Philosophies of History (JR 136 )

Philosophies of History (JR136)

History is the study of the past in all its forms. Philosophy of history examines the theoretical foundations of the practice, application, and social consequences of history and historiography. It is similar to other area studies – such as philosophy of science or philosophy of religion – in two respects. First, philosophy of history utilizes the best theories in the core areas of philosophy like metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics to address questions about the nature of the past and how we come to know it: whether the past proceeds in a random way or is guided by some principle of order, how best to explain or describe the events and objects of the past, how historical events can be considered causally efficacious on one another, and how to adjudicate testimony and evidence. Second, as is the case with the other area-studies, philosophy of history investigates problems that are unique to its subject matter. History examines not what things are so much as how they came to be. History focuses on the unique rather than the general. Its movers are most often people who act for a variety of inner motives rather than purely physical forces. Its objects are no longer observable directly, but must be mediated by evidence. These problems and many more that are specific to the past have been studied and debated for as long as philosophy itself has existed. Philosophy of history should not be confused with the history of philosophy, which is the study of the development of philosophical ideas in their historical context.

Pre-modern history

In his Poetics, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) maintained the superiority of poetry over history because poetry speaks of what must or should be true rather than merely what is true. Herodotus, a fifth-century BCE contemporary of Socrates, broke from the Homeric tradition of passing narrative from generation to generation in his work "Investigations"  , also known as Histories. Herodotus, regarded by some as the first systematic historian, and, later, Plutarch (46–120 CE) freely invented speeches for their historical figures and chose their historical subjects with an eye toward morally improving the reader. History was supposed to teach good examples for one to follow. The assumption that history "should teach good examples" influenced how writers produced history. Events of the past are just as likely to show bad examples that one should not follow, but classical historians would either not record such examples or would re-interpret them to support their assumption of history's purpose

Arguably the first scientific philosophy of history was produced, Herodotus (c. 484-425 BCE).  . To attain his comprehensive characterization of the Greek and non-Greek worlds, Herodotus’ research depended on the often fabulous oral traditions of his predecessors. But what he sacrifices in confirmable fact he makes up for in the descriptive vividness of everyday life. All stories, however preposterous, are recorded without moral judgment since they each reflect the beliefs of a time and of a people, all of which are worth knowing. While Greece and Rome produced a number of important historians and chroniclers, none were more comprehensive or more influential than Thucydides (c.460-c.395 BCE). Like Herodotus, Thucydides viewed history as a source of lessons about how people tended to act. And like him, too, Thucydides was concerned with how methodological considerations shaped our view of the past. However, Thucydides was critical of Herodotus for having failed to carry out a sufficiently objective account. “To hear this history told, insofar as it lacks all that is fabulous, shall perhaps not be entirely pleasing. But whoever desires to investigate the truth of things done, and which according to the character of mankind may be done again, or at least approximately, will discover enough to make it worthwhile” (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War). To remedy Herodotus’ uncritical record, first, Thucydides restricted his inquiry to the main actors of the Peloponnesian War: the generals and governors who decided what was to be done rather than the everyday people who could only speculate about it. The lesson to be learned was not the sheer diversity of cultural behaviors but the typological character of agents and their actions, which was to serve as a sort of guide to future conduct since they were likely to repeat themselves. Second, Thucydides treated his evidence with overt skepticism. He claims to not accept hearsay or conjecture, and to admit only that which he had personally seen or else had been confirmed by multiple reliable sources. Thucydides was the first to utilize source criticism in documentary evidence. The lengthy and eloquent speeches he ascribes to various parties are preserved only under the promise that they follow as closely as possible the intention of their alleged speaker.

With the waning of classical antiquity came the decline of the scientific paradigm of history. The religious practice of sacred-history in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic worlds, though often interpreting the same key events in very different ways, share common meta-historical principles. The past is not studied for the sake of disinterested truth, but in the hope of attaining a glimpse of the bond between the divine plan and a given people’s course in the world. In that sense, many non-fundamentalist historians of each faith regard their sacred texts as meaningful documents meant for consideration in the light of the present and what its authors believe to be our common future. Under the surface chronicle of events like floods, plagues, good harvests, or benevolent rulers is seen a moral and spiritual lesson provided by god to his people, which it is the historian’s task to relate. As the Qur’an makes clear, “In their history, there is a lesson [‘ibra] for those who possess intelligence” (Qu’ran 12:111).

The most reflective of the early medieval historiographers is doubtless Augustine (354-430). In opposition to Thucydides’ aim to show the repeatability of typical elements from the past, Augustine’s emphasized the linearity of history as a part of the Christian eschatology, the necessary unfolding of God’s eternal plan within a temporally-ordered course of history. His City of God (413-26) characterizes lives and nations as a long redemption from original sin that culminates in the appearance of Christ. Since then, history has been a record of the engaged struggle between the chosen elect of the City of God and the rebellious self-lovers who dwell in the City of Men. Because time is linear, its key events are unique and inviolable: the Fall of Adam, the Birth and Death of Jesus, and the Resurrection all move history along to the Final Judgment with infallible regularity.

Sacred-history thus tends to provide an overarching narrative about the meaning of human existence, either as a tragedy or a statement of hope in a redeemed future. Besides its canonical status throughout much of the medieval world, its influence manifestly stretches over the hermeneutical tradition as well as the teleological philosophers of history of the Nineteenth Century.

From the Classical period to the Renaissance, historians alternated between focusing on subjects designed to improve mankind and on a devotion to fact. History was composed mainly of hagiographies of monarchs or of epic poetry describing heroic gestures (such as The Song of Roland—about the Battle of Roncevaux Pass (778) during Charlemagne's first campaign to conquer the Iberian peninsula).

In the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun, who is considered one of the fathers of the philosophy of history, discussed his philosophy of history and society in detail in his Muqaddimah(1377). His work represents a culmination of earlier works by medieval Islamic sociologists in the spheres of Islamic ethics, political science, and historiography, such as those of al-Farabi (c. 872 – c. 950), Ibn Miskawayh, al-Dawani, and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201–1274)^[ Ibn Khaldun often criticized "idle superstition and uncritical acceptance of historical data". He introduced a scientific method to the philosophy of history (which Dawood considers something "totally new to his age") and he often referred to it as his "new science",^[which is now associated with historiography. His historical method also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of the state, communication, propaganda, and systematic bias in history

By the eighteenth century historians had turned toward a more positivist approach—focusing on fact as much as possible, but still with an eye on telling histories that could instruct and improve. Starting with Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889) and Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), historical studies began to move towards a more modern scientific^[ form. In the Victorian era, historiographers debated less whether history was intended to improve the reader, and more on what causes turned history and how one could understand historical change.

Cyclical and linear history

Narrative history tends to follow an assumption of linear progression: "this happened, and then that happened; that happened because this happened first".. Many ancient cultures held mythical concepts of history and of time that were not linear. Such societies saw history as cyclical, with alternating Dark and Golden Ages. Plato taught the concept of the Great Year, and other Greeks spoke of  eons. Similar examples include the ancient doctrine of , which existed in Ancient Egypt, in the Indian religions, among the Greek Pythagoreans' and in the Stoics' conceptions. In his Works and Days, Hesiod described five Ages of Man: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age, and the Iron Age, which began with the Dorian invasion. Some scholars identify just four ages, corresponding to the four metals, with the Heroic age as a description of the Bronze Age. A four-age count would match the Vedic or Hindu ages known as the Kali, Dwapara,Treta and Satya yugas. According to Jainism, this world has no beginning or end but goes through cycles of upturns (utsarpini) and downturns (avasarpini) constantly. Many Greeks believed that just as mankind went through four stages of character during each rise and fall of history so did government. They considered democracy and monarchy as the healthy régimes of the higher ages; and oligarchy and tyranny as corrupted régimes common to the lower ages ^] In the East, cyclical theories of history developed in China (as a theory of dynastic cycle) and in the Islamic world in the work of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406).

The story of the Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden, as recounted and elaborated in Judaism and Christianity, preserves traces of a moral cycle; this would give the basis for theodicies which attempt to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with the existence of a God, providing a global explanation of history with belief in a coming Messianic Age. Some theodicies claimed that history had a progressive direction leading to an eschatological end, such as the Apocalypse, organized by a superior power. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and Bossuet (in his Discourse On Universal History of 1679) formulated such theodicies, but Leibniz (1646-1716), who coined the term Théodicée, developed the most famous philosophical theodicy. Leibniz based his explanation on the principle of sufficient reason, which states that anything that happens does happen for a specific reason. Thus, while man might see certain events as evil (such as wars, epidemics and natural disasters), such a judgement in fact only reflected human perception; if one adopted God's view, "evil" events in fact only took place in the larger divine plan. In this way theodicies explained the necessity of evil as a relative element that forms part of a larger plan of history. Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason was not, however, a gesture of fatalism. Confronted with the antique problem of future contingents, Leibniz invented the theory of "compossible worlds", distinguishing two types of necessity, to cope with the problem of determinism.

During the Renaissance, cyclical conceptions of history would become common, with proponents illustrating decay and rebirth by pointing to the decline of the Roman Empire. Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy (1513–1517) provide an example. The notion of Empire contained in itself ascendance and decadence,^[ as in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) (which the Roman Catholic Church placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum).

Cyclical conceptions continued in the nineteenth and twentieth century’s in the works of authors such as Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), Nikolay Danilevsky (1822–1885), and Paul Kennedy (1945– ), who conceived the human past as a series of repetitive rises and falls. Spengler, like Butterfield, when writing in reaction to the carnage of the First World War of 1914–1918, believed that a civilization enters upon an era of Caesarism after its soul dies.^[ Spengler thought that the soul of the West was dead and that Caesarism was about to begin.

The development of mathematical models of long-term secular sociodemographic cycles revived interest in cyclical theories of history (see, for example, Historical Dynamics (2003) by Peter Turchin, or Introduction to Social Macrodynamics^[ by Andrey Korotayev et al ).

Sustainable history

"Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man" is a philosophy of history proposed by Nayef Al-Rodhan, where history is defined as a durable progressive trajectory in which the quality of life on this planet or all other planets is premised on the guarantee of human dignity for all at all times under all circumstances. This theory views history as a linear progression propelled by good governance, which is, in turn, to be achieved through balancing the emotional, amoral, and egoistic elements of human nature with the human dignity needs of reason, security, human, accountability, transparency, justice, opportunity, innovation, and inclusiveness

Human dignity lies at the heart of this theory and is paramount for ensuring the sustainable history of humankind. Among other things, human dignity means having a positive sense of self and instilling individuals with respect for the communities to which they belong. Thus, reconciling humans' predisposition for emotionally self-interested behavior with the imperatives of human dignity appears as the one of the most important challenges to global policymakers At national level, they have to protect their citizens against violence and provide them with access to food, housing, clothes, health care, and education. Basic welfare provision and security are fundamental to ensuring human dignity. Environment and ecological considerations need to be addressed as well. Finally, cultural diversity, inclusiveness and participation at all levels, of all communities are key imperatives of human dignity.

In this respect, the sustainable history philosophy challenges existing concepts of civilizations, such as Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilisations. Instead, it argues that human civilisation should not be thought of as consisting of numerous separate and competing civilisations, but rather it should be thought of collectively as only one human civilization. Within this civilization are many geo-cultural domains that comprise sub-cultures. Nayef Al-Rodhan envisions human civilization as an ocean into which the different geo-cultural domains flow like rivers,” The Ocean Model of one Human Civilization". At points where geo-cultural domains first enter the ocean of human civilization, there is likely to be a concentration or dominance of that culture. However, over time, all the rivers of geo-cultural domains become one. There is fluidity at the ocean's centre and cultures have the opportunity to borrow between them. Under such historical conditions the most advanced forms of human enterprise can thrive and lead us to a 'civilisational triumph'. Nevertheless, there are cases where geographical proximity of various cultures can also lead to friction and conflict.

Nayef Al-Rodhan concludes that within an increasingly globalised, interconnected and interdependent world, human dignity cannot be ensured globally and in a sustainable way through sole national means. A genuine global effort is required to meet the minimum criteria of human dignity globally. Areas such as conflict prevention, socio-economic justice, gender equality, protection of human rights, environmental protection require a holistic approach and a common action.

The Enlightenment's ideal of progress

In contrast to Vico’s pessimism, the philosophy of history in the 18th century is continuous with the Enlightenment ideals of moral progress and the power of reason. Voltaire’s (1694-1778) Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations (1756), wherein the phrase ‘philosophy of history’ is supposed to have been coined, was the first attempt since Herodotus to write a comprehensive history of world culture in a non-Christian and non-teleological framework. Social and cultural history replaced military and political history with a trans-religious and trans-European tenor intended to showcase the spiritual and moral progress of humanity. To further rid Europe of what he considered Christian biases, on display especially in the modern eschatology of Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), Voltaire was the first major modern thinker to stress Arab contributions to world culture. In keeping with the Enlightenment, he believed that the best remedy for intolerance and prejudice was simply the truth, something which is best discovered by the objective historian working with original documents, never by the ideologue repeating the dicta of authorities. But for his apologies for non-biased historiography, Voltaire betrays rather clearly the ideals of his age. Differences between the Christian eschatological worldview and his own age’s rationalist science are regarded summarily as improvements, whereas the medieval destruction of the ancient clearly represents decline. The age of reason is, for Voltaire, the standard by which other eras and peoples are to be judged, though few could be said to have reached.

Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-1794) openly embraced Enlightenment progressivism. Like Voltaire, his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (published posthumously in 1795) viewed the past as a progress of reason, but was more optimistic about the inevitable progress of liberal ideals such as free speech, democratic government, and the equity of suffrage, education, and wealth. The point of history was not only a description of this progress. Because the progress is lawful and universal, history is also predictive and, what is more, articulates a duty for political institutions to work toward the sort of equalities that the march of history would bring about anyway. The historian is no mere critic of his time, but also a herald of what is to come. Widely influential on the French Revolution, Condorcet also made a significant impression on the systematizing philosophies of history of Saint-Simon, Hegel, and Marx, as well as laid the first blueprints for systematic study of social history made popular by Comte, Weber, and Durkheim.

Less revolutionary was Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784). Kant begins from the Enlightenment view of history as a progressive march of reason and freedom. But given his epistemology he could not presume, as did Voltaire and Condorcet, that the teleological progression of history was empirically discernible within the past. It is not a demonstrable fact, but a necessary condition for the meaningfulness of the past to posit teleological progress as a regulative idea that allows us to justify the many apparent evils that have sprung up within history despite the overall benevolent character of creation. The wars, famines, and natural disasters that pervade history should be seen as nature’s instruments, guiding people into the kinds of civil relationships that eventually maximize freedom and justice. History reveals human culture as the means by which nature accomplishes its state of perpetual peace in all the spiritual pursuits of mankind.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) was key in the general turn from Enlightenment historiography to the romantic. His Ideas toward a Philosophy of History of Humanity (1784-91) echoes Vico’s contention that there is no single faculty of human reason for all peoples at all times, but different forms of rationality for various cultures as determined by their particular time and place in the world. Accepting Vico’s notion of necessary development, he nevertheless rejects the Enlightenment emphasis on rationality and freedom as its measures. Herder also discards the Enlightenment tendency to judge the past by the light of the present, irrespective of how rational we consider ourselves today. This results from his fundamental conviction that each national culture is of equal historical value. The same inner vitalism of nature guides all living things on the regular path from birth to death. Just as childhood and old age are essential to the development of the person, are valuable in their own right, and thus should not be judged as somehow inferior from the standpoint of adulthood, so too a nation’s character is of inviolable worth and essential to the development of the whole.

Herder not only rejected Kant’s Enlightenment universalism, but also the epistemological means by which an understanding of ancient people can be reached. It was clear that there could be no empirical proof or rationalist demonstration of the organic pattern of the development Herder finds. Nor, however, should we posit teleological progress as a merely regulative principle of reason. The sense for past people and cultures is not itself communicated whole and entire through their documents in such a way that would be open to historical analysis or source criticism. The historian only apprehends the real spirit of a people through a sympathetic understanding – what Herder calls Einfühlen— of their inner life by analogy with her own. The historian ‘feels her way into’ a people and an age, in order to try to sympathetically apprehend why they made the choices they did.

Romantic historiographers were strongly guided by Herder’s idea that the definition of a people lay more in its inner spirit than its legal borders. The fairy tales of the Grimm brothers (1812), as much as the nationalistic histories of Macaulay (1800-1859), the Wilhelm Tell (1804) saga of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), J.W.v. Goethe’s (1749-1832) Goetz von Berlichingen (1773), the transcription of the Beowulf epic (1818), and the surge of histories asserting the sanctity of minority Russio-slavic cultures like the Estonian Kalevipoeg (1853) or the Armenian Sasuntzi Davit (1873) each sought to revitalize and unify present culture under the banner of a shared past. The Romantics followed Herder, too, in their belief that this national character was not discernible solely by meticulous analysis of documents and archival records. The historian must have an overarching sense of the course of history of a people, just as the dramaturge reveals the unity of a character through each individual episode. Hardly a bare chronicle of disconnected facts, the narratives historians tell about the past should communicate a sense of spirit rather than objective information. And only those who ‘breathe the air of a people or an age’ have the proper sort of sympathetic understanding to interpret it correctly. The potential abuses of historiography, to which this nationalistic romanticism lends itself, had a decisive impact on the three main streams of philosophy of history in the 19th century.

During the Aufklärung, or Enlightenment, history began to be seen as both linear and irreversible. Condorcet's interpretations of the various "stages of humanity" or Auguste Comte's positivism were one of the most important formulations of such conceptions of history, which trusted social progress. As in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762) treatise on education (or the "art of training men"), the Aufklärung conceived the human species as perfectible: human nature could be infinitely developed through a well-thought \ pedagogy. In What is Enlightenment? (1784), Immanuel Kant defined the Aufklärung as the capacity to think by oneself, without referring to an exterior authority, be it a prince or tradition:

Enlightenment is when a person leaves behind a state of immaturity and dependence (Unmündigkeit) for which they themselves were responsible. Immaturity and dependence are the inability to use one's own intellect without the direction of another. One is responsible for this immaturity and dependence, if its cause is not a lack of intelligence or education, but a lack of determination and courage to think without the direction of another. Sapere aude! Dare to know! is therefore the slogan of the Enlightenment.

In a paradoxical way, Kant supported in the same time enlightened despotism as a way of leading humanity towards its autonomy. He had conceived the process of history in his short treaty Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784). On one hand, enlightened despotism was to lead nations toward their liberation, and progress was thus inscribed in the scheme of history; on the other hand, liberation could only be acquired by a singular gesture, Sapere Aude! Thus, autonomy ultimately relied on the individual's "determination and courage to think without the direction of another."

The name of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) is nearly synonymous with philosophy of history in two senses, both captured by his phrase, “The only thought which philosophy brings with it, in regard to history, is the simple thought of Reason—the thought that Reason rules the world, and that world history has therefore been rational in its course” (Hegel 1988, 12f). History unfolds itself according to a rational plan; and we know this precisely because the mind which examines it unfolds itself from the first inklings of sense-certainty to absolute knowing in a regular teleological pattern. The same process that governs the movement of history also governs the character of the philosophical speculation inherent in that moment of history. And at the present epoch of philosophical speculation we are capable of understanding the entire movement of history as a rational process unfolding an ever greater awareness of rational freedom. A true account of the whole of reality, which is itself the sole endeavor of philosophy, must consider everything real as real insofar as it can be comprehended by reason as it unfolds within its necessary historical course. Reason is, for Hegel, the real. Both are understood as historical.

Hegel’s lecture series on the Introduction to the Philosophy of History (published posthumously in 1837) is a sort of secular eschatology, wherein the course of reality is considered a single epochal evolution toward a providential end. This is cognized by an increasingly unfolding awareness according to that same plan. As he demotes religion to a subservient place to absolute knowing in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), so too does Hegel replace the sacred-history conception of grace with the phenomenological unfolding of reason.

Hegel’s view of the common structural unveiling of reason and history leads to specific consequences for his teleological historiography. Reason consists in both the awareness of contradiction and its sublimation by means of the speculative act of synthesis which results in an increased self-recognition. Analogously, the development of history consists in a progressive structure of oppositions and their necessary synthetic sublimations which leads to an ever increasing self-awareness of freedom. That necessary movement is illustrated in his account of three distinct epochs of world history. In the ancient orient, only the despot is free; his freedom consists only in the arbitrary savagery of his will. The people are held in bondage by the identity of state and religion. The opposition of the despot and his subjects is to some degree overcome by the classical Greek and Roman recognition of citizenship, under which the free individual understands himself to be bound by honor over and above the laws of the state. Still, the great many in the classical world are still un-free. It is only in the intertwining of the Christian recognition of the sanctity of life and the modern liberal definition of morality as inherently intersubjective and rational that guarantees freedom for all. “It was first the Germanic Peoples, through Christianity, who came to the awareness that every human is free by virtue of being human, and that the freedom of spirit comprises our most human nature” (Hegel 1988, 21).

The critics of Hegel have been as passionate as his disciples. Of the former we may count Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and the historical school at Basel: J.J. Bachofen (1815-1887), Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), and a younger Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). What unites them is a shared belief that historiography should highlight rather than obscure the achievements of individuals under the banner of necessary rational progress, a general ridicule of any historical process which brings about providential ends in the face of overwhelming global suffering, an anti-statist political stance, and a disavowal of progress as coextensive with the expansion of social welfare, intellectualism, and utility. Past epochs were not merely some preparatory ground on the way to the comfortably modern Hegelian or Marxist state, but stand on their own as inherently superior cultures and healthier models of culture life. For Bachofen and Nietzsche, this meant the ancient Greeks, for Burckhardt the aristocrats of the Italian Renaissance. So too ought the remarkable individuals of these eras be seen as fully-willed heroes rather than as Hegelian ‘world-historical individuals’ who appear only when the world process requires a nudge in the direction that providence had already chosen apart from them.

Of the latter group, we may count his disciples both on the left and the right, and prominent theorists of history like Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), Max Stirner (1806-1856), Georg Lukács (1885-1971), Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968), and Theodor Adorno (1903-1969). Most recently the general outline of Hegel’s philosophy of history has been adopted in Francis Fukuyama's (1952—) controversial The End of History (1992).

But without question the most important philosophical engagement with Hegel’s historiography is that of Karl Marx (1818-1883), whose own account of the past is often considered a sort of ‘upside-down’ version of Hegel’s Weltprozess. Even while Marx maintains Hegel’s belief in dialectical progress and historical inevitability, he supplants his speculative method with a historical materialism that views the transitions of epochs in terms of the relationship between production and ownership. Marx’s account of the past has obviously had pervasive political and economic influences; but his philosophy of history has also won many modern and contemporary adherents among a wide number of practicing historians, who regard material conditions as opposed to motivational conditions, as sufficient for historical explanation.

After Kant, G. W. F. Hegel developed a complex theodicy in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which based its conception of history on dialectics: the negative (wars, etc.) was conceived by Hegel as the motor of history. Hegel argued that history is a constant process of dialectic clash, with each thesis encountering an opposing idea or event antithesis. The clash of both was "superated" in the synthesis, a conjunction that conserved the contradiction between thesis and its antithesis while sublating it. As Marx famously explained afterwards, concretely that meant that if Louis XVI's monarchic rule in France was seen as the thesis, the French Revolution could be seen as its antithesis. However, both were sublimed in Napoleon, who reconciled the revolution with the Ancien Régime; he conserved the change. Hegel thought that reason accomplished itself, through this dialectical scheme, in History. Through labour, man transformed nature so he could recognize himself in it; he made it his "home." Thus, reason spiritualized nature. Roads, fields, fences, and all the modern infrastructure in which we live is the result of this spiritualization of nature. Hegel thus explained social progress as the result of the labour of reason in history. However, this dialectical reading of history involved, of course, contradiction, so history was also conceived of as constantly conflicting: Hegel theorized this in his famous dialectic of the lord and the bondsman.

According to Hegel, One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it... When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

Thus, philosophy was to explain Geschichte (history) afterward. Philosophy is always late, it is only an interpretation of what is rational in the real—and, according to Hegel, and only what is recognized as rational is real. This idealist understanding of philosophy as interpretation was famously challenged by Karl Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach (1845): "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Social evolutionism

Inspired by the Enlightenment's ideal of progress, social evolutionism became a popular conception in the nineteenth century. Auguste Comte's (1798–1857) positivist conception of history, which he divided into the theological stage, the metaphysical stage and the positivist stage, brought upon by modern science, was one of the most influential doctrines of progress. The Whig interpretation of history, as it was later called, associated with scholars of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in Britain, such as Henry Maine or Thomas Macaulay, gives an example of such influence, by looking at human history as progress from savagery and ignorance toward peace, prosperity, and science. Maine described the direction of progress as "from status to contract," from a world in which a child's whole life is pre-determined by the circumstances of his birth, toward one of mobility and choice.

The publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859 introduced human evolution. However, it was quickly transposed from its original biological field to the social field, in "social Darwinism" theories. Herbert Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest", or Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Society (1877) developed evolutionist theories independent from Darwin's works, which would be later interpreted as social Darwinism. These nineteenth-century unilineal evolution theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilised over time, and equated the culture and technology of Western civilisation with progress.

Ernst Haeckel formulated his recapitulation theory in 1867, which stated that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny": the evolution of each individual reproduces the species' evolution, such as in the development of embryos. Hence, a child goes through all the steps from primitive society to modern society. This was later discredited. ^]Haeckel did not support Darwin's theory of natural selection introduced in The Origin of Species (1859), rather believing in a Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Progress was not necessarily, however, positive. Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–55) was a decadent description of the evolution of the "Aryan race" which was disappearing through miscegenation. Gobineau's works had a large popularity in the so-called scientific racism theories that developed during the New Imperialism period.

After the first world war, and even before Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) harshly criticized it, the Whig interpretation had gone out of style. The bloodletting of that conflict had indicted the whole notion of linear progress. Paul Valéry famously said: "We civilizations now know ourselves mortal."

However, the notion itself didn't completely disappear.  Francis Fukuyama proposed a similar notion of progress, positing that the worldwide adoption of liberal democracies as the single accredited political system and even modality of human consciousness would represent the "End of History". Fukuyama's work stems from a Kojevian reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Unlike Maurice Godelier who interprets history as a process of transformation, Tim Ingold suggests that history is a movement of autopoiesis

A key component to making sense of all of this is to simply recognize that all these issues in social evolution merely serve to support the suggestion that how one considers the nature of history will impact the interpretation and conclusions drawn about history. The critical under-explored question is less about history as content and more about history as process.

In 2011 Steven Pinker wrote a history of violence and humanity from an evolutionary perspective in which he shows that violence has declined statistically over time.

The validity of the "great man theory" in historical studies

After Hegel, who insisted on the role of "great men" in history, with his famous statement about Napoleon, "I saw the Spirit on his horse", Thomas Carlyle argued that history was the biography of a few central individuals, heroes, such as Oliver Cromwell or Frederick the Great, writing that "The history of the world is but the biography of great men." His heroes were political and military figures, the founders or topplers of states. His history of great men, of geniuses good and evil, sought to organize change in the advent of greatness. Explicit defenses of Carlyle's position have been rare in the late twentieth century. Most philosophers of history contend that the motive forces in history can best be described only with a wider lens than the one he used for his portraits. A.C. Danto, for example, wrote of the importance of the individual in history, but extended his definition to include social individuals, defined as "individuals we may provisionally characterize as containing individual human beings amongst their parts. Examples of social individuals might be: social classes; national groups; religious organizations  , large-scale events  , large-scale social movements  , etc." (Danto, "The Historical Individual", 266, in Philosophical Analysis and History, edited by Williman H. Dray, Rainbow-Bridge Book Co., 1966). The Great Man approach to history was most popular with professional historians in the nineteenth century; a popular work of this school is the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1911), which contains lengthy and detailed biographies about the great men of history. For example, to read about (what is known today as) the "Migrations Period," consult the biography of Attila the Hun.

After Marx's conception of a materialist history based on the class struggle, which raised attention for the first time to the importance of social factors such as economics in the unfolding of history, Herbert Spencer wrote "You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown....Before he can remake his society, his society must make him."

The Annales School, founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, were a major landmark on the shift from a history centered on individual subjects to studies concentrating in geography, economics, demography, and other social forces. Fernand Braudel's studies on the Mediterranean Sea as "hero" of history, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's history of climate, etc., were inspired by this School.

Is history predetermined

There is disagreement about the extent to which history is ultimately deterministic  . Some argue that geography (see geographic determinism), economic systems (see economic determinism), or culture (see cultural determinism) prescribe "the iron laws of history" that decide what is to happen. Others see history as a long line of acts and accidents, big and small, each playing out its consequences until that process gets interrupted by the next.

It should be noted that even determinists do not rule that, from time to time, certain cataclysmic events occur to change course of history. Their main point is, however, that such events are rare and that even apparently large shocks like wars and revolutions often have no more than temporary effects on the evolution of the society.

Karl Marx is, perhaps, the most famous of the exponents of economic determinism. For him social institutions like political system, religion and culture were merely by-products of the basic economic system (see Base and superstructure).

However, even he did not see history as completely deterministic. His essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon contains the most famous formulation of Marx's view of the role of the individual in history: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past.

Teleological sense of history

Theodicy claimed that history had a progressive direction leading to an eschatological end, given by a superior power. However, this transcendent teleological sense can be thought as immanent to human history itself. Hegel probably represents the epitome of teleological philosophy of history. Hegel's teleology was taken up by Francis Fukuyama in his The End of History and the Last Man   Thinkers such as Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Althusser, or Deleuze deny any teleological sense to history, claiming that it is best characterized by discontinuities, ruptures, and various time-scales, which the Annales School had demonstrated.

Schools of thought influenced by Hegel also see history as progressive, but they saw, and see, progress as the outcome of a dialectic in which factors working in opposite directions are over time reconciled (see above). History was best seen as directed by a Zeitgeist, and traces of the Zeitgeist could be seen by looking backward. Hegel believed that history was moving man toward "civilization", and some also claim he thought that the Prussian state incarnated the  “End of History". In his Lessons on the History of Philosophy, he explains that each epochal philosophy is in a way the whole of philosophy; it is not a subdivision of the Whole but this Whole itself apprehended in a specific modality.

Historical accounts of writing history

A classic example of history being written by the victors—or more precisely, by the survivors^[ —would be the scarcity of unbiased information that has survived to the present about the Carthaginians. Roman historians left tales of cruelty and human sacrifice practiced by their longtime enemies; however no Carthaginian was left alive to give their side of the story.

Similarly, we only have the Christian side of how Christianity came to be the dominant religion of Europe. However, we know very little about other European religions, such as Paganism.^[ We have the European version of the conquest of the Americas, with an interpretation of the native version of events only emerging to popular consciousness since the early 1980s. We have Herodotus's Greek history of the Persian Wars, but the Persian recall of the events is little known in Western Culture.

In many respects, the head of state may be guilty of cruelties or even simply a different way of doing things. In some societies, however, to speak of or write critically of rulers can amount to conviction of treason and death. As such, in many ways, what is left as the "official record" of events is oft influenced by one's desire to avoid exile or execution.

However, "losers" in certain time periods often have more of an impetus than the "winners" to write histories that comfort themselves and justify their own behavior. Examples include the historiography of the American Civil War, where it can be argued that the losers (Southerners) have written more history books on the subject than the winners and, until recently, dominated the national perception of history. Confederate generals such as Lee and Jackson are generally held in higher esteem than their Union counterparts. Popular films such as Cold Mountain, Gone with the Wind, and The Birth of a Nation have told the story from the Southern viewpoint. Also, despite "losing" the Vietnam War, the United States produces more scholarship on the war than any other country, including Vietnam.  Popular history abounds with condemnations of the cruelty of African slave traders and colonists, despite the "winning" status of those people in their heyday.

 For example pre-Columbian populations of America: the historical record of America being “discovered" by Europeans is now sometimes presented as a history of invasion, exploitation and dominance of a people who had been there before the Europeans. This reinterpretation of the historical record is called historical revisionism, which can take the form of negationism, which is the denial of genocides and crimes against humanity. The revision of previously accepted historical accounts is a constant process in which "today's winners are tomorrow's losers", and the rise and fall of present institutions and movements influence the way historians see the past. In the same sense, the teaching, in French secondary schools, of the Algerian War of Independence and of colonialism, has been criticized by several historians, and is the subject of frequent debates. Thus, in contradiction with the February 23, 2005 law on colonialism, voted by the UMP conservative party, historian Benjamin Stora notes that:

As Algerians do not appear in their "indigenous" conditions and their sub-citizens status, as the history of nationalist movement is never evoqued, as none of the great figures of the resistance —Messali Hadj, Ferhat Abbas   emerge nor retain attention, in one word, as no one explains to students what has been colonization, we make them unable to understand why the decolonization took place.

Michel Foucault's analysis of historical and political discourse

The historico-political discourse analyzed by Michel Foucault in Society Must Be Defended (1975–76) considered truth as the fragile product of a historical struggle, first conceptualized under the name of "race struggle"—however, the meaning of "race" was different from today's biological notion, being closer to the sense of "nation" (distinct from nation-states; its signification is here closer to "people"). Boulainvilliers, for example, was an exponent of nobility rights. He claimed that the French nobility were the racial descendants of the Franks who invaded France (while the Third Estate was descended from the conquered Gauls), and had right to power by virtue of right of conquest. He used this approach to formulate a historical thesis of the course of French political history—a critique of both the monarchy and the Third Estate. Foucault regarded him as the founder of the historico-political discourse as political weapon.

In Great Britain, this historico-political discourse was used by the bourgeoisie, the people and the aristocracy as a means of struggle against the monarchy—cf. Edward Coke or John Lilburne. In France, Boulainvilliers, Nicolas Fréret, and then Sieyès, Augustin Thierry, and Cournot reappropriated this form of discourse. Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, this discourse was incorporated by racialist biologists and eugenicists, who gave it the modern sense of "race" and, even more, transformed this popular discourse into a "state racism" (Nazism). According to Foucault, Marxists also seized this discourse and took it in a different direction, transforming the essentialist notion of "race" into the historical notion of "class struggle", defined by socially structured position: capitalist or proletarian. This displacement of discourse constitutes one of the bases of Foucault's thought: discourse is not tied to the subject, rather the "subject" is a construction of discourse. Moreover, discourse is not the simple ideological and mirror reflexion of an economical infrastructure, but is a product and the battlefield of multiples forces—which may not be reduced to the simple dualist contradiction of two energies.

Foucault shows that what specifies this discourse from the juridical and philosophical discourse is its conception of truth: truth is no longer absolute; it is the product of "race struggle". History itself, which was traditionally the sovereign's science, the legend of his glorious feats and monument building, the(the sovereign) built monuments, fought in wars and claims victory on behalf of himself which ultimately became the discourse of the people (modern population), a political stake. The subject is not any more a neutral arbitrator, judge, or legislator, as in Solon's or Kant's conceptions. Therefore, what became the "historical subject" must search in history's furor, under the "juridical code's dried blood", the multiple contingencies from which a fragile rationality temporarily finally emerged. This may be, perhaps, compared to the sophist discourse in Ancient Greece. Foucault warns that it has nothing to do with Machiavelli's or Hobbes's discourse on war, for to this popular discourse, the Sovereign is nothing more than "an illusion, an instrument, or, at the best, an enemy. It is {the historico-political discourse} a discourse that beheads the king, anyway that dispenses itself from the sovereign and that denounces it".

History and education

Since Plato's Republic, civic education and instruction has had a central role in politics and the constitution of a common identity. History has thus sometimes become the target of propaganda, for example in historical revisionist attempts. Plato's insistence on the importance of education was relayed by Rousseau's Emile: Or, On Education (1762), a necessary counterpart of The Social Contract (also 1762). Public education has been seen by republican regimes and the Enlightenment as a prerequisite of the masses' progressive emancipation, as conceived by Kant in Was Ist Aufklärung? (What Is Enlightenment?, 1784).

The creation of modern education systems, instrumental in the construction of nation-states, also passed by the elaboration of a common, national history. History textbooks are one of the many ways through which this common history was transmitted. Le Tour de France par deux enfants, for example, was the Third Republic's classic textbook for elementary school: it described the story of two French children who, following the German annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine region in 1870, go on a tour de France during which they become aware of France's diversity and the existence of the various patois.

In most societies, schools and curricula are controlled by governments. As such, there is always an opportunity for governments to impose. Granted, often governments in free societies serve to protect freedoms, check hate speech, and breaches of constitutional rights; but the power itself to impose is available to use the education system to influence thought of malleable minds, positively or negatively, towards truth or towards a version of truth. A recent example of the fragility of government involvement with history textbooks was the Japanese history textbook controversies.

The rise of right wing parties in India also resulted in attempts to rewrite both history and pre history. Attempts are being made to disprove the Aryan migration into the sub continent theory, instead it is claimed that Aryans were indigenous. Attempts also are being made to disprove the Indus Valley civilizations uniqueness instead it is claimed that IVC is the pre Vedic Hindu religion.

Narrative and history

A current popular conception considers the value of narrative in the writing and experience of history. Important thinkers in this area include Paul Ricœur, Louis Mink, W.B. Gallie, and Hayden White. Some have doubted this approach because it draws fictional and historical narrative closer together, and there remains a perceived "fundamental bifurcation between historical and fictional narrative" (Ricœur, vol. 1, 52). In spite of this, most modern historians, such as Barbara Tuchman or David McCullough, consider narrative writing important to their approaches. The theory of narrated history (or historicized narrative) holds that the structure of lived experience, and such experience narrated in both fictional and non-fictional works (literature and historiography) have in common the figuration of "temporal experience." In this way, narrative has a generously encompassing ability to "'grasp together' and integrate ... into one whole and complete story" the "composite representations" of historical experience (Ricœur x, 173). Louis Mink writes that, "the significance of past occurrences is understandable only as they are locatable in the ensemble of interrelationships that can be grasped only in the construction of narrative form" (148). Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson also analyzes historical understanding this way, and writes that "history is inaccessible to us except in textual form ... it can be approached only by way of prior (re)textualization" (82).

History and causality

Narrative and causal approaches to history have often been contrasted or, even, opposed to one another, yet they can also be viewed as complementary. Some philosophers of history such as Arthur Danto have claimed that "explanations in history and elsewhere" describe "not simply an event—something that happens—but a change". Like many practicing historians, they treat causes as intersecting actions and sets of actions which bring about "larger changes", in Danto's words: to decide "what are the elements which persist through a change" is "rather simple" when treating an individual's "shift in attitude", but "it is considerably more complex and metaphysically challenging when we are interested in such a change as, say, the break-up of feudalism or the emergence of nationalism".

Much of the historical debate about causes has focused on the relationship between communicative and other actions, between singular and repeated ones, and between actions, structures of action or group and institutional contexts and wider sets of conditions. John Gaddis has distinguished between exceptional and general causes (following Marc Bloch) and between "routine" and "distinctive links" in causal relationships: "in accounting for what happened at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, we attach greater importance to the fact that President Truman ordered the dropping of an atomic bomb than to the decision of the Army Air Force to carry out his orders."^[28] He has also pointed to the difference between immediate, intermediate and distant causes. For his part, Christopher Lloyd puts forward four "general concepts of causation" used in history: the "metaphysical idealist concept, which asserts that the phenomena of the universe are products of or emanations from an omnipotent being or such final cause"; "the empiricist (or Humean) regularity concept, which is based on the idea of causation being a matter of constant conjunctions of events"; "the functional/teleological/consequential concept", which is "goal-directed, so that goals are causes"; and the "realist, structurist and dispositional approach, which sees relational structures and internal dispositions as the causes of phenomena".  

History as propaganda: Is history always written by the victors?

In his "Society must be Defended", Michel Foucault posited that the victors of a social struggle use their political dominance to suppress a defeated adversary's version of historical events in favor of their own propaganda, which may go so far as historical revisionism.   Nations adopting such an approach would likely fashion a "universal" theory of history, a manifest destiny in the US, to support their aims, with a teleological and deterministic philosophy of history used to justify the inevitableness and rightness of their victories.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Culture of Defeat took a completely different view—according to him, defeat is a major driver for the defeated to reinvent himself, while the victor—confirmed in his attitudes and methods, dissatisfied by the high losses and paltry gains made, may be less creative and fall back. The concept evokes Hegel's Master–slave dialectics—the master is dependent of the work of the slave, the slave has to take his master's and his own interests into account, gets more knowledge and more insight as the master; and in realising that the world around him was created by his own hands he may gain self-consciousness and emancipation. Schivelbusch worked on three basic examples, the South and its Lost cause after the Civil War, France after the Franco-Prussian War 1870/71, and Germany following World War I. Wolfgang Schivelbusch view includes complex psychological and cultural responses of vanquished nations, from every level of society and sees a need and rise of creativity and various narratives for the defeated

Within a society Walter Benjamin believed that Marxist historians must take a radically different view point from the bourgeois and idealist points of view, in an attempt to create a sort of history from below, which would be able to conceive an alternative conception of history, not based, as in classical historical studies, on the philosophical and juridical discourse of sovereignty—an approach that would invariably adhere to major states (the victors') points of view. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur asked instead for a plurality in history writing. "We carry on several histories simultaneously, in times whose periods, crises, and pauses do not coincide. We enchain, abandon, and resume several histories, much as a chess player who plays several games at once, renewing now this one, now the another" (History and Truth 186). George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is a fictional account of the manipulation of the historical record for nationalist aims and manipulation of power.

To some degree, all nations are active in the promotion of such "national stories", with ethnicity, nationalism, gender, power, heroic figures, class considerations and important national events and trends all clashing and competing within the narrative.

With regard to the history of science, the introduction of new paradigms is depicted by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Innovation in science or technology is not based on single experiments or ideas per se, but needs a supportive environment and technical achievements to allow for a change of perspective. In all sorts of science    innovative concepts are often being made in parallel (compare Zeitgeist), and the "winning" concept or individual contribution depends not on the idea per se, but other aspects as supportive circumstances, personal networks, usability or simple wording. The process may lead to format wars, which leaves losers and winners behind.

The Semmelweis reflex is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or paradigms, Semmelweis himself being driven into insanity, but his concept prevailing after his death grew in a strong narrative of the history of medicine.

Judgment of history

For Hegel, the history of the world is also the Last Judgment. Hegel adopted the expression "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht" ("world history is a tribunal that judges the world"; a quote from Friedrich Schiller's poem "Resignation" (published in 1786) and used to assert the view that History is what judges men, their actions and their opinions.

Since the twentieth century, Western historians have disavowed the aspiration to provide the judgement of history. The goals of historical judgments or interpretations are separate to those of legal judgements, that need to be formulated quickly after the events and be final. The issue of collective memory is related to the issue of the "judgement of history".

Related to the issue of historical judgement are those of the pretension to neutrality and objectivity. Analytical and critical philosophers of history have debated whether historians should express judgements on historical figures, or if this would infringe on their supposed role. In general, positivists and neopositivists oppose any value-judgement as unscientific

Contemporary

Characterized by its criticism of the 20th century Anglophone attempts to epistemologically ground historical explanation, objectivity, and causation as universal functions of logic, the Postmodern legacy in philosophy of history has been taken up by three contemporary theorists in particular: Hayden White (1928-), Frank Ankersmit (1945-), and Keith Jenkins (1943-). Each maintains that the analysis of these epistemological issues wrongly circumvents questions about interpretation and meaning, and each considers the search for once-and-for-all demonstrations an attempt to avoid the relativistic character of historical truth. Hayden White inaugurated this ‘linguistic turn’ in historiography with his Meta-History: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1979). By focusing on the structures and strategies of historical accounts, White came to see historiography and literature as fundamentally the same endeavor. Historians, like fiction writers, wrote according to a four-fold logic of emplotment, according to whether they saw their subject matter as a romance, tragedy comedy, or satire. This aim stems from their political ideology – anarchist, radical, conservative, or liberal respectively – and is worked out by means of a dominant rhetorical trope – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, or irony respectively. Representative philosophers – Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, and Croce – and representative historians – Michelet, Tocqueville, Ranke, and Burckhardt – are themselves tied to these modes of emplotment. While White’s architectonic has come under criticism as being both overly reductive in its structure and a warrant for relativism, other theorists have taken up his banner.

Among these, Frank Ankersmit endorses the general outline of White’s narrativism, while stressing the constructivist aspect of our experience of the past. There is no ‘ideal narratio’ for Ankersmit, because ultimately there is no ontological structure onto which the single ‘correct’ narration can be correspondentially grafted. Alongside Gianni Vattimo (1936-), Sande Cohen (1946-), and Alan Munslow (1947-), Keith Jenkins takes White’s anti-realism in a decidedly deconstructionist fashion. Jenkins exhorts an end to historiography as customarily practiced. Since historians can never be wholly objective, and since historical judgment cannot pretend to a correspondential standard of truth, all that remains of history are the congealed power structures of a privileged class. In a statement that summarizes much of contemporary historical theory, Jenkins concludes the following:

Historiography now appears as a self-referential, problematic expression of ‘interests’, an ideologically-interpretive discourse without any ‘real’ access to the past as such; unable to engage in any dialogue with ‘reality’. In fact, ‘history’ now appears to be just one more ‘expression’ in a world of postmodern expressions: which of course is what it is. (Jenkins 1995, 9)

Although 21st century philosophy of history has widened the gap between practicing historians and theorists of history, and although it has lost some of the popularity it enjoyed from the early-19th to mid-20th century, it will remain a vigorous field of inquiry so long as the past itself continues to serve as a source of philosophical curiosity.