William James Durant was a prolific
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
writer,
historianA historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
, and philosopher. He is best known for
The Story of CivilizationThe Story of Civilization, by husband and wife Will and Ariel Durant, is an eleven-volume set of books covering Western history for the general reader...
, 11 volumes written in collaboration with his wife
Ariel DurantAriel Durant was the co-author of The Story of Civilization.-Biography:Durant was born in Proskurov as Chaya Kaufman to Ethel Appel Kaufman and Joseph Kaufman. The family emigrated to the United States in 1901. She met her future husband, Will Durant, while a student at Ferrer Modern School in...
and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for
The Story of PhilosophyThe Story of Philosophy: the Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers is a book by Will Durant that profiles several prominent Western philosophers and their ideas, beginning with Plato and on through Friedrich Nietzsche...
, written in 1926, which one observer described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy."
He conceived of philosophy as total perspective, or, seeing things "
sub specie totius," a phrase derived from Spinoza's "
sub specie aeternitatis." He sought to unify and humanize the great body of historical knowledge, which had grown too voluminous and become fragmented into esoteric specialties, and to vitalize it for contemporary application. Durant was a gifted prose stylist and storyteller who won a large readership in great part because of the nature and excellence of his writing, which, in contrast to formal academic language, is lively, witty, colourful, ornate, epigrammatic, in short, "humanized."
Will and Ariel Durant were awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for General Non-FictionThe Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction has been awarded since 1962 for a distinguished book of non-fiction by an American author that is not eligible for consideration in another category.-1960s:...
in 1968 and the
Presidential Medal of FreedomThe Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award bestowed by the President of the United States and is—along with thecomparable Congressional Gold Medal bestowed by an act of U.S. Congress—the highest civilian award in the United States...
in 1977.
Early life
Durant was born in
North AdamsNorth Adams is a city in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 13,708 as of the 2010 census, making it the least populous city in the state...
,
MassachusettsThe Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
of French-Canadian parents Joseph Durant and Mary Allard, who had been part of the Quebec emigration to the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
.
In 1900, Durant was educated by the Jesuits in
St. Peter's Preparatory SchoolSaint Peter's Preparatory School is a private all-male Jesuit college-preparatory school located in Jersey City, New Jersey, USA...
and, later,
Saint Peter's CollegeSaint Peter's College is a private, coeducational Roman Catholic college in the United States. Located in Jersey City, New Jersey, it was founded in 1872 by the Society of Jesus. Today, Saint Peter's College is one of 28 member institutions of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities...
in
Jersey City, New JerseyJersey City is the seat of Hudson County, New Jersey, United States.Part of the New York metropolitan area, Jersey City lies between the Hudson River and Upper New York Bay across from Lower Manhattan and the Hackensack River and Newark Bay...
. 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
socialistSocialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
philosophy but, after
World War IWorld War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, 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 philosophy. 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 BrisbaneArthur Brisbane was one of the best known American newspaper editors of the 20th century.-Biography:...
'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
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
,
FrenchFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
,
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and
geometryGeometry arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers ....
at
Seton Hall UniversitySeton Hall University is a private Roman Catholic university in South Orange, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1856 by Archbishop James Roosevelt Bayley, Seton Hall is the oldest diocesan university in the United States. Seton Hall is also the oldest and largest Catholic university in the...
,
South Orange, New Jersey-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 16,964 people, 5,522 households, and 3,766 families residing in the township. The population density was 5,945.3 people per square mile . There were 5,671 housing units at an average density of 1,987.5 per square mile...
. Durant was also made
librarianA librarian is an information professional trained in library and information science, which is the organization and management of information services or materials for those with information needs...
at the college.
Teaching career
In 1911 he left the seminary. He became the principal of Ferrer Modern School, an advanced school intended to educate the working-classes; he also taught there. Alden Freeman, a supporter of the Ferrer Modern School, sponsored him for a tour of
EuropeEurope is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. At the Modern School, he fell in love with and married a pupil, 13 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
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...
, he made it the inevitable outcome of the laughter of young children or the endurance of his parents' marriage. As Ariel DurantAriel Durant was the co-author of The Story of Civilization.-Biography:Durant was born in Proskurov as Chaya Kaufman to Ethel Appel Kaufman and Joseph Kaufman. The family emigrated to the United States in 1901. She met her future husband, Will Durant, while a student at Ferrer Modern School in...
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 UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
.
The Story of Philosophy
The Story of PhilosophyThe Story of Philosophy: the Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers is a book by Will Durant that profiles several prominent Western philosophers and their ideas, beginning with Plato and on through Friedrich Nietzsche...
originated as a series of
Little Blue BooksLittle Blue Books are a series of small staple-bound books published by the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company of Girard, Kansas . They were extremely popular, and achieved a total of more than 300 million booklets sold over the series' lifetime...
(educational pamphlets aimed at workers) and was so popular it was republished in 1926 by
Simon & SchusterSimon & Schuster, Inc., a division of CBS Corporation, is a publisher founded in New York City in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. It is one of the four largest English-language publishers, alongside Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins...
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 CivilizationThe Story of Civilization, by husband and wife Will and Ariel Durant, is an eleven-volume set of books covering Western history for the general reader...
. 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 EducationBrown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 , was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which...
) ignited the Civil Rights Movement. This Declaration was introduced into the
Congressional RecordThe Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published by the United States Government Printing Office, and is issued daily when the United States Congress is in session. Indexes are issued approximately every two weeks...
on October 1, 1945.
The Story of Civilization
The Durants strove throughout
The Story of CivilizationThe Story of Civilization, by husband and wife Will and Ariel Durant, is an eleven-volume set of books covering Western history for the general reader...
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 CivilizationThe Story of Civilization, by husband and wife Will and Ariel Durant, is an eleven-volume set of books covering Western history for the general reader...
is the most successful
historiographicalHistoriography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
series in history. It has been said that the series "put Simon and Schuster on the map" as a publishing house.
The Story of CivilizationThe Story of Civilization, by husband and wife Will and Ariel Durant, is an eleven-volume set of books covering Western history for the general reader...
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 CivilizationThe Story of Civilization, by husband and wife Will and Ariel Durant, is an eleven-volume set of books covering Western history for the general reader...
, they were awarded the
Pulitzer PrizeThe Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
for literature; later followed one of the two highest awards granted by the United States government to civilians, the
Presidential Medal of FreedomThe Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award bestowed by the President of the United States and is—along with thecomparable Congressional Gold Medal bestowed by an act of U.S. Congress—the highest civilian award in the United States...
, by
President FordGerald Rudolph "Jerry" Ford, Jr. was the 38th President of the United States, serving from 1974 to 1977, and the 40th Vice President of the United States serving from 1973 to 1974...
in 1977.
Other works
Throughout his career, Durant had several brilliant speeches; among such was the
"Persia in the History of Civilization" that was presented as an address before the
Iran-America SocietyThe Iran-America Society was founded in the 1950s in Tehran, Iran to promote understanding between the people of Iran and the people of the United States of America. The founding Chairman of the Board was Ralph E. Becket. David Nalle was one of its early directors. Its office in Washington, DC...
in
TehranTehran , sometimes spelled Teheran, is the capital of Iran and Tehran Province. With an estimated population of 8,429,807; it is also Iran's largest urban area and city, one of the largest cities in Western Asia, and is the world's 19th largest city.In the 20th century, Tehran was subject to...
on April 21, 1948, and its manuscript had been intended for inclusion in the
Bulletin of the Asia Institute (formerly
Bulletin of the American Institute for Persian, then
Iranian, Art and Archaeology), Vol. VII, no. 2, which never saw publication. They were followed by
Rousseau and Revolution with a slender volume of observations called
The Lessons of HistoryThe Lessons of History is a book by historians Will Durant and Ariel Durant.In The Lessons of History the authors provided a summary of periods and trends in history they had noted upon completion of their momentous eleven volume The Story of Civilization...
, 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 CemeteryThe Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery is a cemetery in the Westwood Village area of Los Angeles, California. It is located at 1218 Glendon Avenue in Westwood....
in
Los AngelesLos Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
.
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 RogersWilliam "Will" Penn Adair Rogers was an American cowboy, comedian, humorist, social commentator, vaudeville performer, film actor, and one of the world's best-known celebrities in the 1920s and 1930s....
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 suffrageWomen's suffrage or woman suffrage is the right of women to vote and to run for office. The expression is also used for the economic and political reform movement aimed at extending these rights to women and without any restrictions or qualifications such as property ownership, payment of tax, or...
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 PhilosophyThe Story of Philosophy: the Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers is a book by Will Durant that profiles several prominent Western philosophers and their ideas, beginning with Plato and on through Friedrich Nietzsche...
,
The Mansions of Philosophy, and, with the help of his wife,
ArielAriel Durant was the co-author of The Story of Civilization.-Biography:Durant was born in Proskurov as Chaya Kaufman to Ethel Appel Kaufman and Joseph Kaufman. The family emigrated to the United States in 1901. She met her future husband, Will Durant, while a student at Ferrer Modern School in...
, wrote
The Story of CivilizationThe Story of Civilization, by husband and wife Will and Ariel Durant, is an eleven-volume set of books covering Western history for the general reader...
. 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
EurocentrismEurocentrism is the practice of viewing the world from a European perspective and with an implied belief, either consciously or subconsciously, in the preeminence of European culture...
, 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."
On the decline and rebuilding of civilizations
Much like Oswald Spengler, 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 within" appeared as the opening graphic of
Mel GibsonMel Colm-Cille Gerard Gibson, AO is an American actor, film director, producer and screenwriter. Born in Peekskill, New York, Gibson moved with his parents to Sydney, Australia when he was 12 years old and later studied acting at the Australian National Institute of Dramatic Art.After appearing in...
's 2006 film
ApocalyptoApocalypto is a 2006 American epic action-adventure film directed by Mel Gibson. Set in Yucatan, Mexico, during the declining period of the Maya civilization, Apocalypto depicts the journey of a Mesoamerican tribesman who must escape human sacrifice and rescue his family after the capture and...
.
On religion and evolution
In an article in 1927, he wrote his thoughts about reconciling religion and Darwinism. 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
http://www.willdurant.com/bibliography.htm.
- Durant, Will (1917) Philosophy and the Social Problem. New York: Macmillan.
- Durant, Will (1926) The Story of Philosophy
The Story of Philosophy: the Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers is a book by Will Durant that profiles several prominent Western philosophers and their ideas, beginning with Plato and on through Friedrich Nietzsche...
. 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 (1931) Great Men of Literature, taken from Adventures in Genius. New York: Garden City Publishing Co.
- Durant, Will (1953) The Pleasures of Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster.
- Durant, Will & Durant, Ariel (1968) The Lessons of History
The Lessons of History is a book by historians Will Durant and Ariel Durant.In The Lessons of History the authors provided a summary of periods and trends in history they had noted upon completion of their momentous eleven volume The Story of Civilization...
. 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.
- Durant, Will (2003) An Invitation to Philosophy: Essays and Talks on the Love of Wisdom. Promethean Press.
- Durant, Will (2008) Adventures in Philosophy. Promethean Press.
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.
External links