SO THIS GUY SAID DURANT WAS GOOD

On the plane back from Paris after my honeymoon, I sat next to this guy who was a futurist. A professional futurist, working for some foundation (Foundation for the Future? The Future Foundation?) on the west coast. He was one of those people who has so many degrees in so many different subjects they have no apparent intellectual boundaries. Wanna talk economics? Sure. Philosophy? Certainly. Physics? Yup. History? Check.

The big surprise of our conversation was his resolute admiration of the popular historian Will Durant. Even though professional historians look down on Durant, he said, the 11-volume Story of Civilization (13 mm copies sold, and counting) is actually an outstanding technical achievement. He said Durant had gone to remarkable lengths to find original source material, and had managed to organize his work coherently and make it entertaining despite the scope of the project.

So I picked up The Story of Civilization at the SF Public Library surplus sale ($1 per volume). It's great. It covers the stuff I know about well-enough, and then a million other things I'd never heard of. And the writing is a relief from the linguistic contortions of modern historians. On English boarding schools of the Elizabethan era: "the curriculum was classical plus flogging..."

The only problem now is that I apparently hallucinated the whole thing. I can find no positive academic comment on Durant anywhere. Typing "Future Foundation" into Google yields 14,800 hits (from London-based consumer think-tanks to DC-based conservative debating societies) to some believers in genetic destiny in PWP's neighborhood (in the future, apparently, everyone will be naked and bald).

Durant apparently has an odd, right-leaning following. This person says Haldeman used his prison term to read Durant. Durant's stll a player at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, or at least in the CEO's intern's quote book.

So I'm reading it and thoroughly enjoying the experience. But WTF?

[Oh well. I guess I'll hust have to read Durant because I like it. I think it's imcumbent on "real historians" to look down on anything we've ever heard of or are likely to read for pleasure. That's why I don't care what they think, unless they can prove to me that Durant made it all up. History is and always will be a battleground. Remember when Patrick O'Brian pretended (I'm pretty sure he was pretending) not to know who Barbara Tuchman was? -LoM]

[The couple I've read were fantastic primers on the classical sources, brilliant, funny, beautifully written - but I agree with a portion of the critique: by using only original sources, the Durants' 50 year (!) project all but eliminated modern scholarship - and you lose not only say, Marxist historiography, which is fair enough, but also most modern archaeology.

Vonn's right about the psychotic academic disdain for good writing, but I think it's clearing out a bit - I've even run across readable contemporary art history! But I remember fondly the Durants' descriptions of the Roman civil wars presaging the end of the Republic...they sound so... somehow...familiar. -PWP]