**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 **