In The Ancient City, Fustel de Coulanges hands us the skeleton key unlocking classical civilization: the Indo-European domestic cult. With a formidable command of primary sources, he shows this archaic religion to be the engine behind the social developments of the ancient world from remote pre-history down to late antiquity. This is the story of the descent of the traditional social order par excellence into something approximating liberalism, and it has never been better told, nor more fully explained.
As the inaugural title in Imperium Press’ Traditionalist Histories series, this work stands as a model for the traditionalist writing of history. In prizing primary above secondary sources, in its careful attention to language and philology, and especially in holding up religion as the elementary force behind history—upstream of economics, war, politics, and all material conditions—Fustel’s masterwork forms a powerful foil to modern historiography.
In his foreword, Dennis Bouvard views The Ancient City through the lens of generative anthropology, leveraging the originary hypothesis of Eric Gans to explain the work in terms of shared origins, sacrality, and the belief in a center. In so doing, he points the way to a post-liberal understanding of our own social order, informed by the imperative order described by Fustel.
