But that critique of scholarship for its dry-as-dust specialization is framed in the way that such critiques of scholarly research in the humanities are often framed today: in studying esoteric subjects that are of no broad relevance, humanists are betraying a duty to consider not just the Big Questions but the Big Culture(s) that truly matter in the long sweep of history, and nothing matters as much as Western culture. “It is eminently respectable to spend half a lifetime in the study of some insignificant tribelet having no demonstrable connections with the culture of the Western world,” wrote Howard Becker in the American Sociological Review, “but preoccupation with things Greek is thought to be direct evidence of a sickly estheticism or a failure to concentrate on ‘genuine research.’ Year after year we turn out dissertations establishing correlations between the number of bath-tubs and the amount of juvenile delinquency in Oskaloosa without feeling at all apologetic. One review, in praising Durant the popularizer, critiques the social sciences of the time for the arcane interests and esoteric specialization of scholarship content with investigating minutiae of interest only to other scholars. Two reviews of this volume nicely illustrate the camps into which academic readers of Durant seemed to fall: either they lauded him for his ability to bring to the distant past a sense of immediacy and vividness for the general reader, or they lambasted him for his hamfisted handling of historical argumentation and historical facts. Will Durant’s The Life of Greece, the second volume in the “Story of Civilization” series, was published in 1939, a grim year for “Western Civilization.” Despite – or perhaps because – the book was such a popular success, it was reviewed in a handful of academic journals.

The life of greece by durant