Most of the people who appear most often and most gloriously in the history books are great conquerors and generals and soldiers, whereas the people who really helped civilization forward are often never mentioned at all. I urge readers to remember, at all times, that all of this was written some 90 years back.) (I have italicized my personal favorites. The remaining post contains select lines and passages from the book, chapterwise. Below are screenshots of the first two pages of the book: Joad begins his discourse on civilization with a chapter titled ‘A Talk’, in which he describes a wonderful conversation with Lucy (probably his daughter). While a lot of what Joad wrote is out-dated information, the beauty of some of his ideas is eternal.

The oblivion that the book currently is in prompted me to write this post. It is very difficult to find this book or references to it these days: I was surprised to see that even goodreads‘s page on CEM Joad does not mention it. Author Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad was one of Britain’s most colorful and controversial intellectual figures of the 1940s.

The Story of Civilization was written in 1931. In fact the book’s intended primary audience, when it was first published, was kids. If you want to introduce a child or a young mind to philosophy and good ideas, this is the go-to book. The book and its take on what it means to be ‘civilized’ have stayed with me ever since. I read it as a child when my guru, my English teacher, lent it to me (he used to say I bought this book only for two rupees from a roadside book vendor). All of 94 pages in big font, it packs in some profound philosophy in palatable, often delicious, lines.

Man has a better chance today to do these things than he ever had before.”ĬEM Joad’s The Story of Civilization is one of the best examples of the cliche that awesome things come in small packages. “… being civilized mean making and liking beautiful things, thinking freely, and living rightly and maintaining justice equally between man and man.

Our Own Civilization By C.E.M.Joad Pdf