Secular approaches: the Enlightenment and beyond
For many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers, the project of establishing a science of history and society, comprising hypotheses and laws of an explanatory power analogous to that attained by theories in the physical sciences, acquired an almost obsessive importance. The age of religious and metaphysical conjectures concerning the destiny of human affairs had, in their opinion, come to a close. The task that now presented itself was one of constructing, upon the basis of hard observable facts, interpretations that would not only rescue the human studies from ignorance, uncertainty, and primitive superstition but also create an instrument for predicting and controlling the fate of humanity. Thus, the idea of establishing a universally valid social science, capable of accounting for the phenomena of history in terms of causal principles comparable to those employed in the natural sphere, came to be linked with the promotion of reformist and revolutionary ideals. Figures such as Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and the marquis de Condorcet in the 18th century and Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Thomas Buckle in the 19th century all believed that it was feasible to apply scientific procedures to the study of human development. But equally—though in widely different ways—they were deeply concerned with practical objects and committed to changing existing institutions and ways of life. To these thinkers, theory was complementary to practice; knowledge was power.
Yet even in the 19th century, when speculation of this type was at its height, there were informed skeptics—Joseph de Maistre and Arthur Schopenhauer, for example, and later the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt—who challenged the optimistic and rationalistic presuppositions on which it was founded. It was pointed out that notions such as that of the perfectibility of humanity or of the existence of some foreseeable goal toward which the course of events was inexorably leading were not empirically established truths but mere articles of faith; in subscribing to them, historical theorists often appeared to be tacitly importing into their allegedly scientific interpretations teleological conceptions of a kind that it had been their declared intention to banish forever from social enquiry. These objections were repeated and amplified in the 20th-century by critics such as Karl Popper, who also maintained that the theorists in question were, in any case, working with an unacceptably crude notion of scientific reasoning and that their high-sounding generalities conspicuously failed to measure up to the requisite standards of conceptual precision and observational testability.
Although such strictures have considerable force, they should not obscure the significant contribution that had been made toward extending human knowledge and understanding. The tendency, for example, to insist upon the relevance of scientific modes of procedure to the areas of historical and social investigation at least achieved the salutary effect of throwing into relief the inadequacy of previous work in these domains; moreover, it indirectly brought to the fore the entire question of the status of history as a legitimate form of thought. For, if history should prove resistant to attempts to assimilate it to other accredited branches of enquiry, it would be necessary to show why this was so and to exhibit those features of historical thinking that lent it its distinctive and irreducible character.
The new science: Vico and Herder
Among the 18th-century theorists, two writers can indeed be picked out who—while remaining firmly within the speculative tradition—at the same time possessed sufficient genius and prescience to realize that the solution to the problem of establishing history as a reputable discipline might be found by pursuing a course different from one modelled upon the methodology of the natural sciences. Partly because of the obscure and scholastic manner in which it was written, the Scienza nuova (1725; New Science) of Giambattista Vico was a work whose importance remained for a long time wholly unrecognized, and it was not until the 20th century that its significance and originality were fully appreciated.
Central to the book is the contention that the kind of knowledge that humans can achieve of their own actions, creations, and institutions is of a radically different type from the knowledge that is acquired by the observation and investigation of the nonhuman or natural world. Knowledge of the former variety is, moreover, held to be in principle superior to that of the latter. For, in Vico’s opinion, in order truly to know something it is necessary in some sense to have made it: it followed that, whereas the reality studied by the physical scientist is the creation of God and therefore only properly known by God, the “world of nations” that forms the subject matter of history is the creation of humans and is therefore something that humans can “hope to know.” Thus, Vico was led to stress the differences rather than the analogies between historical and other forms of enquiry; in particular, he emphasized the need for the historian to enter imaginatively into the spirit of past ages, re-creating the outlooks and attitudes that informed them as opposed to seeking to impose upon them inappropriate or falsifying interpretations—“pseudomyths”—that derived from the cultural ethos of his own time. Vico propounded a cyclical theory of human history, according to which “nations” or societies pass through determinate stages, and he combined this with the idea that a providential principle is in some manner immanent within the various forms of life that humans construct. He employed such conceptions, however, in a fashion that treated human nature as historical and emphasized that human powers and capacities do not conform to a fixed or static pattern but are necessarily subject to change and development in the course of time.
In a similar vein, the German writer Johann Gottfried von Herder, in his influential Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91; Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man), implied that it was vital to view human actions and achievements from a standpoint that took proper account of “time, place and national character”—in other words, cultural milieu and the inevitable limits imposed by historical situation and circumstance. In its general direction, Herder’s historical thought reflected the Enlightenment preconceptions of humans as progressive beings. Herder’s chief importance lies, however, in his insistence upon the misconceptions involved in treating the products of past thought and action as if they were the manifestations of an unchanging human consciousness and as if they could be explained by reference to abstract laws eternally valid for humans everywhere. According to Herder, such an approach failed to recognize the complex influences that act upon human beings as members of particular historical societies; each of these societies possessed its unique life-style, subtly but inescapably determining the mentalities of those born within its confines in a manner that rendered futile all attempts to reduce human propensities and needs to the terms of some simple set of abstract formulas.
Many of Vico’s and Herder’s ideas appear familiar today, but it is easy to forget that the emergence of what has come to be known as the “historical sense” is a comparatively recent phenomenon, one that represents a genuine revolution in European thought. It is largely because of this revolution that social and political theories of the kind elaborated by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza in the 17th century now seem oddly artificial, so remote are the categories in which they sought to explain human life and behaviour from those that have subsequently found acceptance.
History as a process of dialectical change: Hegel and Marx
The suggestion that there is something essentially mistaken in the endeavour to comprehend the course of history “naturalistically” and within an explanatory framework deriving from scientific paradigms was powerfully reinforced by conceptions stemming from the development of German idealism in the 19th century. The “philosophy of spirit” of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel made its appearance upon the intellectual scene contemporaneously with Saint-Simonian and Comtean positivism, rivalling the latter in scope and influence and bringing with it its own highly distinctive theory of historical evolution and change. Hegel’s stress upon the “organic” nature of social wholes and the incommensurability of different historical epochs owed evident debts to Herderian ideas, but he set these within an overall view that conceived the movement of history in dynamic terms. Regularities and recurrences of the sort that typically manifest themselves in the realm of nature are foreign, Hegel maintained, to the sphere of mind or spirit, which was characterized instead as involving a continual drive toward self-transcendence and the removal of limitations upon thought and action. Humanity is not to be conceived according to the mechanistic models of 18th-century materialism; essentially humans are free, but the freedom that constitutes their nature can achieve fulfillment only through a process of struggle and of overcoming obstacles that is itself the expression of human activity. It was in this sense that Hegel claimed that spirit was “at war with itself”—“it has to overcome itself as its most formidable obstacle.” In concrete terms, this meant that historical advance did not proceed through a series of smooth transitions. Once the potentialities of a particular society had been realized in the creation of a certain mode of life, its historical role was over; its members became aware of its inadequacies, and the laws and institutions they had previously accepted unquestioningly were now experienced as fetters, inhibiting further development and no longer reflecting their deepest aspirations. Thus, each phase of the historical process could be said to contain the seeds of its own destruction and to “negate” itself; the consequence was the emergence of a fresh society, representing another stage in a progression whose final outcome was the formation of a rationally ordered community with which each citizen could consciously identify himself and in which there would therefore no longer exist any sense of alienation or constraint. Somewhat curiously, the type of community Hegel envisaged as exemplifying this satisfactory state of affairs bore a striking resemblance to the Prussian monarchy of his own time.
The notion that history conforms to a “dialectical” pattern, according to which contradictions generated at one level are overcome or transcended at the next, was incorporated—though in a radically new form—in the theory of social change propounded by Karl Marx. Like Hegel, Marx adopted a “directional” view of history; but, whereas Hegel had tended to exhibit it as representing the unfolding in time of an inner spiritual principle, Marx looked elsewhere for the ultimate determinants of its course and character. Humans, according to Marx, are creative beings, situated in a material world that stands before them as an objective reality and provided this field for their activities. This primitive truth, which had been obscured by Hegel’s mystifying abstractions, afforded the key to a proper understanding of history as a process finally governed by the changing methods whereby humans sought to derive from the natural environment the means of their subsistence and the satisfaction of their evolving wants and needs. The productive relations in which people stand to one another, resulting in such phenomena as the division of labour and the appearance of economically determined classes, were the factors fundamental to historical movement. What he termed the superstructure of society—which covered such things as political institutions and systems of law, ethics, and religion—was in the last analysis dependent upon the shape taken by the “material production” and the “material intercourse” of human beings in their struggle to master nature: “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Hence, the inner dynamic of history was held to lie in conflicts arising from changes in the means of production and occurring when modes of social organization and control, adapted to the development of the productive forces at one stage, became impediments to it at another; they were to be resolved, furthermore, not by abstract thought but by concrete action. Thus, the Hegelian conception of spirit as involved in a relentless struggle with itself and with what it had created underwent a revolutionary transformation, explosive in its implications.
Marx’s interpretation of the historical process, with its stress upon necessity and the operation of ineluctable laws, was often portrayed by its proponents as being scientific in character. It has, however, more than one aspect, and it would be an error to identify its underlying methodology with that associated with Comtean positivism. Generally speaking, the basic categories within which it was framed derived from a theory of human nature that had more in common with the postulates of German Romantic thought than with those of British and French empiricism: to this extent, the logical structure Marx sought to impose upon the data of history belonged to a tradition that stressed the differences rather than the resemblances between the human and the natural world.
Later systems
The tendency to detect in history the presence of large-scale patterns and comprehensive uniformities continued into the 20th century in the work of a number of writers, most notably Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–22; The Decline of the West), wherein the history of humankind is presented in terms of biologically conceived cultures whose careers conformed to a predetermined course of growth and decay, was widely acclaimed during the years of disillusionment that followed World War I; and a somewhat similar reception was given to Toynbee’s massive A Study of History (1934–61) immediately after World War II. Toynbee, like Spengler, undertook a comparative study of civilizations, thereby repudiating attempts to treat the past as if it exhibited a single linear progression: at the same time, he diverged from Spengler in suggesting that current Western society might not after all be necessarily doomed to extinction and in tempering a predominantly deterministic mode of thought with reservations that allowed a place for human free will and the possibility of divine intervention. Yet, as some of his critics were quick to point out, such qualifications were not easy to reconcile with his original insistence upon the need to adopt “a scientific approach to human affairs”; nor was it clear that his own use of inductive methods to establish the laws governing the development of civilizations was above logical suspicion or reproach. Toynbee’s experiment might have been impressive as an individual achievement; nevertheless, with the multiplication of objections and in a theoretical climate that had become skeptical of speculative system-building of any kind, the very feasibility of engaging upon a project of the type he had undertaken came to be seriously questioned. It was felt increasingly that philosophy of history in the traditional sense—resting largely upon uncriticized assumptions concerning the nature of historical inquiry and its relations with other disciplines—had reached something of an impasse; if history was still to be treated as a proper subject for philosophical examination, it must be along lines quite different from those previously pursued.
