of a hospital...abjuring all the feelings of nature, as he discards those of honor and religion…” The unhappy woman is Therese Levasseur and Rousseau really did abandon five of his children, rather ironic for the celebrated author of a Emile, a manual on how to raise children. According to Durant, “[Rousseau] was not made for family life, being a skinless mass of nerves, and a wanderer in body and soul...[He] never quite became a man.”
The pearl clutching Durant decries Sentiments des citoyens as one of the lowest moments in Voltaire’s career, but I thought it was an honest assessment of a disordered and hypocritical individual from someone much more clear headed than the unstable Rousseau. In the end, Durant summarizes the lives of Voltaire and Rousseau respectively by invoking Horace Walpole’s epigram that “the world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”
There was much more to Europe than Rousseau. The chapter on Italia Felix, portrays an Italy “the golden peninsula” not yet united, but animated and colorful, if no longer at the height of its Renaissance glory, nonetheless alive with music, art, and religion; dotted with schools, universities, monasteries, and churches with the aristocracy feeling the inroads of the French Enlightenment. This was the era of Vivaldi: composer of operas, Vico: the philosopher of history, Casanova: the famous, or rather infamous memoirist, Beccaria: the reformer of criminology, and Winckelmann: not an Italian, but famous for studying Italy and exalting its classical heritage.
Iberia similarly shows a profoundly traditional society, yet with a ruling class seeing the future across the Pyrenees. The Marques of Pombal, minister of Portugal, appointed by Joseph I, comes off as perhaps the greatest scoundrel of the century. He was a talented administrator, guiding Lisbon through the infamous earthquake of All Saints Day in 1755, but his dealings with the Jesuits were dishonest, cynical, and opportunistic. The Jesuits were running successful communes of Indians in Paraguay, which had won the admiration even of the anti-clerical Voltaire, but Pombal wanted to settle the region with colonists. The Indians, naturally resisted, and for this Pombal blamed the Jesuits whom he now sought to suppress as part of a wider anti-clerical program. An attempt by the aristocracy to assassinate the king, makes things worse. The Jesuits, according to Durant, were not involved in the attempted assassination, but this was too good of an opportunity to waste for Pombal in subordinating the church to the state. Amidst the expulsions, the suppression, and the false pretexts, Pombal most egregiously ends up executing the Father Malagrida, an associate of the nobles who had tried to assassinate the king, despite the fact that he had tried to warn the king, despite the fact that he was seventy two and by now half insane. When a judge cannot proceed with the farce, Pombal has him removed. Father Malagrida is executed to the disgust of Louis XV and Voltaire neither of which could be described as pious or biased towards the church. “Pombal’s lordly manners and dictatorial methods were making new enemies every day. He had enriched himself and his relatives; he had built for himself an extravagantly costly palace. There was hardly a noble family in the kingdom that did not have a beloved member wastisng away in jail. Everywhere in the Portugal there were secret hopes and prayers for Pombal’s fall.” After the king dies, and Pombal sees himself soon falling from power “[He] took a wild revenge upon the village of Trefaria, whose fisherfolk had opposed...forcible impressment...he ordered a platoon of soldiers to burn the village down; they did it by flinging lighted torces through the wooden cottages in the dark of night.” This is not the mark of a humanist champion of the people, but of a vile cretin, using liberal reforms as a means for his own personal aggrandizement.
In Spain Charles III attempts similar measures. Forged letters “rejected [today] by Catholics and unbelievers alike” implicating the Jesuits in a plot against the king, provide a pretext to suppress the order. The ministers Count Campomanes and Count Aranda, pursue reforms which do not seek to destroy the church, though Durant implies that the latter would have preferred to do so, but simply to subordinate it to the state. The reforms reach their limits, for the state is not omnipotent, as much as it wished that it was, but in the end the Enlightenment had penetrated to the highest levels of society even in the the poorest and most pious of nations, a trend which we shall see again in Russia. Kings were certainly not friends of religion or tradition in this era.
Let us for example consider the “first avowedly agnostic ruler of modern times” Frederick the Great, the philosopher king who “liked to have a philosopher or two at his table to flay the parsons and stir the generals.” He was also the personal friend of Voltaire, and a talented flute player who also wrote compositions. He was very much a man of the Enlightenment but of course hardly a contemporary liberal; he was far too cynical about humanity. He “laughed at utopias of benevolence and peace” and proclaimed that “every man has a wild beast in him. Few can restrain it; most men let loose the bridle when not restrained by terror of the law.” He did not believe in equality and believed that in all societies an aristocracy would always emerge and that “hereditary aristocracy would develop a sense of honor and loyalty, and willingness to serve the state at great personal cost, which could not be expected of bourgeoisie geniuses formed in the race for wealth.” In the face of the aristocracy’s tendency towards infighting and exploitation of the people, Frederick was nonetheless a believe in monarchy to protect the state “against division, and the [poor] from class injustice, [through]... absolute power.” Frederick did not persecute religion for he viewed it as an inevitable consolation to the poor. He rather pursued a policy of toleration and protected “Jesuits...Mohammedans, Jews, and atheists.” As a consequence of this toleration he predicts in a letter to Voltaire that Catholicism will die out soon: “It will take a miracle to restore the Catholic Church...you will yet have the consolation of burying it and writing its epitath.” According to Durant, “the most thorough of skeptics had forgotten for a moment to be skeptical of skepticism.”
In contrast to other more successful enlightened absolutist was Joseph II, brother of Marie Antoinette, whose efforts at liberal reforms were shipwrecked upon the vicissitudes of provincialism. He succeeded the illustrious Maria Theresa, and carried out a program of reform that began when he was not yet emperor but a member of the state council. Once emperor he sought to bring the church under state control. “New bishops were required to take an oath of obedience to the secular authorities. No papal regulation or decree was to be valid in Austria without the government’s permission.” Monasteries were suppressed; their wealth was seized by the state. Joseph orders the removal of votive tablets and most statuary from the churches. He restricts popular devotions before sacramentals, even before the Host. Pope Pius VI takes the extraordinary measure of crossing the Alps, the first time a pope had visited a German nation since 1414 to appeal personally to the emperor against the anti-clerical measures. The rather diverse Empire was arranged feudally and many provinces were semi independent. Joseph’s efforts at centralizing the government under Vienna would lead to serious revolts against his authority in Belgium and Hungary. Joseph gives in and annuls most of his reforms in 1790. Amidst a disintegrating empire and declining health, he dies at the age of forty eight.
In Russia, Catherine the Great, enamored of the French philosophes, seeks to reshape Russia according to their ideals. She personally prepares a report, a nakaz, on reforming the Russian constitution based upon Enlightenment principles. She submits the Orthodox Church under the state moreso than it already was under Peter the Great. She attempts to reform serfdom and is warned by the nobles that “unless the peasant was bound to the land and his landlord, he would migrate to the towns or, more irresponsibly, from village to village, creating chaos, disrupting production, and interfering with the conscription of sturdy peasant sons for the army or the fleet.” She proceeds cautiously, and eventually concedes. A serious peasant revolt led by Pugachev fails and only reconciles the throne and the nobility. Catherine was a warrior queen; she partitions Poland and drives the Turks back establishing Russian domination over the lands of southern Ukraine and the Black Sea in a campaign led by the famous General Potemkin. The French Revolution tempers Catherine’s liberalism. She forbids the publication of “her once beloved Voltaire” and sends his bust to a storage room, establishing a strict reign of censorship.
Germany, very much a nation, but not yet a united government, made a name for itself in this era through its writers and its philosophers. Kant the philosopher of Konigsberg, a Prussian city on the Baltic, which strangely enough in our era now belongs to Russia, writes on a wide variety of topics, indeed beginning his career as a writer on science, including the publication of a paper outlining a remarkably contemporary model of the formation of the solar system. The Critique of Pure Reason lays down a priori knowledge as the basis of reality and seeks to describe and outline the bounds of this pure reason, listing the universal categories under which all of knowledge belongs to. “The first hundred pages are tolerably clear; the rest is a philosophical conflagration in which the untutored reader will see nothing but smoke.” The Critique of Practical Reason was focused on morality, laying down the categorical imperative in which an action is judged by its universal utility, and the humanistic declaration that individuals must be ends and never means. The Critique of Judgements is many things, but it stands out as a philosophy of aesthetics and design.
Weimar, capital of the duchy of Saxe Weimar Eisenach, yet with only six thousand inhabitants becomes the literary capital of eighteenth century Germany. There were four writers at the head of its fame. Wieland writes a philosophical novel about an Athenian named Agathon. Goethe among many volumes, including like Kant many on science, writes about Faust and an iron handed knight named Gotz. Herder writes about language and history. Schiller was a playwright and a historian; Durant describes his satirical play The Robbers as “powerful nonsense.”
The Scottish Enlightenment is described as an ‘outburst of genius that illuminated Scotland between Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and Boswell’s Life of Johnson.” In England, Fanny Burney prefigures Jane Austen, Lauren Sterne writes the legenday Tristam Shandy, and Gibbon writes his voluminous history of Rome.
May I be forgiven for leaving out Mozart, but Durant didn’t, along with Gluck, Haydn, the events in Islamic nations from Persia to Morocco, the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the Enlightenmen in Scandinavia, Poland’s last king Poniatowski, and countless writers, painters, musicians, and statesmen. There is very important coverage of industrialization and it is intriguing that in this era one could already find primitive versions of air travel and the automobile.
The last chapter leads up to the French Revolution, detailing the lives of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and Durant’s opinions on what caused the revolution to break out when it did. The defining moment happens at the Tennis Court Oath when the Third Estate boldly discards the old constitution, confident in the the justness of their cause and the support of the Paris masses. The ploy works, and the book closes with the Storming of the Bastille, a rapid constitutional crisis, already becoming a torrent of blood. The book ends with a very ironic farewell to the reader, because the Durants would continue on to cover the Napoleonic Era, which is rather fortunate because while the 1700s certainly feel like one of those centuries at the edge of an era, this book certainly did not cover the culminating drama, and I’m glad the series did not end here.
The book could have been called the Age of Rousseau, though it had already been previously designated by the Durants as the Age of Voltaire. They shared the century between them, despite having many disagreements and having very contrasting lives. Voltaire was the enemy of Christianity and an advocate for religious toleration, but his politics defended the rich, of which he was a part, and kings as well, famously remarking that under a monarchy you only have to convince one individual in order to change things. Rousseau was born into poverty and was the sentimental if not entirely consistent champion of the masses. If his political philosophy has since then been demolished by more clever and consistent thinkers, he still stands out as the poet announcing the dawn of the age of democracy.
Jean Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712 with his mother dying shortly after his birth. He received some education tinted through with Calvinism but became a sort of transient, his adventures revealing an emotional young man prone to melancholy, unstable employment, and even a strain of masochism and exhibitionism. By his own admission he was “a young stranger… whose mind was deranged..” The alpine scenery leaves a tremendous impact on him and so does his older lover Madamoiselle Warens.
He was a poor unknown through many years to the point of experiencing homelessness. His first bridge to fame came about in 1740 when Mme. Warens found him a job as a tutor to the Mably family who had connections to Paris high society, and who eventually granted Rousseau letters of introduction before a trip to Paris. There he meets Fontenelle, Miravaux, and Diderot, befriending the latter. He was almost forty when he finally gained national fame by winning a competition held by the Academy of Dijon by submitting an essay the Discours sur les arts et les sciences, arguing that civilization has had a corrupting influence on humanity. So began the barrage of writings that became an essential part of the Enlightenment and the literary preface to the French Revolution.
His political philosophy was a patchwork of inconsistent sentimentalism held together by a yearning for social justice. The inherent goodness of man, the corrupting influence of institutions, the attack on private property, the state of nature, the social contract, the noble savage, the general will, have all since been enshrined in the history of modern political thinking. He considered democracy to be the full participation of citizens in legislating through public assemblies, a state of affairs by his own admission only possible in small nations. He looked down upon representative democracy as leading to the representatives legislating for their own interests rather than for the people’s and thought that ideally, representatives would hold administrative and judicial posts, but not have the power to legislate, which should belong to public assemblies including all citizens.
Everything he wrote was ridiculed and critiqued even by other Enlightenment thinkers. His philosophy managed to offend both conservatives and liberals. Rousseau at times seems to change his mind on property, civilization, and religion, and Durant can’t help but rush to his defense: “The contradictions in his works lay between his character and his thought.” In the end it was not the minute details of what he wrote that mattered. In his overall sentiments, he captured the zeitgeist perhaps better than anyone else at the time, and through slogans such as ‘the general will,’ the ‘consent of the governed’ and the ‘social contract’ managed to give if not a scientific at least a powerful, poetic basis for the rising bourgeoisie to justify their desired emancipation of their ambition and prestige from the restrictions placed upon them by the landed aristocracy of the ancien regime.
After his pedagogical Emile is condemned by the Council of Geneva for attacking orthodox religion, Rousseau fires back in Lettres de la montagne, accusing the Calvinist leadership of privately sharing in his doubts and heresies, and condemning them as hypocrites. Voltaire is dragged into the Lettres in a manner he finds unpleasant, and he responds to Rousseau with the Sentiments des citoyens in which Rousseau’s character is excoriated “as a man who still carries the tragic marks of his debauches, and who...drags along with him...the unhappy woman whose mother he made die, and whose children he exposed at the door of a hospital...abjuring all the feelings of nature, as he discards those of honor and religion…” The unhappy woman is Therese Levasseur and Rousseau really did abandon five of his children, rather ironic for the celebrated author of a Emile, a manual on how to raise children. According to Durant, “[Rousseau] was not made for family life, being a skinless mass of nerves, and a wanderer in body and soul...[He] never quite became a man.”
The pearl clutching Durant decries Sentiments des citoyens as one of the lowest moments in Voltaire’s career, but I thought it was an honest assessment of a disordered and hypocritical individual from someone much more clear headed than the unstable Rousseau. In the end, Durant summarizes the lives of Voltaire and Rousseau respectively by invoking Horace Walpole’s epigram that “the world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”
There was much more to Europe than Rousseau. The chapter on Italia Felix, portrays an Italy “the golden peninsula” not yet united, but animated and colorful, if no longer at the height of its Renaissance glory, nonetheless alive with music, art, and religion; dotted with schools, universities, monasteries, and churches with the aristocracy feeling the inroads of the French Enlightenment. This was the era of Vivaldi: composer of operas, Vico: the philosopher of history, Casanova: the famous, or rather infamous memoirist, Beccaria: the reformer of criminology, and Winckelmann: not an Italian, but famous for studying Italy and exalting its classical heritage.
Iberia similarly shows a profoundly traditional society, yet with a ruling class seeing the future across the Pyrenees. The Marques of Pombal, minister of Portugal, appointed by Joseph I, comes off as perhaps the greatest scoundrel of the century. He was a talented administrator, guiding Lisbon through the infamous earthquake of All Saints Day in 1755, but his dealings with the Jesuits were dishonest, cynical, and opportunistic. The Jesuits were running successful communes of Indians in Paraguay, which had won the admiration even of the anti-clerical Voltaire, but Pombal wanted to settle the region with colonists. The Indians, naturally resisted, and for this Pombal blamed the Jesuits whom he now sought to suppress as part of a wider anti-clerical program. An attempt by the aristocracy to assassinate the king, makes things worse. The Jesuits, according to Durant, were not involved in the attempted assassination, but this was too good of an opportunity to waste for Pombal in subordinating the church to the state. Amidst the expulsions, the suppression, and the false pretexts, Pombal most egregiously ends up executing the Father Malagrida, an associate of the nobles who had tried to assassinate the king, despite the fact that he had tried to warn the king, despite the fact that he was seventy two and by now half insane. When a judge cannot proceed with the farce, Pombal has him removed. Father Malagrida is executed to the disgust of Louis XV and Voltaire neither of which could be described as pious or biased towards the church. “Pombal’s lordly manners and dictatorial methods were making new enemies every day. He had enriched himself and his relatives; he had built for himself an extravagantly costly palace. There was hardly a noble family in the kingdom that did not have a beloved member wastisng away in jail. Everywhere in the Portugal there were secret hopes and prayers for Pombal’s fall.” After the king dies, and Pombal sees himself soon falling from power “[He] took a wild revenge upon the village of Trefaria, whose fisherfolk had opposed...forcible impressment...he ordered a platoon of soldiers to burn the village down; they did it by flinging lighted torces through the wooden cottages in the dark of night.” This is not the mark of a humanist champion of the people, but of a vile cretin, using liberal reforms as a means for his own personal aggrandizement.
In Spain Charles III attempts similar measures. Forged letters “rejected [today] by Catholics and unbelievers alike” implicating the Jesuits in a plot against the king, provide a pretext to suppress the order. The ministers Count Campomanes and Count Aranda, pursue reforms which do not seek to destroy the church, though Durant implies that the latter would have preferred to do so, but simply to subordinate it to the state. The reforms reach their limits, for the state is not omnipotent, as much as it wished that it was, but in the end the Enlightenment had penetrated to the highest levels of society even in the the poorest and most pious of nations, a trend which we shall see again in Russia. Kings were certainly not friends of religion or tradition in this era.
Let us for example consider the “first avowedly agnostic ruler of modern times” Frederick the Great, the philosopher king who “liked to have a philosopher or two at his table to flay the parsons and stir the generals.” He was also the personal friend of Voltaire, and a talented flute player who also wrote compositions. He was very much a man of the Enlightenment but of course hardly a contemporary liberal; he was far too cynical about humanity. He “laughed at utopias of benevolence and peace” and proclaimed that “every man has a wild beast in him. Few can restrain it; most men let loose the bridle when not restrained by terror of the law.” He did not believe in equality and believed that in all societies an aristocracy would always emerge and that “hereditary aristocracy would develop a sense of honor and loyalty, and willingness to serve the state at great personal cost, which could not be expected of bourgeoisie geniuses formed in the race for wealth.” In the face of the aristocracy’s tendency towards infighting and exploitation of the people, Frederick was nonetheless a believe in monarchy to protect the state “against division, and the [poor] from class injustice, [through]... absolute power.” Frederick did not persecute religion for he viewed it as an inevitable consolation to the poor. He rather pursued a policy of toleration and protected “Jesuits...Mohammedans, Jews, and atheists.” As a consequence of this toleration he predicts in a letter to Voltaire that Catholicism will die out soon: “It will take a miracle to restore the Catholic Church...you will yet have the consolation of burying it and writing its epitath.” According to Durant, “the most thorough of skeptics had forgotten for a moment to be skeptical of skepticism.”
In contrast to other more successful enlightened absolutist was Joseph II, brother of Marie Antoinette, whose efforts at liberal reforms were shipwrecked upon the vicissitudes of provincialism. He succeeded the illustrious Maria Theresa, and carried out a program of reform that began when he was not yet emperor but a member of the state council. Once emperor he sought to bring the church under state control. “New bishops were required to take an oath of obedience to the secular authorities. No papal regulation or decree was to be valid in Austria without the government’s permission.” Monasteries were suppressed; their wealth was seized by the state. Joseph orders the removal of votive tablets and most statuary from the churches. He restricts popular devotions before sacramentals, even before the Host. Pope Pius VI takes the extraordinary measure of crossing the Alps, the first time a pope had visited a German nation since 1414 to appeal personally to the emperor against the anti-clerical measures. The rather diverse Empire was arranged feudally and many provinces were semi independent. Joseph’s efforts at centralizing the government under Vienna would lead to serious revolts against his authority in Belgium and Hungary. Joseph gives in and annuls most of his reforms in 1790. Amidst a disintegrating empire and declining health, he dies at the age of forty eight.
In Russia, Catherine the Great, enamored of the French philosophes, seeks to reshape Russia according to their ideals. She personally prepares a report, a nakaz, on reforming the Russian constitution based upon Enlightenment principles. She submits the Orthodox Church under the state moreso than it already was under Peter the Great. She attempts to reform serfdom and is warned by the nobles that “unless the peasant was bound to the land and his landlord, he would migrate to the towns or, more irresponsibly, from village to village, creating chaos, disrupting production, and interfering with the conscription of sturdy peasant sons for the army or the fleet.” She proceeds cautiously, and eventually concedes. A serious peasant revolt led by Pugachev fails and only reconciles the throne and the nobility. Catherine was a warrior queen; she partitions Poland and drives the Turks back establishing Russian domination over the lands of southern Ukraine and the Black Sea in a campaign led by the famous General Potemkin. The French Revolution tempers Catherine’s liberalism. She forbids the publication of “her once beloved Voltaire” and sends his bust to a storage room, establishing a strict reign of censorship.
Germany, very much a nation, but not yet a united government, made a name for itself in this era through its writers and its philosophers. Kant the philosopher of Konigsberg, a Prussian city on the Baltic, which strangely enough in our era now belongs to Russia, writes on a wide variety of topics, indeed beginning his career as a writer on science, including the publication of a paper outlining a remarkably contemporary model of the formation of the solar system. The Critique of Pure Reason lays down a priori knowledge as the basis of reality and seeks to describe and outline the bounds of this pure reason, listing the universal categories under which all of knowledge belongs to. “The first hundred pages are tolerably clear; the rest is a philosophical conflagration in which the untutored reader will see nothing but smoke.” The Critique of Practical Reason was focused on morality, laying down the categorical imperative in which an action is judged by its universal utility, and the humanistic declaration that individuals must be ends and never means. The Critique of Judgements is many things, but it stands out as a philosophy of aesthetics and design.
Weimar, capital of the duchy of Saxe Weimar Eisenach, yet with only six thousand inhabitants becomes the literary capital of eighteenth century Germany. There were four writers at the head of its fame. Wieland writes a philosophical novel about an Athenian named Agathon. Goethe among many volumes, including like Kant many on science, writes about Faust and an iron handed knight named Gotz. Herder writes about language and history. Schiller was a playwright and a historian; Durant describes his satirical play The Robbers as “powerful nonsense.”
The Scottish Enlightenment is described as an ‘outburst of genius that illuminated Scotland between Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and Boswell’s Life of Johnson.” In England, Fanny Burney prefigures Jane Austen, Lauren Sterne writes the legenday Tristam Shandy, and Gibbon writes his voluminous history of Rome.
May I be forgiven for leaving out Mozart, but Durant didn’t, along with Gluck, Haydn, the events in Islamic nations from Persia to Morocco, the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the Enlightenmen in Scandinavia, Poland’s last king Poniatowski, and countless writers, painters, musicians, and statesmen. There is very important coverage of industrialization and it is intriguing that in this era one could already find primitive versions of air travel and the automobile.
The last chapter leads up to the French Revolution, detailing the lives of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and Durant’s opinions on what caused the revolution to break out when it did. The defining moment happens at the Tennis Court Oath when the Third Estate boldly discards the old constitution, confident in the the justness of their cause and the support of the Paris masses. The ploy works, and the book closes with the Storming of the Bastille, a rapid constitutional crisis, already becoming a torrent of blood. The book ends with a very ironic farewell to the reader, because the Durants would continue on to cover the Napoleonic Era, which is rather fortunate because while the 1700s certainly feel like one of those centuries at the edge of an era, this book certainly did not cover the culminating drama, and I’m glad the series did not end here.
September 9, 2016
Will and Ariel Durant give us here both the end of an era, a king, an old feudal world and the end of their over 40 year journey of writing synthetic history (though they would live past their predictions and live to write one more volume). Volume X won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1968, and it is tough to decide whether it was the writing and dedication of its authors, or the age itself, bursting its seems with genius (Goethe, Mozart, Kant, Rousseau, Voltaire, Franklin), villainy and roguishness (England in India, Cagliostro,) wars over words (Voltaire) and words about wars (Frederick the Great).
You can tell that with this volume Durant has reached his wheelhouse. This is the age that he himself was waiting to write, and he only saw fit to write it after filling us in on the previous 5,000 odd years of history (Volumes I-IX) to bring us up to date. He labours over Rousseau, Voltaire, with minor (50 plus pages each) excursions on Dr. Johnson, Goethe, Mozart. Still, even with so much material brought to bear, he manages to synthesize it and tell the story through the main personages of the era (Voltaire and Rousseau set as a canceling pair like Neo/Agent Smith), while still giving more than enough space to the nameless poor and the mass movements that pushed them and their societies forward.
If there is a flaw, it is that the details can bog one down, most easily when there is no narrative to make it go down easier. But, really, it is impossible to narratize economics.
You can tell that with this volume Durant has reached his wheelhouse. This is the age that he himself was waiting to write, and he only saw fit to write it after filling us in on the previous 5,000 odd years of history (Volumes I-IX) to bring us up to date. He labours over Rousseau, Voltaire, with minor (50 plus pages each) excursions on Dr. Johnson, Goethe, Mozart. Still, even with so much material brought to bear, he manages to synthesize it and tell the story through the main personages of the era (Voltaire and Rousseau set as a canceling pair like Neo/Agent Smith), while still giving more than enough space to the nameless poor and the mass movements that pushed them and their societies forward.
If there is a flaw, it is that the details can bog one down, most easily when there is no narrative to make it go down easier. But, really, it is impossible to narratize economics.
December 28, 2016
It took me months to read this book at a chapter a day. Easy to read as it was conceived for the general reader. But at over 900 pages long, it takes a commitment.
I must confess that I have the entire "Civilization" series in my library.I have always used the 11 volumes as reference books reading sections prompted by other reading. But after reading Rousseau's "Confessions" I felt that I wanted more period depth and determined to read the entire book.
I started to resist the author's continued interpretation of the accomplishments of the ages major arts figures. How can one writer (or two!) possibly have the judgment or background to pronounce on all the liberal arts of the century?
I will be donating this book to someone else and do the same for other volumes as I finish them. In the future I will select a more narrow coverage of specific elements during this period in history and avoid such generalities.
I must confess that I have the entire "Civilization" series in my library.I have always used the 11 volumes as reference books reading sections prompted by other reading. But after reading Rousseau's "Confessions" I felt that I wanted more period depth and determined to read the entire book.
I started to resist the author's continued interpretation of the accomplishments of the ages major arts figures. How can one writer (or two!) possibly have the judgment or background to pronounce on all the liberal arts of the century?
I will be donating this book to someone else and do the same for other volumes as I finish them. In the future I will select a more narrow coverage of specific elements during this period in history and avoid such generalities.
November 16, 2014
I've now finished reading the first ten volumes of this eleven-volume set, which remains wonderful and deserving of a more complete review than I will write here. Once I finish the final volume, The Age of Napoleon, I'll write a longer review of the entire set. I will restate what I said after reading one of the earlier volumes, to wit that this is one of the greatest reading experiences of my life. I'll read a few books to flesh out some of the more interesting topics from this volume (as I've been doing: this series makes one so curious about items mentioned that I come out of a book like this with a long list of other books I'd like to read, other topics I'd like to study).
July 17, 2022
Review in English (not my mother tongue) and Spanish (below)
ENGLISH:
The Durants were a couple from the mid-20th century. He was a professor of philosophy, and a popular history of philosophy that he wrote was so successful that he was able to stop working. He and his wife devoted the rest of their lives to writing a lengthy and monumental "History of Civilization." They traveled all over the world, especially Europe, while composing it. This is the tenth and second-to-last volume, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and my first foray into the series.
It is very long. Longer than a day without bread. But because it's so entertaining, it goes through quite well, even though it doesn't have a clear common thread, and reads more like a series of interlocking biographies. The Durants make an attempt at "integral history": they talk not only about politics and economics, but also about art, philosophy, music, historiography, etc. They are more interested in the world of ideas than the political-military one, and for this reason the general impression is disjointed. I am a great supporter of comprehensive history, but I believe that within it, political, military and economic history must be prominent, and addressed first, to provide the reader with a scaffolding to stand on. The Durants spend little on scaffolding. And entire chapters are thrown away talking about art and sculpture, which is not very riveting if you can't see the works while you're reading.
Still, it's fascinating. They make you grimace with the life of Rousseau, who forever changed ideas about how children should be educated, despite the fact that he sent all his own to an orphanage; and that he changed the world forever even though he was half insane. They make you need to read Gibbon's “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”; the works of Voltaire, the diatribes of Samuel Johnson. They manage to analyze Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" in a semi-comprehensible way. They make you wonder if the human masses can really live without religion. They leave pearls of calm humor ("Justice is not only blind: it limps", and this "is a universal complaint.") They are masters at conveying to you the atmosphere that was lived in the halls of Paris, in the Scottish university, in the European courts. Their portrayal of the pre-revolutionary atmosphere in France makes you bite your nails.
The book leaves me with a disquieting feeling that too many things have happened, and that the world has given too many jewels for it to be possible to enjoy everything in a single lifetime: so many paintings to look at, so much poetry to read, so much music to listen to, so much philosophy to reflect on… And only in the second half of the 18th century! It is impossible to drink all the fountains. The Durants must have been amongst the closest. Their scholarship is impressive. An authentic monument, with its index and its tremendous apparatus of bibliographical notes.
There are people who have read all eleven volumes of the series. I guess I will too. It must be a reading experience difficult to match.
ESPAÑOL:
Los Durant fueron un matrimonio de mediados del siglo XX. Él era profesor de Filosofía, y tuvo tanto éxito con una historia popular de la filosofía que escribió, que pudo dejar de trabajar. Él y su esposa dedicaron el resto de su vida a escribir una larguísima y monumental “Historia de la Civilización”. Viajaron por todo el mundo, especialmente por Europa, mientras la componían. Éste es el décimo y penúltimo volumen, que ganó el Pulitzer, y mi primera incursión en la serie.
Es larguísimo. Más largo que un día sin pan. Pero como es muy entretenido, entra bastante bien, a pesar de que no tiene un hilo conductor claro, y se lee más como una serie de biografías entrelazadas. Los Durant hacen un intento de “historia integral”: hablan no sólo de política y economía, sino de arte, filosofía, música, historiografía, etc. Les interesa más el mundo de las ideas que el político-militar, y por eso la impresión general es deslavazada. Soy un gran partidario de la historia integral, pero creo que dentro de ella, la historia política, militar y económica ha de ser prominente, y abordada en primer lugar, para proveer al lector de un andamio en el que apoyarse. Los Durant dedican poco al andamio. Y se tiran capítulos enteros hablando de arte y escultura, cosa que tiene poca gracia si no puedes ver las obras al mismo tiempo que vas leyendo.
Aún así, es fascinante. Logran que alucines con la vida de Rousseau, que cambió para siempre las ideas sobre cómo se han de educar los niños, a pesar de que él mando a todos los suyos a un orfanato; y que cambió el mundo para siempre a pesar de que estaba medio loco. Logran que necesites leer “Decadencia y Caída del Imperio Romano”, de Gibbon; las obras de Voltaire y Samuel Johnson. Logran analizar de manera semicomprensible la “Crítica de la Razón Pura”, de Kant. Hacen que te preguntes si realmente las masas humanas pueden vivir sin religión. Van dejando perlas de humor tranquilo (“La justicia no sólo es ciega: cojea”, y esto “es una queja universal”.) Son unos maestros en transmitirte el ambiente que se vivía en los salones de París, en la universidad escocesa, en las cortes europeas. Su retrato del ambiente prerrevolucionario en Francia logra que te comas las uñas.
El libro me deja una sensación desasosegante de que han pasado demasiadas cosas, y que el mundo ha dado demasiadas joyas para que en una sola vida se pueda disfrutar de todo: tantos cuadros que contemplar, tanta poesía que leer, tanta música que escuchar, tanta filosofía sobre la que reflexionar… ¡Y sólo en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII! Es imposible beberse todas las fuentes. Los Durant debieron ser de los que más cerca estuvieron. Su erudición es impresionante. Un auténtico monumento, con su índice y su tremendo aparato de notas bibliográficas.
Hay gente que se ha leído los once volúmenes de la serie. Supongo que yo también lo haré. Debe de ser una experiencia lectora difícil de igualar.
ENGLISH:
The Durants were a couple from the mid-20th century. He was a professor of philosophy, and a popular history of philosophy that he wrote was so successful that he was able to stop working. He and his wife devoted the rest of their lives to writing a lengthy and monumental "History of Civilization." They traveled all over the world, especially Europe, while composing it. This is the tenth and second-to-last volume, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and my first foray into the series.
It is very long. Longer than a day without bread. But because it's so entertaining, it goes through quite well, even though it doesn't have a clear common thread, and reads more like a series of interlocking biographies. The Durants make an attempt at "integral history": they talk not only about politics and economics, but also about art, philosophy, music, historiography, etc. They are more interested in the world of ideas than the political-military one, and for this reason the general impression is disjointed. I am a great supporter of comprehensive history, but I believe that within it, political, military and economic history must be prominent, and addressed first, to provide the reader with a scaffolding to stand on. The Durants spend little on scaffolding. And entire chapters are thrown away talking about art and sculpture, which is not very riveting if you can't see the works while you're reading.
Still, it's fascinating. They make you grimace with the life of Rousseau, who forever changed ideas about how children should be educated, despite the fact that he sent all his own to an orphanage; and that he changed the world forever even though he was half insane. They make you need to read Gibbon's “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”; the works of Voltaire, the diatribes of Samuel Johnson. They manage to analyze Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" in a semi-comprehensible way. They make you wonder if the human masses can really live without religion. They leave pearls of calm humor ("Justice is not only blind: it limps", and this "is a universal complaint.") They are masters at conveying to you the atmosphere that was lived in the halls of Paris, in the Scottish university, in the European courts. Their portrayal of the pre-revolutionary atmosphere in France makes you bite your nails.
The book leaves me with a disquieting feeling that too many things have happened, and that the world has given too many jewels for it to be possible to enjoy everything in a single lifetime: so many paintings to look at, so much poetry to read, so much music to listen to, so much philosophy to reflect on… And only in the second half of the 18th century! It is impossible to drink all the fountains. The Durants must have been amongst the closest. Their scholarship is impressive. An authentic monument, with its index and its tremendous apparatus of bibliographical notes.
There are people who have read all eleven volumes of the series. I guess I will too. It must be a reading experience difficult to match.
ESPAÑOL:
Los Durant fueron un matrimonio de mediados del siglo XX. Él era profesor de Filosofía, y tuvo tanto éxito con una historia popular de la filosofía que escribió, que pudo dejar de trabajar. Él y su esposa dedicaron el resto de su vida a escribir una larguísima y monumental “Historia de la Civilización”. Viajaron por todo el mundo, especialmente por Europa, mientras la componían. Éste es el décimo y penúltimo volumen, que ganó el Pulitzer, y mi primera incursión en la serie.
Es larguísimo. Más largo que un día sin pan. Pero como es muy entretenido, entra bastante bien, a pesar de que no tiene un hilo conductor claro, y se lee más como una serie de biografías entrelazadas. Los Durant hacen un intento de “historia integral”: hablan no sólo de política y economía, sino de arte, filosofía, música, historiografía, etc. Les interesa más el mundo de las ideas que el político-militar, y por eso la impresión general es deslavazada. Soy un gran partidario de la historia integral, pero creo que dentro de ella, la historia política, militar y económica ha de ser prominente, y abordada en primer lugar, para proveer al lector de un andamio en el que apoyarse. Los Durant dedican poco al andamio. Y se tiran capítulos enteros hablando de arte y escultura, cosa que tiene poca gracia si no puedes ver las obras al mismo tiempo que vas leyendo.
Aún así, es fascinante. Logran que alucines con la vida de Rousseau, que cambió para siempre las ideas sobre cómo se han de educar los niños, a pesar de que él mando a todos los suyos a un orfanato; y que cambió el mundo para siempre a pesar de que estaba medio loco. Logran que necesites leer “Decadencia y Caída del Imperio Romano”, de Gibbon; las obras de Voltaire y Samuel Johnson. Logran analizar de manera semicomprensible la “Crítica de la Razón Pura”, de Kant. Hacen que te preguntes si realmente las masas humanas pueden vivir sin religión. Van dejando perlas de humor tranquilo (“La justicia no sólo es ciega: cojea”, y esto “es una queja universal”.) Son unos maestros en transmitirte el ambiente que se vivía en los salones de París, en la universidad escocesa, en las cortes europeas. Su retrato del ambiente prerrevolucionario en Francia logra que te comas las uñas.
El libro me deja una sensación desasosegante de que han pasado demasiadas cosas, y que el mundo ha dado demasiadas joyas para que en una sola vida se pueda disfrutar de todo: tantos cuadros que contemplar, tanta poesía que leer, tanta música que escuchar, tanta filosofía sobre la que reflexionar… ¡Y sólo en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII! Es imposible beberse todas las fuentes. Los Durant debieron ser de los que más cerca estuvieron. Su erudición es impresionante. Un auténtico monumento, con su índice y su tremendo aparato de notas bibliográficas.
Hay gente que se ha leído los once volúmenes de la serie. Supongo que yo también lo haré. Debe de ser una experiencia lectora difícil de igualar.
August 2, 2017
"...little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever."
Edmund Burke, on the execution of Marie-Antoinette
In the tenth volume of Will Durant's Story of Civilization, we now approach the latter half of the 18th century. This is an age of titanic personalities, in every field. Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Bach, Schiller, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Voltaire -- what an age to be alive in! For those unfamiliar with Durant's epochal series, his approach was a symphonic history that covered politics, economics, religion, architecture, music, and literature. This particular volume opens with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's critique of reason, and -- amid all the politics -- examines the influence of the Romantic reaction on the arts and politics, ending with the storming of the Bastille.
This is an age of enormous change; the industrial revolution has spread beyond England, and its social consequences are brewing political revolution, especially in France. It is an age of war, like most ages; Russia, Austria, and Turkey bicker incessantly over the Black Sea, and western Europe sees several wars of succession. The most influential conflict, however, is the Seven Years War. This saw most of Europe allied against Prussia and England, with from some instability on Russia's part. While the consequences in Europe were minimal, this was the war that made England an superpower. While everyone invaded (and was rebuffed by) Prussia, the English chased the French out of both India and North America, creating an incredible global empire. The Seven Years War would set the stage for the American War of Independence, removing as it did America's great opponent on the continent, and pressuring the British to make the colonies pay for themselves via taxation.
Although the Enlightenment has already provoked its reaction in the form of the Romantic movement in the arts, the 'age of reason' itself is not yet spent: it is only now beginning to enter some subjects, like economics. Irreligion among the intellectual caste is de rigeur, although in the Protestant north, a few individuals (Boswell and Gibbon, for instance) get their subversive kicks by embracing Catholicism, if only temporarily. Writers like Voltaire and Rousseau write constantly of novel approaches to old problems: Emile, for instance, is ostensibly about the proper education of a human being. (A curious subject, given that the author sent his own children to an orphanage on their birth.) In the decline that which had been sustaining public morality, the Church and faith in general, people tried to find new ways of justifying a moral life. Some, like the Marquis de Sade, didn't bother; they rejoiced in the fact that without God, all things were permissible. Much of the philosophy here, skeptical as it was of the old authority, also rebelled against reason; this was an age of Feeling, of sensibility -- hence a larger role here for literature, theater, and other arts in the history. Rousseau in particular is used to epitomize the beginning of the romantic age, for his writings condemned cities, civilization, and material learning as corruptive elements leading the inherently good hearts of men astray. (Burk's comment about sophisters and economists almost echoes him there.) His emphasis on humanistic morals, however, did not make him a traditionalist; he regarded the Church with suspicion because it threatened patriotism, being an institution which transcended nations. (This was an age of French literature, Italian opera, and German music -- every nation had something to be extremely proud of.) Rousseau is most remembered for his political philosophy, which emphasized the 'will of the people'. While sometimes cited as an inspiration for the American revolution, Rousseau did not believe that representative legislatures truly served the will of the people; that had to be effected through full democratic assemblies, and so genuine democracies must remain small. Rousseau's emphasis on popular will and republics put him at odds with Voltaire, who distrusted the populace and smiled upon enlightened kings. In general, Durant noted, the revolutions of the 19th century would follow Rousseau in politics and Voltaire in religion.
Rousseau and Revolution is, like all of the books in Durant's series, formidable in its size but not in its writing. Durant, when he shows his personality, is utterly amiable. He is not as personal with his pen here as he was in The Age of Faith or The Reformation, but at times we witness the human being behind the pen, mindful that he is not writing of abstractions but of real people. He cautions the reader to never lose sight of the individual people whose lives were creating what we perceived as larger trends. Accordingly, Durant writes not just of big things -- the epic novels, the epic personalities -- but of passing affections, like fashion and frivolities, the concerns of the flesh and blood creatures who then walked abroad. The Durants are gentle and humane authors, students of the very history they write, forgiving of their subjects' sins and excesses. We'll see if that lasts throughout the French Revolution, for this book ends with the storming of the Bastille.
We move now to Napoleon and the end of civilization; or at least, the end of Will and Ariel Durant's Story thereof.
Edmund Burke, on the execution of Marie-Antoinette
In the tenth volume of Will Durant's Story of Civilization, we now approach the latter half of the 18th century. This is an age of titanic personalities, in every field. Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Bach, Schiller, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Voltaire -- what an age to be alive in! For those unfamiliar with Durant's epochal series, his approach was a symphonic history that covered politics, economics, religion, architecture, music, and literature. This particular volume opens with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's critique of reason, and -- amid all the politics -- examines the influence of the Romantic reaction on the arts and politics, ending with the storming of the Bastille.
This is an age of enormous change; the industrial revolution has spread beyond England, and its social consequences are brewing political revolution, especially in France. It is an age of war, like most ages; Russia, Austria, and Turkey bicker incessantly over the Black Sea, and western Europe sees several wars of succession. The most influential conflict, however, is the Seven Years War. This saw most of Europe allied against Prussia and England, with from some instability on Russia's part. While the consequences in Europe were minimal, this was the war that made England an superpower. While everyone invaded (and was rebuffed by) Prussia, the English chased the French out of both India and North America, creating an incredible global empire. The Seven Years War would set the stage for the American War of Independence, removing as it did America's great opponent on the continent, and pressuring the British to make the colonies pay for themselves via taxation.
Although the Enlightenment has already provoked its reaction in the form of the Romantic movement in the arts, the 'age of reason' itself is not yet spent: it is only now beginning to enter some subjects, like economics. Irreligion among the intellectual caste is de rigeur, although in the Protestant north, a few individuals (Boswell and Gibbon, for instance) get their subversive kicks by embracing Catholicism, if only temporarily. Writers like Voltaire and Rousseau write constantly of novel approaches to old problems: Emile, for instance, is ostensibly about the proper education of a human being. (A curious subject, given that the author sent his own children to an orphanage on their birth.) In the decline that which had been sustaining public morality, the Church and faith in general, people tried to find new ways of justifying a moral life. Some, like the Marquis de Sade, didn't bother; they rejoiced in the fact that without God, all things were permissible. Much of the philosophy here, skeptical as it was of the old authority, also rebelled against reason; this was an age of Feeling, of sensibility -- hence a larger role here for literature, theater, and other arts in the history. Rousseau in particular is used to epitomize the beginning of the romantic age, for his writings condemned cities, civilization, and material learning as corruptive elements leading the inherently good hearts of men astray. (Burk's comment about sophisters and economists almost echoes him there.) His emphasis on humanistic morals, however, did not make him a traditionalist; he regarded the Church with suspicion because it threatened patriotism, being an institution which transcended nations. (This was an age of French literature, Italian opera, and German music -- every nation had something to be extremely proud of.) Rousseau is most remembered for his political philosophy, which emphasized the 'will of the people'. While sometimes cited as an inspiration for the American revolution, Rousseau did not believe that representative legislatures truly served the will of the people; that had to be effected through full democratic assemblies, and so genuine democracies must remain small. Rousseau's emphasis on popular will and republics put him at odds with Voltaire, who distrusted the populace and smiled upon enlightened kings. In general, Durant noted, the revolutions of the 19th century would follow Rousseau in politics and Voltaire in religion.
Rousseau and Revolution is, like all of the books in Durant's series, formidable in its size but not in its writing. Durant, when he shows his personality, is utterly amiable. He is not as personal with his pen here as he was in The Age of Faith or The Reformation, but at times we witness the human being behind the pen, mindful that he is not writing of abstractions but of real people. He cautions the reader to never lose sight of the individual people whose lives were creating what we perceived as larger trends. Accordingly, Durant writes not just of big things -- the epic novels, the epic personalities -- but of passing affections, like fashion and frivolities, the concerns of the flesh and blood creatures who then walked abroad. The Durants are gentle and humane authors, students of the very history they write, forgiving of their subjects' sins and excesses. We'll see if that lasts throughout the French Revolution, for this book ends with the storming of the Bastille.
We move now to Napoleon and the end of civilization; or at least, the end of Will and Ariel Durant's Story thereof.
January 21, 2018
This is the 10th of the 11-book grand oeuvre of Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization, a monumental accomplishment forty years in the making, that continually amazes by its comprehensive scope and depth of detail.
It is the view of the authors that "history is philosophy teaching by example," as Thucydides reportedly said, and that all aspects of the described cultures must be included in a putatively thorough historical work... art, philosophy, social mores, trade, science as well as the conflicts. It seems that the conflicts drown out all else in some historical works, such as Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
I started this 11 volume set with v.5 through v.11, before going back to v.1 through v.4. Since each volume stands on its own, they need not be read in strict sequence.
I liked the frequent passing references to people and events wherein the author assumes reader familiarity, sometimes requiring me to do a little backtracking. I also enjoyed the Latin and French phrases left to the reader to infer from context or look them up, as well as the wry wit sprinkled throughout the work.
The author appears not to be a believer, but periodically tips his hand in favor of 'belief in belief,' just as rulers and literati throughout time have credited religion with having a unifying and morally civilizing effect on an ignorant and pugnacious people, as well as providing the alleged "divine warrant" for the ruler to govern.
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." Lucius Annaeus Seneca
It is the view of the authors that "history is philosophy teaching by example," as Thucydides reportedly said, and that all aspects of the described cultures must be included in a putatively thorough historical work... art, philosophy, social mores, trade, science as well as the conflicts. It seems that the conflicts drown out all else in some historical works, such as Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
I started this 11 volume set with v.5 through v.11, before going back to v.1 through v.4. Since each volume stands on its own, they need not be read in strict sequence.
I liked the frequent passing references to people and events wherein the author assumes reader familiarity, sometimes requiring me to do a little backtracking. I also enjoyed the Latin and French phrases left to the reader to infer from context or look them up, as well as the wry wit sprinkled throughout the work.
The author appears not to be a believer, but periodically tips his hand in favor of 'belief in belief,' just as rulers and literati throughout time have credited religion with having a unifying and morally civilizing effect on an ignorant and pugnacious people, as well as providing the alleged "divine warrant" for the ruler to govern.
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." Lucius Annaeus Seneca
December 10, 2018
This series by the Durants is the supposedly acclaimed one, just because it is the individual work, if we could take Mr. Durant and his wife as the single one. Some people say the series brings forth a usefully condensed history of many civilizations, peppered here and there with amusing events and remarks, which is so suitable for general readers and helps them to read history with fun and joy. There are a few amusing events indeed, but the style of story-telling here is more anecdotal not different from some tabloid pieces than revealing and insightful. I’m partly for the action of generalization of complex ideas and thoughts and events for them to reach broader realm of readers, but totally against the way of softening them so much, maybe in order to fondle the reader’s mind and ears, that many times I have a feeling of not reading the story of histories, but the wet tales of many figures running back and forth to woo and coo, then becoming the great ones for many generations to admire and recite. For some tales to tell over drinking bouts, they are perhaps so terrific; for names to be remembered, they are quite adequate; for history or the so-called civilization to be grasped, they are next to somewhere around nothing.
July 3, 2021
The scope of Durant's work is mind-boggling. The sheer amount of work he has put into this series is beyond impressive. Though the series has shifted over time from a history of civilization to a history of Europe to a history of France, it is nevertheless priceless. Ten of the eleven are now under my belt and I've spent hundreds of hours with Will Durant. As Durant ages, he reveals more and more of himself. As I wrote in my review of the Voltaire volume, what we find in the senior Durant is a respectful and knowledgeable liberal, a man enamored with the Enlightenment and at heart critical of Christianity and all it represents. We see this yet again in this volume. The place he grants Rousseau in history is entirely out of place, and the credit he pays what was by his own admission a bad man is sorely misplaced. How a man of Durant's caliber and knowledge could see the horror of the French revolution up close and yet still admire the French philosophers is as mind-boggling as the scale of his work.
You will learn lots of things in this book, but learn skeptically. Durant's facts are correct but his interpretation is simply sad.
You will learn lots of things in this book, but learn skeptically. Durant's facts are correct but his interpretation is simply sad.
January 8, 2019
This book devotes twice as many pages (14) to comparing, contrasting, and summarizing three salons in Paris from 1757-1774 as it does to the East India Company's exploitative colonialism (7). (Note that 'Our Oriental Heritage' gives less than 250 pages to the entire history of India.)
Within the obvious limitations of this editorial perspective, the book is great. The Durants couldn't have written two volumes about the 18th century without really loving the salonnieres and philosophes and it shows through all of the (many, many) pages. Their devotion illuminates the beginnings of ideas that still hold great sway today, and show how immediate the past can be.
Rousseau, despite his enormous importance, seems like a terrible human being. Boswell was basically a walking petri dish of venereal diseases. This book drives home how much personal mediocrity you have to wade through when you restrict all power, influence, and voice to wealthy (even the "self-made" authors do quite well for themselves) white men.
Within the obvious limitations of this editorial perspective, the book is great. The Durants couldn't have written two volumes about the 18th century without really loving the salonnieres and philosophes and it shows through all of the (many, many) pages. Their devotion illuminates the beginnings of ideas that still hold great sway today, and show how immediate the past can be.
Rousseau, despite his enormous importance, seems like a terrible human being. Boswell was basically a walking petri dish of venereal diseases. This book drives home how much personal mediocrity you have to wade through when you restrict all power, influence, and voice to wealthy (even the "self-made" authors do quite well for themselves) white men.
February 19, 2013
This volume was so much more refreshing than the last two or three but even then it seemed to go on forever. I think I liked this one more because it covered people who I read and knew before but I didn't know their history. For example Edward Gibbon's the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had a medical problem where his testes would collect four liters of water in them! This with wearing tight britches in which Gibbon's thought flattered him! Retch...you have to dig a lot to find gold and this was one for me. The ending was quite good, he and his wife thought they were finishing their work at this volume but they went on to do one more. These are a real champion of history.
August 25, 2018
Aah! The Story of Civilisation is a real time machine. Is Durant a historian, philosopher or an artist? He is obsessed with imagery, isn't he? In this volume we sit in the parlers of Paris or some remote place (for the banished) - eat, drink, and debate with the chic philosophes of the day (and of course scorn them with Rousseau); listen to music and maybe compose some with the enlightened despots from St. Petersburg to Lisbon (if you get lucky in Austria or Italy you can catch up on some Mozart and Vivaldi), we watch operas, look at paintings, debate on which side to stand on the issues of Spanish Succession & Maria Theresa. At the end we hold rakes to lead Louis XVI to the guillotine. This was an amazing journey. Many stops of course. I don't mind passenger trains, really.
September 4, 2009
I find this book fascinating, but it is sooooooooo huge, it daunts me, and I have put it to the side because I own it(I found it on the side of the street, and now it is MINE!) Right now, I can borrow two books, at at time from the big, big bookstore that I work for, so I am saving Rousseau for a later time.
February 17, 2010
A must read if you are going to spend any significant time in France. For the effort, your understanding of what you will see and hear will be ‘enlightened.’
Not an easy read, but well worth the effort if want to have a complete sense of history and understanding when you go. I suggest you begin 3 to 4 months prior to departure.
Not an easy read, but well worth the effort if want to have a complete sense of history and understanding when you go. I suggest you begin 3 to 4 months prior to departure.
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