Will Durant Quotes
As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.
Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. The Lessons of History. Simon and Schuster, 1968, p. 34.
The term “magistrates” refers to chief executives such as Governors, Mayors, Kings, etc. and not members of a judicial branch per se. For example the President of the United States is sometimes referred to as the Chief Magistrate of the Nation.”
It is hard for us today to understand why intelligent, thoughtful, people would seriously consider and even advocate anarchy. Yet there were many intelligent people who preached anarchy. The key to understanding this is that it is also hard for us to realize how terrible and actually dangerous was typical life under the Russian Government of the Czars. It was not only that most people were serfs--virtually slaves, but the government officials, the military and civilian both, could and did, abuse people in every way imaginable. In America today, if any of us were unfortunate to be the victim of violence, the odds are high that it would be at the hands of another citizen. In Russia (and other countries) at the time, the odds were that the perpetrator of the violence was a government official or government sanctioned person—police, military, aristocrats, civil officers. As but one example. Cossacks would frequently get drunk, pillage and rape a community and kill any who resisted—all with impunity. This quotation from Tolstoy is the classic argument of the anarchist at the time. It was impossible that the absence of government could be as bad as the government then was.
William James Durant was a Russian born, historian, and philosopher. He became best known for his work “The Story of Civilization,” and acclaimed 11 volume series written over 50 years in collaboration with his wife, Ariel Durant, and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy (1926), described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy". They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1968 and in 1977, the Durants were presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
