Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges

“Henry James Sumner Maine”

“Bertrand de Jouvenel”

“It is along these lines, I propose, that the unquestioned belief in communal origin, without which, as Coulanges shows, we face a more or less accelerated descent into a violence that is not only physical but creeps into our habits, our interaction, our very language, is possible.”

“The two premodern religions were ancestor worship and nature worship (see "The Ancient City" by Fustel de Coulanges). The two postmodern religions are evidently identitarianism and environmentalism. Is this a coincidence, or something deeper?”

“The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges -- the single best book I have found on who we are and how we got here.”

“The upper classes among the ancients never had intelligence or ability enough to direct the poor towards labor, and thus help them to escape honorably from their misery and corruption. A few benevolent men attempted it, but they did not succeed. The result was that the cities always floated between two revolutions, one to despoil the rich, the other to enable them to recover their fortunes. This lasted from the Peloponnesian war to the conquest of Greece by the Romans.”

“Thus the ancient city was transformed by degrees. In the beginning it was an association of some hundred chiefs of families. Later the number of citizens increased, because the younger branches obtained a position of equality. Later still, the freed clients, the plebs, all that multitude which during centuries had remained outside the political and religious association, sometimes even outside the sacred enclosure of the city, broke down the barriers which were opposed to them, and penetrated into the city, where they immediately became the masters.”