Ideas That Shaped Mankind by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto offers a tour of ideas that shaped human history through a series of lectures titled: Ideas That Shaped Mankind: A Concise History of Human Thought (The Modern Scholar) (The Modern Scholar: Great Professors Teaching You).  The audio version allows us to hear the Queen Mary University of London professor deliver the lectures in his upper class British accent.

He covers the major world religions, Buddhism, Muslim, Christianity and Judaism.  The disproportionate effect of Judaism is not unusual in that small countries like England, Greece and Rome/Italy have produced disproportional cultural impacts.  

Many of the ideas that shaped history turned out to be quiet deleterious.  These include ideas presented in Machiavelli's The Little Prince, Marxism, Communism, fundamentalism and a stew of other isms that promise utopia but deliver something considerably less palatable. He concludes that embracing cultural pluralism may be the only hope for humanity.

The Year our world began - 1492 - 7 min.