History’s Winners and Losers

<![CDATA[The difference between history’s winners and losers obviously depends on the criteria we adopt to discriminate between success and failure at the level of nation, culture, and civilization. For the purposes of this article, I will leave the display of military splendor and the creation of great art out of the equation. Neither military parades in a public square nor architectural wonders constitute a boon for ordinary people, even if they produce a feeling of national pride. Rather, I define success as a function of three complementary factors: the ability to survive intact for extended periods; the achievement of approximate prosperity in a largely impoverished world; and the fostering of a relatively free, confident, and vigorous citizenry. (Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian calculus developed in his A Fragment on Government, based on “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” plainly does not consort with these observations, since happiness is both an ambiguous concept and a non-measurable “quantity.”)]]>