William James Durant
(November 5, 1885 – November 7, 1981) 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 General Nonfiction in 1968 and the
Presidential Medal of Freedom
in 1977.
Early life
Durant was
born in North Adams
, Massachusetts
of French-Canadian
parents Joseph Durant and Mary Allard, who had been part of the
Quebec emigration to the United States.
In 1900,
Durant was educated by the Jesuits in
St. Peter's
Preparatory School
and, later, Saint Peter's
College
in Jersey City, New Jersey
. Historian Joan Rubin writes of this period,
"Despite some adolescent flirtations, he began preparing for the
vocation that promised to realize his mother's fondest hopes for
him: the priesthood. In that way, one might argue, he embarked on a
course that, while distant from Yale's or Columbia's
apprenticeships in gentility, offered equivalent cultural authority
within his own milieu."
In 1905, he began experimenting with
socialist philosophy but after
World War I began recognizing that a "lust for
power" underlay all forms of political behavior. However, even
before the war, "other aspects of his sensibility had competed with
his radical leanings," notes Rubin. She adds that "the most
concrete of those was a persistent penchant for philosphy. With his
energy invested in
Spinoza, he made little
room for
Bakunin. From then on, writes
Rubin, "his retention of a model of selfhood predicated on
discipline made him unsympathetic to
anarchist injunctions to 'be yourself'. . . To be
one's 'deliberate self,' he explained, meant to 'rise above' the
impulse to 'become the slaves of our passions' and instead to act
with 'courageous devotion' to a moral cause."
He graduated in 1907. He worked as a
reporter for
Arthur
Brisbane's
New York
Evening Journal for ten dollars a week. At the
Evening
Journal, he wrote several articles on
sexual criminals.
In 1907, he began
teaching Latin, French, English and geometry at Seton Hall University
, South Orange, New Jersey
. Durant was also made
librarian at the college.
Teaching career
The Modern School in New York City,
circa 1911-12.
Will Durant stands with his pupils.
This image was used on the cover of the first Modern
School magazine.
In 1911 he left the Seminary. He became the teacher and chief pupil
of the
Ferrer Modern School, an
experiment in
libertarian education. Alden
Freeman, a supporter of the Ferrer Modern School, sponsored him for
a tour of
Europe. At the Modern School, he
fell in love with and married a pupil, thirteen years his junior,
Chaya (Ida) Kaufman, whom he later nicknamed "Ariel". The Durants
had one daughter, Ethel, and adopted a son, Louis.
By 1914 he began to reject "intimations of human evil," notes
Rubin, and to "retreat from radical social change." She summarizes
these changes in his overall philosophy:
- "Instead of tying human progress to the rise of the proletariat, he made it the inevitable outcome
of the laughter of young children or the endurance of his parents'
marriage. As Ariel Durant later
summarized it, he had concocted, by his mid-thirties, 'that
sentimental, idealizing blend of love, philosophy, Christianity,
and socialism which dominated his spiritual chemistry' the rest of
his life.
- "Those attributes ultimately propelled him away from radicalism
as a substitute faith and from teaching young anarchists as an
alternative vocation. Instead, late in 1913 he embarked on a
different pursuit: the dissemination of culture."
In 1913, he resigned his post as teacher. To support themselves, he
began lecturing in a Presbyterian church for five- and ten-dollar
fees; the material for these lectures became the starting point for
The Story of Civilization.
Author
In 1917, working on a doctorate in philosophy, Will Durant wrote
his first book,
Philosophy and the Social Problem. He
discussed the idea that philosophy had not grown because it avoided
the actual problems of society. He received his doctorate in 1917.
He was also an instructor at
Columbia University. Brief descriptions
of some of his major works follows.
The Story of Philosophy
The Story of
Philosophy originated as a series of
Little Blue Books (educational pamphlets
aimed at workers) and was so popular it was republished in 1926 by
Simon & Schuster as a
hardcover book and became a bestseller, giving the Durants the
financial independence that would allow them to travel the world
several times and spend four decades writing
The Story of
Civilization. He left teaching and began work on the eleven
volume
Story of Civilization. Will drafted a civil rights
"Declaration of Interdependence" in the early 1940s, nearly a full
decade before the Brown decision (see
Brown v. Board of Education) ignited the
Civil Rights
Movement. This Declaration was introduced into the
Congressional Record on October 1,
1945.
The Story of Civilization
The Durants strove throughout
The Story of Civilization to
create what they called "integral history". They opposed this to
the "specialization" of history, an anticipatory rejection of what
some have called the "cult of the expert." Their goal was to write
a "biography" of a civilization, in this case, the West, including
not just the usual wars, politics and biography of greatness and
villainy, but also the culture, art, philosophy, religion, and the
rise of mass communication. Much of
The Story considers
the living conditions of everyday people throughout the twenty-five
hundred years their "story" of the West covers. They also bring an
unabashedly moral framework to their accounts, constantly stressing
the repetition of the "dominance of strong over the weak, the
clever over the simple."
The Story of Civilization is the
most successful historiographical series in history. It has been
said that the series "put Simon and Schuster on the map" as a
publishing house.
The Story of Civilization is also noteworthy because of
the excellence of its writing style, and contains numerous
apothegms worthy of the Roman and Renaissance authors Durant
admired. Discussing certain inconsistencies in the character of
Botticelli in
The Renaissance
(page 137), he writes: "Doubtless like all of us he was many men,
turned on one or another of his selves as occasion required, and
kept his real self a frightened secret from the world."
For
Rousseau and Revolution, (1967), the 10th volume of
The Story of Civilization, they were awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for literature; later followed
the highest award granted by the United States government to
civilians, the
Presidential Medal of Freedom
by
President Ford in 1977.
Other works
They followed
Rousseau and Revolution with a slender
volume of observations called
The Lessons of History; which
was both synopsis of the series as well as analysis. Though they
had intended to carry the work into the 20th century, they simply
ran out of time and had expected the 10th volume to be their last.
However, they went on to publish a final volume, their 11th,
The Age of Napoleon in 1975. They also left behind notes
for a twelfth volume,
The Age of Darwin, and an outline
for a thirteenth,
The Age of Einstein, which would have
taken
The Story of Civilization through to 1945.
Two posthumous works by Durant have been published in recent years,
The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time (2002) and
Heroes of History: A Brief History of Civilization from Ancient
Times to the Dawn of the Modern Age (2001).
- Final years
The Durants also shared a love story as remarkable as their
scholarship; they detail this in
Dual Autobiography. After
Will went into the hospital, Ariel stopped eating. Will died after
he heard that Ariel had died. They died within two weeks of each
other in 1981 (she on October 25 and he on November 7). Though
their daughter, Ethel, and grandchildren strove to keep the death
of his Ariel from the ailing Will, he learned of it on the evening
news, and he himself died at the age of 96.
He was buried beside
his wife in Westwood Village Memorial Park
Cemetery
in Los Angeles
.
Writing about Russia
In 1933, he published
Tragedy of Russia: Impressions from a
Brief Visit and soon after,
The lesson of Russia. A
few years after the books were published, social commentator
Will Rogers had read them and described
a symposium he had attended that included Will Durant as one of the
contributors. He later wrote of Durant, "He is just about our best
writer on Russia. He is the most fearless writer that has been
there. He tells you just what it's like. He makes a mighty fine
talk. One of the most interesting lecturers we have, and a fine
fellow."
Legacy
Will Durant fought for equal wages,
women's suffrage and fairer working
conditions for the American labor force. Durant not only wrote on
many topics but also put his ideas into effect. Durant, it has been
said widely, attempted to bring philosophy to the common man. He
authored
The Story of
Philosophy,
The
Mansions of Philosophy, and, with the help of his wife,
Ariel, wrote
The Story of Civilization. He
also wrote magazine articles.
He was trying to improve understanding of viewpoints of human
beings and to have others forgive foibles and human waywardness. He
chided the comfortable insularity of what is now known as
Eurocentrism, by pointing out in
Our
Oriental Heritage that Europe was only "a jagged promontory of
Asia." He complained of "the provincialism of our traditional
histories which began with Greece and summed up Asia in a line" and
said they showed "a possibly fatal error of perspective and
intelligence."
Philosophical writings
On the decline and rebuilding of civilizations
Will Durant saw the decline of a civilization as a culmination of
strife between religion and secular intellectualism, thus toppling
the precarious institutions of convention and morality:
"Hence a certain tension between religion and society
marks the higher stages of every civilization.
Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and
bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of
morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and
art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the
past.
For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it
clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological
leisureliness.
Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a
galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes
on the character of a "conflict between science and
religion."
Institutions which were at first in the hands of the
clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and
divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become
secular, perhaps profane.
The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology
and-after some hesitation- the moral code allied with it;
literature and philosophy become anticlerical.
The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant
worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with
every dogma and every idea.
Conduct, deprived of its religious supports,
deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of
consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to
weary wealth.
In the end a society and its religion tend to fall
together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death.
Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises,
gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and
after centuries of chaos builds another civilization."
More than twenty years after his death, Durant's quote of "
A
great civilization is not conquered from without until it has
destroyed itself from within" appeared as the opening graphic
of
Mel Gibson's 2006 film
Apocalypto.
On religion and evolution
In an article in 1927, he wrote his thoughts about reconciling
religion and science. An excerpt from the article:
- "As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical
account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not
see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and
profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to
torture it into conformity with modern theory."
Selected books
See a full bibliography at Will Durant Online
[36096].
- Durant, Will (1917) Philosophy and the Social Problem.
New York: Macmillan.
- Durant, Will (1926) The Story of Philosophy. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will (1927) Transition. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
- Durant, Will (1929) The Mansions of Philosophy. New
York: Simon and Schuster. Later with slight revisions re-published
as The Pleasures of Philosophy
- Durant, Will (1930) The Case for India. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will (1931) Adventures in Genius. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will (1953) The Pleasures of Philosophy. New
York: Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will & Durant, Ariel (1968) The Lessons of History. New
York: Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will & Durant, Ariel (1970) Interpretations of
Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will & Durant, Ariel (1977) A Dual
Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will (2001) Heroes of History: A Brief History of
Civilization from Ancient Times to the Dawn of the Modern Age.
New York: Simon and Schuster. Actually copyrighted by John Little
and the Estate of Will Durant.
- Durant, Will (2002) The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All
Time. New York: Simon and Schuster.
The Story of Civilization
- Durant, Will (1935) Our Oriental Heritage. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will (1939) The Life of Greece. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will (1944) Caesar and Christ. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
- Durant, Will (1950) The Age of Faith. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
- Durant, Will (1953) The Renaissance. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
- Durant, Will (1957) The Reformation. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
- Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1961) The Age of Reason
Begins. New York: Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1963) The Age of Louis
XIV. New York: Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1965) The Age of
Voltaire. New York: Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1967) Rousseau and
Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1975) The Age of
Napoleon. New York: Simon and Schuster.
See also
Notes
- Rogers, Will, Gragert, Steven K. The Papers of Will
Rogers, University of Oklahoma Press (1996) pg. 393
- Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture,
Univ. of North Carolina Press (1992)
- http://ktwu.wuacc.edu/journeys/scripts/412b.html
- The Story of Civilization, V.1., 71. See also this
article's Discussion page.
- The Story of Civilization (Vol 3 Caesar And
Christ. Epilogue - Why Rome fell): A great civilization is not
conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.
The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her
morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic
despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
- Durant, Will. Popular Science, Oct. 1927
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