François Guizot

History of Civilization in Europe

Originally given as a series of lectures at the Sorbonne, François Guizot's "The History of Civilization in Europe" was published to great acclaim in 1828 and is now regarded as a classic in modern historical research. The History was particularly influential on Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville, in fact, requested that a copy of The History be sent to him when he arrived in the United States. This volume offers what Guizot himself describes as a "philosophic history" of Europe, one which searches for the underlying general causes and effects of particular events. Guizot considers European civilisation in its broadest senses, encompassing not merely political, economic, and social structures, but also the ideas, faculties, and sentiments of "man himself". Guizot understood a two-way relationship between external conditions (i.e., social, political, and economic conditions) and the inner man: external conditions affect the inner man, who's moral and intellectual developments eventually shape social and other external conditions. Guizot's History describes the development of European civilisation in terms of the inevitable advance of equality of conditions, due to many factors, including a new emphasis on the individual. The author explores the decentralisation of power that characterised feudalism, the centralisation of power after the fifteenth century, and finally the rebuilding of local autonomy necessary for representative and free government. As Editor Larry Siedentop describes, "The [History's] moral is about the social and political consequences of destroying local liberty . . . excessive concentration of power at the centre of any society is, in the long run, its own undoing."