This image was used on the cover of the first Modern School magazine.įrom 1907 to 1911, Durant taught Latin and French at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. The Modern School in New York City, circa 1911–12. To be one's 'deliberate self,' he explained, meant to 'rise above' the impulse to 'become the slaves of our passions' and instead to act with 'courageous devotion' to a moral cause.' Teaching career From then on, writes Rubin, 'his retention of a model of selfhood predicated on discipline made him unsympathetic to anarchist injunctions to 'be yourself.'. With his energy invested in Baruch Spinoza, he made little room for the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

She adds that 'the most concrete of those was a persistent penchant for philosophy. However, even before the war, 'other aspects of his sensibility had competed with his radical leanings,' notes Rubin. In 1905, he began experimenting with socialist philosophy, but, after World War I, he began recognizing that a ' lust for power' underlay all forms of political behavior. In that way, one might argue, he embarked on a course that, while distant from Yale's or Columbia's apprenticeships in gentility, offered equivalent cultural authority within his own milieu.' Historian Joan Rubin writes of that period, 'Despite some adolescent flirtations, he began preparing for the vocation that promised to realize his mother's fondest hopes for him: the priesthood. Peter's Preparatory School in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1903, Durant enrolled at Saint Peter's College (now Saint Peter's University), also in Jersey City, where he graduated in 1907. William James Durant was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, to French-Canadian Catholic parents, Joseph Durant and Mary Allard, who had been part of the Quebec emigration to the United States. As a result of their success, he and his wife were jointly awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. He sought to unify and humanize the great body of historical knowledge, which had grown voluminous and become fragmented into esoteric specialties, and to vitalize it for contemporary application. ĭurant conceived of philosophy as total perspective or seeing things sub specie totius (i.e., 'from the perspective of the whole')-a phrase inspired by Spinoza's sub specie aeternitatis, roughly meaning 'from the perspective of the eternal'. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy (1926), described as 'a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy'. It was written in collaboration with his wife, Ariel Durant, and published between 19.

William James Durant ( / d ə ˈ r æ n t/ Novem– November 7, 1981) was an American historian and philosopher, best known for his 11-volume work, The Story of Civilization, which contains and details the history of Eastern and Western civilizations.

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