/lit/ - Literature

>>18809013
Great prose and covers art and literature really well. Durant was a Columbia philosophy PhD and covers ideas excellently, so you'll come out with a background as good as reading any strictly philosophical history, but with way more context.

Also excellent prose.

Downside is less focus on day to day life and military history is very compressed.

You can skip the first book as the scope is too big and the dating techniques make it less accurate today. Life of Greece is excellent. The audio editions are really good too if you go that route. I listened to Greece and Rome whole reading Age of Faith and the Renaissance.

If only every voting citizen had read this. Basically counts as a 2,000 page survery of philosophy too since Durant focuses on ideas and culture.

>>18615569
The early Greek historians all complained about the younger generations growing decadent in the glow of Athens's material success. They complain of people caring more about comforts than pride, of switching to argument and rhetoric over action and war, of men and women being overly permiscuous whilst also practicing birth control and lowering the population. The idea of the lower classes breeding put of control while the elite hardly reproduce in order to pass on and not divide their great fortunes dates back to at least 200BC. You had endless cycles of poor flags rising up and creating democracies and overturning tradition in the Greek states, then the mob getting out of control, then the aristocrats coming back in with a foreign army. Sparta destroyed itself through economic inequality that led to revolution, doing what other states could not. The democratic mob appealed to Sparta's history and tried to reinstitute the old ways but it was too late.


Ibn Khaldun similarly talks about the rise of civilizations and then their fall into decadent periods.

Will Durant picks up this thread more critically in his Magnus opus (pic related). Having access to 3,000 years of sources, he sees that the old have been decrying the weakness and degeneracy of the young for all that time and takes it with a grain of salt.

Durant paraphrased the meme better than any: "every civilization begins a stoic, and dies an epicurean."

But it isn't all a decline to weakness. Like Gibbon said, the professionalization of the Roman armies "elevated war to an art, and degraded it to a trade." You can have material expansion and cultural decay at the same time. Durant notes that cultural pursuits improve with "decadence" and great art, philosophy, and science tend to come after the rise of a people. He noted the universal trend towards entrenched elites practicing birth control, which he posits may form some sort of ad hoc eugenics. Climate change, although the phrase didn't exist in his time, plays a role at the local level as Crete or Egypt found their land ruined for agriculture due to over cultivation.

Durant is an interesting guy because he was a Columbia philosophy PhD living in the Gilded Age who go into radical left wing politics as kings still ruled Europe and many had no vote. He was 29 when WWI started. He eventually abandoned leftism in the 1910s and dedicated his life to pic related. The idea was that philosophy and culture were center of Western success and progress for humanity. Thus, he covers the history of philosophy, art, and literature alongside wars and politics in his books, which are truly great and have top tier prose as well.

Point being, the idea is as old as time. There is nothing new under the sun, but it also isn't very accurate and a more detailed study is needed for patterns in the rise and decline of civilizations.

>>18611224
The Story of Civilization is truly great here and focuses on the development of thought and culture. You can skip book one and go to Greece.

Fukayama's Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Decay are good in that he includes cogent summaries and case studies for every major theory in state development.