I've always considered that to be history, though, it seems like that's why people study history to me. His concept seems to be more about using statistics, a kind of data driven approach.
It's not new...but my impression of the book is that he's too motivated to lift up china and downgrade the west. And since this is his motivation he has to "balance things out" after he's mentioned newton by bringing up witch burning etc. The first part of Duchesne's book goes into a bit of detail about the various authors from this school of thought and the way they try and twist certain things to reach this result. It makes the whole book questionable.Citing Newton as a closet alchemist should be nothing new or earth shaking to anyone fimilier with him, nor dose it undo his works.
I don't think people in large groups are pretty much the same. Different cultures can lead to very different mentalities even when looking at the group on the whole. The other two aren't things I would say either...Some of his main points were; that lazy, frightened, and greedy people are those driving social development, that people in large groups are pretty much the same, and that the great and the foolish only serve to speed up or slow down events in development.
I think that most of us could agree with at least two out of the three without coming to blows. I will leave it open as to which two any one wishes to choose.
I think whenever someone tries to use a system to evaluate history they will end up distorting things in order to make them fit into the system. Because a system isn't useful if it is very complicated, and yet history is complicated.
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Just finished "The Birth of the Modern: 1815-1830 by Paul Johnson. Very good book. My only complaints are that from time to time some modern political issue will come into play and he gets biased. Also that he's a little too credulous regarding lurid anecdotes.
He tries to cover everything interesting about the time period and does a good job at it...really makes it come to life. He quotes a lot from diaries from the time period. But it's not just disconnected anecdotes, he relates it back to show how things were changing into the modern era in many ways. So he will be discussing carriages and will tell about what it was like to ride in them and how many varieties there were that we don't even think about, and how often there were accidents and fatalities, and then turn that into a discussion of the roads and how the were modernized, and then finally to the railroads.
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