1091 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-1567310214
The Story of Civilization is an 11-volume set of books by the American writers, historians and philosophers Will and Ariel Durant that focuses on a philosophical understanding of Western history that was intended for the general reader. Written over a period of more than fifty years, Volume 10: Rousseau and Revolution was originally published in 1967, and centers on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his times (it was also the only Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of the whole series). Over the course of these 1000+ pages – one of the fattest books in the series – we learn all about the birth of the British Empire and the reign of George III, the decline of the Habsburgs and the rise of the Hohenzollerns and, consequently, the ongoing disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire, the Seven Years’ War, the history of the papacy for, although the popes had lost a great deal of their political influence, they were still major figures in the Europe of the time, and their decisions had major consequences on the course that the Roman Church would take over the next century, and so much more, besides. Not only is this a work about the European powers during this period, but, true to the title of this volume, the Durants show how the writings of Rousseau and other authors created the intellectual climate that would lead to revolution.
While The Story of Civilization has a full complement of colorful characters and deep thoughts, the persons who populate Rousseau and Revolution is truly distinctive for the broad cast of poor players that strut and fret their hour upon the stage: enlightened despots like Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia and Joseph II of Austria; economists like Adam Smith, historians like Edward Gibbon and political theorists like Edmund Burke (and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, naturally); philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Giambattista Vico and Cesare Beccaria (and, again, Rousseau); writers like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller (and Rousseau, once again); composers like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Joseph Haydn and Christoph Willibald Gluck (and, you guessed it, Jean-Jacques); and artists like Canaletto, Francisco Goya, Jean-Antoine Houdon and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (but not, this time, you-know-who). This is some cast, no doubt, but in spite of all of these geniuses bouncing about, Rousseau and Revolution is a real joy to read, covering such disparate topics with ease and style; it is almost as if the Durants had written a kind of gestalt biography in which all of these great thinkers’ lives were somehow interconnected (in many ways, they were).
But it is Rousseau that is the cement that keeps this work from tumbling over, Rousseau and his hypothetical “State of Nature” in which there must have been a time before organized societies existed and in which Man lived in Peace and Harmony and that people were neither good nor bad, but were born as a Tabula rasa – a blank slate – and that artificial societies and the environment corrupted the purity of Mankind (a kind of secular version of Man’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden and a state of innocence). In Rousseau's state of nature, people did not know each other enough to come into serious conflict and they did have normal values. The modern society, and the ownership it entails, is blamed for the disruption of the state of nature which Rousseau sees as true freedom:
Hence although men had become less forbearing, and although natural pity had already undergone some alteration, this period of the development of human faculties, maintaining a middle position between the indolence of our primitive state and the petulant activity of our egocentrism, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least subject to upheavals and the best for man, and that he must have left it only by virtue of some fatal chance happening that, for the common good, ought never to have happened. The example of savages, almost all of whom have been found in this state, seems to confirm that the human race had been made to remain in it always; that this state is the veritable youth of the world; and that all the subsequent progress has been in appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individual, and in fact toward the decay of the species.
We have Rousseau to think for the modern-day Environmentalist Crusades and their desire to see Man reduced in his circumstances, who think that more that Man has deviated from the state of nature the worse he has become. Espousing the belief that all degenerates in the hands of Mankind, Rousseau taught that men would be free, wise and good in the state of nature and that instinct and emotion, when not distorted by the unnatural limitations of civilization, are nature’s voices and instructions to the good life; Rousseau’s “Noble Savage” stands in direct opposition to the man of culture. The modern-day Left has run with this idea, seeing the modern world in general – and the West in particular – as inherently bad and in need of correction, if not destruction. In Rousseau’s work one finds the foundations of socialism and can see the mass of contradictions and fallacies underlying this morally bankrupt ideology, unobstructed by the clever rhetorical devices of modern collectivists. The principles espoused by Rousseau haunt us even today and, until they are finally faced, the specter of tyranny will continue to hang like a pall over the Western conscience.
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