Philosophy of History, A Guide For Students - M. C. Lemon

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PHILOSOPHY OF HISTO RY 511
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Philosophy of History is an essential introduction to a vast body of writing about 13
history, from classical Greece and Rome to the contemporary world. M.C. Lemon 14
maps out key debates and central concepts of philosophy of history, placing 15
principal thinkers in the context of their times and schools of thought. 16
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Lemon explains the crucial differences between speculative philosophy as an
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enquiry into the course and meaning of history, and analytic philosophy of history
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as relating to the nature and methods of history as a discipline. Part I offers a guide 20
to the principal thinkers from pre-historical times to the present, covering thinkers 21
such as Vico, Hegel, and Marx. Part II is a critical summary of the leading issues 22
raised by critical theorists of history, incorporating topics such as objectivity, 23
ideology, historical explanation and narrative. Part III revisits the two branches in 24
the light of contemporary contributions to the discipline. 25
This guide provides a comprehensive survey of historical thought since ancient 26
times. Its clear terminology and lucid argument will make it an invaluable source 27
for students and teachers of history alike. 28
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M.C. Lemon is a lecturer in the history of political thought and political theory at
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the University of Ulster. His past publications include The Discipline of History and
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the History of Thought (1995). 33
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P HI L OS OP H Y OF
HISTO RY
A Guide for Students
M.C. Lemon
First published 2003
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
© 2003 M.C. Lemon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lemon, M. C. (Michael C.), 1945–
Philosophy of history : a guide for students / M.C. Lemon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. History—Philosophy. 2. History—Historiography.
3. Historiography. 4. History, Ancient—Historiography.
5. History, Modern—Historiography. I. Title.
D16.8 .L375 2003
2002014645
ISBN 0-203-38023-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-38640-X (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0–415–16204–1 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–16205–x (pbk)
BRIEF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
PART 1
Speculative philosophy of history 5
1 Speculative philosophy of history: what is it and why study it? 7
2 Pre-classical ideas on ‘history’ 14
3 Classical Greek and Roman speculations on history 28
4 The Christian challenge to Graeco-Roman historical perspectives 45
5 A changing consciousness of history: the Renaissance and
Machiavelli 74
6 An innovative interlude: from Machiavelli to Vico 107
7 Vico’s philosophy of history 127
8 Speculative philosophy of history during the Enlightenment 168
9 Hegel’s philosophy of history 201
10 Marx on history 238
PART II
Analytic philosophy of history 279
11 Analytic philosophy of history: what is it and why study it? 281
12 The ‘what is history?’ debate 290
13 What is history for? 323
PART III
The end of history? 357
14 The end of history? The postmodernist challenge 359
15 The End of History? Fukuyama’s speculative philosophy of history 390
v
FULL CONTENTS
Acknowledgements xvi
Introduction 1
PART 1
1 Speculative philosophy of history: what is it and why study it? 7

Introduction – the two branches of philosophy of history:
speculative and analytic 7
‘Philosophy’ 8
The relevance of speculative philosophy of history 10; Is speculative
philosophy of history worthwhile? 12
2 Pre-classical ideas on ‘history’ 14

Introduction: principles of selection 14
A ‘pre-historic’ mentality? 16
A mythical consciousness of the past? 16; ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ 16;
‘Poetry’ 17; ‘Primitiveness’ 17; ‘Childhood’ 18; A bizarre or
‘workable’ mentality? 18
Ancient ideas of history 19
Time 19; The passing of time 20; The archetypal past 21;
‘Story-telling’ and ‘historical causality’ 21; ‘Progress’ 22;
‘Science’ 23; The earthly life 24
Some reflections 25
vii
CONTENTS
3 Classical Greek and Roman speculations on history 28

Introduction 28
The emergence from ‘myth’ 28; Reasons for the shift 29
Classical Greek and Roman ideas on ‘history’ 31
Historical cycles 31; ‘Fate’, ‘Fortune’, and ‘the gods’ 33; The
principle of growth (the biological analogy) 35; Decay, and ‘the
ages of man’ 37; Political cycles 39; Unchanging ‘human nature’ 40
Comments 41
Conflicting views on the idea of ‘progress’ in the Classical world 41;
‘Progress’ and philosophy of history: special pleading? 44
4 The Christian challenge to Graeco-Roman historical perspectives 45

Introduction 45
Roman historical ideas 45
The ‘Four World-Monarchies’ myth 45; Cycles 46; The demise
of Empire 47; ‘Rome Eternal’ 48; Escape from cycles? 48;
The ‘body–state’ analogy 49; Other presuppositions 51;
Graeco-Roman historical ideology summarised 51
The Judaeo-Christian alternative 52
Jewish apocalyptic ideas 52; Early Christianity 54;
Augustine (354–430) 55
The Graeco-Roman/Judaeo-Christian divide 56
The dichotomy questioned 56; The dichotomy denied? 58;
The dichotomy affirmed? 59
Augustine, the philosopher of history? 61
Augustine’s two ‘cities’ 61; The irrelevance of history? 62;
History as relevant? 63; Interpreting Augustine 65; Some
heuristics of the history of thought 67
Summary comments 69
The Christian challenge 69; Cyclical and linear history 69;
The Christian deity and history 70; The temporal and spiritual lives 71
viii
CONTENTS
5 A changing consciousness of history: the Renaissance

and Machiavelli 74
Introduction 74
The ‘Middle Ages’ 74; Historical monotony? 74; Aquinas 75;
‘Scholasticism’ 76
Renaissance humanism and ‘the Middle Ages’ 77
Effects on historical consciousness 78; The humanists and

‘secularism’ 79
Broader Renaissance secularism 81

Economic activity and secularism 81; ‘Individualism’ 82;
‘Cultural relativism’ 83; Printing 84
Limitations of the Renaissance ‘Cultural Revolution’ 85
Continuing relevance of ‘the Renaissance’ 87; ‘Movements’ 88
Thomas More’s Utopia 90

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) 93
Machiavelli’s reputation 93; Machiavelli on history 94;

Learning from history 95; Principles underlying history – unchanging
nature and human nature 97; ‘Education’: law, role-models,
and religion 98; The role of individuals 100; ‘Fortune’ 100;
Cycles 102; God 103
Summary comments 104
6 An innovative interlude: from Machiavelli to Vico 107

Introduction 107
Vico’s originality 107
Vico’s intellectual inheritance 108
The Scientific Revolution 108; Seventeenth-century philosophy 111;
‘Empiricism’ 111; Seventeenth-century ‘rationalism’ 112;
Seventeenth-century political thought 115; The discipline of
history 119; Religion and Biblical criticism 120
Conclusion 124
ix
CONTENTS
7 Vico’s philosophy of history 127

Introduction 127
Vico’s intellectual development 127; Vico’s ‘great discovery’ 128;
Vico’s ‘master-key’ 129
The question of true knowledge 131
The earlier Vico 131; ‘True knowledge’ in the New Science 132
Vico’s ‘ideal eternal history’ 136
Mankind’s origins – ‘the age of gods’ 136; The ‘age of heroes’ 140;
The ‘age of men’ 143; Monarchy in the ‘age of men’ 145;
The potential demise of ‘the age of men’ 146
The recourse of history 147
The idea of ‘recourse’ 147; ‘Recourse’ in post-Classical European
history 149; The inevitability of ‘recourse’? 150
Religion and the meaning of history 152
Biblical history and the Hebrews 153; Christianity 153;
‘Providence’ 155; Divine grace 157; Religion and history in Vico 159
Political dimensions 159
Cyclical depression? 159; Stopping the rot? 161; A new age? 163
8 Speculative philosophy of history during the Enlightenment 168

Introduction 168
Vico and the Enlightenment 168; The Enlightenment 168;
Enlightenment ‘philosophy of history’ 170
Rousseau 171
The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences 171; The Discourse
on the Origins of Inequality 174; The ‘noble savage’ 175;
The disastrous progress of mankind 176; The origins of political
societies 178; The final stages 179; Rousseau’s philosophy of history 180;
Postscript on Rousseau – The Social Contract 181; Critique 183
Turgot 184
On ‘progress’ and ‘rationality’ 184; The monitoring of ‘progress’ 186
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CONTENTS
Condorcet 187
Historical premises 188; The ten stages of history 189; Overview
of Condorcet’s philosophy of history 191; The tenth stage 193;
Politics and philosophy of history in Condorcet 194
Edmund Burke 196
The argument of the Reflections 196
Conclusion 200
9 Hegel’s philosophy of history 201

Introduction 201
The influence of Hegel’s times 202; Introduction to Hegel’s
thought 203; Mind objectifying itself 204; Dialectics 205;
Impersonal ‘Reason’ 206
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right 209
Right, will, and freedom 209; Property and crime 210; ‘Morality’
and conscience 211; Ethical life – the family 211; Ethical life –
‘Civil Society’ 212; Ethical life – ‘the state’ 212
Hegel’s The Philosophy of History 213
‘Spirit’ 214; ‘Spirit’ and World history 215; Hegel’s method 215;
The state and ‘World History’ 217; National Spirits 218
‘History proper’ 221
The Oriental realm 221; The Greek realm 222; The Roman
realm 223; The Germanic realm 224; The first period 225;
The second period 226; The third period: the Renaissance 226;
The Reformation 227; The emergence of ‘modern times’ 228;
The 1789 French Revolution 229
Loose ends 231; USA – the future? 233
Conclusion 234
10 Marx on history 238

Introduction 238
Philosophical foundations: the early Marx 240; Towards private
property and the proletariat 242
xi
CONTENTS
Marx’s ‘immature’ philosophy of history 245

Feuerbach and ‘materialism’ 247; Feuerbach, Marx, and Hegel 248;
The resonance of Marx’s ‘immature’ philosophy of history 250
Marx’s revised theory of history: ‘Historical Materialism’ 253
From ‘philosophy’ to ‘practice’: Marx’s epistemology 253; Historical
materialism: The German Ideology 255; Division of labour 257;
The state 258; Superstructure and ideology 259; The course of
history: historical change 261; Historical sketch 262; Feudalism and
the Middle Ages 262; Pre-industrial capitalism 263; Industrial
capitalism 264; The moral dimension 265; The prediction of
‘communism’ 266; Later developments 269
Comments 271
‘Progress’, ‘determinism’, and inevitability 271; ‘Science’ versus
‘philosophy’ 274; The demise of ‘philosophy of history’? 276
PART II
11 Analytic philosophy of history: what is it and why study it? 281

Historical methodology – an important distinction 281; The difference

between historical methodology and analytic philosophy of history 282;
The blurring of the difference 283; The relevance of analytic philosophy
of history 285; Theoretical and practical studies 286; ‘Observing’
things 286; ‘History proper’ 288; Foreign territory? 288
12 The ‘what is history?’ debate 290
Introduction 290
Theoretical preliminaries 290
‘Actual’ and ‘ideal’ history 290; Words and ‘reality’ 291;

The word, ‘history’ 292; History as ‘the study of the past’ 293
‘Types’ of history 294
Descriptive history 294; Analytic history 295; Narrative history 298
xii
CONTENTS
The epistemological status of ‘history’ 301

Acquiring knowledge of things past 302; Evidence, inference, and
facts 303; The reliability of ‘facts’ 304; Proof and ‘sources’ 304;
Written sources – their limitations 306
‘Historical explanation’ 308
Scientific causality 308; ‘Covering-law’ models 309; ‘Explaining’
things 310; Historical accounts 312; Narrative and ‘explanation’ 313;
The logic of narrative sequences 313; Narrative and conventional
understanding 314; Indeterminacy in human conduct 315;
Summary 315; ‘Historical explanation’ restored? – ‘explication’ 316
Historical topics 318
‘Anything goes’? 318; Narrative parameters 319; Highways and
byways 320
13 What is history for? 323

Introduction 323
Theoretical preliminaries 325
The practising historian 328
Practically motivated historical work 329; Historical work ‘for its

own sake’ 331
The communication of history: the history ‘book’ 333
Practically motivated historical writings 334; The nature and role

of ‘ideology’ in communicating history 335; Three questions 339;
History written ‘for its own sake’ 341; Narrative history ‘for its
own sake’ 345; ‘Relevant’ and ‘significant’ facts 347;
Summary 349
Why read history? 350
Reading history ‘for the sake of it’ 350; Reading history as a means
to an end 353
Conclusion 356
xiii
CONTENTS
PART III
14 The end of history? The postmodernist challenge 359

Introduction 359
The nature of postmodern theory 359
The basic postmodernist perspective 359; Postmodernism as
a ‘movement’ 361
Some key postmodernist thinkers 363
Derrida 363; Foucault 364; Lyotard 365; Baudrillard 367;
Jameson 369
Postmodernism and the discipline of history 370
The issues 370
Postmodern history: two contemporary examples 371
Munslow: the problem with mainstream history 371; Munslow’s
alternative ‘history’ 374; Critique 375; Jenkins on ‘own-sakism’ 378;
Jenkins on the postmodern alternative ‘history’ 381; Critique 382
Conclusion: the foundations of postmodernism revisited 385
‘Ideology’: shallow and deep 386
15 The End of History? Fukuyama’s speculative philosophy of

history 390
Introduction 390
‘The times we live in’ 390; The revival of speculative philosophy
of history 391
The logic of historical development 393
The ‘Mechanism’ of modern natural science 393; The ‘Mechanism’
behind liberal democracy 395; Some preparatory reservations 397;
‘Spirit’, thymos, the desire for recognition 398; Megalothymia 400;
Isothymia 401
The contemporary world 404
xiv
CONTENTS
Thymos and liberal democracy 404; Thymos and economics 405;

International relations and war 407; Nationalism 409
The challenge from the Left 411; The challenge from the Right 413;
Thymos and the future: Fukuyama’s doubts 415; Fukuyama’s
doubts resolved? 417; Critique 419; Empirical judgements 419;
The Islamic world 420; Philosophy and ideology 422; Fukuyama’s
message? 424; Thymos revisited 425
Concluding reflections 426
Notes 429
Bibliography 448
Index 452
xv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In some chapters I have leaned heavily on the enviable knowledge displayed in

other academics’ writings, namely, H. Frankfort et al., R. Nisbet, S. Jaki, and G.
Trompf in chapters 2 to 4, and B. Mazlish, and F. Manuel in chapter 8. I have also
benefited from encouragement and advice from my former editor, Heather
McCallum, my present editor, Victoria Peters, and from Professor Donald Sassoon
of Queen Mary College, University of London, and from the technical help of
Ruth Jeavons, Laila Friese, and Jane Horton. Whatever deficiencies this book
displays are of course entirely my responsibility.
xvi
INTRODUCTION
This book has a dual purpose. Primarily I hope to introduce the subject ‘philosophy
of history’ to those history students, academics, and teachers who may to varying
degrees be unfamiliar with an extensive branch of writings relating to their
discipline. Nowadays such relative unfamiliarity is commonplace amongst
historians. There are at least two (related) reasons for this – first, a claustrophobic
compartmentalisation of disciplines, certainly in the Anglo-American world,
where professional pressures tend towards narrow discipline bases – and second,
specifically in historians, an air of indifference towards ‘philosophy of history’,
either as an example of such compartmentalisation, or as a more deliberate
stance emanating from some unfortunate encounter with philosophy, best
forgotten. Such diffidence may be justified, but only on the basis of some familiarity
with ‘philosophy of history’ – and a principal purpose of this ‘guide’ is to furnish
precisely that.
This book, then, is offered as an historians’ guide, but not because the ideas of
our philosophers of history are, patronisingly, to be simplified because of ‘fear’
of philosophy – rather, because within the extensive literature of ‘philosophy of
history’ it concentrates more on what might interest historians than philosophers.
And as for being a guide, again the intention is not to condescend, but rather to
map out what, with respect to even one of its two branches, has rightly been called
‘a boundless land’ of ‘semi-monstrous’ proportions.1
A secondary purpose of this ‘guide’ relates more urgently to the contemporary
nature of historical study, for it is under attacks sourced precisely from the two
branches of philosophy of history, namely, ‘speculative’ and ‘analytic’. First, from
recent signs of a revival in ‘speculative’ philosophy of history which, as we shall see,
tries to construct some kind of ‘universal history’ of the world (the rise and decline
of great states, empires, and cultures), complaints have arisen that modern
historians have lost that sense of the grand sweep of time – that their writings are
narrowly focused specialist studies, more akin to the mentality of ‘antiquarians’ or
‘laboratory workers’2 than efforts to make sense of the unfolding of human history.
Some even go so far as to suggest that ‘history’ proper is disappearing from schools
and universities, replaced by a mish-mash of controversial contemporary ‘social’
studies ranging over ethnic, gender, and other ideological concerns, leaving
1
INTRODUCTION
students bereft of any sense of an accepted past from which they can appreciate their
present as emerging and thus achieve a salutary perspective.3
Another attack arises from the other branch of philosophy of history, namely,
‘analytic’ (or ‘critical’)4 philosophy of history which, as we shall see, attempts to
bring to the surface and examine the validity of those presuppositions which
underly the thinking and writings of historians. For example: what is a fact, can one
be objective about the past, do historians explain things in a special way? Stemming
from more general ‘philosophical’ positions, the answers given to such questions
vary and are by no means necessarily subversive of historians’ work. Yet some are,
and perhaps no more so than those critiques inspired by many so-called ‘post-
modern’ philosophers which amount to a thorough-going refutation of the very
possibility of the discipline of history having any validity. Why? Because they claim
that any discourse has an inbuilt subjectivism due to the reference-systems and
value-orientations embedded in perceptions of ‘reality’ and the language expressing
them. From this viewpoint, historians are talking rubbish – or at least, one
historian’s rubbish is as good or as worthless as any other’s.
It is in the light of all these considerations that this ‘historians’ guide to philosophy
of history’ is offered – to help familiarise historians with the principal outlines of
an extensive, multi-faceted literature so they can better assess its relevance for
them; also, as a by-product, to provide historians with relevant food for thought
where they are subject to attack on the nature of their practice – i.e., studying,
writing, and teaching history. Each reader will doubtless sort out the dross from the
gold within ‘philosophy of history’ in his or her own way despite any critical edge
offered in this exposition. For my own part, I have elsewhere argued for a
‘productive marriage’ between the discipline of history and philosophy of history,
but one based only on the ‘right’ foundations!
Finally, some might argue a further rationale for this ‘guide’ – namely, the arrival
of the new millennium. For them, this ‘event’ cannot but stimulate reflection upon
‘the meaning of history’. Be this an artificial stimulus or not, less dubious is the fact
that we now have another century of history to survey, which by any standards has
included momentous changes for most of the world, and raises issues for the future
perhaps more palpably than any previous century. Churlish indeed would be the
historian who took exception at being the first everyone else asks for insight,
interpretation, and divination of meaning! Yet does his discipline so equip him?
Should it? Grappling with a moral problem, I once asked a distinguished moral
philosopher for advice. He replied that the last person to ask what one ought to do
is the moral philosopher! Appearances notwithstanding, then, is the historian the
last rather than the first person to ask about ‘history’? Should we turn instead to
philosophers of history, leaving the actual historians mute? Perhaps this ‘guide’ may
be of some service to those historians sensitive to the issue.
Part I begins by distinguishing between ‘speculative’ and ‘analytic’ philosophy of

history, concentrating on the former, offering reasons why it might invite study by
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INTRODUCTION
historians, and then offering a guide to its principal areas and noted individual
contributions. Part II begins by explaining in general terms what ‘analytic’
philosophy of history is, again offering reasons why it might invite historians’
attention, and then offers a guide to the principal issues it revolves around. Part III
revisits both branches of philosophy of history, but brings matters up-to-date by
exploring contemporary contributions from both its speculative and analytic angles
which, it happens, differently announce ‘the end of history’.
For ease of reading I have as far as possible restricted notes to references only,
although for academic purposes these are necessarily extensive in those chapters
where, in interpreting them, I have laboured to allow thinkers to speak for
themselves.
3
Part I
SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY
OF HISTO RY
1
SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF
HISTO RY
What is it and why study it?
Introduction: the two branches of philosophy of history:

speculative and analytic
When the famously ‘enlightened’ Frenchman, Voltaire, coined the term
‘philosophy of history’, he meant something akin to what we might now call ‘critical
cultural history’. In his 1769 Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of Nations he
surveyed ancient and classical cultures (primarily in terms of their customs and
religions), including China and India, as well as feudal times in Europe up to the
reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715). Rather than present this huge historical vista as
some kind of inherently meaningful pattern or story, his intention was to extract
morally useful lessons from such ‘history’ (for example, to downplay sentimental
or overawed respect for tradition and authority, and to highlight moral short-
comings and absurdities in his own society, thereby raising not only the present but
also the future, ‘in the light of history’). In short, he was interested in this approach
to ‘history’ because of the new perspective it offered regarding human progress. His
own views on the latter could be pretty gloomy, and how much hope his
‘philosophical history’ gave him for the better future he desired is a doubtful matter.
But one thing is clear – he meant his readers to think about history, not simply to
read and research it ‘for its own sake’ as a residue of interesting facts and events.
A second aspect to Voltaire’s ‘philosophy of history’ was closely related to the
above, namely, his awareness that the method of study required for such a ‘history’
at least needed to be rational – that is, able to sidestep superstition and religious
orthodoxy and to examine long-held beliefs. Therefore he recognised the need to
attend to how the historian works on his material and how he thinks about what
he is doing – that is, an aspect of his ‘philosophy of history’ concerned history as a
discipline or method, in addition to ‘history’ as ‘what happened’. In the event,
however, his own views on the discipline of history were not especially innovative.1
Embryonic as Voltaire’s coining of the phrase was, the essentials are already
there to explain what ‘philosophy of history’ is. Leaving aside temporarily the term
‘philosophy’, we see that philosophy of history is concerned with the two different
meanings of the term ‘history’. On the one hand it treats of it as meaning past
events, circumstances, and facts – in other words, ‘history’ as the material or ‘object’
7
SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
to be studied; and on the other hand it treats it as the academic discipline which
studies the former. In short, the meaning of the term ‘history’ is twofold, and can
be expressed by saying that history as object is what the subject of history studies.
Philosophy of history is concerned with both versions of ‘history’, thus consisting
of two branches. Where it treats of history as ‘object’, it is usually called speculative
(or substantive) philosophy of history, and where it treats it as a ‘discipline’ it is best
called analytic philosophy of history.
‘Philosophy’
The other term involved in our subject-matter is ‘philosophy’. This is a term which
has become more precise than in Voltaire’s time, when it simply meant something
like ‘thoughtful knowledge’ – and it is perhaps partly because of this that the term
is intimidating to some. For example, doubtless some scientists are neglectful of
philosophy of science because they are nervous of ‘philosophy’, just as some
historians are de-motivated regarding ‘philosophy of history’. But here we can
return to our glimpse at Voltaire, for a third aspect to his philosophy is that he
meant his readers to think rationally about both the material and the discipline of
history – and there is a reassuring sense in which that is almost ‘all’ what we call
‘philosophy’ is, namely, to think rationally about something. All we need add is that
such thinking only becomes ‘philosophical’ when there is not already a recognised
‘method’ for finding answers to questions – in other words, where the matter under
scrutiny does not fall under existing academic disciplines or other accepted ‘rules’
of thought. For example, we now have scientific disciplines to approach such
questions as ‘what is illness?’, ‘what are stars?’, and ‘where did mankind come from?’,
(respectively, medicine, astronomy, and biology). Likewise, other disciplines such
as social sciences, languages, and indeed history provide accepted approaches to
different questions. Also, apart from academic disciplines, we have familiar ways
of tackling questions such as ‘when is the next flight to New York?’, ‘why did you
spend so much money?’, and ‘where are my gloves?’. In all these cases we do not
‘philosophise’. What this shows is that philosophy approaches those issues for
which, in the absence of existing ‘rules’, we simply have to rely on our capacity to
‘think out’ a problem as best (‘rationally’) as we can. Thus it is that over the
millennia ‘philosophers’ have pondered about justice, happiness, dreams, art,
motion, the State, and much more. It is true the emergence of modern science and
social studies has diminished the area of philosophical enquiry, but plenty of
‘inaccessible’ questions remain for philosophy to flourish (for example, perennial
moral issues), as well as new ones emerging. Not least among them are whether
there is such a thing as ‘world-history’ in any meaningful sense, (thus, ‘speculative
philosophy of history’) and whether the practice of the subject, ‘history’ – i.e., the
discipline of history – is fully valid, (thus, ‘analytic philosophy of history’).
In short, (and contrary to many philosophers who ‘philosophise’ precisely about
‘what is philosophy?’ – the answer is provided by the history of thought), there is
no mystery enveloping ‘philosophy’ making it an esoteric subject which, for example,
8
scientists and historians should respectfully leave to ‘the experts’. It has no special
subject-matter of its own (unlike all other viable academic disciplines), neither any
special method (again, unlike all other viable disciplines). Rather, it simply means
seeking knowledge or understanding, through the exercise of reason, of those
matters otherwise inaccessible via known paths or rules of enquiry – and in the
sense that this means trying to think something through ‘on our own’, it is a
uniquely ‘democratic’ activity, open to everyone.
All this, however, is not to say philosophy is easy. Many brilliant thinkers adorn
its history, and we tread respectfully in their wake to avoid thinking and saying silly
things. Also, their reflections and arguments amongst each other over time have
generated a special vocabulary better to denote certain recurring complex and/or
abstract ideas, and not only is it as well to become familiar with some of this
vocabulary in order to understand their writings, but its persistence shows its
usefulness to our own efforts to ‘think things through in a rational way’.
Speculative philosophy of history

If, then, ‘philosophy’ is more to be embraced than feared, let us look further into
that branch of philosophy of history called speculative philosophy of history. As
already intimated, this consists of thinking about the actual ‘content’ of (human)
history to see in what sense ‘it as a whole’ is explicable or meaningful. It is hence
not surprising that some who have attempted this employed the term ‘universal
history’, and that one recent scholar described it as ‘the central aspiration to afford
a total explanatory account of the past’.2 Although not all speculative philosophy
of history is so overtly ambitious, those who engage in it are variously attempting
to reach conclusions about the following kinds of questions: does history
demonstrate a single giant unfolding story? If so, does the ‘story’ have an ending?
And is that ending utopian, cataclysmic, or simply mundane? Or does history go
round in circles (‘cycles’)? Can history be divided up into distinct periods such as
‘the Dark Ages’, and if so, what are they? And what does this tell us about the
course of history? Is the history of the world necessarily a history of progress of
humanity; if so, why? If not, why not? Do ‘laws’ govern historical development, or
is it already begging the question to see history as ‘developing’? Is the course
of history determined by forces outside human control, or can individuals’ actions
make a difference? Can we learn anything from the flow of history, or is every
situation unique?
In their turn, these large questions have generated a recognisable body of
subsidiary issues. Is there such a thing as ‘Fate’? Or ‘Providence’? Has ‘human
nature’ remained the same throughout history? Can we talk of different mentalities
over the ages, such as an early ‘mythical consciousness’ as distinct from the
modern ‘scientific’ outlook? Can the history of humanity be seen as analogous
to the growth of the individual from infanthood, through childhood and youth, to
maturity, and then old age? Why is it that great cultures have invariably declined?
Is it inevitable?
9
Speculative philosophy of history, then, stems from the impulse to make sense of
history, to find meaning in it, or at least some intelligible pattern. And it should
not surprise us that at the heart of this impulse is a desire to predict the future (and
in many cases to shape it). By any standards, then, this branch of philosophy of
history is audacious, and there is a sense in which the term ‘speculative’ is not only
appropriate but also carries derogatory implications for those historians and others
who insist on a solely empirical approach to the past, i.e., on ‘sticking to the facts’.
In short, to some, the very project of speculative philosophy of history can appear
misguided on the grounds that it is ‘theoretical’ in the bad sense of the term –
factually unfounded, impossible of proof, prey to imaginative flights of fancy, and
premised on an unrealistically encyclopaedic knowledge of history throughout
recorded time and over most of the globe. To others, however, it is a worthwhile
undertaking because it is so natural to a reflective being. Just as at times one gets
the urge to ‘make sense’ of one’s own life, either out of simple curiosity about its
‘meaning’, or through suffering a particularly turbulent phase, or because weighty
decisions about one’s future are looming, so some are drawn to reflect, not on
themselves, but on the history of their species – mankind.
The relevance of speculative philosophy of history

Whether speculative philosophy of history is worthwhile or, instead, a
fundamentally flawed exercise, it is surely an understandable venture. Here I revert
to the analogy of the individual’s reflections on his or her life. Firstly, attempts to
discover a theory or ‘philosophy’ of history are intrinsically interesting because
they try to make sense of the overall flow of history – even in some cases to give it
meaning. And there is a sense in which to do particularly the latter is to offer
answers to the question, ‘what is the point of life?’ (not of yours or mine, but of
human life in general). The importance of such a question is either self-explanatory
or nil, depending on an individual’s assumptions. Some see it as the ultimate
question to be answered, whereas others see it as symptomatic of an arrogant
anthropomorphism which demands that ‘life, the universe, and all that’ be reduced
to the petty model of merely human dimensions, where intention and reason are
seen as the governing principles. But that individuals differ in this way is exactly
the point, in the sense that speculative philosophy of history raises the issue directly
into the light of argument, allowing us to examine our initial assumptions regarding
the value or futility of such ‘ultimate’ questions. For example, one might ask sceptics
whether they at least accept the notion that, on the whole, ‘history has delivered’
progress in the arts, sciences, economics, government, and quality of life. If the
answer is ‘yes’, how do they account for it? Is it chance (thus offering no guarantees
for the future)? Or if there is a reason for it, what is this ‘reason’ which is ‘going on
in history’? Similarly, if the sceptics answer ‘no’, then why not? Again, is it chance?
Or is there some ‘mechanism’ underlying the course of history which prevents
overall continuous progress? If so, what is it, and can it be defeated? And as for those
10
who do believe in a history which delivers progress, what do they have to say about
the immense catalogue of horrors still to be found in the world?
Whatever answers are given, whether from the enthusiast’s or the sceptic’s
viewpoint, they cannot but be interesting to us in their own right, for since we are
beings conscious of the passing of time and of the varying of events and
circumstances, we cannot but wish ‘to make sense’ of this aspect of our being-in-
the-world. In short, to be ‘conscious’ of this or that is to ‘make sense’ of it, in the
most basic sense that human-beings are of necessity perpetually, instinctively
engaged in the practice of ‘understanding’, or contriving meaning in, what they
experience. Thus it would be strange indeed if historians, whose object is the past,
did not find speculative philosophy of history intrinsically interesting, whether
impressed or not by particular examples of it.
To pursue our analogy, there is a second reason why an impulse towards speculative
philosophy of history, worthwhile or not, is at least understandable – namely, there
are certain periods in history when many who are part of them feel their times are
especially turbulent or in some way remarkable (just as when an individual, for
example, falls seriously ill, undergoes a severe loss, wins the lottery, or retires). At
such times, interest in ‘making sense of the past’ has a practical point – namely, the
felt need to come to terms with the present through gaining a perspective on how
one has got there. Such reflections serve the function of restoring, or confirming,
a meaning to the present otherwise lost or at least jeopardized by an unprecedented
flow of events. Only too aware of the particular narrative of events leading to our
present situation, we attempt to regain our bearings by seeking more reflective
generalised explanations for the state we are in. This urge to ‘take stock’ of affairs
in turbulent times is ‘natural’, I suggest, for either of two reasons – first, the need
not only for individuals but also for communities (local, regional, national, and
even international) to preserve their sense of identity; and second, the need to
find excuses or deflect blame, where the unsteadiness of the present is unpleasant
and perceived as resulting from failure. This latter is probably no more than a
particular case of the general need to preserve a sense of identity, for in finding
‘excuses’ for the parlous state one might be in, one is meaning ‘it wasn’t me, sir’!
As we will see, if by a ‘theodicy’ is meant ‘a justification of the ways of God to man’,
many speculative philosophies of history contain elements of ‘a justification of the
ways of man to man’, (for which we might coin the term ‘histodicy’).3 For example,
‘America is still the land of the free despite some of the things it has “had” to do
. . .’, just as ‘I am still “me” despite some of the things I have done . . .’.
To complete our analogy, a third reason why speculative philosophy of history is

understandable is that there are periods in history when many intuit the coming
to an end of an epoch, and the possibility, even necessity, of fashioning a new
future. Thus the range of their vision extends beyond the short or medium term,
and they look at themselves (either as individuals or, by analogy, as ‘cultures’, or
even as ‘mankind’) in terms of their ‘historic’ possibilities. This involves an attempt
11
to supersede the ‘details’ of the past in order to abstract overall ‘trends’ and general
‘laws’ from which to predict the future. A variety of positions can follow, most of
which have been proposed at one time or another by different philosophers
of history. The prediction may be one of gloom, which we can do nothing about;
or of gloom, but one we can at least mitigate; or of a gloom which can be entirely
averted. Alternatively the prediction may be one of endless ‘progress’ which only
has to be nurtured, or of limited progress in limited areas. There is even the
‘prediction’ that ‘history’ has stopped – that, at least politically and economically,
mankind has reached a culmination from which we can expect no further
fundamental changes or developments either in terms of regress or progress.
Is speculative philosophy of history worthwhile?

From the above, then, I suggest speculative philosophy of history is an under-
standable intellectual exercise and, to that extent, defensible. Broadly, its project
is interesting in its own right since it purports to ‘make sense’ of history, and to that
extent suggest answers to ‘the meaning of life’. The latter issue has naturally
occupied human beings (and always will) insofar as they are ‘self-conscious’ – i.e.,
‘meaning-constructing’ beings. And in an increasingly secular age where religion
is less appealed to for answers to that question, speculative philosophy of history is
all we have left. Also, as suggested, for those who dismiss the question of ‘the
meaning of life’ on the a priori grounds that there simply isn’t one, perhaps
the burden of proof is on them to show, from history, its meaninglessness (i.e.,
demonstrate it a posteriori). But in doing so, they would be engaging precisely in
that which their a priori stance would appear to denigrate, namely, speculative
philosophy of history!
We also saw two broadly practical reasons for engaging in speculative philosophy
of history – namely, the urge in rapidly changing times to restore a sense of
continuity, or at least intelligibility, in defence of a society’s identity; and secondly,
the impulse to predict the future, and hopefully influence it, on the basis of
identifying general forces governing history.
From all this it is not surprising that certain themes recur in the writings of many
speculative philosophers of history – the search for meaning or design in the flow
of history, various theories of progress, the notion of recurring cycles, the issue of
individual agency, the discovery of ‘laws’ of development which ‘determine’ history,
and the question of the changeability of ‘human nature’; in their turn, these themes
generate subsidiary notions regarding the role of chance, Fate, or Providence,
different periodisations of history, theories of different ‘national’ or ‘cultural’
characteristics of peoples, variously coloured predictions for the future, and
attempts to make sense of human suffering.
As suggested, this is all intrinsically interesting. But one further theme which
cannot but press itself on historians in particular, is whether, not only this or that
example of a ‘theory’ of history, but the general rationale underlying all speculative
philosophy of history (understandable as the impulse is) is worthwhile in the first
12
place. According to the philosopher Hegel, writing in the early nineteenth century,
historians only ‘skim the surface’, (i.e., record and analyse ‘the facts’ without
comprehending their part in the larger scheme of things) – and in the Introduction
I mentioned similar concerns voiced today about the teaching and writing of
history. What is the point of studying history, it might be asked, if not to emerge
with something to say about its overall meaning, direction, and significance? In
short, one could turn the issue on its head and ask whether the study of history is
worthwhile if it is not pointed deliberately towards wider horizons of understanding.
Fascinating as the minutiae of the Crimean War might be, or the task of inferring
a satisfactory account of the social origins of Victorian prostitution, are such
piecemeal historical studies worthwhile in themselves? The practice of many
historians today suggests they think it is. Others will argue that they study and
teach, for example, the history of the Crimean War in order to enhance under-
standing of, and gain perspective on, aspects of European history both before and
after that war. To that extent, then, they are moving towards finding a grander
‘design’ or ‘significance’ to history. Alternatively, some may value studying history
not because of any such leanings towards ‘theorising’ or ‘speculating’ about its
course but because of that ‘civilising’ effect the discipline is supposed to have in
virtue of being one of the ‘humanities’ subjects revitalised in the Renaissance.
There may be other justifications for studying history4 – but the point is made. If
some historians question the value of speculative philosophy of history, the shoe
can be put on the other foot – but in a more charitable spirit, for no speculative
philosopher of history would question the value of the study of history, only the
value of how it is undertaken in any particular instance.
Although the following chapters of Part 1 are far from being a history of speculative
philosophy of history, they are at least suggestive of the framework such a history
might employ. This is because they are chronological in order, thereby offering
the possibility of conveying the sense in which the same thing (in this case,
speculative philosophy of history) has changed over time, and of suggesting
explanations for how and why. However, as elaborated upon at the beginning of
the next chapter, rather than adopting the stricter definition of ‘speculative
philosophy of history’ which a proper history would probably require, for the
more general purposes of a ‘guide’ I have adopted a looser notion in order to
accommodate what may be proposed as ‘dominant general attitudes’ towards the
meaning of history in addition to specific speculative philosophies of history crafted
by individual thinkers. As for the latter, this guide draws attention mainly to the
most celebrated examples. But sufficient guidelines emerge from their study, I hope,
to enable those interested in the genre to pursue lesser known examples from an
informed perspective.
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2
PRE-CLASSICAL IDEAS ON
‘HISTO RY’
Introduction: principles of selection

Some scholars claim that speculative philosophy of history did not begin until the
sixteenth or even seventeenth century AD. Others, without explanation, have
embarked on accounts of it based on that assumption, resulting nonetheless in a
number of excellent books. Because the arguments for that starting-point are
neither always clear nor form a consensus, and because I begin with earlier periods,
it is helpful to comment on this issue as a way of explaining the principles of
selection in the following chapters on ‘speculative philosophy of history’. Firstly,
to reserve the beginnings of speculative philosophy of history to the later period is
justifiable, but only on the basis of various suppositions. One is that we restrict it
to systematic, full-blown examples of the effort to construct, or make sense of, some
kind of ‘universal’ history (such as Hegel’s Philosophy of History). For our purposes,
however, such examples can best be seen merely as speculative philosophy of
history at its more highly developed. This leaves room to explore ‘lesser’ types
represented by substantial reflections on history, or important attitudes towards it,
found within writings neither so explicitly nor exclusively focused as the former.
As perhaps an extreme example of this, we will explore how the so-called ‘pre-
rational’, allegedly ‘mythical’, mind-set in early societies made sense of the past.
A second supposition justifying such a late beginning for speculative philosophy
of history is that we should restrict the meaning of ‘philosophy’ strictly to the
exercise of reason unshackled from ‘belief’ and/or superstition. Thus theories about
the course and meaning of history which in particular originate from religious beliefs,
impervious to criticism because held as axiomatically true, do not amount to
‘philosophy proper’. Sympathetic as we may be to this notion, there are difficulties
in upholding it. In general the relation between faith (‘belief’) and reason has
been as unclear to many philosophers as it has to many theologians. It is still
‘philosophised’ about. A difficulty arising more specifically from philosophy of history
is that a number of its exponents, otherwise undoubtedly ‘philosophers’, have so
clearly introduced religious ideas into their philosophies of history. The above-
mentioned Hegel is one example. We will encounter others from our own times,
particularly those who argue an implicit connection between ‘the idea of progress’
14
PRE-CLASSICAL IDEAS ON ‘HISTORY’
and the view of history they claim as unique to the Christian religion. Given this
equivocal relation between religious and philosophical thinking, we can adopt a
more accommodating approach to ‘speculative philosophy of history’ which
includes an exploration of ideas about history inspired by religious views. In
particular we shall outline an alleged specifically Judaeo-Christian set of ideas
relating to the course and meaning of history, including those of Augustine.
A third supposition which might justify locating the origins of speculative
philosophy of history in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries AD is that only
since then has there been a more or less uninterrupted succession of different, often
conflicting, philosophies of history such that the subject can be treated historically.
In other words, if we wish to treat speculative philosophy of history as a distinctive
‘tradition’ of philosophical thought, we must treat it as constituting a continuing
line of argument contributed to over time by a variety of thinkers responding to
each other. Only then does speculative philosophy of history become a ‘real’
phenomenon subject to historical reconstruction rather than being a term which
denotes randomly selected, radically disconnected, examples of ‘its’ sporadic
appearances.
There is much to be said for this argument. Indeed, in a different context I would
regard it as irrefutable1, and would not doubt the sixteenth/seventeenth century
AD starting point. However, not only is it not clear that those who begin their
account of speculative philosophy of history at that point do so on this reasoning,
their writings often fall short of that kind of genuinely historical account it implies.
Some, although scrupulously informative about and instructively critical of the
writers they treat of, are nevertheless content to organise their accounts more as a
chronicle of successive thinkers than as a properly connected narrative. But if many
appearing to take an historical approach to speculative philosophy of history
are thus wanting in their practice, this ‘guide’ does not purport to be a history in
the first place. Again, then, we can therefore allow our approach to encompass
a more generous time-span, and one within which we can explore incidences of a
more loosely defined ‘speculative philosophy of history’. Relevant ideas of the
Renaissance, and Machiavelli in particular, are an example.
Thus although good reasons can be found for restricting the study of speculative
philosophy of history to the sixteenth or seventeenth century onwards, they are not
sufficient in the context of this ‘guide’ to persuade us to ignore earlier ideas and
‘theories’. Although not always ‘pure philosophy’, nor exclusively focused on
‘history’, these earlier notions are nonetheless of relevance – and particularly so
for historians, interested as they are in the past rather than in philosophy for its
own sake. But more than this, we will find that when we do reach that later period
when speculative philosophy of history matures into a definite ‘tradition’, then its
philosophers, in their efforts to make sense of history, invariably incorporate their
own ideas and explanations of how those earlier cultures understood it.
15
A ‘pre-historic’ mentality?
A mythical consciousness of the past?

Although few writings of direct relevance survive from the early civilisations of
ancient Egypt, Greece, and other Near and Middle East regions, scholars have
found sufficient evidence to construct accounts of, or at least generate suggestions
about, how those cultures ‘understood the past’. Three features stand out – a
mythical view of space and time; a belief in the eternal recurrence of ‘cycles’ of
events; and following from these beliefs, the absence of any notion of the historic
capacity of man to fashion what we call ‘progress’.
Calling to mind ancient myths we think of often detailed, lengthy narratives
involving the dramatic actions and interactions of gods, and of men of semi-divine,
heroic stature. And we recognise that not only were these stories told to entertain;
they usually contained some moral, and (inevitably, as narrative) ‘explained’ how
this or that came about. For example, numerous early, or ‘primitive’, cultures had
their own version of ‘the story of creation’, the origins of mankind, the invention
of agriculture, and the forming of societies – and within these stories or ‘mythical’
accounts the forces of good and evil play their part, as well as such of attributes as
strength, cunning, perseverance, and fidelity. But we should not confuse such
‘stories’ with those we find in fables. Fables are works of the explicitly fantastic
imagination – nobody is expected to believe them, (although any morals they
preach are meant to be taken seriously). Ancient ‘myths’, on the contrary, were
regarded as sacred or divine in the sense of voicing truths of ultimate relevance to
their societies. Does this mean these early peoples believed in the factual truth of
the narratives, or were they supposed to recognise them as mere allegories, however
sacred in import? This is a natural question for us to ask – one of many which the
phenomenon of ‘myth’ has provoked in a huge body of frequently disputatious,
abstract literature. However, the very asking of this question takes us to the heart
of the matter, for it is a question from our point of view, not (so far as the evidence
suggests) from that of those early peoples. It would not have occurred to them, for
they did not see the world as something distinct from them, about which they as
‘subjects’ could make ‘objective’ statements. In other words, we think in terms of
an external world of nature and happenings (i.e., of space and time) whose
‘otherness’ we can try to know (through science and history) by the exercise of
observation and rational thought.
‘I’ and ‘Thou’

‘Pre-historic’ peoples did not experience their being in the world in this latter
manner. Rather, they saw ‘nature’ not as ‘other’ but as animated, just like
themselves. They knew themselves as alive; wilful, emotional, calculating, and
capable of agency. This is also how they ‘saw’ what we call the ‘objects and events
in nature’. The land, sky, stars, trees, hills, winds, deserts, plants, water – all were
16
‘seen as’ animated, alive, just like themselves. And ‘events’ such as storms, plagues,
dawn, dusk, floods, animal migrations, eclipses, the turning of the seasons – all
were ‘seen as’ the actions, or results of actions, taken by this animated nature around
them. Let us be clear here. It is not so much that they saw nature ‘as’ animated –
this could invite the false notion that they made allegories of nature, that they
anthropomorphised it ‘in order to’ make sense of it. Rather than ‘seeing’ (‘inter-
preting’) nature in this way, they directly experienced it in this way. Their experience
was that of being part of a totally animated world, not that of being separated from
it, only to be reconnected through the intellectual mediation of some ‘process of
knowing’. It is in this sense, then, that the question of whether these peoples
believed their great ‘myths’ to be true is posed from a false perspective. Rather,
irrespective of listening to classic ‘mythical’ sagas, they lived their daily lives within
a ‘mythical’ consciousness in the first place. The grasses on the riverbank, for
example, would be regarded as animated and be assigned as the property or work
of a ‘god’. For instance, if in picking reeds someone cut their hand, we have to
imagine them regarding the offending reed as, for example, spiteful or malevolent.
The god of plants must be offended, and consequently be propitiated via an
appropriate (‘ritual’) offering – or the god may be trying to convey a message, such
that the ‘medicine-man’, ‘priest’, or augurer needs to be consulted for its meaning.
We may summarise the above, and draw attention to a much fuller account of
this ‘ancient’ mentality, by quoting from the editor’s stimulating opening chapter
in the book Before Philosophy. ‘The fundamental difference between the attitudes
of modern and ancient man as regards the surrounding world is this: for modern,
scientific man the phenomenal world is primarily an “It”; for ancient – and also for
primitive – man it is a “Thou” ’.2
‘Poetry’
We may also make two points commonly observed – first, this ‘ancient’ mentality
is intrinsically highly imaginative, able to weave any number of ‘fantastic’ or ‘poetic’
accounts of a reality construed as consisting of a myriad of animated phenomena,
each with their own individualistic ‘characters’ and subsumed under the powers of
numerous ‘gods’ as idiosyncratic as the human personalities they were imagined
from. This ‘poetic’ feature of the ancient mentality reaches its fullest expression in
their great myths, then, but is not a ‘special’ vehicle reserved for these classic tales.
Rather, the great myths are (one of) the major pieces of evidence for the kind of
claims about the generally pervasive ‘pre-classical’ mentality sketched out above. In
a later chapter we will see that Vico, one the first to make such claims, featured them
prominently as the very foundation of his own speculative philosophy of history.
‘Primitiveness’
The second observation is pre-figured where the passage quoted above refers to
‘ancient’ and ‘primitive’ man, meaning contemporary ‘primitives’, suggesting the
17
latter share this ‘mythical’, ‘poetic’ mentality. Indeed, if ancient myths are evidence
for the latter, some anthropologists’ studies of primitive tribes in modern times are
another source of evidence. But for our purposes what is important is the concept
of ‘primitiveness’, for it figures in subsequent efforts to ‘make sense’ of history,
particularly in diverse attempts meaningfully to periodise history – also it is a concept
of obvious significance to those who ponder over the question of ‘human progress’.
In other words, the notion of ‘primitiveness’ plays an important role in speculative
philosophy of history, and thus the attempt to flesh out (at least) part of its meaning,
by equating it to what is alleged above about the ‘ancient’ mentality, should be of
interest to us.
‘Childhood’
One further observation, less common nowadays and doubtless controversial for
psychologists, is related to this concept of ‘primitiveness’ – namely, the belief that
certain analogies hold between ‘the primitive’ mind and early childhood. One of
these, popularised by Rousseau in the mid-eighteenth century, was that ‘primitive’
or ‘aboriginal’ peoples share the innocence and naivety we like to associate with early
childhood – and thus those speculative philosophers of history who equated their
contemporary ‘primitives’ with peoples of ancient times used the notion to elaborate
upon a metaphor of the ‘history of mankind’ as having started in ‘childhood’, and
then passing through the equivalent stages of ‘maturation’ found in individuals.
Another analogy between ‘primitives’ and children, again extended to (or derived
from) ancient societies, returns us to those claims about a ‘mythical’, or even
‘magical’, mentality. Some argue there is a stage in early childhood when the child
perceives the ‘outside’ world as ‘animated’ like his or her self – that it is only after
a period of ‘development’ that children realise, for example, that the door cannot
hurt them because, unlike them, it is only a (mindless, emotionless) thing. In other
words, some claim we undergo an early phase of childhood surrounded, so to speak,
by ‘the gods’ – that is, by powerful ‘forces’ and ‘objects’ which, like us, have a will
of their own. Like ideas of an ‘original innocence’, this notion of a ‘mythical’
mentality, characteristic both of ancient cultures and of a natural stage of childhood
psychology, has similarly been exploited by some speculative philosophers of history
in their explorations of ‘the history of humanity’. Indeed, one of these, the
nineteenth-century thinker Auguste Comte, claimed that during a period
of madness he had ‘regressed’ to just such a ‘childlike’ mentality, and then
progressively ‘grown out of it’ – and that the illuminating experience informed his
ambitious philosophy of history.
A bizarre, or ‘workable’, mentality?

This may lend weight to the notion that this ancient ‘mythical’ consciousness
is bizarre, an impression hardly diminished when we are confronted by actual
examples of ancient ‘myths’ abounding in the most ‘extraordinary’ accounts of a
18
world peopled by gods, spirits, and demons. But as suggested, these classic myths
are not special cases designed to entertain as fiction, but simply the highest
expressions of a general consciousness about the world. As such, we have to accept
that in an important sense these ‘myths’ – and more crucially, the general mentality
they emerged from – worked in the sense that, ‘bizarre’ or not, it enabled early
peoples not only to survive for thousands of years but also to build civilisations as
impressive as the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian examples. The ‘mythical’
mentality of the ancients, then, cannot be dismissed as ‘absurd’ or ‘fanciful’, for if
it were these things, they could not have managed the world around them. The
task, then, is to see what they ‘meant’ in terms which must still be capable of being
made sense of by us, for however much the world and/or ‘human nature’ has
changed, neither can have changed so much as to imply that the ancients were as
aliens in a different universe. One final word on this: for thousands of years, right
up to the seventeenth century AD and beyond, people successfully farmed the land
in the ‘false’ belief that the sun rises in the morning, and that it goes round
the Earth. They were ‘wrong’ – these were ‘fanciful’ notions, but we can extract the
‘sense’ from them. Even more to the point, we may ask of a friend, ‘how is the love-
life treating you?’, as if ‘the love-life’ were some whimsical individual power or
force with its own agenda for our friend. Here, ‘the love-life’ is as a ‘god’. And it is
but a short step, rather than a giant imaginative leap, to say we might as well ask
‘how do you stand with Aphrodite?’ (the Greek goddess of love). No doubt if
matters do not stand well, appropriate ‘rituals’ will be engaged in to propitiate her,
such as a visit to the hair-stylist – or the augurs or oracles will be consulted, as in
checking one’s stars! Another example of this ‘fetishising’ mentality would be to
complain, not that one was doing badly at work, but that ‘work is not treating me
very well at present’, again implying a world peopled by animated ‘forces’ or ‘gods’
who unpredictably bestow their good or ill will upon one.
It is in this light, then, that we can treat the ‘mythical’ ideas of ancient cultures
as not only meaningful but also ‘practical’, in the sense that they fulfilled their
function of ‘making sense’ of peoples’ experience. Whether their ideas were ‘true’
is hardly the point, just as a millennium from now our present ‘scientific’ mentality
might be superseded by a different consciousness. Our present one ‘works’, and it
would be up to future historians, anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists
to recover its ‘sense’. Our task, however, is to recover the ‘sense’ of how, in
particular, ancient cultures understood ‘history’, or the passing of time.
Ancient ideas of ‘history’
Time
We may begin with their understanding of time itself. We now measure out time
into discrete, equal, ‘abstract’ amounts such as hours, minutes, and seconds. These
‘pieces’ of time are not related to any events and, although abstractly identical, are
each unique in the sense of being unrepeatable. It is true we also count time in terms
19
of days, months, years, decades, and so on. But these are simply multiples of the
smaller measures – a day is 24 hours. We give precise, unrepeatable dates to events.
However, there is another, more ‘poetic’, sense of time which we all appreciate
– namely, when we refer to a certain time in more concrete, personal terms; ‘that
Monday morning feeling’, ‘the weekend’, ‘it was end of term’. This is more akin to
how ancient peoples understood time – as distinct ‘pieces’ or ‘regions’ of time with
recognised, similar content. But more than this, there seems a sense in which they
regarded a ‘piece of time’ such as dawn, not as similar on each occasion, but
essentially as identical recurrences of an original event. And because this archetypal
event, such as the ‘first morning’, would of course be seen as resulting from the
dramatic interactions of ‘the gods’ rather than in the impersonal terms of a
scientifically governed nature, it would be truer to say that each dawn was seen not
so much as a ‘recurrence’ but as a re-enactment of the original story. Thus, for
example, in ancient Egyptian mythologies of creation, the sun-god emerged, self-
created, on the solitary hillock surrounded by the primeval waters, and proceeded
to bring order to the formless chaos such that the heavens, the sky, the earth, and
the netherworld were ordered and fixed. Thus for the ancient Egyptians, each dawn
(and New Year’s Day) could be intuited as the re-enactment of the sun-god’s
emergence from the abysmal depths after a successful struggle with the forces of
chaos and darkness. Consistent with their sense of active participation in this
animated world, important rites and festivals marked the New Year, when sacrificial
offerings were made, and praises sung, to the sun-god.
In this way ancient peoples ‘mythologised’ time and its passing. The succession
of the seasons, the flooding of rivers, the changing of prevailing winds, the coming
of harvest, the migrations of animals – all were seen as recurrences or re-enactments
of archetypal stories, some going back to original creation myths which would
see even the movements of the heavenly bodies in terms of a gigantic recurring
cycle. Numerous early cultures shared the notion of ‘the Great Year’, a variously
calculated (but always huge) ‘time’ in which key stars would return to their original
places, signalling the re-beginning of an endless replication of all that had
happened.
The passing of time

In the above we have only glimpsed the tip of an iceberg. Yet we can draw on this
to make some further general observations on what sense these ancient peoples
made of ‘the past’. First, apart from the archetypal distant past in which things
originated, there is a paradoxical sense in which the more immediate past did not
seem important or interesting to them as the past. It is true they would chronicle
centuries of time in terms of the reigns of different kings and the movements of the
heavenly bodies, but the notion of a self-sustaining history of their own human past
was not relevant. Clearly, if times had been particularly bad, good, or turbulent,
they would be recorded – but no ‘explanations’ would be sought (as in modern
history) other than celebrating or bemoaning their ‘fate’ at the hands of the gods.
20
Even more to the point, we have already intimated how the ‘pastness’ of past events
was of no special relevance to their mentality, for ‘the past’ is ever-present in the
re-enactment of events, and also beckons in the future. The important thing was
to be alert to, and respect, what duties and ‘rituals’ the present (re-enactment of
the) ‘piece of time’ required, so as to play one’s proper part in the animated drama
of existence, cooperating with the gods, however difficult they could be, to procure
peace and prosperity. Is this that far, in practice, from our own sense of the past –
at least, if we lead routinised lives? Or does life in today’s ‘advanced’ societies
preclude such disinterest in ‘the passing of time’?
The archetypal past

Second, however, and as antidote to this disinterest in the ‘pastness’ of the past,
we have already seen their intense interest in the archetypal past. Their ‘creation
myths’ in particular, as well as myths relating to subsequent ‘originating’ events,
explained the nature of the cosmos to them, described the character of the
numerous forces or ‘gods’ they shared the world with, and served as a guide to how
to conduct themselves in relation to their kings and lesser officials, their work,
their home-life, and other aspects of their environment. What had ‘happened’
back in the origins of time had established the unalterable outlines of the drama
of life. However, given that reality rarely lives up to propaganda, it is not surprising
that these archetypal, original times were looked back to as pristine. Many ancient
cultures clung to a belief in a ‘golden age’ long ago in their past – ‘golden’ in two
(typically ‘poetically’ related) senses; an age in which gold was the only metal, and
an age ‘golden’ for the primal freshness and splendour of its order.3 Pessimism about
the present is not a new phenomenon!
‘Story-telling’ and ‘historical causality’

Another aspect of ancient peoples’ ideas of the past, already noted, is worth
elaborating on – namely, their use of ‘story-telling’ as the vehicle for explaining
events. Seeing themselves as living in a totally animated environment, all
happenings could not but be the result of the desires, impulses, and strategies of
willful beings – either themselves or the gods, spirits, and demons around them. As
Frankfort puts it: ‘When the river does not rise, it has refused to rise. The river, or
the gods, must be angry with the people who depend on [it]’.4 All that happens does
so through personal agency, and the only vehicle for explaining ‘what happened’
in this way is to tell it as a ‘story’ – that is, as a narrative. Now, what concerns us
here is not whether, in telling a ‘story’, a particular narrative is fictional or factual,
but that narrating a story is a vehicle or form of explanation – and what seems clear
is that ancient peoples’ view of the world necessitated their explaining what
happened in it by putting events into the narrative structure. Now although there
is more to say about ‘narrative’ later in this book, what we can already see is that
narrative only works with personal agents who will this, decide that, and respond
21
to circumstances. As a form of ‘explanation’ it does not appeal to abstract ‘factors’

or ‘laws’ governing events. Rather, each event is uniquely individual, precisely
because the product of ‘individuals’, (in the case of the ancients, be these ‘gods’ or
men – and even if events are ‘re-enactments’, paradoxical as that might appear).
What we can say, then, is that implicit in ancient cultures was a view of what we
now call ‘causality in history’ – namely, that ‘what happened and why’ was always,
and only, explicable in terms of the actions, responses, and interactions of beings
(human and ‘divine’), and thus only communicable in terms of narrating a story. The
kind of modern historical analysis which introduces ‘abstract’ economic,
sociological, and demographic factors into explaining ‘what happened’, or employs
some general ‘laws’ of development, evolution, or political change, was absent in
the ‘historical’ awareness of ancient peoples. Alternatively, we could say it would
have been irrelevant to them. Indeed, we can see a sense in which the very notion
of causality in history did not figure at all in their mentality, if by ‘causality’ we
mean the operation of underlying impersonal ‘laws’ governing events. The river
refused to rise – it was not ‘caused’ not to rise.
A final comment is worth making here, particularly in the light of some
contemporary complaints about ‘narrative history’. If the earliest known way of
‘explaining happenings’ was to put them into ‘stories’, this does not necessarily
mean that the story-form (or narrative structure) is therefore inherently naive,
childish, or even non-explanatory altogether, as some modern critics would have
us believe. On the contrary, one could turn this on its head by arguing that insofar
as it has not been superseded either in ordinary speech or in much written history,
the ancientness of the narrative approach to perceiving and explaining (past) events
testifies to its intuitive appropriateness as the ‘form’ in which we apprehend
succeeding events.5
‘Progress’
The final observation to be drawn from our glimpse at the mentality common to
ancient cultures is a negative one. They had no notion of ‘historical progress’, and
consequently no belief in it. Because this may in fact challenge our modern
imagination more than some other features of the ancient world-view, and because
the theme of ‘belief in progress’ is of major (and controversial) importance for the
remainder of this guide to speculative philosophy of history, it is worth elaborating
upon. In the modern Western world the belief in ‘human progress’ is so deeply
underlying that it is taken for granted. Brought to the surface, it is a fourfold belief
– the notion that over the millennia, history has, despite dark periods, delivered
‘progress’, certainly in the arts and sciences, technology, economic welfare, the
treatment of individuals, and political freedom; the notion that history is ‘linear’,
in the sense that we do not go backwards, or round in some vast historical cycle;
the notion that ‘progress’ will thus continue in the future; and the notion that an
important task in our present is therefore to participate in planning and striving
to bring about ‘progress’. This general consciousness was, quite simply, absent in
22
ancient cultures – as suggested, its absence may be one of the chief obstacles to our
ability truly to empathise with so much of their outlook and behaviour.
Nevertheless, to the extent we can explain this absence (although explaining a
negative can be a dubious procedure), we can at least claim to understand ancient
mentality that much better.
‘Science’
One obvious explanation is that so much of what we call ‘progress’ results from
science, and particularly its application in technology, and that ancient peoples
were ignorant of it. But this raises more questions than it answers. Not all ‘progress’
results from science – in any event, the ancients were sophisticated in the kind of
mathematics involved in their astronomical calculations. As for technology, they
were superb craftsmen and builders. Alternatively, it might be suggested their lives
were so bound up with physical survival in often harsh and unpredictable climates
that they had no opportunity to ‘develop’. Yet all ancient cultures had classes of
(subsidised) priests and officials with time and resources to ‘develop’. For these
reasons the more relevant question is, why did they not develop science and
technology? And the answer is that they had no concept of ‘progress’. In short, the
question should be turned on its head. It is not that their lack of ‘science’ precluded
any idea of ‘human progress’. Rather, their lack of any idea of ‘human progress’
caused, or at least significantly contributed to, their inability to develop science.
This certainly is the view of one scholar, worth quoting at some length, and
it takes us back to those presuppositions underlying the ancients’ mentality,
particularly their ‘mythical’ view of nature and their cyclical view of time.
Discussing the ancient Mesopotamians, Jaki tells us,
[t]he promising creativity of Hammurabi’s age was not followed up in later

times either in literature, or in the arts, or in legislation, let alone in
matters of scientific learning. The basic reason for this failure is neither
geophysical nor socio-economic. . . . They remained trapped in the
disabling sterility of a world view in which not reason ruled but hostile
wilfulness. . . . Believing as they did that they were part of a huge,
animistic, cosmic struggle between chaos and order . . . the animistic,
cyclic world view made it . . . impossible for them to realise that to
influence or to control nature one had to be able to predict accurately its
future course. . . . As a result, the mastery of science could not become a
proud feature of the culture of a land on which ziggurats cast their sombre
omen.6
And the same author offers an essentially similar analysis of numerous other ancient
cultures, from both East and West, which although stemming from his Christian
inspired contempt for the ancients’ cyclical view of time, is amply documented. For
example, now referring to the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, he insists:
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[t]heir common failure to reach the level of both scientific and historical
thinking is not a coincidence. Science and historiography are but different
types of a causal and rationally confident probing into the space-time
matrix in which external events . . . run their irrevocable courses. To
achieve science one has to recognise that these courses are not returning
on themselves in a blind circularity.
As for the ancient Egyptians in particular,
[m]uch of their intellectual history had been a long stagnation in the

morasses of an animistic and cyclic world view, which in turn rested on
their conception of the Watery Abyss as the ultimate entity, . . . (one
from which) there could not emerge an unambiguous and effective pointer
suggesting the presence of clear, rational laws in the universe.7
The earthly life

To the extent, then, that belief in ‘human progress’ is related in different ways both
to a ‘scientific’ and an ‘historical’ mentality, the world-view shared by so many
ancient cultures did not accommodate such a belief because it precluded these two
(apparently) necessary conditions. We may add another ‘necessary’ condition,
absent in ancient cultures, of an outlook grounded on belief in ‘progress’ – namely,
a perspective which affords genuine value and significance to life on this earth. In
one version or another, ancient cultures looked to the afterlife, the defeat of death,
or release from the eternal wheel of fate, as the only real value to be cherished.
Nothing of ultimate worth could be expected from earthly life. Peace, order, and
transient pleasures might be hoped for during it – but the impulse to make things
better, to question and change things, to take control of circumstances (implying
what to them would appear an absurdity, the ‘conquest of nature’), was foreign to
their mentality and thus absent from their psychology.
This apparently obvious connection between belief in ‘progress’ and the
affording of genuine value and significance to actual earthly life is an issue which
will heighten as we now move forward in time to map out the different ideas about
‘history’ which characterised the classical cultures of Greece and Rome, and which
played an important role in early Christianity. All I will observe here is that,
perhaps unlike other ‘necessary conditions’ whose absence contributed to the lack
of any idea of ‘human progress’ in ancient cultures, the connection between the
latter and the de-valuing of ‘this earthly life’ is more of a ‘chicken–egg’ relation.
Did ancient peoples not believe in ‘progress’ because, as suggested, their underlying
‘philosophy’ afforded little significance to life on earth? Or is it the other way round
– namely, they awarded such insignificance to this earthly life because they had
no experience (and thus no concept) of ‘progress’? The former explanation
puts enormous weight on ideas, world-views, or ‘philosophies’ as determinants
(‘causes’) of historical circumstances, whereas the latter gives scope for material
24
circumstances, through affecting peoples’ mentalities, to play a much larger role in

determining history. This is yet another issue within ‘the philosophy of history’
itself – namely, the clash between ‘idealism’ and ‘materialism’ – which we shall
return to later.
Some reflections
Finally we may ask whether ancient cultures’ ideas about ‘the past’ amount to
much? In one sense the answer is no. Their ideas and thinking were not the product
of ‘reason’, ‘philosophy’, ‘science’, or ‘history’ as we know it. Rather, they were the
product of an intuitive anthropomorphic imagination, and as such might be
dismissed as ‘superstition’, unworthy of serious consideration. At one level this is
clearly so.
Yet in other senses they do amount to something of value for anyone inclined
to think about the course and meaning of history. Insight into their ‘mentality’ puts
our ‘mentality’ into perspective – first by making us that much more aware we have
one in the first place, and second by perhaps humbling us with the possibility (I
would say, certainty) that ours will not be the last. This would not mean some
return to ‘superstition’. (In any event, some argue that ‘science’ is simply one more
‘superstition’ – and many scientists, past and present, have held ‘mystical’ beliefs).
But it might be a future mentality more in tune with a holistic perception of
individual minds, societies, the natural world, and the fundamental ‘laws’ of the
cosmos, such that (in a manner akin to ancient intuitions) the distinction between
what we confidently call ‘mind’ and ‘matter’, so fundamental to our mentality,
would be superseded in a new science and philosophy. Books would have to be
written explaining how our present mentality centred on the belief or ‘superstition’
that individual ‘minds’ confronted something Other – namely, an ‘It’, or ‘material
reality’. And the implications of this ‘extraordinary’ view of existence would have
to be drawn out.
Another reason why the ancients’ world-view still amounts to something of
interest is that some of their ideas are not as ‘bizarre’ or unfamiliar as we might
think. I have already made passing, semi-jocular reference to a similarity between
their notion of the ‘gods’ and our contemporary fetishistic attitudes and behaviour.
But Karl Marx included an esteemed section in Das Kapital on ‘the fetishism of
commodities’, by which he meant that the real attributes of people, and the actual
social and power relations between them, are no longer transparent to us – we are,
after all, all ‘free and equal’ members of our ‘free and equal’ ‘democratic’ societies.
Rather, these real differences and powers are mapped out with precision by the
pricing of ‘commodities’, meaning not just material objects such as potatoes and gold
necklaces, but also activities, particularly work. We feel powerless against a bustling,
complex world functioning in terms of the exchange of ‘commodities’ (including
our work-activity and our status) – they, the ‘commodities’, conduct busy,
individual lives exchanging amongst themselves in infinite differentiations whilst
we, the real source of wealth-production and of social and power relations, stand
25
mutely passive, mutually captive to a world not recognised as of, but nonetheless
of, our own making.
Some contemporary thinkers (e.g., Baudrillard) advance similar ideas, yet
perhaps supersede them by focusing no longer on ‘commodities’ but on ‘signs’,
suggesting that contemporary capitalism, particularly with the influence of
advertising upon an affluent consumer society, functions more in terms of the
manufacture and exploitation of ‘logos’, ‘icons’, or ‘signs’. A world of meanings or
‘significations’ is abstracted whereby real qualities such as reliability, youthfulness,
tastefulness, efficiency, and ‘quality’ itself, are represented by icons or signs. We buy
a shirt with a logo announcing the appropriate attribute or status in ourselves,
whether we have it or not, and whether the logo has anything to do with shirts.
We are not yet confronted by a tin of baked beans with a Rolls-Royce or BMW logo,
but when we are, some will buy them, entering a ‘hyperreality’ of ‘significations’ in
which they submit themselves to a representation of their being in the world which
has nothing to do with their real presence in it, (nor with baked beans!) – and over
which they have no control other than the alluring deception of ‘consumer choice’.
In short, in fetishing real qualities they are communing with the ‘gods’ – no longer
Osiris and Aphrodite, but corporate logos.8
Another sense in which ancient ideas still have resonance concerns their
fascination in astronomy and astrology (interchangeable until the rise of modern
science in the seventeenth century AD). Mindful partly of distant real or rumoured
disasters such as ‘the Flood’, many ancient cultures devoted considerable resources
to plotting and dating the movements of the moon, sun, planets, and stars.
Believing that, as ‘animated’, the entire cosmos undergoes regular cycles of decay
and renewal, they would for example seek the ‘right time’ to plant and harvest, to
build, to instate kings, as well as ‘prophesy’ future cataclysmic events and changing
epochs. Various calculations were made of the huge period in which the stars
returned to their ‘original’ positions, permitting different accounts of the age of the
universe and different astronomical calendars charting its future course. Today’s
recognition that some of their calculations regarding, for instance, eclipses and
planetary phases were astonishingly accurate has encouraged a ‘rogue’ literature
speculating upon what ‘secrets’ the ancients knew about the past and future of our
planet – but one thing is clear, they spent much time surveying the night sky. So
do we. There are hundreds of astronomical observatories around the world,
expensively resourced. Costly ‘state of the art’ ones are being built at present, and
more are planned. In addition, space telescopes have been developed. In short,
today’s world abounds with ‘seers’. Why?
A final sense in which ancient cultures’ ideas about time and history are
still worth consideration is that awareness of them raises some of those larger
issues which remain of relevance to any attempt to ‘make sense’ of the course of
history, such as the idea of, and belief in, ‘progress’; the influence or otherwise
of the natural environment; the notion of changing ‘mentalities’ and ‘human
nature’; the appropriateness or otherwise of narrative logic in explaining history;
and the general notion of ‘cycles’ of repetition in history. Additionally, where some
26
of these issues had been explicit components of ancient cultures’ ideas and were
transmitted to subsequent times, then how those later cultures responded to them
(either to challenge or accept them) helps explain and account for their own views
on ‘history’. As we shall now see, this was particularly and understandably the case
in the Near East and Mediterranean basin with respect to the era immediately
succeeding ‘ancient’, ‘pre-historical’ times – the classical world of the Greeks and
Romans.
27
3
CLASSICAL GREEK AND
ROMAN SPECULATIONS ON
HISTO RY
Introduction
The emergence from ‘myth’

As we move forward in time, and geographically, into the period of Greek antiquity
stretching from roughly 1200 BC to that flowering of Hellenic culture starting
around 500 BC, we encounter a gradual emancipation of thought from that
‘mythical’ world-view described in the last chapter. As we will see, this shift in
‘mentality’ included changes in the way ‘history’ and the passing of time were
understood. But let us first map out the general backcloth of the overcoming of the
‘mythical’ mind-set within which those changes occurred – namely, the transition
to what is called the ‘rational’, or ‘philosophical’ consciousness which attempts to
understand things purely through the exercise of ‘reason’ rather than from the
imaginative, ‘poetic’ perspective of intimate involvement in an animated,
anthropomorphised world.
Not surprisingly, this shift in outlook was not made all at once, but is traceable
through the differing ideas of a number of thinkers who left writings (often
fragments) or were reported on later. For example, in Hesiod (eighth century BC)
we meet a poetic, mythical account of the origins of the gods and of men, sharing
a number of beliefs with those ancient Near Eastern cultures in the previous
chapter. But by the fifth century BC we are surrounded by philosophers, albeit of
differing ‘schools’, who in their explanations of reality attained that level of rational
intellectual abstraction epitomised by Plato and Aristotle. In addition, although
not ‘scientists’, it is argued1 that their mental approach centring on a belief in the
ultimate intelligibility of the universe laid the foundations for that emergence of
‘real’ science which occurred in the Hellenistic period some two centuries later. As
Frankfort puts it, ‘[t]his change of viewpoint is breathtaking’,2 and he attributes it
primarily to the Ionian ‘school’ of philosophers originated by Thales (625–546 BC),
contributed to by Anaximander (611–547 BC) and Anaximenes (570–500 BC), and
which influenced the thinking of Heraclitus, (540–475 BC).
This school sought the ‘origins’ or explanation of things not in terms of the
actions of gods but in terms of some ultimate ‘principle’ underlying all existence,
28
CLASSICAL GREEK AND ROMAN SPECULATIONS ON HISTORY
be it in their case water, air, or fire. It is true that some also spoke of ‘the gods’,
whereas logic might dictate their abandonment altogether (as it did to later
‘materialists’ such as Democritus (c. 460–370 BC), Epicurus (341–270 BC) and the
Roman Lucretius (98–55 BC), who still spoke of ‘the gods’ but regarded them as
irrelevant to explaining nature and human affairs). But logic is one thing and reality
– in this case, social reality – another. Some were boldly ‘atheistic’ whilst others,
including later and different ‘schools’ (even Plato, 428–347 BC), continued to pay
lip-service to ‘the gods’, perhaps as much to assure their ideas a hearing as to avoid
censure (a practice continued in subsequent Christian – and other – societies into
our own times).
The point is, however, that such philosophers adopted a viewpoint or ‘mentality’
which detached them, as subjects, from the ‘objective’ world outside them, held
that world to be intelligible, and therefore posed them the challenge of exposing
its ‘workings’ or ‘logic’ through reasoned argument. Some, as above, sought to
explain everything in material terms (e.g., the ‘atomic’ theory of Democritus),
others exploited the notion of the interplay of opposites such as ‘Being’ and
‘Becoming’ (e.g., Heraclitus’ theory of ‘universal flux’), whilst others such as
Parmenides (515–? BC) abandoned the search for some ultimate material ‘principle’
underlying reality. He proposed instead that the universe is a changeless, infinite
unity beyond the senses, governed or ‘made up’ by thought – that insofar as material
or ‘phenomenal’ reality is ultimately explicable in terms of ‘the thought of it’, then
its explanation is to be sought within the world of ideas, which we can enter
through our capacity to ‘reason’ or be ‘logical’. In short, since reality is ‘thought’,
it can only be apprehended through the nature or ‘laws’ of ‘thought’ – the ‘idealist’
position famously elaborated upon by Plato – rather than by perception of material
things or through imagination.
Reasons for the shift

This dawning and triumph of ‘philosophy’ in classical Greece has understandably
been the object of enormous interest amongst philosophers and historians
of thought. Its importance in laying the foundations for Western culture is
monolithic. Yet for all the studies of early Greek philosophy, quite why this shift
from a ‘mythical’ consciousness occurred, why in Greece, and why at the time it
did, remain historical questions perhaps impossible to supply answers to, since it is
doubtful we have enough information and evidence from which to infer them. It
is noticeable that even those who do focus on the shift from ‘myth’ to ‘philosophy’
do so by explaining its character and significance, but only hint at explanations of
why it occurred (or offer none).3 One observation common to some scholars,
suggestive of an explanation, takes us back to Hesiod. Although he presented a
‘mythopoeic’ account of the origins of the gods and men, two things mark out his
ideas as different from the ancient cultures of the Near East. First, he does not have
a particularly reverent attitude towards the ‘gods’ – there is much intermarriage
between ‘gods’ and men in his epic Theogony (Genealogy of the Gods) and this is
29
taken as early evidence of a more familiar, less respectful attitude in Greek thought
towards many of the gods. Second, a number of Greek thinkers, as Hesiod himself,
were laymen. Not part of an official ‘priesthood’ obliged to guard the sanctity of
traditional beliefs and ‘mysteries’, the freedom of thought enjoyed by individuals
such as Hesiod, Thales, and Anaximander was naturally accompanied by indepen-
dence of thought.4 Apart from its other features, in his Works and Days Hesiod’s
frequent excursions into moral and political problems of the day, and practical
advice on matters of farming and business, demonstrate the independence of mind
of a secular thinker. Thus, despite the fate of Socrates (399 BC), the comparative
freedom of thought enjoyed by the Greeks could be one explanatory factor in the
shift from ‘myth’ to ‘philosophy’.
Another factor sometimes suggested is the city life enjoyed by many Greeks.
Perhaps thinking of the effects of urbanisation in the nineteenth century AD, a
reasonable supposition might be that ‘city-life’ put a new distance environmentally
and culturally between people and nature, diminishing the hold of the old
‘animistic’ mythological world-view. Yet we have to assume that Frankfort, for
one, would find this unconvincing since he notes that urban life thrived in ancient
Egypt and Mesopotamia, but that this ‘in no way diminished man’s awareness of
his essential involvement in nature’.5
A further suggestion to explain this ‘shift’ could be the geo-physical environment
experienced by the Greeks – a factor often appealed to in later philosophies of
history to explain different ‘mentalities’ between peoples (although not as
dramatically different as the ‘shift’ we are considering here). Wilson, Frankfort, and
Jacobsen are not the only scholars to make much of the geo-physical environment
in their explanations of, respectively, ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian
‘mythopoeic’ world-views. Yet they refer to it more to explain the differences in the
mythologies between these two civilisations, given the markedly different
geographical and climatic features between the Nile delta and hinterland and those
of the Tigris and Euphrates, than to explain the commonality of their basic
mythical mind-set. In this connection it is perhaps significant that when the
Frankforts turn to Greece and ‘the emancipation of thought from myth’, they make
no reference to the geo-physical environment either as an aid to explaining this
‘emancipation’ or in accounting for the differences between ancient Near Eastern
poetic mythology and its Greek counterpart prior to that ‘emancipation’.6 As we
will see, a different writer does exploit features of the natural environment of the
Greeks to explain a fundamental aspect of their early philosophy – the abundance
of growth – but not to explain its emergence from myth in the first place.7 Perhaps
there is nevertheless a connection – namely, that the climate and geography of
Greece was far more benign than its harsher, more unpredictable counterparts in
Mesopotamia, and thus less likely to inspire fear and therefore ‘superstition’; and
that it was not dependent upon such a striking and singular feature as the flooding
of the Nile in ancient Egypt, an obvious stimulant to ‘myth-making’.
The above suggestions remain, however, purely speculative. Perhaps all we can
say, ultimately, is that this fascinating and momentous period of the emergence
30
from a ‘mythical’ mentality was ‘bound to’ happen somewhere, sooner or later, as
mankind began to leave behind its ‘childhood’ and start to ‘grow up’ – in short, we
might find ourselves employing that analogy of the ‘natural’ development individuals
undergo in the process of maturation which we have already encountered as a
common theme in ‘speculative philosophy of history’! This may not be a partic-
ularly convincing explanation (and certainly not of the particulars – i.e., why
Greece, and why then?) – but at least it directly introduces us to the challenges
addressed by philosophers of history.
Classical Greek and Roman ideas on ‘history’

If increasingly explicit philosophical writings are the most direct evidence of the
shift from a ‘mythopoeic’ view of the world amongst the Greeks, the emergence of
historians is almost as powerful a pointer. Of these, some of the most famous are:
the widely travelled, so-called ‘father of history’, Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC), who
wrote extensively of the customs and histories of numerous Middle Eastern cultures
and, in the latter parts of his History, traced the great conflict between Greece
and Persia in the early fifth century BC; the militarily experienced Thucydides
(c. 460–400 BC), whose History of the Peloponnesian War covered the confrontations
between Athens and Sparta which, beginning in 431 BC, lasted for some twenty-
seven years; and Polybius (c.203–120 BC), the widely informed and thoughtful
Graeco-Roman who, amongst other things in his Histories, analysed the history of
Rome up to the point when, having defeated the Carthaginians by the mid-second
century BC, it became ruler of most of the Romans’ then ‘known’ world.
Just as no historian today thinks and writes in a vacuum, neither did the classic
Greek and Roman historians. To differing degrees and with varying deliberateness
they reflected broader, more ‘speculative’ attitudes abundant in other philosophical
and literary works towards the past and the course of events. Our interest is in these
broad presuppositions rather than in the more exact historiography of classical
Greek and Roman historians (although we shall return to Polybius in particular as
a masterful exploiter of prevailing, sometimes contrary, ‘theories’ of history). It
should not surprise us that some, and the most important, of these broad
‘presuppositions’ about history were inherited from that ancient ‘primitive’
mentality, to be re-worked into more ‘rational’ ideas. Although intertwined in
ancient mythologies, for the sake of exposition we can separate out three such
‘ideas’ which were inherited, adapted, and elaborated upon.
Historical cycles
First, there is the recurrent theme of ‘cycles’ – the notion that time, and the events
it contains, goes round in a huge circle. To the ‘pre-philosophical’ mind this notion
applied to the cosmos as a whole, and within that overall ‘pattern’ the cyclical
regularities of nature on Earth were subsumed. Daily, monthly, yearly, and in larger
movements, things would return to the point where they began. Thus the same
31
natural events such as dawn, a new moon, the new year, and longer term cata-
strophes such as flood, draught, and famine would return repetitively as inevitable
‘effects’ of the (endlessly) circular motion or ‘logic’ of time. Numerous Greeks and
Romans not only retained this idea, but by Hellenistic times refined it into an
elaborate and popular astrology. Others, however, were not so interested in
pursuing its superstitious possibilities. Rather, they transferred the notion of cosmic
cycles to actual human history – if ‘nature’ goes round in circles, so does man and
society. For example, numerous passages in Plato’s writings demonstrate his belief
that history stretched back maybe hundreds of thousands of years, in which human
societies were repeatedly devastated by natural catastrophes and had to begin anew
the long and arduous path from primitive kinship groups to the eventual formation
of city-states. These city-states themselves, as we shall see, were suggested by Plato
to undergo their own (perhaps circular) course of development and decline. But
in the larger picture all that might have been achieved in the way of civilisation
was, and will be, swept away again as the inexorable cycle of time turns all around.
‘Have not thousands upon thousands of city-states come into existence, and . . .
have not just as many perished?’8 In one of Plato’s fables, indeed, it is suggested that
because the Earth is a material thing, and thus imperfect, it cannot share the divine
perfection of perpetual rotation but must periodically reverse its rotation, with
catastrophic results – not only geographically (floods, eruptions) but, in the longer
term, also morally. This is because in departing from the motion exemplified by
‘God’ or ‘reason’, the other ‘force’ governing the universe – chaos or disorder –
gains the upper hand, and ‘as this cosmic era draws to its close, this disorder comes
to a head. The few good things it produces it corrupts with so gross a taint of evil
that it hovers on the very brink of destruction, both of itself and of the creatures
in it’.9 Although Plato might not have believed this himself, it is a typical enough
application of the doctrine of ‘cyclical history’ derived from the widely accepted
notion of the causal potency of cosmic cycles.
Plato and others were thinking of broad-scale movements – the succession of
aeons – and were not referring to the more intimate details of actual historical life.
But in succeeding centuries the cyclical doctrine became increasingly entrenched,
particularly amongst those Stoics who took it to the extreme of believing that
as the planets retrace exactly the same route which they had already
traversed, each being that had already been produced during the previous
period will re-emerge once more in exactly the same manner. Socrates will
exist again, and Plato as well, and also each man with his friends and
fellow citizens; each of them will suffer the same trials, will manage the
same affairs; each city, each village, each camp will be restored. This
reconstitution of the Universe will occur not once, but in a great number
of times; or rather the same things will reoccur indefinitely to no end.10
In like vein, it is clear (from a work wrongly attributed to Aristotle11) that this
overall belief in the cyclical nature of history even engendered doubts as to the
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meaning of ‘before’ and ‘after’, since if the course of events has a beginning, and
an end which heralds a re-beginning of the same course, are we ‘after’ the people
of Troy, or, if nearer the beginning of the cycle, ‘before’ them? Clearly these latter
examples are extremes, perhaps matched by modern-day counterparts who seriously
speculate upon, or believe in, ‘parallel universes’ – that is, who in doggedly follow-
ing up the implications of an idea, irrespective of empirical evidence and the
apparent claims of common-sense, do what the classical Greeks have been noted
for by those who try to explain some of their ideas.
These extremes apart (although they tell their own story), there is ample
evidence of a widespread general belief in cosmological cycles from at least the time
of Heraclitus (540–475 BC), which many translated into a belief in an analogous
repetitive cycle of not only natural but also human events. Such beliefs persisted
for centuries, into the so-called ‘Silver Age’ of Latin literature exemplified by
Seneca (4 BC–AD 65), later by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–180), and
were clearly still widespread in St Augustine’s times (AD 354–430) since, as we shall
see later, he devoted considerable energy to combating them. Given such longevity
and ubiquity of notions, however varied, about the world’s cyclical history (human
affairs included), we must therefore recognise overall general belief in the latter as
an indispensable component of peoples’ understanding of the past and the course
events take – in other words, of how they saw ‘history’ and their place in it.
‘Fate’, ‘Fortune’, and ‘the gods’

Another idea inherited from ancient times was that of ‘fate’ or ‘fortune’. This is a
notion as difficult to pin down then as it is in today’s use. At one extreme it can
mean ‘blind chance’, and at the other mean the ‘force’ which, sooner or later as ‘fate’
catches up with one, delivers the appropriate reward or punishment for the conduct
of an individual or even of a nation. But even in the former guise as ‘chance’, the
notion is used to refer to some force or ‘agency’ which determines affairs by
overriding, and often confounding, human intentions and strivings – and it is
probably unwise to go further in search of a formal definition. Rather, we have to
look at how this ‘umbrella’ notion was used to see what ‘fate’ or ‘fortune’ meant for
different individuals. We can draw a line, however, where ‘fate’ is not only equated
with ‘chance’, but where ‘chance’ is construed as not in any sense a determining
cause. In short, if one takes the view that ‘things are simply as they are’ (meaning
there is no explanation for them), it adds nothing to that statement to attribute
‘the way things are’ to ‘fate’. In that formula, ‘fate’ is literally meaningless. This may
well have been the case for the ‘materialist’ thinkers, Epicurus (341–270 BC) and
Lucretius (c. 98–55 BC), for although the former seemed to believe in ‘the gods’,
he held that they are indifferent to human affairs; ‘fate’, where it does ‘play a role’
(sic), is in fact simply ‘chance’. On the other hand, if in saying ‘things are simply
as they are’ one also attributes them to ‘fate’, one means the latter to add something
to the initial statement. In this case (apart from having contradicted oneself) one
does mean something by ‘fate’. One means there is a reason or cause for ‘the way
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things are’ or ‘the way things turn out’ – namely, ‘fate’. It would appear that for
centuries numerous Greeks and Romans at least subscribed to this somewhat
indeterminate notion of ‘fate’ or ‘fortune’ governing events.
More than this, they would often personify ‘fate’ into the actions of ‘the gods’.
Here we are reminded of that ‘primitive’ mythopoeic mentality which no doubt
persisted at various levels, but this could be misleading insofar as belief in the
existence of gods (and/or ‘God’ – for example, Plato, and many Stoics, talked of
both) need not equate with a fully mythopoeic world-view. For the latter to be
dominant it would not be enough to regard an unexpected event as the effect of the
actions of a god. Rather, the event itself would be understood as ‘the god’ acting.
In short, ‘fate’ would not be a term used to indicate that something happened
because the gods willed it – rather, ‘fate’ itself would be a god (that is, ‘the river
refused to rise’). And indeed, in both Greek and Roman mythology, so widely
exploited and much beloved in classical literature, ‘fate’ was a god – namely, the
Fates which determined one’s character, destiny, and time of death.
Yet ubiquitous as was the classical Greek and Roman belief in ‘gods’, and difficult
as it might be to judge quite what they meant to them and how seriously they took
their presence, they did not play the same role in their consciousness as in the
earlier ‘mythopoeic’ mentality. For the Greeks and Romans nature was nature. The
gods might intervene in it, but nature itself was not animated. Similarly, it seems,
for ‘history’. For Greek and Roman historians, history was the enquiry into the
course of human events – wars, treaties, law-giving, the founding of cities,
invasions, conspiracies, constitution-building – a history ‘made’ in the immediate
sense by human-beings. ‘Underneath’ this busy history, however, would be the
governing force of ‘fate’, or (taken from cosmology) the impersonal Wheel of
Fortune which would ensure a predictable circularity overall in human affairs. For
Polybius, for example, ‘Fortune’ particularly favoured Rome, ensuring its unique
stability and exceptional achievements – but even Rome would inevitably decline,
(signs of which he claimed to detect in his own day). Or at a less impersonal level,
‘the gods’ may intervene in certain episodes – a way of ‘explaining’ the unexpected,
or of highlighting a significant event, or of lending an air of inevitability to the
outcome of a battle.
Finally, at an even less impersonal, more immediate level, ‘Fortune’ was
personified into a moral force arbitrating on the deeds and character of individuals
(and nations). Arrogance, insolence, impiety, the committing of shameful acts,
and other moral failings, would sooner or later be punished by Fortune, just as
virtue would be rewarded. From Herodotus onwards, many Greek and Roman
historians, as well as dramatists and poets, made a point of extolling how, ‘in the
end’, justice is inescapably dealt out to the wicked – the moral order is maintained
inexorably, because if men do not see to it themselves, or are unable to restrain
those bent on wickedness, Fortune will see to it that evil gets its just desserts. Here,
fortune or fate is at its most tangible and ‘interventionist’ as a ‘force’, ‘power’, or
‘factor’ determining not only the overall course of history, but the histories of
individuals.
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Once again, how sincere this belief was is difficult to gauge. For some it might
simply have been a device to preach good morals, whilst for others this belief in
the moral intelligibility of life could simply have been the effect of wishful thinking.
In any event, this brand of ‘determinism’ in history – the notion that some agency
outside humankind operates to ensure justice and retribution – continued to
exercise a powerful influence into Christian times, even if the day of reckoning is
moved to after death and ‘another place’. Even today there are those who, either
from religious doctrine or from some notion akin to the classical notion of ‘Fortune’,
believe for example that Hitler was bound to come to a sticky end ‘sooner or later’
because they cannot conceive of a history which is morally neutral, or even worse,
‘corrupt’. Today’s historians, on the other hand, are far too ‘sensible’ to entertain
such an idea?
The principle of growth (the biological analogy)

The third idea of relevance to history which the Greeks inherited and adapted
from the pre-philosophical, ‘mythical’ world-view of more ancient cultures was
that of genesis, growth, and eventual decay. In the ancient mind this notion
connected directly with that of an animated cosmos undergoing cycles of change.
Surrounded by the natural world of plants and animals (including themselves)
inexorably governed by the cycle of genesis, growth, decay, and rejuvenation, they
transferred this overwhelming perception to the giant animal they conceived the
universe to be. The Greeks rationalised and exploited this notion of ‘growth’ into
an all-pervading principle which they applied now to ‘physical science’ and to
history. (Nisbet suggests the Greek climate, in producing an abundance of plant life
as well as a contrasting arid season, might have contributed to the pervasiveness
of the concept of growth and decay in the Greek way of looking at things).12
Aristotle (384–322 BC) is the best-known exponent of this principle. His exten-
sive researches into biological and zoological life confirmed for him the overriding
truth that all things come into being, grow to fulfil their ‘end’, and then decay.
Observation of this process in a thing reveals its nature. For example, the acorn is
a hard seed – but gradually it changes into a shoot, grows into a sapling, and ‘finally’
develops into the fully-fledged oak-tree, after which zenith it eventually decays.
Here we have the notions of a natural process of change, through growth, towards a
pre-programmed ‘end’ or ‘purpose’ (the mature oak), succeeded by gradual decay.
This is the famous teleological principle (taken from telos – ‘end’ or ‘final cause’)
whereby, barring accidents (e.g., seeds being eaten, saplings being trampled), things
necessarily or ‘by nature’ come to be what they essentially ‘are’ through a process of
change, growth, or development. They have an inbuilt ‘end’ or ‘purpose’ which is
realised as the zenith of their being.
But this notion of organic growth towards a ‘natural’ end-fulfilment was
not restricted to the realm of biology. Aristotle himself applied this way of
understanding the nature of things to (amongst other things) geophysical and
historical processes. ‘If the earlier forms of society are natural, so is the state, for it
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is the end of them, and the completed nature is the end. For what each thing is
when fully developed, we call its nature, whether we are speaking of a man, a horse,
or a family’.13 Indeed, so compelling did this method of understanding reality seem
to many, that ‘the realm of final causes stood . . . for the bedrock of intelligibility.
The result was that investigation of any realm, living or not, was not considered
satisfactory without attributing, rightly or wrongly, purposes to processes and
phenomena of every kind, ranging from the fall of stones to the motion of
the stars’.14 For example, under the influence of the master Aristotle, until the
seventeenth century AD a stone was thought to fall because, being base material,
it longed for the centre of the Earth. This has led at least one writer (Jaki) to
attribute the failure of scientific progress in classical and medieval times (and by
implication the broader ‘progress’ resulting from successful science) partly to the
over-exploitation and mis-application of the biological analogy of organic growth.
In terms of history we have already seen an intimation of its application in
Aristotle. But we can also go back to Plato and before for the overall ‘theory’ that
the polis (or Greek form of ‘city-state’) was in fact the culmination of a necessary,
‘natural’ process of development wherein the first form of social organisation was
the family. This (‘the seed’) ‘grew’ into kinship groups organised into villages,
which in time ‘grew’, through a ‘natural’ process of amalgamation and enhanced
complexity, into city-states. The ‘end’ or ‘telos’ was, then, the city-state, but there
is a strong sense in which, given the biological analogy, the city-state is logically
‘prior’ to the family and the village, since they are social organisations which must
‘naturally’ change and develop towards their ‘pre-programmed’ end-point.
Yet not only was the biological analogy of purposive growth applied to the
emergence of nations and city-states; it can also be detected in how many Greeks
conceived of the arts, the practical sciences of agriculture and animal husbandry,
and general cultural sophistication, as the natural culmination of a progressive
development from more ‘barbarous’ times. Some, regarding their own civilisation
as the zenith (or ‘telos’) of humankind’s development, exhibited a certain
complacency, even smugness. The analogy of biological change and growth towards
a fulfilled apex contained a powerful message, after all. It told them humankind was
meant to live in city-states and was meant to achieve the culture and life-style
enjoyed by (better born) citizens of Hellenic city-states. In short, it was natural,
because things had ‘grown’ to be as they were – and insofar as, for example, the polis
was natural, it was ‘right’ – and insofar as it was right, it was ‘good’. Here we
encounter perhaps the origins of the perennial equating of ‘rightness’ with ‘the
natural’, and of both with ‘the good’. The key to this familiar equation, however,
is that underlying the notion of ‘the natural’ is the analogy of biological growth with
its attendant notions of purposive (‘teleological’) change.
But history has of course moved on. The polis no longer exists, and markedly
different civilisations or ‘cultures’ succeeded those times. Humankind is not, then,
‘meant’ to live as it did in, for example, fifth-century BC Athens. Does this mean
those Greeks and Romans who saw historical change in this way were wrong? Or
were they right to apply the analogy of purposive biological growth to historical
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change, and only wrong where they believed their own societies represented the
maturity of human life? Let us not forget the other side to the principle of growth
– namely, decay. There is logical room to argue that the fact of succeeding, different
civilisations does not necessarily give the lie to those who regarded their own times
as the apex of humankind – later times could simply represent gradual decay. And,
as we shall see, this is indeed how many in the Renaissance interpreted history,
looking back with admiration to the ‘golden age’ of classical civilisation and culture
and hoping for a ‘rebirth’ of European societies (a fittingly biological metaphor) by
following its model. Alternatively, there is logical room to argue the Greeks and
Romans were not wrong in their ‘biological’ thinking, but only mistaken in placing
their own civilisations at the apex of human development. And indeed, using a
‘theory’ not altogether dissociated from the classical pre-occupation with the
principle of growth and teleological change, the nineteenth-century philos-
opher, Hegel, did just that, as we shall see. He proposed the view that humankind
had in his times reached its ultimate ‘meaning’, ‘nature’, or ‘perfection’ in the
socio-economic, political, and religio-philosophical forms of dominant post-
revolutionary European countries. Not only this, later in this book we shall
encounter the view put forward in our own times by Fukuyama (leaning on an
interpretation of Hegel), that the collapse of Soviet communism at the turn of the
1990s has at last signified ‘the end of history’ in the sense that humankind has
reached the zenith of its historical ‘growth’ – namely, a world now dominated by
capitalist economies functioning through liberal-democratic political institutions.
Returning to classical times, however, we should observe that the notion of
purposive historical change through the analogy of biological growth was one
of the most important ways in which the course of history was made not only intelli-
gible but also meaningful. Underneath the seemingly arbitrary play of immediate
historical events, a pattern analogous to genesis, growth, and maturation in the
organic world was discerned in the broader history of civilisation. This pattern
endowed history with intelligibility. More than this, because the pattern was that
of natural biological growth, it endowed history with meaning. History is not
aimless. Although such ideas were not, so far as we know, put into a systematically
worked out ‘philosophy of history’, the notions of intelligibility and meaning,
however ill-formed, introduce ingredients essential to the subsequent emergence
of just such ‘speculative’ philosophy.
Decay, and ‘the ages of man’

We have already noted that one phase of the biological principle of ‘growth’ is its
nemesis – decay – but have had little to say about it so far. When thinking in broad
terms of the history of civilisations, some Greeks and Romans, as we have seen, were
more concerned to point to the achievements of their societies than to contemplate
the ‘downside’ to the biological analogy (although Polybius did warn of it in the
case of Rome’s triumphant rise to prominence).15 But there were two other strains
of thought which did concentrate on the notion of decay in their view of history
and change.
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The first is an ancient view, retold in some detail in Hesiod’s myth of the races
of men, and appealed to in one form or another by many subsequent Greek and
Roman philosophers and poets. This idea was that over a huge time-span there
had been a succession of different ‘ages of men’, and that each age was worse than
the previous. Using a metaphor from metallurgy (which has some correspondence
in archaeology), the first age was the famous ‘golden’ one in which men lived
simple, peaceful, technologically uncomplicated, moral lives. This race of men
disappeared, however, to be succeeded by the age of silver, where men were warlike,
quarrelsome, and wicked – ‘in no way like the first, in body or mind’.16 This age was
succeeded, in turn, by the age of bronze, in which the obsession with war grew to
such a pitch that the race destroyed itself. In Hesiod, this age of bronze is followed
by a race of military ‘heroes’ who, although warlike, were morally superior because
of their uprightness and bravery. (This fourth age, ‘metallurgically’ unspecified,
seems to interrupt the overall tale of decline – in Hesiod, it corresponds to the time
and people of the Trojan war, and may thus be his way of paying tribute to a widely
revered ‘national myth’ – indeed, those ‘heroes’ not killed in battle were awarded
eternal life on the Isles of the Blest). The fifth, and final, age is the age of iron –
their present age in which men’s lives were full of oppression, labour, injustice,
and other evils.
Thus the myth of ‘the golden age’, which people would look back to and,
thinking cyclically, hoped would reappear following the destruction their own
‘iron’ age was inevitably headed for. Although not rationally explicated in Hesiod’s
Works and Days (and earlier mythologies), the idea of a Golden Age succeeded
by progressive decline echoed on as a strain in the classical mind-set regarding
the overall course of the history of mankind, alongside and perhaps contrary to the
belief in ‘growth’. But we should not look for too much consistency. To the extent
that the myth of ‘the ages of men’ derived from, or was combined with, the notion
of cyclical change, there is room in it for a return to ‘the Golden Age’. Likewise,
where the notion of cyclical change was associated with the biological analogy of
‘growth’, not only does that analogy decree decay – it also decrees a rebirth from
new ‘seeds’. In short, we have a set of notions flexible enough to engender apparent
or even real inconsistencies, and one needs to see which notions were chosen, and
how they were used, in any particular case. The myth of ‘the ages of men’ was
usually interpreted pessimistically as signalling man’s inevitable decline from a
pristine happiness, simplicity, and morality. Yet, for example, one present-day
commentator, Nisbet, abandoned this standard interpretation of the myth,
claiming to find in Hesiod’s famous version much that optimistically speaks of the
progress of mankind (that is, without resorting to belief in a cyclical return to
the ‘golden’ age).17 The principle of growth (the biological analogy), on the other
hand, was often used optimistically to praise the achievements of mankind and
laud the present. Its darker implications – the inevitability of decay following the
zenith of maturity – were underplayed. And even so, the analogy could be extended
to include the notion of rebirth and reinvigoration from new ‘seeds’. As for the third
component of this set of notions, the notion of historical cycles – it could be used in
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conjunction with the biological analogy to give meaning and purpose to human
history. On the other hand in classical times there were those who saw historical
change as ultimately meaningless precisely because they saw history as one
unfolding, endlessly repetitive cycle.
Political cycles
The other strain of thought which utilised the ‘decay’ dimension of historical
change is that found in notions of constitutional change. Here the focus narrows from
ideas about the course of humankind’s overall history to the more immediate
historical consideration of changes in forms of government in the recent experience
of Greek and Italian city-states. As will be apparent, the notion of cyclical
repetition played a strong part in classical political thought. So also did the idea of
decay, although how far the common-place cyclical notion of constitutional change
was associated with the biological analogy of growth, decay, and rebirth is more
difficult to judge. It could be argued that the dynamics of political change in the
‘standard’ account were so based on common-sense and observation (157
constitutions, in Aristotle’s case) as not to require resort, either deliberate or
unwitting, to any analogy taken from another area of study.
Although the way in which political change was often understood has been the
object of close scrutiny by political theorists and historians of political thought,
whose detailed explorations engender different versions and diverse interpretations,
it is sufficient here to abstract its general outlines. Pre-figured in Plato and given a
more elaborate treatment in Aristotle’s Politics, (and appealed to in one form or
another by philosophers and political thinkers until beyond the sixteenth century
AD) the ‘standard’ account suggested an inevitable cycle of constitutional change.
The dynamic principally responsible for this was the notion of degeneration from
an initally sound ‘starting point’, leading to a change of constitution. ‘Starting’ at
monarchy, this initially healthy form of rule by a king who cares for the common
good and judiciously balances the contesting ambitions of different groupings,
begins to degenerate as the king becomes corrupted by power or greed, or if his
successor lacks the skills, morality, and foresight to manage the complexities of
statecraft. A point is reached where the better-off, responsible, influential, and
well-born minority of the citizens take control of the city-state, thereby instituting
an aristocracy. Initially a healthy form of rule, aristocracy itself begins to degenerate
as jealousy and ambition within its ranks cause rival factions manoeuvring for
power. The needs of the bulk of the citizens become ignored as corruption grows
and public order and safety is diminished. As the aristocracy degenerates (into
what Aristotle called ‘oligarchy’), a point is reached where the general body of
disillusioned, public-spirited citizens throw off the rule of the now selfish minority
and themselves take power, thereby instituting a ‘democracy’ (or ‘polity’).
But the same principle of ‘decay’ inexorably begins to operate. What begins as
the sensible government of the city-state, where wealth and property are respected
and justice is strictly observed, degenerates through envy, ignorance, and selfishness
39
into such disorder that government collapses. ‘Anarchy’ or mob-rule takes over,
threatening the very existence of the city-state by subverting people’s confidence
in law and order and inviting foreign aggression. Out of such dangerous chaos
emerges a ruthless dictator or tyrant who rescues the city-state by imposing despotic
order, careless of the citizens’ rights to life and property. The populace submit to
tyranny, however – some willingly, given the alternative; others because they have
no choice. Order is restored, but at a terrible price. As affairs settle down, however,
the tyranny moderates (‘deteriorates’?). It no longer needs to govern so
draconically. It becomes to its advantage to cull the favour and cooperation of its
subjects. A point is reached where tyranny either reforms itself into monarchy, or
is succeeded by a monarch rather than a tyrant, or may even be overthrown in a
revolution, to be replaced by a monarch. Whichever way this stage is achieved –
(and the reader will see the manifold possibilities in actual history as to the rich
variety of mechanics for all of these constitutional changes) – the circle is now
complete. We are back at our ‘starting-point’ of monarchy, and the whole cycle
begins again.
Apart from the fascination such a ‘theory’ might have had for political theorists
and the tantalizing possibilities it offered for historians in their accounts of real
events, what concerns us here is the common dynamic underlying this notion of
constitutional change – the theme of decay or degeneration (or if ‘degeneration’
is over-suggestive of the biological analogy, ‘deterioration’) from an initially healthy
‘starting-point’. I say ‘starting-point’ because the emphasis is clearly on the process
of subsequent decline rather than on any process of growth towards a healthy form
of state. An example of where attention was paid to the latter idea is Polybius’
account of the ‘growth’ or development of Rome to its political pre-eminence. But
here the ‘standard’ account is precisely set aside, for he argued that Rome was
exceptionally well-favoured in its political stability because its institutions had
‘grown’ into a constitution remarkable for being a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy,
and ‘democracy’. In short, the Rome of the second century BC was exceptional
amongst states because it was an exception in constitutional development. But this
apart, the ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ course of political change was construed as a cycle
driven by deterioration (even when things ‘improve’, as in the ‘deterioration’ of
tyranny).
Unchanging ‘human nature’

If we look further into this dynamic of deterioration we find another notion
common to the classical ‘understanding’ of historical processes – namely, that
human nature never changes. It is because it never changes that the political cycle
turns inexorably. Although (apart from the beliefs of some Stoics) this does not
mean a repetition of the same actual events, it does mean that in similar situations
people, both individually and en masse, will act in the same way, thereby producing
similar outcomes. Quite how this unchanging ‘human nature’ was construed is
difficult, if not pointless, to specify but easy enough to imagine. As Aristotle
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insisted, men are neither gods nor beasts – we can take him to mean they are neither
perfect in their virtues nor bestial in their vices. They have the light of intelligence
and the balm of morality, but can be deceived by ignorance and appearances and
corrupted by selfishness. Amongst their ‘natural’ attributes are love of family
and fatherland, but also a self-love which invites greed, envy, and a capacity
for violence. The natural urge for justice can be overwhelmed by the desire for
vengeance. Although nature produces some individuals of unblemished character,
given enough pressure most of humankind will put their own interests first, blame
others for their own shortcomings, and en masse will seek scapegoats and be fickle
in their political loyalties. Thinking as much of the history of the Roman Republic
as of his own times, we shall find Machiavelli (in the sixteenth century AD)
exploiting the notion of an unchanging human nature in the construction of his
lessons of statecraft, and the picture he paints of it is famously cynical – or realistic
– depending on one’s point of view. But he was elaborating upon notions apparent
amongst Greek and Roman writers, including many historians – namely, that we
have to be realistic about human nature; that it never changes; that acquaintance
with it helps to understand history; and that political lessons can be learnt from it.
That the notion that human nature is always the same is contradicted by the
myth of ‘the ages of men’, in which it precisely is said to have changed from a race
of ‘golden’ men, should not surprise us. We have outlined a number of different
notions underlying attitudes towards the past and the course of human events (both
long-term and more immediate) in the classical world. As broad presuppositions
and/or tendencies of thought, it would be wrong to expect the kind of overall
consistency found in later explicit attempts to construct a ‘philosophy of history’.
An exception to this could be the aforesaid Polybius. Many of the notions singled
out in this chapter are interwoven into his Histories, particularly Book VI, making
for instructive reading. Yet he wrote as an historian, not as a philosopher in the
‘technical’ sense of the term, and his employment of these various notions – for
example, ‘fortune’, cycles, the biological analogy, and constitutional change – is
eclectic rather than logically consistent, as so ably demonstrated by Trompf in the
opening two chapters of The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought. Yet
perhaps as much because of this eclecticism as despite it, Polybius’ Histories is a
valuable second century BC source for the mix of presuppositions and more explicit
notions which coloured Greek and Roman attitudes towards the past and their
understanding of the course of history. These continued after Polybius (doubtless
partly because of him), variously reflected in poetry, philosophy, political thought,
mythology, and the writings of classical historians.
Comments
Conflicting views on the idea of ‘progress’ in the Classical world

Given it was not until around the seventeenth century AD (with the possible
exception of Augustine, discussed in the next chapter) that explicit ‘speculative
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philosophies of history’ emerged, which deliberately attempt to find an overall

intelligible pattern – even ‘purpose’ or meaning – in history, what do we make of
the less systematic yet suggestive classical ideas treated above? Fate, Fortune, cycles,
repetition, decay, degeneration of mankind from a ‘golden’ age, the growth of
culture and civilisation to its ‘natural’ zenith, an unchanging human nature, hopes
for a new ‘golden age’, an ordained moral order – the reader may be forgiven for
thinking this a mixed, even contradictory, bag. Is it right to conceive of the
possibility of ‘human nature’ changing over the course of history (e.g., for either
better or worse), or have human-beings always had basically the same nature, (and
will they continue to) despite enormous changes in their circumstances? Is ‘fate’
or ‘fortune’ simply a device for expressing ignorance of causes and marking
exceptional events, or does ‘it’ actually operate ‘underneath’ historical develop-
ment, ultimately flouting all human attempts to fashion their own history? Again,
does a fate-governed history render humankind’s history meaningless, or reassure
us that justice prevails, despite human failings? And perhaps most exasperating of
all, should we conceive of history as progressive, as if humankind were like an
individual growing from infancy, accumulating skills and learning from experience,
all the while maturing towards a perfection of civilisation, knowledge, and culture?
Or is human development caught in the grip of cyclical forces whereby, either
through a necessity of decay (following the biological analogy) or through some
‘flaw’ in human nature which causes inevitable deterioration from healthy high-
points, it is unrealistic to think in terms of unilinear progress?
It is this latter dichotomy which has particularly captured attention in modern
scholarship. In 1920, J. B. Bury’s Idea of Progress was published. Although not the
first to make the claim, he insisted the classical world of the Greeks and Romans
had no idea of ‘progress’. Mesmerized by a world which was fundamentally
unchanging because it was part of an endlessly wheeling cosmos, the classical mind
submitted fatalistically to the ultimate pettiness of human affairs and aspirations.
Many followed Bury in arguing that this world-view precluded any belief in the idea
of human progress (understood as extending cumulatively in a linear direction).
Indeed, this is one of the reasons given for the claim that speculative philosophy
of history did not begin until the seventeenth century AD, since only then did the
belief in human progress appear – the supposition being that a necessary condition
for speculative philosophy of history is the holding of such a belief.
However, in 1980 R. A. Nisbet – who had already grappled with classical ideas
in an earlier study of Western theories of social development18 – directly
confronted, and attempted to refute, this view of the classical mind in his History
of the Idea of Progress. His method is to give numerous examples from classical
literature where the notion of human progress is apparent, and to reinterpret
writings which were in his view wrongly taken to deny its possibility. He does not
deny the classical propensity for cyclical thinking, but even so:
the point should not be lost that what eventually is to become decline and
fall commences as genesis and progress . . . [and] whatever amount of
42
cyclical thought there may have been in classical antiquity, there was also
a solid and fertile substance of belief in linear progress – from remote past
to distant future.19
He reinforces this by making the following clarion-call for a revision of the view
which alleges the absence of any idea of progress in the classical world-view:
[t]he supposition, so widely repeated in even the best of modern and

contemporary interpretations of Greek political thought, that time
and change were regarded as enemies, that reality lay in the permanent
and unchanging, and that everything must be seen as dictated by Fate –
that supposition should be laid to rest forever.20
Some few years earlier, however, S. L. Jaki had reached the opposite conclusion in
chapter 6 of his Science and Creation (1974). Concerned primarily with the history
of scientific thought, Jaki is also deeply interested in the notion of human progress.
Indeed, we might say it is the latter which is his ultimate concern, and that his
interest in the history of science stems from his belief that scientific inquiry and
progress is the key to human progress in general. His method is similar to Nisbet’s
insofar as he finds numerous examples from classical writings to demonstrate, in this
case, the lack of the possibility of any worthwhile idea of human progress.
Particularly critical of what he takes to be the dominant strain in classical thinking
– the belief in cyclic recurrences – and especially of Aristotle’s application of ‘the
biological cycle’ to physical processes, which he claims held back progress in
scientific thought, Jaki lays much of the blame for the lack of any commitment to
human progress in classical thought to a mind-set oppressed by
the inhibitory impact of the belief in cyclic recurrences. The treadmill of

perennial returns not only generates pessimism by its spectre of the
inevitable decay of man’s achievements but it also invites the setting of
a complacently low ceiling on attainable goals.21
Again, ‘preoccupation with the idea of universal cyclic recurrences leads naturally
to the weakening of a concept of time which gives to each human action a unique
character and unequivocal meaning. More concretely, the meaning of historical
succession and what is based on it, the concept of progress, would in such a
framework lose their significance and, more specifically, their inspirational value’.22
Such a preoccupation ‘hardly encouraged conviction in the rationality of nature,
nor did it enhance man’s readiness to dominate nature. It did not generate
intellectual curiosity or appreciation of experiments aimed at controlling nature.
In particular, the belief in eternal cycles imposed on thinking a concept of time
which could only be cyclic, therefore fundamentally repetitious and ultimately
meaningless’.23
43
‘Progress’ and philosophy of history: special pleading?

The contrast between these two positions could not be clearer. Both are argued
passionately and with impressive erudition. Yet it is what the two agree on which
should particularly interest us. Despite their disagreement on classical thought
both authors are intimating that the very idea of (and hence belief in) human
progress must be grounded on a uni-directional rather than cyclical history; more,
that the project of philosophy of history must be grounded on the notion of linearity
and progress; and finally, that without such presuppositions history has no meaning,
and (speculative) philosophy of history is impossible. In short, the disagreement
highlights an alleged symbiosis between belief in human progress and the very
rationale of speculative philosophy of history. And this may help account for what
appears to be an alarming conflict of views. When we look at each book as a whole
we find the above intimations brought out as, in fact, strongly held convictions. In
Jaki’s case (indeed, as his concluding words) he wants to insist on the Christian
truth of ‘the Creator and . . . a creation once-and-for-all . . . – a firm faith in the
only lasting source of rationality and confidence, the Maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible’.24
Nisbet advances what appears to be a similarly religiously inspired viewpoint, for
after complaining his contemporary Western culture has lost all sense of its
historical identity and continuity, and its sense of religion – where ‘[t]he present
becomes a scene composed of the absurd, the irrelevant, the demonic’, and where
‘the result of ceasing to believe in God is not that one will then believe nothing;
it is that one will believe anything’25 – he concludes his book by claiming that in
such an atmosphere belief in the idea of progress ‘is bound to remain moribund.
. . . Only, it seems evident from the historical record, in the context of a true culture
in which the core is a deep and wide sense of the sacred are we likely to regain
the vital conditions of progress itself and of faith in progress – past, present, and
future’.26
In short, both authors are engaged in special pleading, and where this happens
distortions, exaggerations, forced interpretations, and partial selections of
examples, are common dangers. This does not mean these books should be
dismissed – on the contrary, they contribute greatly to our knowledge, and we are
grateful to revisit them in the following chapters. But it does mean we should take
into account the special pleading underlying their construction. Thus, to revert to
the marked disagreement between Jaki and Nisbet on the classical world-view, it
may be safe to assume that each side has exaggerated its case, and has selected
examples less than impartially. The latter is all the more easy to do, of course, when
dealing with a period in history so long (even if we limit it to c. 500 BC–c. AD 100)
and so rich in diverse schools of thought. I suggest we should rest content with
that mixed, even contradictory bag, summarised above as a more likely account of
classical speculations on history.
44
4
THE CHRISTIAN CHALLENGE
TO GRAECO-ROMAN
HISTO RICAL PERSPECTIVES
Introduction
After a period of turbulence which culminated tellingly in Julius Caesar’s career,
the Roman Republic (already with a considerable empire) gave way during the
reign of Octavian (declared ‘Augustus’ in 27 BC) to the ensuing Principate, or
system of Imperial rule. Under a long succession of Emperors, some as famous as
others were infamous, the Roman Empire was extended and consolidated. Its power
was unrivalled, its greatness unchallenged, its stability apparently ensured. In
AD 330 the Emperor Constantine moved its capital to Byzantium (renamed
Constantinople, and since 1930, Istanbul), facilitating the formalisation (by the
400s) of the Western and Eastern Empires. ‘Rome’ spanned the ‘civilised’ world,
and where it also included ‘uncivilized’ regions, attempted to restrain, if not
encompass, them. Yet by 476 the Western Roman Empire had collapsed, its last
Emperor, Romulus Augustus, being deposed by the Goths. Although the Eastern
(Byzantine) Empire survived until the Ottoman Turks sacked Constantinople in
1453, ‘Rome’ – ‘the eternal city’ – increasingly became a memory, oft despised
in the Christian West, until many of its culture’s ideals were revived in what we
call ‘the Renaissance’.
Roman historical ideas
The ‘Four World-Monarchies’ myth

Because of the constitutional stability and, until near its demise, the domination
of the Roman Empire, that earlier Hellenic and subsequent Graeco-Roman (or
Hellenistic) fascination in the constitutional changes city-states undergo
increasingly lost its relevance. Correspondingly, although not abandoned, the
underlying assumption of history as an endlessly repeating cycle underwent a shift
in focus. Now entrenched in a system of hereditary Imperial rule, pagan thinkers
turned their attention away from theories of constitutional change within the
complex histories of individual city-states. Instead, they reflected on the larger
(thus potentially more speculative) theme of the rise and fall of entire states and,
45
indeed, empires. And it is clear that, partly influenced by the importation of Middle
Eastern ideas (in particular, probably the Book of Daniel’s prophecies), one of their
approaches to this theme centred on a belief that world history consisted of the
succession of four world-monarchies, or great empires – with a possible fifth, eternal,
empire to come. Open to diverse interpretation, writers in Imperial times used this
broad formulation variously. But their common concern was to assess the status of
the Roman Empire itself. In some versions Rome was the fourth world-monarchy,
succeeding the earlier empires of Babylon (or Assyria), Persia, and Greece (or
Macedonia), each of which had inevitably declined and succumbed to the next.
For some, as the fourth empire, Rome was the last, and would thus persist eternally.
Others believed it would go the way of the previous empires, to be succeeded by a
different, fifth, eternal empire. Yet others saw Rome as the fifth empire (succeeding
the Assyrian, Median, Persian, and Macedonian Empires) and hence eternal –
while at least one writer, Dionysius,1 also marked Rome as the fifth world-
monarchy, but still doomed to eventual oblivion.
Cycles
Irrespective of the various interpretations put upon the ‘theory’ of four or five
successive world-monarchies, three features emerge relevant to our topic of the
presuppositions informing how Roman history was made sense of in the culture of
Imperial Rome. The first is that the doctrine of successive world-empires remains
strongly suggestive of that cyclical thinking so prevalent in earlier Greek and
Graeco-Roman approaches to history, except that now it was applied to the rise
and fall of great empires rather than constitutional change within separate city-
states. Adopting the notion of the inevitable eventual collapse of empires, a variety
of explanations was offered, ranging from a Stoical ‘superstition’ centred on fate,
or ‘the Great Wheel of Fortune’, which ensured the impermanence of all things as
they were subject to necessary dissolution and subsequent eternal recurrence,
(sometimes linked to the belief in cosmological cycles), to more rational or secular
explanations couched in political and/or moral terms. Thus, for example, the
eventual fall of empires was construed as ‘necessary’ because of their natural
propensity to expand beyond manageable size – or relatedly, the emergence of
political divisions so severe as to lead to radical disunity – or the increasing
arrogance and aggression of overwhelming power, leading to risky ventures and the
breeding of both foreign and domestic hostility. The moral undertones of this latter
‘mechanism’ were even more explicit in those who identified the growth of luxury
as sounding the death-knell, since it engendered moral degeneration into idleness,
vanity, and jealousy, (a theme echoing down the centuries and, for example, one
that informed Rousseau’s pessimism regarding Enlightenment ‘civilisation’ in his
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences). Not surprisingly, some who saw the fall of
empires as resulting from moral decline linked this to those earlier, comforting
notions about the retributive nature of Fate whereby, ultimately, Divine justice
rules the world.
46
CHRISTIAN CHALLENGES TO GRAECO-ROMAN PERSPECTIVES
A further version of the ‘degeneration of morality’ mechanism of inevitable fall

of empire was proffered – particularly after Constantine converted to Christianity
in AD 413, ending the persecution of Christians and giving them official State
recognition. This version claimed that the departure from the Empire’s religion –
the abandonment of its gods – signalled its inevitable collapse, (not a uniquely
Roman theory!).
Using, and sometimes combining, these arguments, (pagan) Roman historians,
philosophers, and statesmen gave substance to the ‘theory’ of the ‘four world-
monarchies’ by drawing parallels between Rome itself (their real interest) and
earlier empires (about which, apart from the Greek, they had little information).
But as noted earlier, not all were pessimistic about Rome itself. Some excepted
Rome from a decline similar to previous empires without abandoning the overall
‘theory’ about their otherwise inevitable collapse. Variously, ‘Rome eternal’ was
exempted because of its culture’s particular virtues, or the exceptional qualities of
its statesmen, or the ingenuity of its constitutional arrangements (even under the
Emperors) – or because it was construed, in straightforward wishful thinking, as that
fifth world-monarchy prophesied to be eternal. Leaving this last notion aside
for the moment, we may now turn to the second feature of this underlying view
of history.
The demise of Empire

If the first was the persistence of ‘cyclical’ thinking, the second is the effort to find
large ‘laws’ of historical development. Speculative as such efforts had been earlier,
people now living from around the 300s AD had much more concrete historical
information about the Roman Empire gleaned over numerous generations – and
some, as we have seen, inspired (or fooled) by the myth of the ‘four world-
monarchies’, embarked on an embryonic ‘comparative’ history to make sense of
their history and prospects for the future. The question for them was, would the
Roman Empire go the way of all the others? It is true that in their search for
common causes underlying the fate of great empires those employing the ‘four
monarchies’ myth did not engage in sophisticated theorising about the mechanisms
driving historical development – for example, none of their explanations relate
specifically to economic factors. Also, the belief in cosmological cycles sometimes
played a part in their thinking. Yet rather than be anachronistic we should recog-
nise that, apart from politics, what we know as the ‘social sciences’ (economics,
economic history, sociology, developmental studies) were unavailable to them –
and partly because of this the study of history itself was far more narrowly based than
today’s. What they did contribute to, despite their lack of investigatory tools, was
the notion that large, long-term forces, ‘factors’, or ‘laws’ operate to cause the
collapse of great empires – and they opened the debate as to whether these were
invariable, (and thus that all future dominant empires would inevitably collapse),
or whether there could be an exception (naturally, their own Empire!). Given the
collapse of the Roman Empire itself, and the later fates of, for example, the Spanish,
47
British, and Soviet Empires, this is not an inconsiderable theme for contemplation,
and it should come as no surprise that contemporary scholars muse over the fate of
‘the American Empire’! Doubtless many in the Western world, similarly inspired
by a combination of ‘superstition’ and common-sense analysis, harbour the supposi-
tion that ‘sooner or later’ the latter will ‘in its turn’ go into fatal decline, to be
succeeded by a new, different ‘world power’. Is this what Paul Kennedy, in his The
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988), is hinting at when, discussing China’s
potential to upset the world balance of powers, he concluded, ‘It is only a matter
of time’?2
‘Rome Eternal’
Such considerations, however, bring us to the third feature of interest in the Roman
employment of the ‘four world-monarchies’ schema – namely, the possibility of
an alleged ‘fifth’ (or, metaphorically, ‘perfect’) Empire which would escape the
recurrent forces of decline and last ‘forever’. We have already noted, confusingly,
that some Romans thinking in these terms identified Rome as the fourth Empire,
and did not believe it would be superseded by a fifth – that it was already the ‘fifth’
in the sense that their Rome was, indeed, ‘Rome eternal’. Other optimists, more in
line with the letter of the myth, simply identified four great Empires prior to Rome,
and held Rome to be the prophesied eternal fifth. (Here we encounter the familiar
syndrome that where events are seen as fulfilling ‘signs’, Providence, or prophesy,
any can be so ‘interpreted’ or manipulated – in other words, history can be ‘recast’
so that what the ‘signs’ portend actually occurs). Here, then, we find the notion of
the possibility of an end to further large-scale historical development – in short (to
coin a contemporary phrase), ‘the end of history’. But we should note that those
who used the four world-monarchies myth to support their belief in ‘Rome eternal’
did not base their hopes on much substantive theorising about the driving forces
of historical change. Certain features already mentioned, such as the constitutional
nature of Imperial rule or the special wisdom of Roman statesmen, were appealed
to, but in this version of ‘the end of history’ superstition rather than reasoning
prevailed. Nonetheless the belief in an eventual settled, perpetual world-order was
not only subscribed to by others in Roman times (in particular, by Christians who
looked forward to ‘the millennium’, of which more below), but also echoed down
the ages, most famously in the (different) theories of history proposed by Hegel and
Marx. In these latter cases, however, this was presented not as belief but as the
product of complex reasoning about the forces governing historical change. And
in our own times, partly prompted by the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the idea
has resurfaced in Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man.3
Escape from cycles?

But let us return to our Romans to make an important observation about those
‘pagans’ who, on the basis of the four world-monarchies myth, believed in ‘Rome
48
eternal’. It would be misleading to call them ‘millennialists’. They were pagans

(thus their belief lacked the special religious significance it had for Christians).
They did not place ‘the end of history’ in the future, (they thought they were living
within it). They did not prescribe a period of a thousand years (unlike Hitler’s
rhetorical hopes for the Third Reich). And perhaps above all, their belief in ‘Rome
eternal’ was not premised on a developmental account of world-history whereby the
‘fifth’ monarchy emerged from a long line of intelligible unilinear change, inevitably
progressing towards and presaging a final world-order. To take just one version,
Assyria did not pave the way for a markedly different empire, Media – and neither
did the latter for Persia, nor Persia for Macedonia, nor Macedonia for Rome itself.
Rather, each previous empire was simply subject to the same recurrent process of
decay. In short, we should not be misled into thinking that those believing in
‘Rome eternal’ because of the four-monarchies myth had thereby abandoned the
governing belief in history as endlessly repeating cycles. Rather, paradoxical as it
might be, they simply exempted Rome.
It is true that logically this does mean abandoning the term ‘endlessly’, and to
this extent we might doubt their logic. But more to the point is that their underlying
conception of historical change remained cyclical – and we may perhaps accom-
modate this by suggesting that a ‘theory’ of history proposing the possibility of
escape from cyclical change is premised precisely on cyclical recurrence as the
model of historical change. It could be argued that the same paradox is met in
Marx. ‘All history is the history of class struggle’, the opening words of The
Communist Manifesto, preface an analysis of historical development which,
although sophisticated, offers a recurring cycle of class struggles as the driving force
of history. Yet Marx predicts a future in which the cycle is escaped from. It might
thus be difficult to present Marx’s history as one, unilinear, continually developing
story, culminating in a ‘millennium’ which history prepared for itself. But we must
look again at Marx later. For the moment the point should stand – the notion of
escape from repeating historical cycles does not necessarily imply abandoning
the supposition of history as recurring cycles – and it certainly does not imply the
necessary substitution of the latter by a ‘unilinear’ theory of historical change, just
as it did not for those Romans who, influenced by the four-monarchies myth,
believed in ‘Rome eternal’.
The ‘body–state’ analogy

If, in their concern to analyse the prospects of the order under which they lived,
some (pagan) ‘Romans’ (including Greeks, North Africans, Near and Middle
Easterners) were influenced by prophetic or mythical suppositions, others thought
about the Empire’s history, its present dispensation, and its future in terms of what
Trompf calls the ‘body-state’ analogy. As he observes,4 this way of looking at history
was probably an adaptation of that earlier Greek biological principle of genesis,
growth, maturity, and decay previously discussed. In Roman hands this was
expressed in less sophisticated, more ‘practical’ terms specifically related to human
49
development – namely, from birth, through adolescence, to maturity and old age,
and Romans applied the analogy to the rise and decline of states and empires, with
results corresponding to their different perceptions and hopes. For example, after
identifying Rome’s infancy with Romulus, and discussing her boyhood and
adolescence as she gained strength and territory, Seneca (in the first century AD)
identified the civil strife involved in the pre-Imperial expansion of Julius Caesar’s
times as Rome’s ‘first old age’,5 after which, Imperial times came unflatteringly as
a senile reversion to second childhood. Later, less pessimistically, Florus employed
the analogy to suggest that Rome under Augustus had reached her proper manhood,
and that although this was succeeded by old age, the invigorating Emperor Trajan
revitalised her back to her prime rather than allowing her to complete the normal
process of lapsing into a senility otherwise only relieved by eventual death.
Whether Florus advanced this charming apologetic solely to flatter his own Emperor,
Hadrian (Trajan’s successor), or whether he was seriously subscribing in his own
way to the notion of ‘Rome eternal’, may be difficult to judge. But he was clearly
not alone in exploiting the ‘body–state’ analogy not only to make sense of Roman
history through putting it into the perspective of the different stages of growth of
the typical (male!) individual – involving notions such as wilfulness, extravagance,
recklessness, and caution, judgement, and maturity – but also to suggest that Rome
would not die. Trompf tells of the pagan Ammianus, who (writing in the second
half of the fourth century ‘under an empire fast becoming Christian’) identified his
own time as that in which Rome, having spent her adulthood in Imperial
expansion, had now settled down to a more peaceful ‘old age’. Although marked
by ‘a certain declining and slackness’,6 this was compensated for by a ‘stability and
venerableness’ ensuring its Empire was ‘destined to live so long as men shall exist’.7
How far such uses of the ‘body–state’ analogy were meant literally is perhaps
impossible to judge. Clearly it was less credible in those cases where, as in ‘Rome
eternal’, death was averted, but even here it was exploited as an ‘explanation’ by
ingenious notions such as a second childhood or late reinvigoration. But what is
equally clear is that many used the analogy as a convenient way of ‘making sense’
of Rome’s long, varied history. It made it possible to identify distinct phases in it;
to simplify it through the historian’s necessarily selective treatment of events; to
allow the making of moral judgements; to make change intelligible without reference
to any special ‘laws’ of social, economic, or historical ‘science’ (unavailable to
them); to permit both assessment of the present and predictions for the future; and
even to extract some kind of meaning in the overall flow of history in the sense
that, in relating to the familiar experience of the human life-cycle, people could
recognise its ‘naturalness’. In facilitating all this we might say that, in the abstract,
the ‘body–state’ analogy furnishes an ideal organising principle for any historian!
And if we add that it neither excluded a narrative approach, nor that venerable
Graeco-Roman belief in fate and ‘cycles’, and even its interweaving with
cosmological movements, we might answer our query whether Roman historians
took the analogy literally by appealing to Dr Johnson’s observation that, in the
affairs of men, it is remarkable how ‘interest smooths the path to faith’.
50
If, then, it was not taken literally it was taken seriously, and there may be nothing
strange in that. How often, today, we encounter the politics and histories of states
discussed seriously in anthropomorphic terms! New states are ‘born’, others are
‘young’ (with corresponding energy yet inexperience), some are described as
‘mature’ (as in ‘a mature democracy’), whilst others are reckoned to be ‘on their
last legs’ (the ‘moribund’ USSR of the 1980s). Again, for example, we talk of China
as the ‘sleeping giant’, of certain countries being ‘quarrelsome’, ‘ambitious’,
‘bullying’, or ‘evil’, and of governments ‘feeling’ threatened, tired, or slighted,
‘approving’ this, ‘disliking’ that – and, of course, of electorates (or even ‘peoples’)
‘choosing’ this and being ‘fickle’ about that. On reflection we might recognise our
lapse into analogical language, but still insist it should be taken ‘seriously’ – (after
all, didn’t the electorate ‘desire’ a change of government?). Does this tell us that
we ourselves have suppositions underlying the way we make sense of history not
so different (albeit less formalised) from the Romans’ appeal to the ‘body-state’
analogy?
Other presuppositions
Other presuppositions also informed the way Romans ‘understood’ their own
Imperial history and wider ‘world history’. Trompf reminds us that the notion of
‘fortune’ retained its grip, inviting that comforting idea of ‘moral retribution’, and
also the idea of history as an eternally recurring sequence of similar events. These
notions were a continuing legacy from some of those outlined in the previous
chapter, just as was the effort to periodise history. Yet if ancient versions of
periodisation centred on poetic notions about the different ‘Ages of Man’, some
Romans adopted the notion more historically and conceived of history as being
divided into ‘Ages’ or recurrent ‘periods of time’, which some (for example,
Seneca8) reckoned in terms of five human generations (and from which our rather
meaningless but convenient unit of ‘a century’ was derived). Linked to the idea of
successive ‘ages’ was the notion that as an ‘age’ came to its end, signs such as disease,
famine, and other natural catastrophes signalled its demise and the dawning of a
new one – a notion still subscribed to both by religious and secular ‘doom
merchants’ in our own day who talk of ‘troubled times’. Additionally, especially in
the latter days of the Western Roman Empire, cosmological ‘theories’ regained
currency within such thinking, possibly as a reaffirmation of fundamental ‘Roman’
beliefs against the growing challenge posed by an alternative ideology – namely,
Christianity.
Graeco-Roman historical ideology summarised

Difficult as it might be to generalise and summarise ‘the Roman’ way of looking at
‘history’ (and related topics such as politics, morality, and philosophy), it seems
many of their presuppositions and more explicit ideas were inherited from that
earlier Hellenic/Hellenistic culture discussed in Chapter 3. Equally, we saw how
51
in its turn that was partly a legacy, albeit dramatically recast, of even earlier
primitive ‘mythopoeic’ intuitions. Just so, as Romans developed their own culture,
rather than cast off Hellenistic ideas, they modified them to suit their practical
needs and intellectual preoccupations. We might almost put this as a general rule
underlying the history of all large-scale ‘cultural’ mind-sets – that they evolve from
earlier (not necessarily less sophisticated) cultures, rather than start from a clean
sheet. This, after all, is no more than an example of perhaps the one lesson all can
agree history teaches – namely, the paradox that although there would be no history
at all if nothing ‘new’ happened, history also tells us there is ‘nothing new under
the sun’.
Thus it is that many scholars still characterise Roman fundamental intuitions
as ‘Graeco-Roman’, although noting various amendments and additions the more
practically preoccupied Romans brought to their Greek heritage. Of special
relevance to us is the claim that the ‘Graeco-Roman’ mind saw the passing of time
as essentially cyclical or circular. Because of this fundamental idea (derived from
belief in the determining astronomical forces of the great wheel of the cosmos
and/or from the universality of the biological life-cycle of birth, growth, zenith, and
decay), it is argued that the Romans saw themselves as in the grip of the natural,
inevitable cycle of endless historical recurrence. Such a fundamental presup-
position, strongly implying an ultimately directionless history, engendered at base
a resigned fatalism, whatever the temporary excitements and achievements within
a particular time-span. If the history of any state or empire is ultimately part of, or
an example of, an overall world-history predestined to repeat itself in circular
patterns, history (or human endeavour) is essentially meaningless. Great city-states,
empires, and cultures might be founded, but ultimately to no avail since fate (whose
sister ‘fortune’ might endow certain events with moral meaning) unmovingly
decreed their decline and replacement by another state similarly doomed. We have
seen how it was only by special pleading, or possibly in bad faith, that some Romans
tried to exempt their own order from that fate. Hence it is that, if the aesthete and
philosopher typify the ‘Greek’ view of the world, perhaps above all the Stoic remains
the abiding image of ‘the Roman view of the world’ – a figure resigned to the dictates
of Nature and Fate, determined so far as it is in him to live a life ‘according to reason’
whereby trivial pursuits and the temptations of desire are relinquished in the
interests of a disciplined serenity gained through contemplation of his place in
the greater scheme of things – a scheme in which time, governed by a remorseless,
repetitive Fate, is endless.
The Judaeo-Christian alternative
Jewish apocalyptic ideas

The previous chapter already encountered the view, and its counter-arguments,
that this Graeco-Roman perspective precluded any idea of progress in history. Yet
this is only one aspect of a broader claim made about Roman presuppositions
52
regarding time and history – namely, that they were fundamentally different from
an alternative set of ideas uniquely characteristic of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
What, allegedly, was so different about the latter’s assumptions?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, at the heart of this is the religious difference between
Judaeo-Christian monotheism and paganism. From the earliest books of the Old
Testament it seems the nomadic Israelites rejected that ‘mythopoeic’ view of nature
which characterised dominant surrounding cultures. Instead they believed nature,
the world, and the cosmos were subject to one single and transcendent god, Yahweh.
Far from deifying nature by peopling it with gods, the only deity was the single
Lord of all, construed as a ‘Person’ governing everything with ineffable power. (It
was not until considerably later, according to Jaki around the time of Solomon in
the tenth century BC, that this God was also called ‘the Creator’, as having created
everything ex nihilo). For the Israelites, this Person demonstrated his purpose
through his mediation with Abraham, whereby he would lead them to enduring
multiplicity and blessings in the world he had made, so long as they held fast to their
recognition of, and willing obedience to, him. The tribulations of ‘the Chosen
People’ are told within the Old Testament, and as early as the eighth century BC
apocalyptic prophecies featured in Jewish culture, whereby ‘out of an immense
cosmic catastrophe’ involving a retributive period of ‘famine and pestilence, war
and captivity’ a Day of Judgement would occur, casting down renegade Jews and
heathen nations. Then the vengeful Yahweh would ‘become the Deliverer. The
righteous remnant . . .will be assembled once more in Palestine’ in which Yahweh
‘will reign from a rebuilt Jerusalem, a Zion which has become the spiritual capital
of . . . a harmonious and peaceful world’ in which material prosperity and justice
will ensure that all live ‘in joy and gladness’.9
Similar prophecies arose in the period of the Maccabaean revolt by the Jews
against persecution by the Syro-Greek Seleucids, when around 165 BC that same
Book of Daniel, in which a version of the ‘four world-monarchies’ was propounded,
prophesied Israel’s overthrowing of the last (in this case, Greek) ‘evil empire’ and
its replacement by the everlasting dominion of ‘the Son of Man’. As Cohn observes,
‘for the first time the glorious future kingdom is imagined as embracing not simply
Palestine but the whole world’.10 When Pompey annexed Palestine in 63 BC the
Jews fell under Roman rule and continued their struggle for independence until
finally suppressed in AD 131. Apocalyptic propaganda (e.g., Ezra) played its role in
their struggle and increasingly ‘the Son of Man’ (previously either a supernatural
individual or Israel itself) was identified as the Messiah, ‘incontestably a man, a
warrior-king endowed with unique, miraculous powers’ who ‘will rout and destroy
the armies of the enemy; he will take captive the leader of the Romans’ and ‘put
him to death; he will establish a kingdom which shall last until the end of the
world . . . an age of bliss . . . in which pain, disease, untimely death, violence and
strife, want and hunger will be unknown and in which the earth will yield its fruits
ten-thousandfold’.11
53
Early Christianity
In the meantime, Christianity had begun its spread into the Roman Empire, and
it is not surprising the early, persecuted Christians’ beliefs were influenced by Jewish
apocalyptic ideas. Sayings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth could be, and were,
interpreted according to the tradition from which he emerged. For many Christians
up to the fifth century, Christ ‘the Messiah’ would make a triumphant Second
Coming, in which, according to a popular interpretation of the Book of Revelation
(written around AD 90), the Roman state (‘the beast’) and its priesthood ‘were cast
alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone’ . . . and ‘the souls of them that
were beheaded for the witness of Jesus . . . and who had not worshipped the beast
. . . lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years’. After this, the Millennium,
would come the Last Judgement when, apart from those cast out forever, the dead
would be resurrected and the New Jerusalem would descend from heaven to become
the new, eternal habitude of mankind in which ‘God shall wipe away all tears . . .
and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there
be any more pain . . .’.12 Later versions of this apocalyptic outlook came, for
example, from Montanus (who in AD 156 inspired a movement which spread
throughout the Empire), lrenaeus towards the end of the second century, Tertullian
in the third century, Lactantius in the fourth, and Commodianus in the fifth.13
Such apocalyptic religious beliefs and movements, Judaeo-Christian or otherwise
inspired, have continued to resurface ever since, of course – but our present topic
is not eschatology, millennialism, or apocalyptics as such, but the specifically
Christian part of the Judaeo-Christian culture as it relates to presuppositions about
the course and meaning of history. And there is a sense in which the early Church
Fathers themselves can be understood as voicing the same distinction, for as the
Church became more established under the Empire from the third century onwards,
they were increasingly critical of the weight their uneducated followers put on
apocalyptic ideas in their Christian faith.
First, as Christians became more integrated into Roman civic life, that obvious
propaganda value of apocalyptic ideas for an oppressed people not only became
increasingly irrelevant, but politically damaging. Second, although early Christians
often saw themselves as an (oppressed) national people, Jesus’ message was that of
salvation for all mankind, irrespective of race, language, nationhood, or (current)
religion. (Nisbet claims it was not until around AD 200 that the idea of ‘humankind’
as one genuine unity, with an historical past and potential for future actualisation,
was actively propagated by Christian thinkers now eager to reach even beyond the
Roman Empire – he further claims that ‘this conception is peculiar to Western
civilisation’).14 Third, many Christian leaders (including Origen, third century AD
and culminating in Augustine) worried that to historicise (however fantastically)
the notion of salvation by linking it to some forthcoming age in which new orders
of justice, peace, virtue, and material prosperity would emerge was dangerously to
miss the point of Christianity.
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Augustine (354–430)
These ideas, and many others, were assembled in Augustine’s ingeniously
ambiguous masterwork, The City of God. Rome was sacked in AD 410, and this was
taken as proof of the likelihood of the collapse of Rome and its empire. Pagan
Romans blamed the establishment of Christianity in the Empire for its parlous
state, and Augustine initially conceived his book as a defence against this
accusation, carrying this out in its earlier parts by trying to show the Empire’s ills
as the fault of pagan Romans’ misgovernment and factiousness. However, partly
prompted by dissatisfaction with fellow Christians who also tried to defend
Christianity’s role in the Empire, but did so by claiming it had bestowed blessings
on Rome, and even hinted at the order of Pax Romana turning into a (historically
real) new era of universal Christian order, Augustine then turned to tackle the
vexed question of the relationship between Christian doctrine and actual life as
lived out in history. People have argued about what he meant ever since (as we shall
see), but it is doubtless fair to say that the finished work ‘moulded more than any
other book by a Christian author the spirit of the Middle Ages. Its pages were as
many wellsprings of information and inspiration for the emerging new world of
Europe about the meaning of mankind’s journey through time’.15 Despite the
diverse interpretations of Augustine’s book, certain key points seem clear. First,
with even more emphasis than previous Christian thinkers, he rejected the idea of
cosmic and historical cycles endlessly recurring. Rather, he denied an eternity
stretching either backwards or forwards in time. Instead he insisted on the
monumental importance of the ‘truth’ that God created the world in time, and
that the world was finite according to God’s plan for mankind – in other words, that
history is linear. Second, he stressed that the world God had knowingly created was
good – that it was created for the benefit of all mankind. Third, he insisted that
rationality and purpose therefore infused the whole of Creation, both in its physical
and its temporal ordering, quoting from the Book of Wisdom, ‘Thou hast ordered
all things in number, and measure and weight’.16 Fourth, (again in stark contrast
to any last vestiges of a ‘mythopoeic’ outlook) he re-emphasised the utterly
transcendent power of God, to whom all creation was subject. And fifth, premised
on belief in the One God who created the universe and lovingly created mankind
to unite in brotherhood and peace in willing fulfilment of His transcendent plan,
he urged that the Christian message was essentially a spiritual message about the
purity of the individual soul – that true happiness derived not so much from
temporal circumstances as from an abiding belief centred on utter confidence in
the beneficence of the Maker.
It is particularly this last point regarding the spirituaI significance of Christianity
and what it does or does not imply regarding actual, temporal life, which has been
open to much interpretation ever since – a debate of signal relevance to our theme
of ‘making sense of history’.
55
The Graeco-Roman/Judaeo-Christian ideological divide

But before surveying the issue let us pause to identify from the previous passages
the (alleged) seminal differences between the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-
Christian attitudes towards time and history. Numerous scholars17 have argued
that one of the most fundamental of them centres precisely on their attitudes to
time. Whereas the Greeks and Romans had a cyclical approach to time and history,
the Christians inherited from the Jews a linear approach. For the Greeks and
Romans, time was infinite and circular, a closed system of eternal recurrences
governed, ultimately, by inexorable cosmological laws. For the Jews and Christians,
on the contrary, time has a beginning (with the Creation) and progresses in a
straight line (as does history within it), through God’s dealings with man, to an end.
For the Greeks and Romans, then, history is endlessly repeatable, whilst for the Jews
and Christians it is always unique. For the former, history is thus ultimately without
purpose, and to that extent is meaningless. For the latter, on the contrary, history
has a direction – it is the purposeful moving towards an end-fulfilment; in short,
history is meaningful. For the former, an underlying fatalism colours their attitude
towards history, since whatever temporary triumphs may distinguish a city or
culture, nothing of unique, lasting, forward-looking significance can be achieved
by men entrapped in the giant circle of cosmic existence – there can be nothing
truly ‘historical’. For the latter, on the contrary, an underlying hope pervades their
attitude towards time and history. Bolstered by belief in the loving guidance of a
transcendent, powerful, wise God to fulfil His purpose through His command of
time and history, the forward, irreversible movement of mankind gives man an
ultimate confidence in the future. Whatever disasters may occur, however arduous
or puzzling the path may be, the history of both man and the cosmos is not to be
dismissed as an infinitely wheeling cycle of unintelligible natural necessity, but to
be affirmed in all its contingencies as the created, once-and-for-all gift of the
supreme, rational Mind.
We appear to be confronted by a vast ideological divide between the two
‘traditions, not only in religion, but derivately, in their respective assumptions
about history – in short, by different ‘philosophies of history’. Such, allegedly, is the
magnitude of this latter divide alone that it is not surprising different scholars have
either questioned its truth or speculated on its significance. In the latter case some
extraordinary claims have been made not least about ‘philosophy of history’ itself.
It is therefore salutary to look first at those who cast doubt on just how large a
contrast in fact existed between the two traditions.
The dichotomy questioned

Perhaps the most exhaustive work on this theme, especially as it relates to ideas of
time and history, is G. W. Trompf’s The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western
Thought. Referring to the dichotomy in the two traditions he repeatedly warns that
‘such a contrast should be eyed with caution’.18 He tells us that ‘the making of a
56
sharp distinction between Christian linearity and classical cyclicism has undoubt-
edly hindered rather than facilitated careful investigation’ into the relation
between Graeco-Roman and Christian assumptions about history, especially from
the Church Fathers onwards into medieval times.19 Not that Trompf thinks the
famed dichotomy is entirely a fallacy:
Admittedly, we have long been asked to believe that Christianity effected
a decisive triumph for historical linearity over cyclical modes of thought,
and certainly the Judaeo-Christian understanding of history excluded any
doctrine of eternal recurrence, whether of worlds or inter-cataclysmic
periods . . . . But that only tells one part of a complicated story.20
He then devotes much space to showing that ‘Christians made no mean use of
their Graeco-Roman heritage’,21 thereby reminding us the early Christians lived
within a Graeco-Roman world. Trompf gives numerous instances, from as early as
Luke’s Gospel, where Christians employed distinctly Graeco-Roman notions in
their presentation of history – particularly the ideas of historical recurrence and re-
enactment (thereby showing they were not averse to approaching a cyclical
interpretation of phases of human history so long as it was not taken to imply an
eternity of cosmological cycles) – and various periodisations of history into different
‘Ages of Man’ (although where Christians appealed to this notion, as did
Augustine, the ‘ages’ were presented as progressive, not circular). His researches
into writings from Classical times through to the Renaissance and into the
Reformation permit him to summarise that ‘we have sought to undermine the well-
known yet superannuated linear-cyclical dichotomy, and to explode the false
opinion that recurrence views of history have been endemic to paganism but
mortifying to monotheists’.22 He reminds us that ‘the persistence of Graeco-Roman
themes was to be the inevitable result of Christianity’s adaptation to a Gentile
world’; that some of these ‘are actually found in the Bible, the most sacred if misused
tome of Western culture’; and in a well-judged aside complains that ‘Interestingly,
modern Christian scholars are still running away from the falsi circuitus of the
classical philosophers without having any precise ideas as to the theories from
which they flee’.
Regarding his central theme of historical recurrence (which he is careful to
differentiate, where possible, from historical cycles per se) Trompf concludes that
‘Jew and Christian have little to fear from ideas of historical (as against
cosmological) recurrence, and that indeed they ought to acquaint themselves with
these ideas if they intend to go on giving meaning to life’,23 for,
in their capacity to interlock with such important (if apparently

contradictory) ideas as progress, degeneration, fortune, necessity, and
providence, they formed the tissue of a basic conception which lies close
to the heartbeat of Western culture, and which goes back in its origins,
with those ancient myths of eternal return, to the primal substructure of
civilisation itself.24
57
Trompf cites other scholars who also challenge the linear-cyclical dichotomy 25
but, unsurprisingly, not Nisbet. For if Trompf’s challenge stems from his argument
that Christian thinkers did not so dramatically reject many Graeco-Roman ideas,
including cyclical-type ideas of historical recurrence, we have already seen Nisbet
arguing that Graeco-Roman thinkers were not dominated by such ideas in any
event – that on the contrary they were perfectly comfortable with such linear-type
ideas as growth, development, cultural transmission, and above all, progress. Thus
Nisbet also challenges the dichotomy, but from the other side.
The dichotomy denied?

Going further than Trompf’s reminder that Christians ‘adapted’ themselves to
Graeco-Roman culture, Nisbet claims that, in addition to Judaism, ‘the other source
of Christianity is Greek’. He continues,
The Jewish followers of and missionaries for Christ were obliged to learn
Greek if they were to be able to communicate the Good News. And in
learning the language they also learned ideas: such Greek ideas as natural
growth, of change conceived of as the unfolding of potentiality into
actuality, of fixed stages of the advancement of knowledge and mankind.26
Recalling his insistence that the notion that Greeks regarded everything as
determined by Fate and had no idea of progress ‘should be laid to rest forever’,27 it
is no surprise that although Nisbet believes Christians built upon and added
to Greek ideas of progress, he does not identify the notion of linear as opposed to
cyclical ideas of history as an addition. Rather, he points to the spiritual dimension.28
Although he sees the Christian notion of the millennium as referring to the hope
of the eventual spiritual perfection of mankind (its ultimate meaning for Nisbet),
he recognises that early (pre-Augustinian) Christians fused the idea of a material
earthly paradise into their millennialist notions. Here, it seems for Nisbet, is the
fundamental Christian contribution to civilisation.
No other element of Christian thought has had as profound and far-

reaching effect upon the entire world, not merely the West, as has its
millennialist vision. We should be hard put to account for the social utopias
of . . . especially the Marxists . . . were there not a long and powerful
tradition of Christian millennialist utopianism which could be, in some
degree, secularised, with its apocalyptic intensity left undiminished.29
Not, it seems, that Nisbet approves of such secularisation. Complaining (in 1980)
of a debilitating lack of self-confidence, hope, and sense of direction in Western
civilisation, he claims ‘the reason for this . . . is our lack of a true culture. And
fundamental to this lack is the disappearance of the sacred’.30 Thus it is, that in reply
to his own question regarding the future of the idea of progress in the West, he
58
responds: ‘Any answer to that question requires answer to a prior question: what
is the future of Judaeo-Christianity in the West?’31
Nisbet’s overall view, then, is that belief in progress depends on a unilinear
‘philosophy of history’, and this in turn requires belief in ‘the sacred’. As he puts it,
‘there is no possibility whatever of dealing with “world history” in . . . unilinear
fashion . . . apart from the use of an omnipresent, omnipotent Providence conceived
as author and executor of a design within which all human cultures . . . fit
smoothly’,32 and ‘only . . . in the context of a true culture in which the core is a deep
and wide sense of the sacred are we likely to regain the vital conditions of progress
itself and of faith in progress – past, present, and future’.33
Here, then, are two writers who almost simultaneously challenged the view that a
fundamental gulf separated the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian assumptions
regarding time and history – namely, that the former had a cyclical, the latter a
linear, view. Yet they approach the issue from opposite sides and draw corres-
pondingly different implications regarding ‘philosophy of history’. Nisbet approves
of the linear approach, stresses the ‘sacred’, and believes both are essential for
‘philosophy of history’. Trompf, on the other hand, believes the prerequisites
for ‘philosophy of history’ do not depend on a linear approach – and that the linear
approach was not, and need not be, so endemic to Christianity as modern scholars
claim. Indeed, in a head-on collision with Nisbet’s thesis, Trompf expresses some
sympathy with those modern (Graeco-Roman orientated) political theorists who,
equating Christian linear thinking with an apocalyptic belief in spiritual salvation
which renders actual history unimportant, claim that Christian doctrine cannot
truly accommodate real ‘philosophy of history’. It seems Trompf would agree with
them, were that equation accurate. Fortunately for Christians, however, Trompf
argues such scholars are wrong about Christian thinking on history. Not only has
it not always centred on apocalyptic theories, it has by no means even been
exclusively linear in its assumptions. Hence his encouragement to them, as to
anyone else, to stop fearing Graeco-Roman cyclical notions ‘if they intend to go
on giving meaning to life’.34
The dichotomy affirmed?

This has been quite a complex confrontation of views between two writers who
otherwise agree that the well-known dichotomy between Graeco-Roman and
Judaeo-Christian views on time and history is false. It has been worth outlining
because of the dramatic implications each draws regarding its overall relevance to
(speculative) philosophy of history. As for those scholars who do insist on the giant
dichotomy, they often draw no less dramatic implications. For example, Bultmann
proclaims:
the Jewish-Christian understanding of history . . . was dependent on

eschatology. The Greeks did not raise the question of meaning in history
59
and the ancient philosophers had not developed a philosophy of history.

A philosophy of history grew up for the first time in Christian thinking,
for Christians believed they knew the end of the world and of history.35
Another example takes us back to Jaki’s Science and Creation. Although the focus
of his extensive scholarship is on the ‘philosophical’ presuppositions shaping
scientific thought, much of what he writes relates to philosophy of history. This is
because Jaki sees the history of progress as substantially dependent on the emergence
and (complex) development of scientific rationality. The suppositions underlying
the latter thus intertwine with those involved in historical thought. This is nowhere
more clear than in those numerous passages where Jaki insists upon a stark
dichotomy between the Graeco-Roman (and previous cultures’) cyclical view of
time and history and the Judaeo-Christian linear view. Arguing that scientific
thought was variously still-born, perverted, or delayed wherever the Christian
rejection of cyclical assumptions was absent or ignored, he concludes, ‘All great
cultures that witnessed a stillbirth in science within their ambience have one major
feature in common. They were all dominated by a pantheistic concept of the
universe going through eternal cycles. By contrast, the only viable birth of science
took place in a culture for which the world was a created, contingent entity’. And
like others on this theme, Jaki draws lessons for the present and future.
Doubtless mindful that the vistas opened up by contemporary science are as
astonishing as they are problematic – that they confront us with material, moral,
and spiritual issues of genuinely historical proportions – he fears we may make the
wrong choice ‘between two ultimate alternatives: faith in the Creator and in a
creation once-and-for-all, or surrender to the treadmill of eternal cycles’. Although
unstated, we can assume that the latter belief is for Jaki both a cause of, and
evidence for, a culture’s lapse into moral indifference, loss of purpose, and ultimate
hopelessness bred of fatalism and superstition. If, on the contrary, we are to stride
forward to make a meaningful history in this age so dominated by science, ‘The past
and present of scientific history tell the very same lesson. It is the indispensability
of a firm faith in the only lasting source of rationality and confidence, the Maker
of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible’.36 For those who may puzzle
as to where the monotheistic Islamic faith figures in this theme, Jaki offers his own
perspective, at least with respect to the times of Muhammad:
the Koran did not provide the necessary mental encouragement and
guidelines for a rational approach to the universe. The reason for this lies
in the overly voluntaristic and moralistic tone of the Koran, and more
particularly, in its emphasis on the will of the Creator . . . no conspicuous
effort is made to tie the sovereign decisions of God to His nature, that is,
to His rationality. In other words, the will of God [Allah] seems to be
above any norm . . .37
60
Augustine, the philosopher of history?
Augustine’s two ‘cities’

Such, then, are some of the perspectives on what many urge as a fundamental
innovation in the way time and history was understood – the alleged dichotomy
between cyclical and linear ‘theories’ of history. Some have denied the dichotomy,
although it has not stopped them drawing dramatic conclusions regarding the
theme. As for those who insist on the dichotomy, some claim the Graeco-Romans
were not interested in history because of their belief in cycles: others claim the
Graeco-Romans were interested in history precisely because of their belief in cycles
(that is, they hoped to learn lessons by charting them): others claim only Christians
were interested in history, because of their belief in progress: whilst others, finally,
claim Christians were not interested in history because their eschatology concerned
an essentially spiritual state which rendered actual contingent historical circum-
stances ultimately irrelevant.
Thus the reader, whether monotheistic, Christian, or of no religion, may be
forgiven for thinking this a confusing scenario. That it is so can partly be attributed
to the legacy of St Augustine, about whose ideas in The City of God it has (somewhat
dubiously) been said, ‘With every reason, Western philosophy can be declared a
series of footnotes’.38 Because Augustine was ‘the rhetorician, the epigrammatist, the
polemicist, but not the patient, logical, systematic philosopher’,39 his ideas afford
considerable scope for diverse interpretations. Additionally, not only is The City of
God a long work serving a variety of purposes, it is only one of a large corpus of
St Augustine’s output. Again, within these writings it is more than likely he changed
some ideas (e.g., his views on whether, and how, the State should deal with heretics
– subsequently ‘the subject of extended, and sometimes sharp, controversy’).40 But
perhaps most of all, one of the central themes he addressed involves inherently
ambiguous notions whose ‘real’ meaning may be impossible to reach scholarly
agreement on – namely, his famous distinction beween ‘the City of God’ and ‘the
earthly City’.
Augustine employed these terms to highlight the difference between a life
centred on involvement in our ‘actual’ circumstances as distinct from being centred
on the spirituality of the individual’s experience, whatever those circumstances.
The former life is lived entirely within ‘the earthly City’, where aspirations for ‘the
good life’ (wealth, pleasure, health) are defined by the managing of one’s affairs in
the busy surrounding world. The latter ‘life’, on the other hand, aspires to be lived
in ‘the City of God’, where the value of one’s being is measured not in terms of
‘actual’, earthly circumstances but in terms of the spiritual qualities of perfect love,
justice, mercy, and faith. The truly ‘good life’ is, then, not determined by how
the external world impinges on one and how one manages it to extract the desired
life-experience. Rather, the good life is the maintenance of that ‘spiritual’ or
psychological state of mind centred on an unqualified love of God and of one’s
neighbours, irrespective of the ‘external’ contingencies thrown up by actual
61
circumstances – for example, poverty, ill-health, rivalries, hatreds, wars, betrayals,

and other such trials.
Augustine is, then, contriving a kind of parable. The ‘City of Earth’ is a ‘place’
which, despite many attractions and possibilities for not only pleasure but also
virtue of a kind, is inevitably a trap for those seeking the truly good life – God’s
kingdom, after all, is ‘not of this Earth’. The earthly City is tainted by sin – the
greed, brutality, and self-interestedness of fallen Man. The City of God, on
the other hand, is a ‘place’ of like-minded ‘saints’ in spiritual communion with
each other and God.
Obviously we are all born in, and thus ‘into’, the ‘earthly City’, but Augustine
claimed that if one were a Christian, hopeful of salvation through God’s grace, one
should regard ‘this’ life as merely a journey through ‘the earthly City’ – indeed, as
a pilgrimage – towards one’s goal, the City of God. Like anyone journeying to a
destination, the places in between are not important in themselves – one should
neither tarry over-long, nor get involved, in them. It is this aspect of the ‘parable’
which has inspired many to claim that Augustine’s perspective is ‘other-worldly’
– that he is suggesting Christians should not concern themselves with ‘earthly’
affairs, but respectfully and/or resignedly lower their heads and travel as trouble-
free as possible, trying not to get involved in the turmoil of the busy streets they
have to traverse. This interpretation was later exploited by the elites of medieval
societies (including the Church itself) to preach to ordinary folk a message of
obedience to authority. But more directly for our purposes, it has also been
interpreted as meaning that for Augustine (and to that extent, for Christian
thought), history is irrelevant both in the grand scheme of things and in its
significance in our own life-times. Why? Because whatever dreams and schemes
might hope to be fulfilled through manipulating and reorganising ‘external’ circum-
stances – for example, democratising government, defeating foreign rule,
revolutionising the economy, or reforming social structures – they are futile, stuck
as they are in the ultimately worthless dimension of ‘the earthly City’. Logically,
such a perspective does not necessarily deny that the course of history may be
‘intelligible’ – but inasmuch as history charts the ‘busy streets’, it lacks real
‘meaning’. And being thus ultimately irrelevant, it is difficult to see the rationale
for any kind of philosophy of history.
The irrelevance of history?

This interpretation of Augustine can, then, lead to the view, paradoxically, that
despite God’s once-and-for-all creation of the world and its finite, linear history (in
contrast to the cyclical eternal history of the pagan Graeco-Romans), that same
history is irrelevant and meaningless to man (apart from certain Divine happenings
such as the Resurrection). For example, Trompf reminds us that despite Augustine’s
various versions of human history (always composed with a polemical purpose), his
overall perspective on the history of ‘the Earthly City’ was that it demonstrated ‘the
mutability of the human estate’,41 that ‘wars, diseases, sorrows, and famine had
62
been with men always’, and that one would ultimately search in vain for any
evidence that God’s justice was exemplified in His having instilled into the Earthly
City’s history any principle of moral retribution or inherent plan of spiritual
progression.42 Inasmuch as his own times presaged a new order in which the City
of God may be established, not only was Augustine vague about how soon this
would happen, neither did he conceive of the eventuality as emerging from, and
because of, the previous course of secular human history. As another scholar,
Deane, puts it, ‘If we confine our attention only to the history of this world and do
not look beyond it to the future kingdom of God’s saints, we cannot call Augustine
a believer in historical progress’.43 In short, the City of God is not the product of
human history – it is radically a-historical.
The same conclusions concerning Augustine’s logic are drawn by Fortin, who
argues that ‘the rationality of the divine plan is not in the materials used. No
analysis of [historical] events will ever lead to the discovery of an end which is at
once present and operative in the process from the beginning and destined to be
progressively actualised through it. It follows that the future course of human
history is totally unpredictable. History will come to an end at the appointed time
. . . because God will have chosen to bring it to a close . . . . Its completion is in no
way related to emergent political structures or the general state of human affairs at
any any given moment’.44 He adds weight to his interpretation by arguing that
Augustine rejected contemporary hopes that a new Christian Rome would
necessarily bring temporal and material rewards with it.45 Rather, the affairs of men
are inevitably unregenerate, and inasmuch as the City of God is entangled in the
Earthly City, its role cannot be to reconstruct the latter along lines of perfection.
On the contrary, without the evil which must pervade ordinary society, the virtue
of the saintly is meaningless – ‘the function of virtue is not to do away with evil
but to conquer it’.46 Thus Fortin interprets Augustine as rejecting any notion of a
realised Christian society functioning according to the morality of the Gospels. No
temporal community can achieve this. Some may be better than others; some
marvellous innovations may emerge. But there is no guarantee that a particular
society will not be replaced by a worse one, nor that innovations will always be used
for good rather than evil. In short, for Augustine there is no reason to believe that
any ‘actual’ or temporal society ‘is at all capable of fulfilling man’s longing for
wholeness’. The ‘historical’ goal of which Augustine writes in his City of God
‘remains transcendent and wholly independent of any observable improvement in
the political sphere’.47 Fortin thus concludes that ‘one is entitled to ask what, if
anything, the modern philosophy of history owes to him?’, to which a radical reply
might be that, logically, it owes him nothing, since interpreted along these lines
Augustine’s thinking precludes the very idea behind ‘philosophy of history’.
History as relevant?
Others, however, have interpreted Augustine along opposite lines. For them,
Augustine sees human history (guided by God’s design) as moving inevitably
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towards the destruction of ‘the Earthly City’ and its replacement by ‘the City of
God’ – and the latter is here interpreted as, indeed, a totally reformed temporal
world (presaged in Augustine’s present times, his ‘sixth Age’, and eventually
actualised in a forthcoming ‘seventh Age’ bearing all the hallmarks of an earthly
millennium – after which, the world would be destroyed, ushering in the final,
eternal, eighth Age). For example, Jaki claims that ‘what the medievals learned [in
The City of God] . . .was, above all, the proposition that the physical universe and
human history both had their origin in the sovereign creative act of God, which
also established a most specific course and destiny for both’.48 He describes
Augustine’s book as the ‘vehicle for a confidence which centuries later made
possible the emergence for the first time of a culture with a built-in force of self-
sustaining progress’,49 and praises Augustine for recognising that ‘the Christian
pursuit of happiness’ must be protected from any ‘relapse into the monotony of
cycles undermining man’s sense of purpose’, from any ‘anti-intellectualism
disdainful of the attainments of reason’, and from ‘considering as something evil
the material world’. Jaki’s interpretation suggests the view of a human history
unfolding in a linear fashion towards a reformed temporal world – and that despite
some possible eventual extinction, the history of humankind is, or can be, one of
continual progress towards the perfected Christian world-society. I say, ‘can be’,
since from the above it seems that, for Jaki, much depends on people ‘having
the right attitude’ (namely, the correct Christian beliefs). Yet whether they do or
will is another matter, since Jaki adds that for Augustine, ‘most importantly, the
pursuit of happiness rested on man’s grasp of his own and of the material world’s
fundamental contingency, as everything rested on a sovereign, creative act of God’.50
Quite what this implies is difficult to discern. Is the course of human history,
then, one of unilinear progress, and hence meaningful? And if so, however, does
this depend on people’s ‘right thinking’, such that without it history would be
chaotic and meaningless? Or if mankind and its world is fundamentally
‘contingent’, is the course of history up to God? If so, the only reason to be hopeful
for continued progress in the reform of ‘the Earthly City’ is to rely on God’s goodwill
rather than on our own beliefs and powers, or on any inbuilt dynamic in the
workings of history. Perhaps Jaki realises this is where his logic leads, for he stresses
Augustine’s message that God’s ordering of material and human history can be
trusted to be both intelligible (unlike, according to Jaki, the Muslim concept of
God) and beneficent because His ‘fingerprints were evidenced by the disposition
of everything according to weight, measure, and number’.51 The reader may be
forgiven for thinking Jaki wants it both ways. On the one hand it would seem the
course of history is at the mercy of God’s will, which could (despite Jaki’s and
Augustine’s protests) be arbitrary (the perennial theological problem of evil and
suffering looms large here). On the other hand, it would seem that how human
beings handle their world is of central importance in determining whether their
history is one of progress and meaning. Yet whether human-beings are bound (by
God or anything else) to conduct their affairs progressively, or bound not to, or not
‘bound’ at all, is another matter – another perennial theological problem looms
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here, namely, that of free wiII. There are, then, ambiguities in this presentation of
Augustine’s views on both the course and the importance of human history,
although it is clear enough that, for Jaki, what happens in ‘the Earthly City’ does
matter – implicit in his hopes for historical human progress there is a connection
(albeit never spelt out) between the ‘Earthly’ and ‘Heavenly’ cities. However
‘spiritual’ the latter may be, it would appear to have distinct temporal implications
in Jaki’s interpretation.
Far less equivocal is Nisbet’s interpretation of this aspect of Augustine. After

arguing that the early Christians’ idea of reform and regeneration encompassed
not only spiritual but also ‘material, political, and social improvement’,52 and
choosing passages in which Augustine praises humankind’s capacity for material
progress, Nisbet refers to Augustine’s notion of ‘the education of the human race’
over time, in which Augustine ‘sees the progress of mankind, the material progress
we have already found to shine so brilliantly in his account, as akin to a long process
of cumulative education in a single human being’. This process of ‘a single, unified
mankind . . . advancing in accordance with an immanent design’ is an historical
process, despite ‘the actual multiplicity and particularity of recorded history’ which
tends to obscure the ‘reality’ of the progress of mankind ‘toward fulfilment of all that
was good in its being’.53 Aware that many have interpreted Augustine as being
strongly opposed to all notions of an earthly millennium, Nisbet nonetheless argues
‘there are grounds for belief that Augustine foresaw a progressive, fulfilling, and
blissful period ahead, on earth, for humanity’.54 Further, Nisbet somewhat mis-
chievously notes that even Augustine’s version of the New Earth which is,
apocalyptically, to succeed the destruction of our temporal world, ‘has a decidedly
earthly, human flavour’ including, in Augustine’s own words, ‘life, health, nourish-
ment, and plenty, and glory, and honour and peace, and all good things’.55
In short, Nisbet offers an Augustine who, almost irrespective of his metaphor of
the ‘Earthly City’ and the ‘City of God’, conceived of and bequeathed a ‘philosophy
of history’ premised on the view that the course of human history is necessarily one
of continuing progress, not only spiritually, but mundanely in terms of political,
social, economic, and cultural improvement. If, then, by ‘the Earthly City’ is meant
this temporal world, then what happens in it – namely, its history – is of the most
intimate significance. In his version of Augustine, not for Nisbet the bowed head
of the resigned pilgrim, ignoring as far possible his mundane surroundings as he
travels in hope to a ‘place’ of a different order altogether!
Interpreting Augustine
Examining these large claims made of, and about, a central ideological divide
between how the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian cultures viewed history
(partly derived from the clash between pagan and monotheistic religions), we have
devoted considerable space to Augustine – or rather, to differing interpretations
of him. This is because his writings (particularly The City of God) crystallised the
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cultural clash between Christianity and Graeco-Roman ideas at a crucial time in

the history of the Roman Empire. As such, combined with the extensiveness and
stature of his writings, Augustine’s legacy stretched over the ensuing centuries we
call ‘the Middle Ages’. Not only did he influence people’s attitudes towards the
course and meaning of history – his legacy is no less important in the related field
of political thought. Yet, as we have seen, even now it remains a thoroughly
ambiguous inheritance whose implications are nonetheless huge whichever
interpretation of his ideas one adopts. (This has been a powerful contributory factor
to his enduring influence, since neither scholars nor enthusiasts are prone to let
ambiguities lie).
On the one hand, the implications of Augustine’s doctrines are that mundane
earthly history is a meaningless kaleidoscope of petty material struggles, triumphs,
and disasters – that on its own, it is going nowhere, and nothing of lasting worth
can be found in its past or be expected in its future. (Ironically one is reminded of
precisely that alleged pagan doctrine of an ultimately meaningless repetitive history
which Augustine is so concerned to refute). No amount of zealous reformism, social
engineering, or political restructuring can bring about a ‘City of Earth’ which
progressively fulfils ‘the human good’. Rather, the latter is radically dissociated
from temporal, earthly life, being instead a ‘spiritual’ state of mind and/or some
transcendental New Order (‘the City of God) subsequent to the apocalyptic
destruction of human life on earth as we know it. That human history will
eventuate in such a manner has been determined by God, irrespective of man’s free
will to fashion his own history. The best use of free will is to follow Christian
morality, loving one’s neighbour and God, rejecting the challenges and temptations
of ‘the Earthly City’, in hopes of achieving a kind of ‘virtual reality’ of ‘the Heavenly
City’ prior to its actual institution by God’s judgement. As we have seen,
interpreted so it is difficult to see any sense in which Augustine’s doctrines offer a
‘philosophy of history’ – that is, a set of ideas which help make sense of, and thereby
possibly give meaning to, human history by explaining what internal mechanisms
or dynamics determine its course. If for some Graeco-Roman minds history was
one of unmitigated gloom, at least they offered explanations for this. The only
‘explanation’ to be extracted for Augustine’s view (to the extent it was his view)
is a paradoxical intermixture of God’s will and the free will of Fallen Man, where
one is reminded of Spinoza’s observation that to refer the inexplicable to ‘the will
of God’ is ‘truly, a ridiculous way of expressing ignorance’.56
On the other hand Augustine has been presented as the first great philosopher of
history, whose ideas originated the notion of the linear, meaningful, progressive
history of mankind towards fulfilling its potential towards unity, justice, and
happiness. It has been claimed that Charlemagne’s ambitions for a ‘Holy Roman
Empire’ at his doubly symbolic coronation by the Pope on Christmas Day 800 were
inspired by an Augustinian vision of a re-formed united Christian ‘Earthly City’,57
and there is a hint in one recent commentator’s mind that this ‘worldly’ version of
Augustine, whereby the One Church is to be God’s instrument for man’s earthly
66
salvation by extending its influence throughout the globe, remains a Catholic ideal
disputed by Protestants who lean towards a more ‘other-worldly’ interpretation of
Augustine – in short, that Catholics think more in terms of history, Protestants
more in terms of souls.58
Some heuristics of the history of thought

From the above, it is clear that much of the problem in interpreting Augustine’s
views on history centres on this issue of ‘worldliness’ and ‘other-worldliness’.
Just what the role of Christianity in the actual affairs of the world should be
– whether it should have any role ‘in’ history at all – remains ambiguous, just as
whether ‘earthly’ history itself should be relegated to a meaningless flux or, on the
contrary, be the focus for rational belief in the inevitable march of human progress
towards the perfect society. Because, as your ‘guide’, I have highlighted opposing
interpretations of Augustine, readers might think I should now try to settle
the matter. However, I do not think it is possible to do so – rather, in a work, The
City of God, so suffused with rhetoric (including polemic) because devoted to
achieving practical objectives, I would almost say it is impossible to expect either
philosophical consistency, intellectual honesty, or ‘good faith’. I have elsewhere59
attempted to explain what is involved in recovering a writer’s thinking – that is,
what is involved in doing ‘the history of thought’. Where, by constructing his book,
a writer is trying to achieve some practical objective, he is not concerned to explore
and argue the truth for the sake of the truth. Rather, what he writes is chosen,
through persuading his reader of the truth of what he says, to achieve some purpose
external to the matter ostensibly under discussion – for example, to follow this
religion, join that political movement, behave in this way, or believe in that way.
There is nothing ‘wrong’ with practically motivated writings – but they are different
from theoretically motivated ones. The latter occur where the writer has no
(practical) axe to grind, being concerned solely to explore, argue, and communicate
the truth on a matter, irrespective of any practical consequences. In this sense the
historian as well as, for example, the scientist, critic, and philosopher, can and
should be a ‘theoretician’. This does not mean that theoretically motivated writings
do not contain errors, or that practically inspired writings never say anything true.
Nor does it mean that parts of a practically inspired book cannot be theoretically
inspired, and vice-versa – (the point is to identify what is going on at any particular
point). What it does mean, however, is that where a piece of writing is practically
inspired, those criteria of logical consistency, objectivity, and open-ended pursuit
of the truth necessary to theoretical writings are replaced by the criterion of
efficiency in achieving the writer’s practical objectives. Accordingly, opponents’
views are often distorted, the writer’s points overstated, ‘inconvenient’ facts
ignored, and chains of reasoning directed to pre-chosen, ‘appropriate’ conclusions.
(Another, less satisfactory, term for such writings is ‘ideological’).
Thus it is that where we encounter such writings it is not so much futile as a
misunderstanding of their nature to assume the writer must be able to be made
67
philosophical sense of, that inconsistencies and ambiguities must be capable of

being cleared up, if only we, the poor readers, had the intelligence to do so. Later
in this book we will encounter Vico imploring his contemporaries to stop believing
that ancient writings must, by their nature, contain hidden wisdom – that whilst
this attitude prevails, no true ‘science’ of the past is possible. Just so, albeit on a less
general level, we might urge people to stop assuming that ‘great thinkers’ must
have been aspiring to explore truth for the sake of truth, and that it is up either to
us or to commentators and historians of thought to make consistent phiIosophical
sense of what they ‘must’ have ‘really’ meant. Rather, the message is that history
of thought approached in such a manner is pre-scientific, and will continue to be
wherever we ignore its first rule – namely, to recognise books and other pieces of
writing as more or less complex artefacts deliberately constructed by thinkers, and
thus to ask, ‘what is it that they are trying to do, both by the book as a whole,
and in any particular part of it?’. All else follows, and as stated, I have explored
the heuristic implications and techniques elsewhere. Our point here is that the
distinction between theoretical and practically inspired writings is a telling one,
and that because Augustine’s City of God exemplifies the latter, those who insist
on trying to interpret it as offering a consistent, unambiguous ‘doctrine’ are
mistaken. And as for those who accept that he did bequeath a confusing legacy,
but might suggest this is simply because, despite his genuine intentions, Augustine
was confused, or wrote badly, or was simply unable to articulate certain ‘inexpress-
ibles’, again I suggest they are mistaken, and that the more likely explanation is that
he did not ‘seriously’ address the very issues they hope, by ‘interpreting’ him, to find
him solving – in short, that his notions of ‘the Earthly City’ and ‘the City of God’,
and their implications for the nature of human history and the role of the Christian
in the temporal world, were not the product of theoretical thinking (thereby
offering the expectation of some intellectually coherent philosophy), but were
practically inspired and practically argued, and hence (particularly given the
complex issues addressed) were unlikely to achieve a level of intellectual coherence
never intended in any event.
It is beyond our brief to demonstrate, from his writings, what I have suggested about
Augustine’s City of God (although some indications may have emerged in our
exposition of the controversy it has provoked). Rather, in line with what I have
said about ‘practically inspired’ writings, we might want to attend to the following
points: Augustine was educated as a pagan, and then during his twenties fell under
the influence of the teachings of the Persian prophet, Mani. But he later renounced
Manichaeism, employing his increasingly renowned rhetorical skills to refute the
‘heresy’. Around 387, having been attracted to Neo-Platonist ideas, and then under
the influence of (St) Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, he converted to Christianity,
and by 395 was made Bishop of Hippo (in North Africa). ‘Never one . . . to hide
his light under a bushel’,60 his renown as a winner of arguments, hounder of
‘heresies’, and indefatigable preacher spread, such that when the Goths sacked the
city of Rome in 410, and Christianity was held to blame for the Empire’s sorry
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demise, it was Augustine whom a Christian representative of Roman officialdom

asked to refute the charge. Hence (although it took from 413 to 426 to complete)
his famous City of God. None of these points in themselves prove, of course, the
claims I have made about his ideas – but they do contain tell-tale signs of where
practically motivated writings, rather than earnestly considered attempts to arrive
at truth for its own sake, are more likely to be found.
Summary comments
The Christian challenge

Clearly, an important part of the Christian challenge to Graeco-Roman culture
focused on its rejection of the doctrine of eternally recurring cosmological and
historical cycles – and we have seen that for many scholars, let alone Christians,
this (alleged) gulf has momentous implications for man’s understanding of time,
the course of history, his own place within it, and his expectations from it. Some
have seen the originally Jewish insistence on the linearity of history, adopted by
the early Christians, as providing the very foundations for ‘philosophy of history’.
Hence the surely extravagant claims made for Christianity in particular, along the
lines that once it was committed to seeking a universal constituency it thereby
‘invented’ the concomitant notions of a meaningful history and belief in human
progress; we are consequently urged to ‘maintain (or regain) the faith’ if humankind
is to face the future with confidence rather than lose itself in doctrines and attitudes
which, blind to the message of history, portend a future for humanity as meaningless
(according, allegedly, to those doctrines and attitudes) as its past has been.
Cyclical and linear history

There are several problems with this point of view. First, in the abstract, neither
linear nor cyclical ‘theories’ of history in themselves point to either the presence
or absence of intelligibility in history. In microcosm, a linear sequence of events is
no more intelligible by its nature than is a (recurring) cycle of events. That events
do not repeat themselves does not mean the course they take is therefore
‘meaningful’. Rather, we might tend more to the opposite view – namely, that
where they do repeat themselves we are more likely to find some principle of
intelligibility, or extract some meaning, in such an historical process. But still, in
neither case is such meaning necessarily implied. What is true, however, is that to
describe history as either cyclical or linear is to say something meaningful about
history. But this is where confusion can arise, because to say something meaningful
about history is not necessarily the same as saying history is meaningful. (By analogy
I could describe someone’s behaviour as repetitious, or observe that every life has
a beginning and an end. Respectively, I am saying something meaningful about his
behaviour, or her life. But this is far from saying that his behaviour, or her life, are
meaningful). Now, when we refer to ‘philosophy of history’, which do we mean? If
69
we mean ‘saying something meaningful about the course of history’, then the
cyclical no less than the linear approach contributes to ‘philosophy of history’,
(and Christianity loses its alleged uniqueness). If, however, we mean ‘showing that
history is meaningful’, then neither the cyclical nor the linear approach necessarily
imply this, (again, confuting those alleged logical grounds for claiming Christianity’s
pre-eminence in providing the only grounds for ‘philosophy of history’ through its
adherence to linear rather than cyclical history).
But of course there is more to this claim, on behalf of Christianity, than its
insistence on history’s linearity. It is only linear because it is the fulfilling, through
time, of God’s design, or purpose. It is this which ensures not only that ‘meaningful
things can be said about history’, but more powerfully, that ‘history is meaningful’.
The ‘secret’, then, in the momentous claims made for Christianity is that it is not
its linear as distinct from the (pagan) cyclical approach which makes it ‘unique’ in
the sphere of ‘philosophy of history’ but, mundanely enough, its concept of God.
The Christian deity and history

This invites a second observation. The Christian concept of God which furnishes
a linear approach to the course of history is (following the Jews) that of both a
transcendent deity and, to make history progressive, a caring deity. The latter point
seems more a matter of belief, even wishful thinking (although some theologians
and philosophers offer explanations) than the former, more metaphysical, idea.
The significance of a transcendent deity is that, being ‘above’ or ‘apart’ from the
universe (unlike the ‘mythopoeic’ notion of the universe as animated, or later
pantheistic versions of God’s, or gods’, immanence within the universe), such a
deity thereby has control over the universe. It is its creation and it determines
what happens in it. God’s transcendence is here seen as the condition of His
determination of the course of history, since absolute power requires absolute
disentanglement from that which is controlled. Logically, this seems sound.
However, this scenario is contradicted by Christianity’s insistence on human free
will (although theologians tell us it is merely complicated, rather than contradicted,
by free will – hence many a tortuous treatise trying to reconcile the necessity of a
God-determined world with free human agency). It is not our brief here to explore
the general philosophical problems which ensue, but it is relevant to comment
where they impinge directly on the validity of those particular claims regarding
Christianity’s ‘foundation’ of philosophy of history. We have encountered
the strident view that a progressive future history for humankind depends on the
continued (or renewed) Christian belief in a linear, meaningful past history – in
short, the huge claim that mankind’s future depends on people adopting the
‘correct’ philosophy of history which, amongst other things, rejects any cyclical
theories as otherwise consigning us to entrapment in a random, meaningless future.
Yet this means the future progress of mankind depends on man, not God. Further,
it means it depends on how people think, on their attitudes and beliefs. By
implication, does it also mean that the course of (past) history has been linear,
70
meaningful, and progressive not because it has been determined by God, but because
of how free human beings have thought in the past?
Many conceptual problems surface here, threatening to render the claims made
for Christianity’s contribution to philosophy of history unintelligible. For example,
what of the aeons of history prior to Christianity? Was their history also determined
by how free human-beings thought? If so, their thinking could not have been along
Christian lines, the very condition, it would seem, of linear, progressive history!
In short, those who make such bold claims about the significance of Christian
beliefs both for the ‘foundation’ of philosophy of history and for history’s future
course are caught in both a dilemma and a paradox. The dilemma is that to the
extent their perspective demands we ‘keep the faith’, then the course of history is
up to us, not God. And the paradox is that, in their logic, history is only meaningful
because of this immanent process centred on human beliefs – beliefs, however,
which precisely centre on the contrary notion of a transcendent God who determines
the course of history! Such ingenious self-contradictions suggest that those
generous claims we found about the Christian challenge to Graeco-Roman
attitudes to history are less coherent than they might be, and contemporary
Christians may think twice before endorsing them.
The temporal and spiritual lives

A further comment on the Christian ‘alternative’ philosophy of history returns us
to Augustine’s ambivalent legacy of the difference, and the relation, between the
‘heavenly’ and ‘earthly’ cities. We may safely translate this great metaphor of
Christian thought as referring to the difference, and relation, between the temporal
and spiritual side of life. Here we might wish to rescue Augustine somewhat
from my ‘accusations’ of ambiguousness and lack of intellectual honesty, since the
theme is inherently ambiguous in any event. It is also important, particularly for
those religions and philosophies which recognise the spiritual or ‘other-worldly’
dimension to human experience. Unlike, for example, wealth or health, ‘happiness’
(‘the good life’, ‘salvation’) is clearly a state of mind. The question is, however,
whether this ‘state of mind’ is the product of one’s mind or the product of one’s
material circumstances (indeed, including wealth and health). Many religions and
philosophies appear to adopt the former position whereby one is urged not to seek
happiness in ‘the things of this world’ (that is, in temporal affairs) because any such
happiness is fleeting (being at the mercy of chance) and illusory (because ultimately
insatiable). Instead, ‘true’ happiness is said to be the product of a mind internally
disciplined towards correct ideas and values, irrespective of ‘the slings and arrows
of fortune’ and/or the vicissitudes of history. Images of the determined Stoic, serene
Buddhist, or contemplative mystic spring to mind here, as well as the devout
Christian. But wherever such a view has dominated, the question has arisen as to
what one’s relation with the actual (temporal) world should be. Should one ignore
it as far as possible, or indulge it at least to be sociable, or combatively engage with
it in pursuit of the ideals one’s religion or philosophy teaches? Part of the answer
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is that it depends what those teachings are – or, more often, how they are
interpreted. Therevada Buddhism, for example, recommended withdrawal from
society in favour of ‘the contemplative life’, whilst Mahayana Buddhism urged the
‘enlightened’ to live and engage in society in hopes of improving it. Plato’s famous
cave analogy suggests the philosopher who has escaped into daylight (‘truth’) will
not be welcome back amongst the slaves ‘underground’ unless he pretends to be like
them. Having envisaged the perfect society in Book Two of his Utopia, Thomas
More then wrote Book One, however, as an exploration of whether there is any
point trying to realise such ideals in the real world. Later the philosopher Hegel,
perhaps believing himself to be echoing Spinoza, claimed that for those of the
contemplative mind, philosophy ‘is the rose in the cross of the present’, granting
them the serenity afforded by insight into Reality, however unsatisfactory the actual
world – and consequently insisted it is not the task of philosophy to try to change
the world we live in,61 a notion famously rejected by Marx.
Many other examples abound of thinkers, before and after Augustine, grappling
with the overall problematic of the relation between the ‘spiritual’ and the
‘temporal’ life, or between the world of Ideal Truth and the actual, mundane world,
or (in some treatments) between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. The problem even has
resonance within the field of psychiatry, for can an unhappy state of experience only
be corrected by changing the actual life-circumstances which (allegedly) cause it,
or are the latter irrelevant, the cure being to ‘rethink’ one’s way into a different state
of mind (through psychotherapy and/or drugs)? Returning to Augustine, then,
the question regarding his ‘philosophy of history’ is whether what happens in the
mundane, actual world has anything to do with ‘true’ human happiness. Should one
strive to change the real world, to refashion socio-economic and political structures
in order to get rid of poverty, disease, oppression, exploitation, and injustice? Or
is happiness a state of mind we have to think our way into by changing, not reality,
but our ideas – in short, by ‘re-thinking’ reality, in this case via ‘converting’ to
Christian faith? If the latter, then (as often observed of much subsequent medieval
historiography) the only relevant aspect of actual, mundane history is the history
of the Universal Church because of its role as mentor of the flock and guardian of
the faith (although military Crusades also have a place). If the former, on the other
hand, then the full panorama of what we call ‘history’ comes into play. As seen,
Augustine is open to either interpretation. Indeed, we can use his metaphor of the
two cities to posit extremes, either of which he was probably striving to avoid. We
can think of the ‘pilgrim’ self-absorbedly travelling through an alien land, selfishly
aloof to the sufferings and injustices around him. Or we can think of the ‘pilgrim’
as an enlightened outsider, outraged by what he sees around him, determined to
put things right in the alien land he is journeying through. As suggested,
Christianity is not alone in proferring the dichotomy between the ‘spiritual’ and
‘temporal’ life, and in differing circumstances various ‘kinds’ of Christian have
veered more to one side than the other. More usually, however, the religion has
presented an ‘orthodox’ eclectic middle position whereby it neither aspires to take
charge of temporal affairs in the hope of fulfilling an historical destiny for mankind,
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nor, however, stands mute and aloof on the sidelines of a temporal history reckoned
to be irrelevant to ‘salvation’. How far this is an inherent ambivalence which was
simply (and unwittingly) translated into the ambiguities of Augustine’s ‘philosophy
of history’, or whether the latter contributed to an ambivalence in Christianity not
in fact a necessary feature of it, is a difficult question – and whilst it remains so the
contribution of Christian thought to philosophy of history, and its relation with
it, remain problematic.
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5
A CHANGING CONSCIOUSNESS
OF HISTO RY
The Renaissance and Machiavelli
Introduction
The ‘Middle Ages’

Trends in recent scholarship have challenged the idea that the collapse of the
Western Roman Empire provoked a radical change from classical Roman culture
to a markedly different, now ‘otherworldly’ Christian culture. Rather, for example,
the latter’s ‘intrusion’ sparked an exciting ‘cultural dynamic’ in which ‘new value-
structures, new subjects worth writing about’, and ‘a whole new literary language’
emerged from an interaction continuing into the seventh century.1 Likewise, the
‘standard’ notion of the subsequent ‘Middle Ages’ as a long period unchanging in
its basic intellectual assumptions has been robustly challenged in certain areas
(e.g., the notion of an outburst of humanist literature in the High Middle Ages, as
masterfully described by Southern).2 But despite these revisions it remains true to
say that regarding time and history the Augustinian heritage (including its
ambiguities) dominated medieval presuppositions. Although those tensions
implicit in the distinction between ‘the City of God’ and ‘Earthly City’ – between
the spiritual and temporal dimensions to life – formed the backcloth to much
dispute in political thought, they were neither resolved nor superseded by any new
perspective on the significance and meaning of the course of history. Where
novelties occurred they originated in one-sided interpretations of Christianity
whereby an individual, sect, or ‘heresy’ emphasised a notion of ‘heaven on earth’
(that is, a temporal realisation of ‘salvation’) – or, alternatively, emphasised the
opposite, whereby the temporal, earthly life was so reviled as to encourage, in
the most extreme cases, group suicide pacts.
Historical monotony?
Thus it is, that, despite recent historiography showing ‘the Middle Ages’ replete
with change and diversity rather than a static period stretching from the fifth to
the fourteenth centuries, from our perspective of ‘speculative philosophy of history’
the platitude that ‘people’s eyes were turned towards Heaven’ – that their
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A CHANGING CONSCIOUSNESS OF HISTORY
intellectual interests centred on eternal verities, and their speculative instincts on

attaining individual spiritual salvation – remains applicable. In this climate nothing
innovative arose in terms of a new outlook on the significance of human history.
Rather, it would seem, people in the Middle Ages were simply not interested in
speculating beyond the Biblical version of history and Augustine’s tutelage (via his
famous metaphor) on how to understand what it meant or implied. This has led
many, particularly in the light of the subsequent ‘Renaissance’, to characterise ‘the
medieval mind’ as lacking any properly historical consciousness of their own past
and of the diverse nature of other cultures. In short, the supposition is that they
saw themselves as living in a basically changeless society, finding no inspiration for
change through looking at their own or anyone else’s history, and no inspiration
for progress in particular because society neither did, nor needed to, change.
Salvation was the goal of the individual. Temporal history did not matter.
The irony is that, arguably, this lack of historical consciousness was precisely the
product of a heightened sense of philosophy of history (albeit of a ‘negative’ kind) –
i.e., that it was just because the medieval mind was encouraged (by orthodox
Christianity) to take a ‘speculative’ perspective on human history that it spurned
genuine interest in real temporal history, whereas those later times (beginning
with the Renaissance) which did demonstrate a lively historical consciousness of
their own and other societies have largely lost that speculative, ‘philosophical’
approach whereby an overall sense of history’s significance could endow their lives
with ‘spiritual’ meaning. In its absence, interest in actual history thrives along with
its paradoxical partner, anomie.
In raising this as a possible perception we encounter the intriguing possibility of
an inverse relationship (both historically and logically) between belief in
‘speculative’ philosophy of history and interest in ‘actual’ history – in short, that
they repel each other. If true, this should not be so surprising. After all, if in good
speculative mode one ‘knows’ what history ‘is all about’, one is less likely to be
curious about its ‘details’. Wars, revolutions, migrations, and other ‘large’ past
events are seen as confirming the substantive ‘meaning’ of the course of history,
whilst ‘lesser’ events are dismissable as insignificant contingencies. Alternatively,
if in good historian’s mode one is fascinated in the discovery and understanding of
past events, one is less likely to be attracted to some pre-determined pattern into
which they ‘must’ fit since, apart from anything else, it undermines historians’
motive of the instinct of curiosity.
Aquinas
But, however relevant to this ‘guide’ as a whole, let us return from such reflections
to ‘the Middle Ages’. It seems that throughout that period basic presuppositions
about history and its course remained unchanged – that in having their eyes trained
on ‘Heaven’, temporal affairs (however pressingly important in practice) were
relegated to relative insignificance in people’s perspective on the ‘larger’ questions
of life, and that consciousness of and interest in history were perhaps particularly
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subject to this. One of the effects, of course, was that their underlying assumptions
about the ‘meaning’ of history were far less likely to be challenged by the uncovering
of new historical facts. In short, in this intellectual climate historical ignorance was
self-reinforcing.
Significantly, part of this historical ignorance extended to intellectual and
cultural history. With the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, numerous
classical writings in mathematics, philosophy, poetry, drama, history, politics, and
the other liberal arts, were lost to that part of Europe ‘which became a cultural unit
thanks to the Germanic invasions of the Roman Empire’,3 either literally through
the effects of war, plunder, and destruction, or figuratively through neglect and
indifference. It would seem that even when there was a major intellectual
innovation in medieval thought – namely, the ‘rediscovery’ of Aristotle’s
philosophy and its integration into Christian thought in the thirteenth century –
however else this affected people’s way of thinking about life, it did not shift the
Augustinian perspective on the place of ‘history’ in it. Vastly impressed by, and
under corresponding pressure from, Aristotle’s astonishingly comprehensive (albeit
‘pagan’) corpus of philosophical, scientific, and metaphysical writings, medieval
scholars and theologians set about the task of reconciling his system with Christian
thought, culminating in the mammoth synthesis achieved by Thomas Aquinas’
Summa Theologica (1273). The tone underlying Aquinas’ reconciliation of the
two systems of thought is often summarised in his famous dictum, ‘Nature is
not destroyed by Grace, but perfected by it’, meaning that earthly things (‘Nature’)
are not utterly unregenerate, base, and corrupt (as could be interpreted from
Augustine), but do have a value. There is beauty, truth, and virtue to be found
in this temporal life. The fact of God’s heavenly perfection (‘Grace’) does
not relegate earthly things to a totally opposite corruption. On the other hand,
the value which is to be found in earthly things is nevertheless incomplete – the
temporal, earthly life is insufficient on its own, and needs the spiritual dimension
to perfect its possibilities. ‘[T]he aim of a good life on this earth is blessedness
in heaven’.4 (Christian) faith in the perfection of God’s heavenly world is
required to properly make the best of what the earthly life offers – it is, so to speak,
the necessary ‘icing on the cake’. Without it, earthly things would indeed
be abandoned to total meaninglessness and corruption. Reason needs to be
accompanied by faith.
‘Scholasticism’
Although this perspective put a more favourable light on temporal matters, opening
up new topics and lines of enquiry hitherto ignored or deliberately shunned, it
seems it was insufficient to effect any basic shift in presuppositions about the
meaning and significance of history. Indeed, it could be argued that so ‘intellectual’
was Aquinas’ synthesis that, unlike Augustine’s combative ideas, his philosophy
was not attuned to making much practical impact on any of people’s entrenched
ways of thinking and behaving. Where it did have a ‘practical’ impact was in the
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intellectual world. Monks and scholars, encouraged by Aquinas’ staving off of

the threat of an unanswerable, pagan, secular-orientated Aristotelianism (Aristotle
was regarded as offering the epitome of a rational explanation of existence) busily
set about the task of researching, publicising, and teaching the now ‘Christianised’
Aristotelian system. And it is here, in part, that we rejoin our theme of speculative
philosophy of history, for what emerged was a formalised set of studies we call
scholasticism (from the Aristotelian ‘schools’ of philosophy’), one replete with
obscure Aristotelian technical terms and rendered more so for being Latinised.
This is part of our story because the dominance of the ‘schools’ was no mean
contributor to that new movement or period which did at last offer an alternative
‘way of thinking’ about the course and meaning of history – namely, ‘the
Renaissance’. It did so by helping provoke the beginnings of a culture counter to
‘medievalism’, partly centred on those such as Petrarch (1304–1374) who, inspired
by contempt for ‘scholasticism’, encouraged a return to the study of the literature
and ideas of the classical, Graeco-Roman world – what they referred to as ‘the
liberal arts’, or studia humanitatis (‘study of the humanities’, from which we derive
our concept of ‘the humanities’). By the fifteenth century these (principally Italian)
like-minded ‘humanist’ scholars (since referred to as ‘the Renaissance humanists’)
began to impose their ideas on a rapidly changing society only too willing to listen.
In schools and universities the new humanist curriculum of studies competed
increasingly successfully with the late medieval scholastical curriculum. The scene
was set, the intellectual world was now equipped, to at last induce some new
presuppositions about the nature and meaning of ‘history’.
Renaissance humanism and the ‘Middle Ages’

Before we explore the broader implications of the Renaissance, and of Renaissance
humanism, for speculative ‘philosophy of history’, we should note that the
Renaissance humanists had a more direct impact on how people thought about
history – and one of singular relevance to this part of our ‘guide’. It was they, no
less, who invented the very notion of ‘the Middle Ages’, or ‘medievalism’. With a
boldness perhaps necessarily characteristic of any who attempt to re-periodise
existing historical conventions (e.g., many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
philosophers of history), Petrarch and those following him turned upside down the
medieval (sic) notion of history’s division into two basic periods – that of darkness
before, and light after, the virtually simultaneous birth of Christ and foundation
of the Roman Empire. Instead, the Renaissance humanists were remarkably
successful in preaching a new, contrary understanding of the course of history,
whereby the classical period of Greece, Rome, and the Roman Empire – Antiquity
– was one of light, followed by a period of darkness (the ‘dark ages’ of barbarism,
ignorance, and cultural desolation) they called ‘the Middle Ages’, which extended
from the fifth century AD until the dawning of their own ‘new’ age in the fourteenth
century, an age of high culture ‘reborn’ from, and remodelled upon, Antiquity’s
dazzling achievements.
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Although it was not until 1855 that the French historian, Michelet, coined it,
there is no doubt they would have found the term ‘the Renaissance’ perfectly suited
to their thinking. And this is how, in a roundabout way, the innovative outlook
elaborated by Aquinas, although not itself producing any shift in medieval
assumptions regarding history’s course and meaning, nevertheless eventually played
its part – albeit negatively. The Renaissance period owes part of its origins and
characteristics to the humanist movement, and the latter’s identity owed much to
their disillusion with the failed hopes of the optimistic twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. In those times, hopes for a new universal order of peace and prosperity
eventually came to be underpinned by Christian-Aristotelian philosophy, science,
and political economy. The latter spawned an intellectual system – ‘scholasticism’
– of which, when the hopes proffered by the late Middle Ages came to nought, ‘the
details all appeared intensely repellent. No books have ever been written that gave
less invitation to study . . . their illegible script, crabbed abbreviations, and margins
filled with comments even less legible than the text, invite derision’.5 In scorning
their recent past and its ideological bulwark, ‘scholasticism’, Renaissance humanists
looked back admiringly to classical literature and the cultural ideals it expressed –
and in so doing, began to turn men’s eyes from Heaven back towards earth, to an
appreciation of human life in its temporal and secular setting.
Effects on historical consciousness

This very boldness in re-periodising history by inventing the notion of ‘the Middle
Ages’ already evidences a willingness to move away from medieval presuppositions
about history – a move which became increasingly explicit as the Renaissance
humanists extended their classical studies and developed their thoughts. However,
it would be wrong to suggest Renaissance humanism came up with an alternative
(speculative) ‘philosophy of history’ by offering some new, systematic, overall
coherence to the course and meaning of human history. Indeed, although there
were Renaissance humanist philosophers, such as Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), many
scholars agree with Paul Kristeller’s assessment that, at least given a more narrow,
professional definition of ‘philosophy’, it is not possible ‘to define Renaissance
humanism by a set of specific philosophical ideas shared by all humanists, or to
regard humanism exclusively as a philosophical movement’.6 In short, no particular
philosophical system characterised ‘the Renaissance’, nor its humanist scholars,
let alone a particular ‘philosophy of history’. Rather, without producing the latter,
the Renaissance humanists nevertheless opened up the path for changes in the way
people ‘speculated’ upon history and its meaning. They effected this in two ways.
First, and more directly, their promotion of the new curriculum, the studia
humanitatis, meant replacing the scholastic curriculum which revolved around the
disciplines of logic, law, pure mathematics, science, astronomy, and metaphysical
(Aristotelian) philosophy. These disciplines were mostly directed towards the
eternally fixed verities of nature, existence, and the universe – that is, ‘towards
Heaven’. Instead, the humanist curriculum studied the changing things of this
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human world: grammar (the correct rules, understanding, and use of language);
rhetoric (the ability to articulate persuasive arguments based on a perceptive
practical sense); ‘poetry’ (meaning the study of classical poetry to appreciate and
replicate the ‘liberal-humanist’ culture and sensibilities of ‘Antiquity’); moral
philosophy (the study of justice in conduct and virtue in character, inspired by
such ‘greats’ as Plato and Cicero, rather than the ‘drier’ technical and metaphysical
components of Aristotle’s philosophy); and, indeed, history. Primarily the latter
meant reading the classical historians and, through imitation, and for good
vocational reasons, learning how to write histories of their own cities and biogra-
phies of their dignitaries.
But more broadly, amongst the best scholars it fostered what we may call a
properly historical consciousness whereby the ‘otherness’ of societies in the past was
recognised. As Rice and Grafton explain, ‘Since the medieval historian had
believed that his own historical epoch went back to the reign of Augustus (27 BC–
AD 14), he had been unconscious of the intellectual and imaginative gulf that had
to be crossed if the ancient world was to be understood . . . He regarded the Romans
as his contemporaries’.7 Now, Renaissance humanists recognised that the Roman
Empire, and periods preceding it, were long past, different societies, the meaning
of whose cultures, mores, and languages had to be recaptured by paying attention
to the contexts in which they flourished. Much work of the humanist scholars
involved the re-translation of ancient texts to render their true historical meaning,
as well as the avid discovery and historical interpretation of hitherto unknown or
neglected writings. Forgeries (e.g., the famous ‘Donation of Constantine’) were
uncovered, misunderstandings pointed out, stupidities exposed – perhaps above
all, that air of unmovable authority which characterised the views and pronounce-
ments of the leaders of the medieval world was ruthlessly and gleefully undermined.
Although it would be wrong to exaggerate the historical accuracy and expertise
of humanist scholars, as well as to concur wholeheartedly with their contempt for
(and, maybe, concept of) ‘the Middle Ages’, their contribution to the foundations
of the modern, objective, source-respecting discipline of history cannot be over-
estimated. But from our particular perspective of ‘speculative philosophy of history’,
in challenging the medieval framework within which people had been taught to
think about history, the emergence of this ‘historical consciousness’ (or sense of the
‘historicity’ of the past) opened up people’s imaginations, a crucial step towards
shifting basic presuppositions about the significance and meaning of ‘history’. In
short, it is difficult to see how later increasingly reflective, deliberate attempts to
‘make sense of history’ (i.e., the project of ‘speculative philosophy of history’) could
themselves make any sense without the prior emergence of ‘a sense of history’.
The humanists and ‘secularism’

The second way in which the Renaissance humanists effected the opening up of
changes in the way people thought about the significance of history, introduces us
to some of those more general features of the Renaissance. The most important of
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these is that they helped, so to speak, turn people’s eyes back towards this earthly
life. Here we may elaborate upon the humanist curriculum. Inherent in the
disciplines mentioned is a (‘reborn’) emphasis upon and interest in actual nature
and human life ‘on this earth’, of which ‘historical consciousness’ is but one
component. The study of the structure and meaning of language (increasingly
including Greek) directs attention to human life, thoughts, and intercourse; the
study of prose and poetic literature directs attention to the beauty and intricacies
of nature, and the range and subtlety of human emotions; the study of ‘rhetoric’ to
the capacity of man to perceive, reason, argue, make judgements, and influence
others through persuasion rather than through unthinking, bluntly ‘authoritative’
pronouncements; and the study of moral philosophy directs attention to the
(human) problem of free will in action, to choice between good and evil, to an
understanding of what is virtuous conduct between friends, parents and children,
rulers and subjects – and yes, between the individual and God.
The latter is important to mention because although the orientation of these
disciplines is so clearly ‘humanist’ – directed away from the eternities of ‘Heaven’
towards the varying, contingent, complex human world – it does not mean
Renaissance humanists were, in the main, anti-God (or atheistic) or even anti-
religion. It is probably true that some (e.g., Machiavelli) were atheistic, and
certainly true that some were sufficiently emboldened to become critical, if not
contemptuous, of the (Catholic or ‘Universal’) Church, culminating in the savage
critiques of such later figures as the famous Christian humanist, Erasmus, and his
equally famous contemporary and initiator of the Protestant Reformation, the
humanistically trained Luther. But the very mention of these two names reveals
that humanist criticism of the Church was more likely, and more effective, when
motivated by concern for religion rather than from those who, although not
rejecting God, disdained religion per se.
This latter type of humanist was represented by those who, without rejecting
God, nevertheless scorned a life dominated by religious belief and enthusiasm, (the
life of the numerous clerical orders, and of the poor, especially in the countryside),
and instead devoted themselves to the busy demands of an active urban life,
pursuing careers in business, commerce, banking, town planning, architecture,
administration, the arts, and government. Proud of their cities, wealthy enough to
have disposable income and time, and excited at the prospects of achieving public
recognition, they energetically pursued the good things of life – that is, a secular
life. They are sometimes described as ‘civic humanists’, were often republican in
their political ideals,8 and became ‘fashionable’. Whether their new, secular values
were inherently atheistic is a matter of philosophy, not history.9 More to the point
is how they themselves viewed God and religion, and here we must recognise that
in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries one would never publicly
disclose blatant atheistic views, so we cannot judge. But what seems likely is that
many ‘civic’ humanists were simply not interested in religion nor, possibly, in God
– not an uncommon position today. It is this equation which, for some, still links
Renaissance ‘humanism’ with what the term means in today’s world.
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Broader Renaissance securalism

In the preceding paragraphs we have outlined how the work of the Renaissance
humanists prompted changes in the way people thought about the past. But
the impact of the Renaissance on such intuitions was not restricted to that of the
humanist movement. It was a much ‘larger’, more amorphous movement, (perhaps
better denoted as a ‘period’ or ‘era’). That is, not all ‘Renaissance’ figures were
‘humanists’, especially if we restrict the latter primarily to scholars. Rather, the
latter brought to consciousness, but also reflected, important aspects of those
broader features which characterised Renaissance culture as a whole – and it is to
where those broader features relate especially to a shift in historical presuppositions
that we now turn.
Of such features, that shift to a secular outlook (so clear in humanist writing) is
basic, and is evidenced in numerous other areas. As people’s eyes ‘turned back’
towards man and nature, nowhere could this be seen more literally than in the
realm of the fine arts and architecture. Foreign visitors (including invading armies)
to Italian cities were astonished at the new style of church and civic building (and
elegantly designed town squares and gardens), so much more ornate, ‘this-worldly’,
and ‘human’ in the scale of their proportions and the interest of their decorations
than the Gothic style dominant elsewhere in Europe. Also, Renaissance sculpture
expressed the naturalness, beauty, and emotional nuances of the human form with
astonishing skill and sympathy, whilst painters revolutionised their art by learning
how to portray perspective and manipulate colour in order to make paintings of
people, animals, and nature lifelike to a degree never thought of, let alone attempted,
in symbolic medieval iconography, because it was not relevant from their other-
worldy viewpoint.
Economic activity and secularism

This new, intense interest in the nature and possibilities of secular, temporal life
was also manifested in a new outlook on economic activity. With a simultaneous
rapid increase in population and prosperity from around 1500 in many parts of
Europe, economic activities such as manufacture, commerce, international trading,
and banking expanded. Entrepreneurship, business know-how, public financing,
and the expansion of economic enterprises, became routine features of the fast-
developing ‘civil societies’ which increasing numbers of towns and cities became
during the Renaissance, spreading northwards from Italy into the rest of Europe.
The merchant and businessman, eyes turned very much ‘towards earth’, became
respected figures. Their perspective on life differed markedly from those of the two
leading medieval classes of the religious clergy and the lofty aristocracy. Hard work,
thrift, the rational pursuit of self-interest, concern for efficient and fair civil
administration, the production of wealth, and the respectability of an ordered
family and home, became a set of values (often, since, called ‘bourgeois’) which
made sense to increasing numbers of people. In short, a crucial component of the
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new secularisation of society which differentiated Renaissance culture was the

development of (pre-industrial) capitalistic practices and attitudes. We have only
to recall Marx’s brief sketch of the development of capitalism – it opened up the
world to an extent unheard of before10 – to recognise the importance of such
innovative economic activity in both evidencing and promoting a fundamental
shift in people’s consciousness regarding the value, significance, and potential of
this life on earth.
‘Individualism’
Another feature of Renaissance culture in general which helped clear the ground
for new perspectives on the ‘meaning’ of history was the growth of ‘individualism’,
a term used by Burkhardt to capture not only the emergence of certain people
remarkable for the variety of their talents and interests – the famed ‘Renaissance
man’ such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) – but also a more widespread
individualistic spirit amongst people in general. Increasingly those in the devel-
oping commercial cities of Europe, loosened from a previously church-dominated
rural way of life, began to think for themselves. This is already evident in the work
of the humanists. But the latters’ challenge to the intellectual dominance of
medievalism was only part of a more general attitude which challenged the
authority of tradition. The old ways of doing things, the old social attitudes,
the old set of religious and moral beliefs, were increasingly abandoned by urban
populations conscious of living in ‘new times’. In modern parlance, a ‘buzz’
circulated, invigorating people to explore new ideas, try out new inventions, open
themselves to new art, pursue the latest fashions in dress and modes of speech and
social conduct, and purchase the new commodities increasingly available through
the voyages of discovery, growth of international trade, and technological
innovation. The individual, if he was prepared to be an ‘individual’, alert to new ideas
and opportunities, prepared to think for himself rather than submit to tradition,
lucky enough to have an up-to-date (‘humanist’) education, and self-seeking
enough to find patronage where necessary, could make his own way in the
variegated, bustling city context, leaving behind the close-knit, tradition-bound,
communal-based mode of rural, agricultural life.
Such, it seems, is the typical ‘sociology’ of urban culture, at least since ‘the
Renaissance’ – namely, the emergence of individualistic values. Having mentioned
‘capitalism’ above, we should add that its typical ‘sociology’ is also frequently cited
as ‘individualism’ – but we should note this is somewhat misleading since the idea
that capitalism breeds ‘individualism’ was initiated in the nineteenth century as a
hostile (socialist inspired) judgement where it meant an ethic centred on self-
ishness, competitiveness and anti-socialness characteristic of a greed and
fear-driven exploitative socio-economic system spawning ‘alienated’ ‘individuals’
struggling to survive in a ‘society of strangers’. This is not to say the ‘individualism’
of Renaissance culture was nothing to do with the emergent capitalism of the period
– neither that the two ‘individualisms’ are not thereby connected. But it is to say
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that the ‘individualism’ attributed to Renaissance culture is different from today’s

often ideologically charged meaning. Applied to the Renaissance, its ‘individ-
ualism’ is usually presented as one of the most positive, progressive, civilised, and
humanising aspects of its culture. Here we may return to Marx, for while (as above)
we find him implicitly praising capitalism in its formative stages, we know what,
according to him, capitalism grew to become. Perhaps the same applies to
‘individualism’.
‘Cultural relativism’
The final general feature of the Renaissance era which prepared the ground for a
shift in people’s perspective on time and history was the emergence of a new
awareness of different societies and cultures – ‘cultural relativism’. Again, although
the humanist movement made an important contribution by reawakening an
historical sense and producing both classical and contemporary histories, other
factors also played their part. Not least was the revolution in geographical knowledge
effected initially by the early fifteenth century ‘rediscovery’ of Ptolemy’s second
century AD maps and texts (brought from the Byzantine Empire), and subsequently
by the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of discovery. Although Ptolemy’s geograph-
ical knowledge was limited to Europe, North Africa, and Asia, unlike medieval
‘world-maps’ stylised around Biblical fantasies, Ptolemy’s information was
sufficiently objective and accurate for people to build upon during the fifteenth
century so as to produce increasingly realistic representations of the oceans and
continents, until the point was reached where geographers such as Mercator
(1512–1594) simply left Ptolemy behind. In Mercator’s case, he had by then the
benefit of the knowledge gained by the spectacular achievements of explorers.
Beginning early in the fifteenth century, Portuguese discoverers in search of sea
access to African gold and slaves went further down the west coast of Africa (as
well as inland). Successful, by the 1480s their ambitions shifted to finding and
rounding the southern tip of Africa, to travel east across the seas to India to create
a sea-route to compete with the ancient (partly) overland spice trade from the Far
East. In 1487 Dias duly rounded the Cape (appropriately named ‘Good Hope’),
and eleven years later Vasco da Gama reached the southwest coast of India via the
Indian Ocean, paving the way for the rapid development of the Portuguese Empire
in the East. Not to be outdone, however, by the 1490s the Spanish authorities were
sufficiently convinced by Columbus (1451–1506) to finance the search for a direct
route west across the Atlantic to the riches of the East, leading to his famous
discovery of the Caribbean islands, after which, by the 1530s ‘the New World’ of
the Americas had been settled by Cortes’ intrusion into Mexico and Pizarro’s into
Peru. Prior to this, despite Columbus’ undying belief that he had in fact discovered
‘the East Indies’, it was clear the New World was undoubtedly a whole continent
standing between Europe and eastern Asia, and by 1521 Magellan had discovered
the straits near the southern tip of South America leading into the ‘calm’ sea he
called ‘the Pacific’, hoping the shores of the Far East would be but a short sail further
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west. In the event, his voyage, ending in the Philippines where he died, (the overall
circumnavigation being completed some eighteen months later), showed how
vast the Pacific Ocean is, and further revised understanding of the geography of
the globe.
In less than 150 years, starting from the early 1400s, the Renaissance impulse for
discovery, adventure, entrepreneurship, and worldly wealth had opened up not
only ‘the New World’, but a new world. Rather than the cramped, Biblically slanted
medieval notion of three continents (Europe, Asia, Africa) divided from each
other by three great ‘rivers’ and surrounded by a circular ocean, the world was now
seen as a collection of great continents connected via traversable oceans. This
new world not only changed people’s ideas about geography – it introduced them
to different societies with ‘novel’ cultures and their own distinct past. Atlases and
travel books became standard reading as people’s imaginations were excited
and their curiosity stirred. Gone forever was the narrow vision of European societies
as the culmination and centre of the human world and its history. Rather, already
stimulated by humanist writings, ‘cultural relativism, one of the distinctive
characteristics that differentiate modern from traditional culture, was powerfully
reinforced by the European discovery of non-Western societies’.11
Printing
The other factor facilitating the growing awareness that peoples ‘are the products
of an ever-changing flow of events and that . . . all human values, ideas, and customs
are contingent products of time and place’,12 is one that underlies everything else
we have selected from ‘the Renaissance’, and without which it is doubtful it could
have reached out to fashion the dominant features of the new era. This was the
invention of printing in the West (the Chinese had invented their own techniques
before AD 200). Although it is disputed whether Western printing was invented
in Holland, France, or Germany, Johann Gutenberg (c. 1395–1468) of the
Rhineland city of Mainz is traditionally regarded as producing the first printed
books from 1450 (his famous Bible in 1455). Initially limited to religious writings
and to imitating the aesthetic qualities of previous manuscript books, the printed
book rapidly spread to a growing European urban market of consumers eager to
learn and be entertained – for instance, by 1500, Venice alone had over 400 printers
(and by 1539 it reached the New World, in Mexico City).
Typically, as it spread, emphasis upon religious books was superseded by the
more secular interests of the Italian Renaissance. Not only religious subjects (and
not only in Latin but also in the vernacular tongues), but books of history, law,
mathematics, and secular stories – books on science, popular Latin classics, atlases
– architectural drawings and engravings of paintings – poured off the presses to
feed the educational, practical, and entertainment needs, as well as intellectual
curiosity, of the growing middle classes of European towns and cities. In the first
fifty years of printing (up to 1500) more than 6,000 separate works were published,
involving the production of ‘about six million books in approximately forty
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thousand editions, more books, probably, than had been produced in Western
Europe since the fall of Rome’.13 This phenomenal growth of the printed word in
the fifteenth century – nothing short of a communications revolution – gave an
enormous boost to the popularising of humanist writings and secular subjects, and
it is little short of providential that in 1453, almost simultaneously with the
invention of European printing, Constantinople, the seat of the Byzantine (East
Roman) Empire fell to the Ottoman Turks, prompting a mass emigration of scholars
to the West bringing numerous classical works unknown to medieval Europe to
further boost the humanist project.
Overall, given that ‘cultural relativism’ is intimately dependent on the
availability of knowledge and its reliable dissemination through a widely accessible
system, it is difficult to over-estimate the impact of printing in broadening people’s
minds and loosening their preconceptions during the Renaissance period. The
possibilities of a ‘new age’ in which human intelligence and knowledge could be
expanded and communicated to open up the potential for a fulfilling, worthwhile
temporal life characterised by the creative, tolerant interchange of different cultural
and social ideas was clearly felt by optimistic Renaissance spirits.
Limitations of the Renaissance ‘Cultural Revolution’

We have outlined the impact printing had in disseminating the secularism,
individualism, and cultural relativism of the Renaissance, and the role the
humanists and explorers played in forming this ethos, including a greatly
heightened historical awareness – and taken all together, we might thus describe
the Renaissance as a ‘cultural revolution’. However, as with what many might see
as an analogous ‘postmodern’ cultural revolution in today’s world, fuelled by an
analogous ‘communications’ and ‘globalisation’ revolution (IT), we should be
cautious not to exaggerate the extent or beneficence of its impact.
First, as for the printed book, it did not reach down to ordinary labouring people,
not only in the country but in the towns and cities, who had neither the ‘know-
how’ to use them (i.e., they were illiterate), the education to appreciate them, nor
the means to purchase them. And relatedly, the skills generated by familiarity with
book-learning and its associated social and cultural graces were irrelevant to the
working life and practices of the lower orders. Also darkening an otherwise rosy
picture is the twin legacy of propaganda and censorship in fifteenth century Europe.
As far as both the religious and temporal authorities were concerned, the new
medium of printing could be used for subversive propaganda purposes. If unchecked,
religious, moral, and political ‘heresies’ could be spread. The demon of ‘the demos’
could be unleashed. Arguably, this is precisely what happened as the new medium
first made widespread the criticism of the Universal Church from cultured,
respected figures such as Erasmus early in the sixteenth century, and then enabled
a veritable explosion of highly charged pamphleteering which fuelled the
Protestant Reformation from the 1520s onwards. But even prior to this explosion,
‘the systematic censorship of books, little practised in the Middle Ages, appeared
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very soon after the invention of printing, and spread with it’.14 By the 1530s both
church and state (Protestant and Catholic) had drawn up lists (‘indexes’) of
prohibited writings, continually revised and updated, such that ‘by 1560 censorship
of books in all its forms was universal in western Europe’.15 ‘The sword’ was applied
to ‘the pen’, but with as little eventual success as some hope, others fear, regarding
censorship of the Internet.
Similar reservations apply to the other features which contributed to a growing
fundamental shift in people’s assumptions about the meaning and significance of
history – namely, secularism and individualism and (to the extent it can be separated
from these) Renaissance humanism. If printing encouraged a ‘cultural relativism’
which figures such as Erasmus hoped would make for a tolerant, civilised, peaceful
and purposeful European community of peoples, by the 1530s it had also spawned
ugly, divisive, religious propaganda and censorship, and an ensuing period of
ignorance, superstition, and intolerance which threatened to plunge European
populations into an intellectual barbarism more real than that which the
Renaissance humanists thought had been left behind in ‘the Middle Ages’. Many
scholars agree that without printing the Reformation could not have happened.
Similarly, if geographical discoveries also contributed to ‘cultural relativism’, by
those same 1530s they also spawned the growth of African slavery and the ruthless
slaughter, enslavement, and ‘conversion’ of the Mexican Aztec and Peruvian Inca
peoples of ‘the New World’.
As for ‘individualism’, we have already commented upon a possible theory of how
it was to grow from refreshing, benign, creative origins in Renaissance times to
become an alleged Frankenstein’s monster accompanying an increasingly rampant,
inhumane capitalism some two hundred years later.
Similar mixed effects have been attributed to the rise of ‘secularism’, most
obviously the notion that beneficial, progressive, and humanising as was ‘the
turning of men’s eyes back to the things of this world’ after centuries of static
‘otherworldliness’, it nevertheless sowed the seeds for later periods in which
‘spirituality’ or the sense of the ‘sacred’ gave way to a morally bankrupt materialism
and soul-less atheism incapable of giving meaning to life. Some argue this began
to occur as an effect of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ of the succeeding seventeenth
century, whilst others point to the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century
as the crucial point at which ‘secularism’ turned sour. (Indeed, although from an
opposite value-assessment, Michelet claimed that such Renaissance features as
‘secularism’ only reached their fulfilment in the French Enlightenment).
Finally, as for Renaissance humanism, although the effects we have discussed
were real enough for brighter and more independent minds, for many it meant
little more than learning the classics by rote and an uncomprehending acceptance
of their relevance and significance – in short, a slavish and superficial following of
fashion. And even at the properly intellectual level, the alleged superiority of the
humanists’ cultural and philosophical norms inherited from ‘Antiquity’ were to be
challenged in the seventeenth century by the new proponents of the ‘Scientific
Revolution’ and the associated new philosophy of ‘scepticism’ and ‘empiricism’,
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which rejected the learning of Antiquity as overblown and erroneous, corres-

pondingly regarding humanist culture as presumptuous, narrow, and outmoded.
Continuing relevance of ‘the Renaissance’

Such, then, are the caveats surrounding our presentation of ‘humanism’, secularism,
individualism, and cultural relativism as those features of the Renaissance which,
combined, we claim as principally responsible for initiating a fundamental shift in
the way people thought about the meaning of human history. Some, if not all, of
these caveats may be true. Certainly, consideration of them in other contexts casts
salutary shadows upon an otherwise sunny perspective from which the above
formative features are seen as such positive characteristics of Renaissance culture.
However, regarding the ‘meaning’ of time and history, because people’s
intuitions or presuppositions have not (empirically) been subject to either large
or frequent variation – and because neither should we expect them to since they
plumb the very depths of what and who human beings think they collectively are
(i.e., the ‘philosophical’ question, ‘what are we here for?’, or ‘what is life about?’)
– then we are dealing with alterations in people’s mind-sets which can take
centuries to ‘filter’ in. Today we are prone to overestimate the pace of some change
in earlier history as well as perhaps exaggerate it in our own times. This is because
certain changes, particularly technological ones, can have rapid practical effects. But
changes in the way people think and behave regarding the larger questions of life
take longer to become established, and even longer to work out their full effects.
For example, it is little over a generation ago in the West that ‘the sexual
revolution’ began, partly prompted by the contraceptive pill. It is seen as provoking
a rapid change in moral attitudes, as well as in sexual equality. The associated
‘liberation’ of women has significantly impacted upon their role in the workforce,
with already felt effects on the institution of marriage and ‘traditional’ family norms.
In short, it seems a rapid ‘change’ in society. Yet I venture that historical experience
tells us ‘we haven’t seen anything yet’, and that only after another hundred or so
years will this fledgling ‘change’ have come to full fruition in a sexual-value
and family culture unimaginable to us now. During this long period of gestation and
unfolding of consequences numerous other changes in technology, attitudes,
and behaviour will occur, such that it may be increasingly difficult to continue
maintaining that ‘the sexual revolution’ began in the 1960s. Indeed, the whole
concept of ‘the sexual revolution’ may be subsumed under some different ‘change’,
or even be dropped altogether by future historians.
It is for these reasons that in treating of people’s presuppositions about how they
‘make sense’ of history itself, I have chosen those ‘conventional’ features of
humanism, securalism, individualism, and cultural relativity which play a part in
the ‘standard’ account of ‘the Renaissance’, even though the caveats pointed out
might (rightly) muddy the water when used to analyse other aspects of Renaissance
times. Indeed, not only have such caveats (and others) served to revise people’s
notions of the Renaissance’s connections with earlier periods and its significance
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for subsequent ones, some even doubt whether we should continue to use the
notion of ‘the Renaissance’ at all in periodising European history. And a logical
consequence of this, of course, is that the Renaissance humanist invention of ‘the
Middle Ages’ is also brought into doubt, as demonstrated by the following current
historiographical trends:
Conventional chronological markers which since at least the time of

Jacob Burckhardt delimited the end of the Middle Ages have . . . been
dissolved in recent years. Both Renaissance and Reformation are liable to
be appropriated by medievalists; alternatively the idea of an ‘Old Europe’
persisting until the convulsions of the French Revolution and Napoleonic
wars can enfold both medieval and early modern Europe into a single
pre-modern, or pre-industrial period.16
Again, there are doubtless many caveats which have rightly prompted such
probings, in this case into the very architecture of our historical periodisations –
yet, for those reasons given above, particularly centred on the nature of shifts in
people’s presuppositions about ‘what history is’, I do not think an account of their
nature and chronology is misdirected by employing the concepts of ‘the Middle
Ages’ and ‘the Renaissance’. On the contrary, it is perhaps just in the context of
changes in speculative assumptions about ‘the meaning of history’ that these
periodising concepts are substantively useful, (going beyond Julia Smith’s sensible
conclusion, which she might also apply to ‘the Renaissance’, that if ‘in neither
geographical nor chronological terms is the notion of “the Middle Ages” neutral,
value-free and unproblematic’, nevertheless ‘for all its faults, it remains in common
usage, and will assuredly continue to do so. Part of its usefulness is simply its
fuzziness, hallowed by five centuries of historical tradition’).17 To conclude this
section on historiographical ‘caveats’ which might otherwise threaten the integrity
of this part of our ‘guide’, we can add two observations not only of direct relevance
to the above considerations but also to our overall theme of the way people
‘understand’ the course of history.
‘Movements’
First, in managing the kaleidoscopic flux of past events one of the more ‘advanced’
things we do, as distinct from constructing narratives of individual conduct vis-
a-vis a political episode, military campaign, or writing a book, is to identify
‘movements’ in history such as ‘the Industrial Revolution’, ‘the Enlightenment’,
and, indeed, ‘the Renaissance’. A ‘movement’ is, then, a ‘large’ phenomenon, and
does not share the sharp resolution of other large-ish historical phenomena such
as wars and specific controversies such as ‘the Reformation’. (Elsewhere, in analysing
their nature I have suggested ‘movements’ are the largest historically recon-
structable, ‘real’ discrete phenomena).18 Given their multifaceted nature, they are
threateningly amorphous because made up of a collection of features and events
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otherwise with lives of their own, but which originate from, inter-transmit, and
exemplify a movement’s defining characteristics. As such, quite when and why
‘movements’ begin, where their parameters extend as they develop, and why and
when they end, are difficult questions. Correspondingly, their validity as real
phenomena is particularly vulnerable to destructive ‘de-construction’. ‘The
Renaissance’ offers a good example of all these points.19 But it is just because of
these inherent characteristics of ‘movements’ that their defining features are almost
necessarily overstated, oversimplified, and over-generalised. Since they cannot be
described or narrated with the accuracy of less complex historical phenomena,
they are denoted by (more or less abstract) key concepts such as ‘the rise of
individualism’ and ‘the turn towards securalism’ in the case of the Renaissance,
or ‘the critical application of reason to tradition and convention’ in the case of the
Enlightenment. Further, where a ‘movement’ spans maybe a hundred or more years,
its name can be used to periodise history, denoting, for example, ‘the Age’ of the
Industrial Revolution, or ‘the Age’ of the Renaissance. Potentially, this further
obscures the real nature of any movement, for much of what occurred, for example,
in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe had little to do with ‘the Renaissance’,
and this only serves to exacerbate the vulnerability of ‘movements’ to revisionist
critiques.
However, none of this should persuade us there are not such things as historical
‘movements’, or that they can be easily revised by picking on some alleged
determining feature. Rather, the point is to appreciate why, because of their nature,
their features are ‘overstated’, ‘oversimplified’, and ‘over-generalised’. It does not
mean these movements were not ‘real’, or that their features were something
radically different from how they are denoted. The critical historian should of
course look closely at how a movement is explained, but if (because untutored
regarding their nature) he is not appreciative of why all ‘movements’ are necessarily
overstated, he runs the risk of throwing the baby out with bathwater as he
undermines, amends, rejects, or otherwise ‘revises’ a movement out of recognition
or out of history altogether. Equally, however, in the effort to recognise or extract
discrete, identifiable phenomena from the kaleidoscopic flux of the past, neither
should the historian ‘invent’ historical movements willy-nilly or idiosyncratically
(as did a number of nineteenth-century thinkers20) – and this brings us to the
second observation.
Even where a case can be made for fundamentally revising the commonly accepted
notion of a particular movement, or for abandoning it altogether, people do not
happily concede. This is even more the case where, as mentioned above, a
particular movement is also used to periodise history by depicting an entire ‘age’ or
‘epoch’. Having argued why ‘the concept of the Italian Renaissance . . . has in my
opinion done a great deal of harm in the past and may continue to do harm in the
future’, Lynn Thorndike adds:
But what is the use of questioning the Renaissance? No one has ever
proved its existence; no one has really tried to. So often as one phase of
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it or conception of it is disproved, or is shown to be equally characteristic

of the preceding period, its defenders take up a new position and are just
as happy, just as enthusiastic, just as complacent as ever.21
In short, people do not readily relinquish the ‘standard’ periodisations of history,

however fuzzy or misleading they may be. However, perhaps neither should they,
since the standard periodisations may be replaced by a bewildering array of
alternative schemes, each with something to be said for them, but leading to no
consensus – and in its absence people would feel lost in an historical vacuum. In
other words, whether people should be readily prepared to revise their ideas
of history’s major ‘movements’ and periodisations is debatable. More to the point
for our purposes is that their very unwillingness is evidence of what I have claimed
– people simply do not quickly or willingly concede their ‘impressions’ or
‘perceptions’ of the course of history because underlying them is an ‘understanding’
or ‘intuition’ of the meaning or significance of history which, in its turn, is a crucial
component in forming their sense (whatever it may be) of ‘the meaning of
life’. (The same reluctance applies to individuals’ own personal history). Rightly
or wrongly, then, but certainly understandably, shifts in people’s presuppositions
about ‘the meaning of history’ or ‘the message of the past’ have been few and
slow, and there is no reason to expect this to change short of some extraordinary
(extraterrestial?) discovery of unmatchable provenance and unanswerable
relevance.
Thus it is, then, that despite those many areas in which doubt can be cast on how
far the Renaissance represented a sea-change in history – and, indeed, on whether
we should still believe in a movement, let alone denote an entire period of history,
called ‘the Renaissance’, – nevertheless in the case of tracing shifts in ‘speculative
philosophy of history’, the notion of ‘the Renaissance’ maintains its relevance to
the changes involved. Variously prompted or contributed to by technological
change (printing), military events (the fall of Constantinople), voyages of
discovery, literary research and retrieval, and economic development, those longer-
term, necessarily abstract-sounding (because ‘cultural’ and ‘philosophical’) factors
of secularism, individualism, and consciousness of cultural relativity began to mark
a shift in the way people conceived the significance of history. As already noted,
it did not demonstrate itself in any explicit works of ‘philosophy of history’ during
the Renaissance. These appear later. But it is apparent in many writings which
evidence the influence of the factors we have discussed, and it is to a sample of the
most famous (albeit often for other reasons) of these that we now turn.
Thomas More’s Utopia

Although More did not discuss history itself, nor present any speculations upon its
meaning, in his popular little book, Utopia, (written in 1513 when he was gaining
the reputation as a lawyer and man of letters which was to lead to his appointment
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as Chancellor by Henry VIII in 1521, and his subsequent martyred execution in

1535), it nevertheless typifies much that we have discussed in Renaissance culture
as relevant to our theme. His humanist background (obvious from other writings
displaying his Greek scholarship and brilliance as a Latin stylist) is evident in his
admiration for classical culture, for although the society he describes in Book Two
is not only imaginary but ‘pagan’, the educated, civilised, and rewarding richness
of the Utopians’ secular culture has an obvious classical reference. Part of More’s
purpose was to use his imaginary society as a stick with which to beat his
contemporary Europe and to open up people’s imaginations to the possibilities of
social and economic change in the context of the new autonomy of emerging
independent sovereign states. The book is replete with radical examples, some
humorously intended, others seriously, of ‘foreign’ social customs and moral values,
designed to foster that sense of ‘cultural relativity’ discussed above. But unlike
strictly secularly-orientated ‘civic’ humanists, More (like his friend Erasmus) was
a devout Christian humanist, and this explains why some aspects of Utopian society
are inspired by monastic ideals of disciplined communal living which, arguably, run
counter to the Renaissance spirit of ‘individualism’. However, More can be
interpreted as showing his sensitivity to this when, alert to the complaint that
Utopians have little individual freedom (for example, to work as they wish) he
retorts that because Utopian social and economic organisation, with its six-hour
working day, gives each citizen economic security and full access to the benefits of
education and culture, the Utopian is far freer than his average sixteenth-century
European counterpart, whose life can be described as slavery.22 (Later, in the early
twentieth century, the socialist/anarchist thinker, Kropotkin, was to draw a
distinction between ‘individualism’, by then associated with the debilitating effects
of capitalism on working people, and what he called ‘individualisation’, the ethical
goal of a communistically organised society only through which all would at last be
empowered to fulfil themselves as individuals).23
Another aspect of Utopia relevant to our theme is More’s (neo-) Platonism,
which not only further evidences his humanist background but also draws together
those components set out above. Although Aristotle continued to be studied in
Renaissance times, the humanists ‘rediscovered’ the philosophy of Plato. Compared
to the dry and technical scholastical selection and presentation of Aristotle, his
mentor’s philosophy was humane, idealistic, and inspirational, and presented
via lively, user-friendly dialogues. Rather than metaphysics and logic, Plato dealt
with more intimate moral issues such as love, justice, friendship, duty, the human
good, and the ideal state. Not only does More’s Utopia reflect these human-scale
interests of Platonism – in ‘imagining’ the ideal society it directly reflects Plato’s
philosophical approach and teaching. Put simply, if, for Plato, we call this action
‘just’ and that (different) action just, and another action less ‘just’ than yet another,
and so on, then all these different actions partake, to some degree, in the same
thing, ‘justice’. But no actual, single action exemplifies ‘justice’, nor ever could,
because ‘true’ or ‘real’ justice is a perfect idea, form, or ‘paradigm’. Similarly, most
people’s ideas of ‘justice’ only approximate towards it, as if seeing the truth only
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through a mist. It is the philosopher’s task to penetrate that mist to the reality of
the matter, to discover, for example, true, or ‘real’ justice, friendship, love, or
beauty. The actual, material world is then but a shadow of reality. ‘Reality’ is ‘ideal’.
As said, most people recognise ‘reality’ only partially, although they have an
instinctive awareness of it. Without the latter they would not even try to be just,
or have any idea what love is about, (let alone ‘true love’). We need our ‘ideals’,
then, and will be the more capable of approximating to realising them the more
philosophers can enlighten us about the ultimate truths of ‘reality’.
This Platonic approach to understanding the nature of reality is but one example
of that enduring and variegated philosophical tradition called ‘idealism’, which
essentially denotes the view that material ‘reality’ is insufficient in itself and
thus cannot be understood in its own terms, but is only explicable as in some
sense derivative of a more ultimate reality constituted by ideas, or mind. Equally
enduring and multifaceted, the philosophical tradition which rejects this is called
‘materialism’. As should be apparent, the popular meanings of both these
philosophical terms do relate to their technical meanings, particularly the former.
What we popularly call ‘an idealist’ is someone who strives towards, if not a perfect
world, then at least one that approximates more closely to the ‘ideal’ reality he
believes ‘exists’.
Thomas More designed his Utopia (meaning ‘nowhere’ or ‘no place’) as just such
an application of Platonic philosophy, in this case dealing with the ideal society.
Its details do not concern us here; rather, its importance for our theme is that, in
addition to being a highly individualistic work displaying a radically imaginative
awareness of ‘cultural relativity’, it seriously asked people to think of a better world,
of refashioning (if not revolutionising) their economy, social structure, and value-
systems. He even raises the question of whether human nature itself can be changed
through ‘social engineering’, almost implying that it is not fixed, but simply a
product of environment. To ask people to think in this way is to invite them to see
their future history as a residue of possibilities for their own conscious manipulation
of it – and by implication, I suggest, it invites them to shift their preconceptions
of the meaning of past history from one which sees it either in quasi-mythical (often
millennialist) terms derived from Biblical prophesies or as a monotony of ultimately
insignificant happenings from which nothing can be learnt. In short, how one
sees the future depends, so often, on how one sees the past. However More’s
enigmatically written Utopia was received (including his own reservations about
the relation between theory and practice, and the practical limitations of radical
change24), in its wide appeal it represented as much a contribution to a shift in presup-
positions about the meaning and significance of history as evidence that this was
already under way.
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Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527)
Machiavelli’s reputation
Given Machiavelli’s notorious reputation from The Prince, and the complication
of revisionist treatments which present his ideas in a favourable light, it is proper
to preface a treatment of his contribution to speculative philosophy of history by
attempting to lay ghosts which might otherwise haunt our understanding. Not
only in The Prince (1513– c.1515) but also in his much longer political work, The
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy’s History of Rome (1513–1517), examples
abound of violent and deceitful statecraft which Machiavelli praises. Repeatedly
he advises ‘princes’ (i.e., anyone in political control) to disregard conventional
(Christian) morality if necessary to secure the political well-being of the state.
Torture, cruelty calculatedly inflicted, assassination, lying, the breaking of promises,
utter ruthlessness, and moral hypocrisy are all legitimate instruments of statecraft
for Machiavelli. As for foreign affairs, the manual to a popular computer war-game
selects a typically chilling (albeit un-referenced) quote: ‘There is no avoiding war;
it can only be postponed to the advantage of others’.25 The traditional view is that
Machiavelli was therefore ‘a teacher of evil’.26
Against this, the ‘liberal’ view argues Machiavelli was a virtuous individual
dedicated above all to the security and welfare of people in society, (e.g., the great
moraliser, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, referred to Machiavelli as ‘a proper man and a
good citizen’).27 This view is derived variously from his Discourses, where he makes
clear his preference for republican rather than monarchical government; from his
realism as a ‘man of his times’; from an historical recognition of his appreciation
of classical politics and secular modes of thought; and most recently from a beguiling
presentation of the complexities and contradictions of Machiavelli’s personality
so well described and compiled by de Grazia.28
The truth lies somewhere in the middle if we accept the universal intuition
(explicated by Hegel29) that ‘evil’ is qualitatively different from ‘wrong’. The former
issues from a disregard of humanity as a whole (the conscience-less psychopath),
whilst the latter occurs where the wrongdoer, in pursuit of his objective, knowingly
violates someone’s rights. Yet sometimes the sheer awfulness of situations can make,
or seem to make, wrong actions necessary and thus ‘right’.
Machiavelli took himself to be studying the fates of states and nations, and it ill
behoves us, after such Second World War events as Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the
firebombing of German cities, to underestimate the literally awful moral territory
he was addressing. Disarmingly (and, many would add, courageously) he does so
with open eyes. He is dealing with real historical facts (e.g., Hannibal’s harsh regime
over his army, probably modelled on Polybius’ account)30 which, like Hiroshima,
will not go away despite wishful thinking. He is not an irresponsible, unreflective
moral degenerate – rather, he is a serious thinker tackling actual scenarios without
the moral hypocrisy with which his own writings have so often been approached.
This does not exonerate him from running the risk of skewed priorities and
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recommending ‘morally wrong’ actions, but it does show he was not a teacher
of ‘evil’.
On the contrary, De Grazia indicates that Machiavelli had a clear sense of ‘evil’
– and that he detested it.
Cruelty to large numbers of men . . . wrings from him the superlative,

‘cruellest’. . . . The instance of Philip of Macedon in the Discourses is
. . . instructive. History discloses that he shifted men bodily from region
to region as herdsmen shift their herds. [Machiavelli] considers this a
horror. ‘These methods are the cruellest and the enemies of every way of
life, not only the Christian but the human’. Niccolò here acknowledges
a moral law . . . a norm common to humans everywhere. So great a
destruction occurs also when entire peoples and their families move from
one place, forced by either hunger or by war, and go in search of a new
location, not to rule it but to settle in it and drive out or kill its inhabitants.
. . . A war involving a migrating or invading population ‘is the cruellest
and most terrifying’.31
Here we are surely reminded of the many examples of ‘ethnic cleansing’ around the
world today, and it is clear Machiavelli would have utterly condemned such
‘statecraft’ as evil. In summary, then, Machiavelli is not a teacher of ‘evil’ – he is
no demon. On the other hand, the ‘liberal’ counter-view is also incorrect. He is no
saint. Like most people most of the time, as uncomprehending of true evil as they
are incapable of it, he can however commit ‘wrong’, if only, in his case, by
recommending it. It is simply that, given the domain he was confronting, and being
a writer, his ideas were (despite censorship) spectacularly public.
Machiavelli on history
Machiavelli’s fascination for both classical and his more local, and contemporary,
history is amply proven in his political writings and in his Florentine Histories. His
abilities as an historian, however, are not our concern here. Rather, it is his
assumptions and more explicit thoughts on the nature and significance of history
which attract our attention. Although Machiavelli was not a ‘philosopher’ in the
sense of setting out an overall reasoned argument by defining his terms and making
one proposition follow logically from another, neither was he unreflective (or
uncommunicative) about how he viewed the meaning of history in general. This
is because, although interested in history for its own sake, his primary passion was
for the maintenance of an orderly governed society – and crucially, he thought
that in its pursuit people can, and leaders should, learn from history. This thought
is already indicative of a ‘philosophy of history’ underlying Machiavelli’s general
ideas, and as we will see, it informed his thinking on politics, morality, ‘the meaning
of life’, as well as on history itself. But why did he think people can learn from
history? And what does it teach? And, ultimately, what do Machiavelli’s answers
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to these questions tell us about the shift in presuppositions about the meaning and
nature of ‘history’ which, even more directly than More’s Utopia, his writings both
evidence and promoted?
Learning from history

Machiavelli dedicated his Discourses to two friends who encouraged him to ‘write
up’ the many thoughts on politics and history with which he entertained them,
stimulated by his reading of Livy’s History of Rome. He writes: ‘I have endeavoured
to embody in it all that long experience and assiduous research have taught me of
the affairs of the world’,32 and then begins the First Book with the bold declaration
that, ‘animated by that desire which impels me to do what may prove for the
common benefit of all’ – (‘evil’ Machiavelli?) – he has ‘resolved to open a new
route, which has not yet been followed by any one’. This ‘new route’ will involve
‘the discovery and introduction of . . . new principles and systems’, based on ‘my
little experience of the present and insufficient study of the past’.33 In short, he is
claiming, amongst other things, to ‘use’ or ‘view’ history in a new way. He remarks
on ‘the wonderful examples which the history of ancient kingdoms and republics
[‘Antiquity’] presents to us, the prodigies of virtue and of wisdom displayed by the
kings, captains, citizens, and legislators who have sacrificed themselves for their
country’. But ‘not the least trace of this ancient virtue remains’. Given that civil
law and medicine were still based on the learnings of Antiquity, it is surprising
that ‘to found a republic, maintain states, to govern a kingdom, organize an army,
conduct a war, dispense justice, and extend empires, you will find neither prince,
nor republic, nor captain, nor citizen, who has recourse to the examples of
antiquity’.
The chief reason for this sad state of affairs, Machiavelli suggests, is that in
addition to ‘the evils caused by the proud indolence which prevails in most of the
Christian states’, there is ‘the lack of real knowledge of history, the true sense of
which is not known, or the spirit of which they do not comprehend’.34 In short, he
is accusing his contemporaries of a political complacency and inefficacy born of
historical ignorance. Yet the ignorance he means is not so much of historical fact
– most of those who read it ‘take pleasure . . . in the variety of events which history
relates’35 – but ignorance of ‘the true sense’ or ‘the spirit’ of the history they read.
Although he does not elaborate on this crucial notion, he seems to mean people
do not use their imagination to understand historic figures as real individuals
produced by their times – they fail to empathise with the culture in which the
history they read took place. The result is they never think ‘of imitating the noble
actions, deeming that not only difficult, but impossible; as though heaven, the sun,
the elements, and men had changed the order of their motions and power, and
were different from what they were in ancient times’.36
Interestingly, Machiavelli here presents us with the other side of the ‘cultural
relativity’ coin, for if one side is that a lack of a sense of cultural relativity leads
people to disregard ‘alien’ cultures – they are not cultures at all but simply bizarre
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‘wonders’ of no relevance to their own lives – the inverse is where people do

‘recognise’ a cultural difference between past and present, but out of a mistaken
understanding of what fashions different cultures, still see no connection between
them and their own lives, (for example, that aspects of them might be worth
adopting). In other words, if straightforward xenophobia is one effect of a lack of
a sense of ‘cultural relativism’, the more complex case is where that sense is present
but is distorted by superficiality, leading to the misunderstanding that differences
in cultures are so radical as to be unsurpassable. Machiavelli thinks people are
wrongly overawed by the historico-cultural gap between their own times and
antiquity, such that, out of their failure to understand ‘the true sense’ or ‘spirit’ of
history, it appears to them impossible to learn from it. ‘Wishing, therefore . . . to
draw mankind from this error’, Machiavelli declares his intention to write about
the history he finds in Livy in a manner which treats of ‘all those matters which,
after a comparison between the ancient and modern events, may seem to me
necessary to facilitate their proper understanding’. He intends, no less, a comparative
history – but not for its own sake. Its purpose is to extract lessons about statecraft,
if not indeed construct a ‘science’ of it. This would seem to be what he means when
he boldly adds that this ‘should be the aim of all study of history’.37
Machiavelli, then, shares that defining Renaissance sense of ‘cultural relativity’
so important in altering presuppositions about the meaning of history. But he is
adding something. If previous Renaissance humanist scholars had helped generate
a consciousness of ‘cultural relativity’ by their historically sympathetic translations
and new editions of classical writings, it would seem Machiavelli remained
dissatisfied with the historical consciousness involved. In pointing to the historical
and cultural gap between ‘Antiquity’ and the Middle Ages, and between both and
the present, it was correct and beneficial. But left at that, it was not only
incomplete; it was damaging – because if history is viewed solely as a succession of
different ‘times’, it can lead to the idea that they are so different that history is no
more than an entertaining read; i.e., history is history, full-stop. There is nothing
to be learnt from it. Further, there is no ‘point’ in history itself – that is, the course
of history – for if societies are so radically dissociated by time that there are no
connecting threads between them, then the course of history is devoid of any useful
meaning for humankind.
Machiavelli does not believe this to be the case, and thus wants to inject into
historical consciousness the salutary notion of the connectedness of history overall.
This, as we will see, does not mean for Machiavelli that history is one single,
meaningful ‘story’ unfolding through, for example, ‘Providence’ or divine planning.
But it does mean that within the course of history men can find lessons, guidelines,
and principles (he does not call them ‘laws’) which can be applied for the benefit
of mankind. He views history as a (yet unopened) treasure-store of practically
applicable experience, and intends to make a start at unlocking it. But people’s
presuppositions about the nature of history – their ‘historical consciousness’ – need
shifting before it is worth their attending the opening.
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Principles underlying history – unchanging nature and human nature

As mentioned, Machiavelli does not gather together the various ‘principles’ he
sees as underlying history as a philosopher would. Rather, they emerge (and are
repeated) in various parts of both the Discourses and The Prince. The passages
quoted above have already revealed two. The ‘order of nature’ does not change; in
men’s perennial confrontation with the natural environment to secure safety and
material well-being, the forces of nature remain the same. Geographical differences
pertain, but within a given region, modern peoples face the same natural structures
and forces their ancient predecessors had to deal with. Second, human nature does
not change either. The way people handle their affairs and the ideas they have
may differ from place to place and from earlier to later times, but this is not because
the fundamental characteristics of human beings actually change. The remoteness
of past times is not due to there having been a different natural order and different
human nature. The same driving forces, the same fears and hopes, and the same
range of emotions have always characterised human beings, and Machiavelli is
famous for the cynical, or realistic, manner in which he views human nature in
general. More accurately, however, because of his overriding interest in statecraft
and government, the numerous and unflattering remarks he makes relate as often
to how human nature should be viewed for the purpose of government rather than
representing some overall view.
[W]hoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with
assuming all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature,
whenever they may find occasion for it. . . . Men act rightly only upon
compulsion: but from the moment that they have the option and liberty
to commit wrong with impunity, then they never fail to carry confusion
and disorder everywhere.38
[N]ature has created men so that they desire everything, but are unable
to attain it; desire being thus always greater than the faculty of acquiring,
discontent with what they have and dissatisfaction with themselves result
from it.39
Also, men have ‘the love of novelty, which manifests itself equally in those who
are well off . . . For . . . men get tired of prosperity’. This ‘love of change’ makes men
fickle and easily influenced, and if they are to be managed, the fundamental
principle that ‘men are prompted in their actions by two main motives, namely,
love and fear’, must be exploited, fear being the most reliable lever.40 Finally, ‘the
great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were
realities, and are often even more influenced by the things that seem than by those
that are’.41
Machiavelli gives this latter thought particular prominence in The Prince, where,
as an extension of his views on human nature (again, for political purposes), we see
him dividing humanity into three groups. First there is the vast majority of ordinary
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people, ‘the vulgar’, who simply have to be manipulated in one way or another, as
above. Hypocrisy (or ‘public relations’, ‘spin-doctoring’) is both necessary and
effective, ‘for men in general judge more by the eyes than by the hands, for every
one can see, but very few have to feel. Everybody sees what you appear to be, few
feel what you are . . . the vulgar is always taken by appearances . . .’.42 The second,
much smaller group, are ‘the few’ who, not deceived by appearances, know what
actually goes on, including appreciating the art of manipulation. (A nice anecdote
tells of a cynically smiling Machiavelli – one of the ‘few’ – standing at the back of
a crowd, studying the charismatic preacher-politician Savanorola holding ‘the
many’ in the palm of his hand). The third, even smaller group, are those actually
in power, particularly the individuals involved. All three groups are brought together
in Machiavelli’s chillingly economical statement, ‘. . . the world consists only of
the vulgar, and the few who are not vulgar are isolated when the many have a
rallying point in the prince’.43
Nature does not change her ways – neither does humankind change its ways.
‘Reflecting now upon the course of human affairs, I think that, as a whole, the
world remains very much in the same condition, and the good in it always balances
the evil’.44 What, then, makes for change? (for without it, there would be no history
at all). Machiavelli’s answer is to add, ‘but the good and evil change from one
country to another’. After the fall of the Roman Empire, he tells us, the
extraordinary concentration of good that characterised it was ‘scattered among
many nations’, some of which do themselves an injustice in praising their past
more than their present. Not so, however, for Italy and Greece, in whose past ‘there
are many things worthy of the highest admiration, whilst the present has nothing
that compensates for all the extreme misery, infamy, and degradation of a period
where there is neither observance of religion, law, or military discipline, and which
is stained by every species of the lowest brutality’. 45 So things do change, and,
according to Machiavelli, in finding what causes change we will find the other
‘principles’ or ‘factors’ which underlie history.
‘Education’: law, role-models, and religion

The most frequent explanation he gives for a country’s changing circumstances and
character is ‘education’. He does not mean ‘education’ in the formal sense of
schooling, but in the broader sense of the (moral, political, and religious) culture
instilled in the people. Instilled in several ways, the most important for Machiavelli
are the public effect of the laws and of their upholding; the propaganda value of
great actions by ‘virtuous’ men; and the character of religion. The ‘vulgar’ need
inspiration and fear to maintain that public-spiritedness which is the backbone of
a healthy state – and any state naturally begins to lose its early vigour. Thus,
regarding law and its observation in the Roman Republic:
Even if we had not an infinity of other evidences of the greatness of this

republic, it would be made manifest by the extent of her executions, and
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the character of the punishment she inflicted upon the guilty. Rome did
not hesitate to have a whole legion put to death according to a judicial
decision, or to destroy an entire city, or to send eight or ten thousand men
into exile. . . .46
As for the exemplary actions of great men, not only is it crucial for their sake that
they receive appropriate public honours, the official celebrating and story-telling
of their great deeds is also an excellent instrument of cultural education by
providing the ‘vulgar’ with inspiring role-models.
Finally, as for religion, because it is ‘the most necessary and assured support of
any civil society’,47 . . . ‘everything that tends to favour religion (even though it
were believed to be false) should be received and availed of to strengthen it’, and
thus it is an essential duty of rulers ‘to uphold the foundations of the religion of their
countries, for then it is easy to keep their people religious, and consequently well
conducted and united’.48 Also, to claim divine authority and miraculous
intervention in favour of a constitution (or founding system of law) adds
immeasurably to its credibility with the people. Where a country’s religion begins
to weaken and stray from the vigour of its original principles, this will cause
important changes in people’s attitudes, morality, and political culture, thereby
constituting a major factor, for Machiavelli, in provoking historical change. He
makes no secret of his contempt for the state of the Christian religion in his own
day; ‘Nor can there be a greater proof of its decadence than to witness the fact that
the nearer people are to the Church of Rome, which is the head of our religion,
the less religious they are’. It has strayed so far from its founding principles that ‘her
ruin or chastisement is near at hand’,49 and much of the parlous state of Italy must
be laid at its door. In addition to the general effects of the religion’s decadence, in
practice any religion’s educative role is most immediately and effectively
transmitted in its daily rites and frequent festivals. These ‘set the tone’ of a people’s
value-system and are thus a powerful historical instrument. In his own day
Machiavelli complains that the Christian religion,
glorifies more the humble and contemplative men than the men of action.
Our religion, moreover, places the supreme happiness in humility,
lowliness, and a contempt for worldly objects, whilst the other [the
ancient Roman religion], on the other hand, places the supreme good in
grandeur of soul, strength of body, and all such other qualities as render
men formidable . . . These principles seem to me to have made men
feeble.50
Although Machiavelli does not propose ditching Christianity for the secular
advantages of Roman paganism (not that he would have any theological objection
in my view), there are many examples of his wish that Christian rites, ceremonies,
and spectacles were more enthralling and awe-inspiring – even ferocious and
bloody.51
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The role of individiuals

If ‘education’ is one factor explaining why things change (i.e., ‘what drives history’),
another returns us to the actions of great (or infamous) individuals – but now
directly for their role in historical change rather than for their educative effect. No
reading of Machiavelli can fail to reveal that he considers individual human agency,
particularly of those in power, as a major determinant of (historical) change.
Wrongly underplayed in much recent historiography and historical thinking
because of a misguided disdain for narrative (and a consequent preference for using
abstract ‘factors’ in historical analysis), the role of individuals in ‘making things
happen’ is so obvious to Machiavelli that he does not feel any need to defend or
explain it. After all, the world consists only of the vulgar, the few who are not
vulgar, and ‘princes’. Constantly, in all the lessons he extracts from his ‘new route’
of comparative history, he focuses upon the actions of those in power. Whether
they succeed or fail, or are ‘virtuous’ or evil, how they perform has potent effects
either for good or ill.
Although his thinking is restricted principally to the political and military
aspects of history because of his fascination in statecraft, this does not mean he is
not interested in the broader topic of cultural changes (e.g., religious change).
Rather, it would seem they can be subject to the determining skill of ‘princes’. In
short, apart from his fascination in power per se (its acquisition, exercise,
maintenance, expansion, and loss), implicit in Machiavelli’s approach to history
is an instinct akin to Aristotle’s notion of politics as the master-science – namely,
that in addition to those special techniques intimate to the practice of ‘politics’ in
the narrow sense, ‘politics’ is not simply one area of expertise or ‘techné’ amongst
others (medicine, warfare, agriculture) but is the overarching umbrella which
embraces all aspects of society. This is because, from its unique overall perspective
of governing society, it determines the relative importance of society’s components.
Rightly or wrongly, then, there is a larger logic to Machiavelli’s belief in the
importance of individual agency in history than simply his fascination in power.
The exercise of statecraft, necessarily by those individuals in political power, is for
him one of the principal causes of change.
‘Fortune’
This said, however, there is a further force which contributes to change for
Machiavelli, and it as often conflicts with the energies of great individuals as assists
them – namely, fortune. Potent as the actions of strong political leaders may be,
fortune can overturn their hopes and achievements. Alternatively, fortune can
provide the circumstances, otherwise incapable of being fashioned by men, in
which great leaders can fulfil their potential despite the odds. We have earlier
encountered the classical notion of ‘fortune’, and it is no surprise that Machiavelli
means the same, particularly where it refers not to mere chance but to a definite
force. Quite what he thought this ‘force’ was is difficult to say, but from his frequent
references to it (and his explicit treatment of it in Chapter 25 of The Prince) it is
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clear it is something tangible for Machiavelli, rather than a metaphorical way

of pointing to the uncertainties which dog human affairs. As a distinct ‘agent’ in
history, he presents ‘fortune’ as immensely powerful and unpredictable. Occasion-
ally it may act as the deliverer of moral retribution, but that is not Machiavelli’s
dominant theme – usually (though not always) fortune is vindictive and destruc-
tive. Often he seems to equate it with ‘the character of the times’, or, alternatively,
suggest the latter are caused by it. Either way, irrespective of anything people can
do about it, there are good times and bad times, propitious times and threatening
times, fast-moving times and slow-moving times. ‘Fortune’ determines the times
we live in, and can rapidly change them so that those who, by chance or intelli-
gence have prospered by adapting to ‘the times’, can be ruined if then unable to
change their ways to meet the new. Repeatedly, Machiavelli stresses that, given
fortune’s power over ‘the times’, adaptability is the key to success. Famously, the
only way to manage the caprice of fortune is, poetically, to treat her as a woman,
boldly and fiercely rather than ‘coldly’ and rationally, for although she cannot be
defeated, she may let herself be subdued by the young and impetuous.52
Finally, there is one further way in which fortune’s governance of history can be
challenged. It seems to Machiavelli that ‘fortune is the ruler of half our actions, but
that she allows the other half or thereabouts to be governed by us’. In a non-too
consistent passage, Machiavelli compares fortune to ‘an impetuous river that, when
turbulent’, causes chaos. But the river can also be quiet (fortune chooses to withdraw
from governing the affairs of men?), and when this occurs, men can build dykes to
restrain the river next time it tries to flood. Just so with fortune; when quiet
(approximately half the time?), people can prudently take measures to minimise
its return.53
Given this account, what exactly is this ‘force’ Machiavelli believed in as a
potent determinant of history? Leaving aside the metaphors of the flooding river
and the wilful woman inviting passionate seduction, we should recognise a rational
core in what Machiavelli intuits about ‘history’ from this somewhat uncertain set
of ideas. Clearly humankind has never been in control of its own circumstances
and, thus, history. There are ‘forces’ man cannot control. Increasingly, through
scientific research in its broadest sense, we have at least come to recognise what
some of these forces are, and may even learn how to control, or at least restrain,them
– stock-market crashes, economic movements, population expansions, class-
structures, diseases, the causes of political alienation and terrorism. But there are
others we know of but can do little about, such as climatic changes. Knowing the
nature of such ‘forces’, we may fear them but do not refer to them as ‘fortune’ (or
‘fate’). Where, however, ‘things happen’ of a totally unforeseen nature – epidemics,
natural catastrophes, startling political and social developments due to ‘changing
times’ – we have to admit there are ‘forces’ unknown which, with apparent
capriciousness, help determine history. This is what Machiavelli means, except he
gathers ‘them’ into one (‘poetical’, classical) ‘force’, namely, ‘fortune’.
In his day, however, the state of scientific, economic, sociological, meteo-
rological, and medical knowledge was miniscule compared to today. To Machiavelli
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and his contemporaries, then, so many of the forces we know, or think, help
determine history (and thus make it intelligible) were unrecognised. In modern
parlance, they must have felt alienated from history, relatively powerless before its
march. It is in this light we should appreciate not only what Machiavelli means by
‘fortune’ (and why he refers to it so frequently), but also what he says about it.
Here, rather than see him as a fatalist, obsessed by fortune’s power over history, he
appears in a more positive light, for he is attempting to lift a corner of the veil of
ignorance concerning history’s determinants. In the ‘political science’ he constructs
from his ‘comparative historical’ studies, he is uncovering how ‘politics’ and
‘statecraft’ work, to show how men of the right calibre can take matters into their
own hands. It is true that ‘fortune’ can still intervene, but if men understand the art
of government (including warfare) they can at least manage affairs better when
fortune strikes, and at best craft a viable state whilst it is dormant. In short,
Machiavelli starts the ‘scientific’ task of revealing the ‘forces’ underlying the course
of history. Limited as it is in scope (i.e., ‘politics’), and inadequate as its conclusions
might be, his analysis is tangible evidence of an approach not only reflecting but
extending the shift in presuppositions about ‘history’ achieved in the Renaissance
– one built upon by subsequent thinkers on history.
Cycles
We may conclude this exploration of the ‘principles’ which Machiavelli thought
underlie history by briefly assessing two further (alleged) ‘factors’ in his thinking –
the notion of historical/political cycles, and the role of God. Regarding the first,
there are those who interpret certain passages from the Discourses and the Florentine
Histories as showing Machiavelli straightforwardly subscribing not only to Polybius’
notion of recurrent political cycles but also to the larger notion of history as an
eternally recurring circle along cosmological lines. For example, Jaki includes
Machiavelli in noting that the Renaissance saw (in some) a renewed interest in and
acceptance of the basic cyclical theory of history, because Machiavelli offers ‘a
classic description of history as an ever recurring treadmill’.54 Predictably this
permits Jaki to include Machiavelli as one of those who failed to make any
contribution to the idea of human progress. We may also revisit Nisbet, who adopts
the same line on a Machiavelli who ‘sees in history nothing but ups and downs,
cyclical returns’,55 and therefore contributes to and confirms Nisbet’s predictably
revisionist, but here extraordinary, view that there are no ‘ideas of progress to be
met with throughout the whole Renaissance’.56
Trompf, however, by virtue of a detailed examination, adopts a less straight-
forward interpretation. Although doubts linger over Machiavelli’s access to the
actual texts, ‘during the sixteenth century the Polybian cycle of governments makes
a dramatic reappearance in the pages of Machiavelli’.57 However, not only does
Machiavelli take an eclectic approach to its details, he removes that element of
‘naturality’ (which alluded to some kind of unknowable ‘divine’ or ‘supernatural’
force) driving the cycle, seeing it driven instead by the human-scale interplay
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between men’s actions and the necessities of situations. Historical circumstances

can repeat themselves, with similar outcomes, but the factors which produce this
‘are neither supernatural nor extrahuman. . . . History remains the domain of
human action’.58 In Trompf’s hands, then, although we would expect Machiavelli
to be interested in this famous classical theory of inexorable political cycles, he uses
some parts of it and abandons others, and most particularly, removes any
‘superstitious’ notion of ‘the wheel of fortune’.
If we were to add that the recognition of historical repetition can be viewed as
neither novel nor ‘philosophical’, but as a common-sense idea which occurs to
anyone, (pace Trompf’s special interest in the topic), then we move even further
away from the view that a belief in ‘supernatural’ inevitable cyclical returns was an
important factor in Machiavelli’s approach to understanding the forces determining
history. And (in a later analysis) this, indeed, is precisely where de Grazia takes us.
Regarding the Polybian cyclical theory he tells us that Machiavelli, ‘[h]aving
presented the theory (note that he calls it an opinion). . . . Niccolò takes it apart,
gently, quickly, wittily’.59 De Grazia observes that ‘if cycles exist as Polybius would
have them, the lessons of history would be restricted’, and ‘most of Niccolò’s study
and experience would be good for little except contemplation’.60 In short,
Machiavelli does not subscribe to a theory of inexorably recurring political cycles.
Running counter to the grain of his activist, interventionist approach to (political)
history, ‘[t]he theory of political cycles appears early in the Discourses and, in effect,
is then discarded’.61
We may comment that this, of course, is not to say that history does not have
its ups and downs, or even less that history is, for Machiavelli, purposefully linear.
‘Fortune’, as we have seen, is a powerful ‘force’, but even where he refers to it
popularly as a ‘wheel’, this neither means Machiavelli believes in the classical
theory of political cycles nor even that, as a ‘wheel’, fortune ensures eternal
historical repetition. More typically he uses the metaphor to capture the notion of
fortune confounding, or overturning, the plans and just deserts of men. It would
seem, then, that de Grazia is the more correct and that those who interpret
Machiavelli as believing in history ‘as an ever recurring treadmill’ have been misled
by some general passages where he (unremarkably) reminds us of the ups and downs
of history, and by confusing his notion of the role of ‘fortune’ (particularly as a
‘wheel’) with the classical idea of cyclical repetition. Rather, history is neither
cyclical nor linear – it is, simply, threateningly chaotic.
God
Finally, in this examination of what drives history for Machiavelli, what about the
role of God? The answer seems to be that God has no role. There is no overarching
‘divine providence’ planning the course of history. We cannot even be sure what
Machiavelli’s real thoughts were on ‘God’, although we know what they were on
religion’s role in society, and on the state of the Christian religion in particular. He
probably did have some sort of ‘belief in God’, but in keeping his references to Him
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uncontroversial, general, and brief, he can be read in different ways – either as

merely paying lip-service to a God in whom he believes but regards as unknowable
and whose operations in history are not evident, (‘that our free will may not be
altogether extinguished’)62 – or as paying lip-service to a (Christian) God in whom
he does not believe – or even, between the lines, as advocating atheism. As ever,
we must recognise the power of censorship in the sixteenth century, both to
endanger writers and deprive them of a hearing; and also that, irrespective of the
times, many individuals sensibly wish to keep their deepest thoughts to themselves.
Whatever the case with Machiavelli, it is clear he omits ‘God’ as one of the factors
behind history. He does not ask us to bring ‘Him’ into our presuppositions regarding
the meaning of history, even where he appears to. He opens the famous Chapter
25 of The Prince by saying, ‘It is not unknown to me how many have been and are
of opinion that worldly events are so governed by fortune and by God, that men
cannot by their prudence change them . . .’. He then embarks on a discussion,
reviewed above, of ‘how much fortune can do in human affairs and how it may be
opposed’.63 Not accidentally, ‘God’ is not mentioned throughout the remainder of
the chapter.
Summary comments
As noted, the complex, controversial period of ‘Renaissance’ did not produce its
own distinctive ‘philosophy of history’. But it would be absurd to ignore the
Renaissance contribution to ‘philosophy of history’ on such grounds. As we move
forward to later explicit and elaborate ‘philosophies of history’, one rationale of this
‘guide’ is to show they did not simply appear from nowhere. On the contrary, the
very grounds on which they stood – an appreciation of the ‘historicity’ of the past;
the linking of culture, religion, politics, and, latterly, class and economics, into a
holistic appreciation of historical societies; the preparedness to question authority
and generate new notions of ‘what history is about’; and the urge to identify and
understand the causes and/or ‘forces’ of historical change – were uncovered during
and because of those features of Renaissance culture we have surveyed. And
although this ‘guide’ does not purport to be a history of ‘philosophy of history’, the
preceding chapters make clear that neither, in their turn, did these Renaissance
shifts in assumptions about the nature and meaning of history simply appear from
nowhere.
So many of the features making for these Renaissance shifts were reflected and
(sometimes unpalatably) extended by Machiavelli that it is fitting this survey of
relevant Renaissance trends should culminate in his ideas – (indeed, de Grazia
goes so far as to refer to Machiavelli as ‘our philosopher of history’).64 His writings
exemplify, deliberately, the consciousness of a new approach (his ‘new route’);
individualism; alertness to ‘cultural relativity’; and perhaps above all, his marked
secularism. This latter feature (also famous in debates over his morality) invites
comment, particularly in the light of that theme which has already emerged as
integral (for some) to speculative ‘philosophy of history’ – namely, the question of
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human progress. Machiavelli can be viewed as a frighteningly secular thinker. As a

precursor of the moral vacuum many felt the later Scientific Revolution’s ‘cold
philosophy’ spawned, (e.g., in Hobbes), there is no ‘superhuman’, or ‘ideal’,
underpinning to morality for Machiavelli. Symptomatically, from what he writes
(or omits to write), ‘God’ plays no role in humankind and its history. Belief in
deities, however, plays a crucial role for Machiavelli insofar as the organised
religions it generates may be more or less manipulable for the political projects of
originating stable societies via ‘authoritative’ legislative frameworks and
maintaining a politico-moral culture favourable to the security of the state. In
short, religion is simply ideology – and the better the function and dynamics of
ideology are understood, at least, by ‘princes’ and those of ‘the few’ who advise
them, the more effectively can ‘the vulgar’ (‘the masses’) be managed. Yet, sinister
(or realistic) as this may sound, the purpose of this aspect of statecraft – managing
‘the vulgar’ – is not to oppress them, nor exploit them for economic gain. Rather,
as for any aspect of statecraft, it is to secure those minimal conditions essential for
all in a society to extract what value they can from their particular lives. The latter
is up to them, but without effective law, without an administrative system to tackle
plague, drought and starvation, and without security from invasion, genocide, rape,
plunder, and forced migration, the value this life may offer is aborted. And it would
seem that, for all ‘practical’ purposes, there is only this life, here on earth, for
Machiavelli.
As the ‘cold’ observer par excellence, he writes more than once that he is no
‘idealist’, no wishful thinker. Not only is he open-eyed about the selfish-
interestedness, fickleness, gullibility, and moral hypocrisy of mankind – (he accepts
it, and advises on how to make the best of it, for everyone) – he is equally open-
eyed about ‘history’. There is no divine plan for, or underneath, it. Neither is there
any inbuilt dynamic making history progressive for humankind. Not a ‘believer’ in
human, or historical, progress in general, he believes that in the ups and downs
of history, ‘virtuous’ leaders can carve out the above minimal conditions for a
human life and, with luck and foresight, sustain them long enough for the the fruits
of a civilised society to ripen – hopefully to the extent of achieving glory in the
annals of history for both that society and its leaders.65 There is no higher reward
– not salvation, nor human perfection, nor the perfect society, nor assured human
progress into the future. There are simply human-beings, fixed in their nature, on
an earth fixed in its nature. To that extent we are lost, save for the energy,
intelligence, and courage we can muster to make our own history. ‘History’ itself is
not going to help us – not being directed, it has no direction. But it does provide
a storehouse of experience we can learn from, rather than approach it with
irrational, erroneous suppositions about its ‘meaning’.
Although not a nihilist, there are respects in which Machiavelli prefigures the
twentieth-century existentialists. Although lacking their psychological sense of
detachment, the notion that ‘existence precedes essence’ – that there are no
blueprints men ‘must’ follow – pervades his historical thinking. (Even to the extent
his beloved Roman Republic does provide a ‘blueprint’, it is one they forged for
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themselves). And as for the consequent – that we are thus ‘condemned to be free’ –
there is indeed an unsettling starkness about Machiavelli’s view of the relation
between history and humankind. Relatedly, this is also apparent in his moral
thinking, for if by pointing to his clear attachment to the secular ideals of classical
moral thought one rightly dismisses those who call him ‘immoral’, one nevertheless
feels he chose them as the most ‘appropriate’ or ‘effective’ rather than their imposing
themselves on his conscience. From this ‘proto-existentialist’ perspective it is
difficult to separate his moral from his historical assumptions, or to see which
determined which.
But our final comment must be that, in opening the door to modernity,
Machiavelli went further than his contemporaries. We would overestimate, ‘over-
modernise’, the contribution of the Renaissance period to the development of
‘philosophy of history’ were we to take Machiavelli as representative of Renaissance
changes in historical assumptions. Rather, in epitomising its possibilities his ideas
were in some respects untypical. If the predominant tone of Renaissance culture was
one of self-praise and hopes for a more civilised future, Machiavelli’s contempt for
his own country’s times, in terms of its ‘political culture’ – (for him, that which
determines all else) – knew no bounds. And if the most important contribution of
the Renaissance to altering ideas on the nature and meaning of history was its
secular emphasis, most people (including intellectuals) remained not only religious
but ‘superstitious’, for instance believing in magic and witchcraft, and holding ‘pre-
scientific’ notions on cosmology, alchemy, and medicine. No doubt Machiavelli
subscribed to some of this himself, but in respect of the cool, neutral rationality he
brings to his consideration of statecraft and the nature of history he shows himself
unencumbered by much of the baggage cluttering his contemporaries’ clarity of
vision. In short, if a major feature of Renaissance culture was to turn men’s eyes back
to earth, Machiavelli went further – he also opened their eyes, too wide for most,
to what they saw. As it happened, they did not have to look. The corner of the veil,
which Machiavelli’s probings had lifted on the nature of history, fell back into
place as even before his death in 1527 Europe plunged into a period of politico-
religious turmoil and reactionary intellectual sterility. The secular impulse of the
Renaissance, promising so much in the humanistic understanding of history, and
bearing fruit in Machiavelli, was stopped by the Reformation. The project of a
rational attempt to ‘make sense of’ history was not to be resumed for many decades,
and not to be attempted comprehensively and systematically (but then for the first
time) until the early eighteenth century by the then obscure, but now increasingly
famous, Giambattista Vico.
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6
AN INNOVATIVE INTERLUDE
From Machiavelli to Vico
Introduction
Despite the claims made for St Augustine as the ‘first philosopher of history’,1 with
good reason most scholars agree that Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), from Naples,
better deserves the title. This is because he was the first thinker to produce an
overall ‘theory’ of the course and meaning of history derived from objective study
and the conscious application of abstract principles. Unlike Augustine, Vico’s
motivation was not primarily ideological. He was principally concerned to
investigate ‘the truth’ about human history for its own sake, (although, as we will
see, this did not preclude him from reaching prescriptive conclusions). In these
respects we may compare Vico’s to Machiavelli’s ‘scientific’ thinking about history.
But whereas Machiavelli was no philosopher, in the sense that he did not construe
his ideas on history from abstract principles brought to light and defended, Vico’s
project was explicitly ‘philosophical’. As he tells us in his Autobiography, he
laboured for many years in comparative solitude to find the key to unlocking
numerous problems in understanding the logic of the course of history – and it is
clear he was open-minded enough to change his mind over certain issues on
occasions.
Vico’s originality
In these senses, then, Vico is recognised as a ‘philosopher’ in today’s parlance – and,
moreover, as the first philosopher of history. In itself this would establish his claim
to originality. But in addition, numerous scholars have remarked that Vico’s
thought is also intrinsically astonishingly novel. There is much to be said for this,
but it would be wrong to conclude our first real philosopher of history’s ideas sprang
from nowhere. Although the directions Vico’s thinking takes were very much his
own, the issues he addressed were neither invented nor discovered by him. Rather,
he was responding to intellectual developments, both current and recent in his
times (which spanned the latter part of the seventeeth, as well as nearly half the
eighteenth, century). We finished the last chapter with Machiavelli, the High
Renaissance, and the beginning of the Reformation, and now seem to be bridging
some 150 years to reach Vico. Did nothing important to our theme occur between?
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The answer is that, far from a period bereft of significant and relevant intellectual
development, the intervening years were replete with innovation in the domains
of philosophy, science, religion, political theory, law, literature, and history – such
that the very foundations of the modern European mind were laid. Vico was far
enough away from, yet still close enough to, this giant formative process to benefit
from a perspective which generated an astonishingly wide scope and synthesising
impulse in his thought. Thus it is that exploring those intellectual currents which
Vico was responding to involves outlining many of the principal features of post-
Reformation and seventeenth-century European thought – features the reader
might fear were being neglected by our shift from Machiavelli to Vico. That this
is no mere ploy of exposition on your guide’s part is partly confirmed by Vico
himself, for it is clear he conceived his major work, The New Science, as not only
what we now call a philosophy of history, but as nothing less than a comprehensive
‘new science’ which would disentangle, correct, and make new sense out of
numerous of the intellectual currents flowing from the Renaissance – in short, a
synthesis of philosophy, historico-cultural studies, and politico-legal theory which
was not only grand but so innovative that Vico regarded his work more as a
superseding of previous knowledge than a synthesis. Having explained what is wrong
with previous ideas, breathtakingly he tells us that ‘for purposes of this inquiry,
[into no less a topic than the understanding of world history, culture, and politics!]
we must reckon as if there were no books in the world’.2 Thus Vico’s sense of his
own originality; and it must therefore be with some irony that we have to insist that
for the purposes of our enquiry (into what Vico’s ideas were) we must precisely
‘reckon with’ the ‘books in the world’ which preceded his, since if we do not know
what he was responding to we will not understand his thinking even if we ‘under-
stand’ what he writes.
Vico’s intellectual inheritance
The Scientific Revolution

We have claimed that Vico’s philosophy of history, explicit in his New Science
(final edition, 1744), is the product of his reflections on major intellectual
movements developed since the Renaissance. Of these, arguably the most
significant was what (since the eighteenth century)3 we call ‘the Scientific
Revolution’. Indeed, it has been claimed that this movement ‘outshines everything
since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to
the rank of mere episodes’.4 From previous history, the revered authorities of
Aristotle and Ptolemy had said the Earth does not move, and is at the centre of the
universe. The Bible said the same, adding the huge moral gloss that the Earth is
so placed as fitting for God’s supreme creation, Man. Born in 1473, the Polish
mathematician and astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus, had by 1530 worked out a
radically new theory which instead placed the sun at the centre of the universe,
and claimed the Earth revolved around the sun (as did the other planets) annually,
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and that it rotated daily (swaying slightly as it did so). Although a largely
mathematical, even hypothetical, construct which retained other (false) features
of the old ‘geocentric’ theory of the universe, Copernicus’ revolutionary new ‘helio-
centric’ theory stimulated other astronomers and ‘natural philosophers’ in the
second half of the sixteenth century. By the 1590s the German astronomer,
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), began publishing his own theories derived from
the Copernican system, culminating in his discovery of the laws of planetary
motion (Kepler’s Laws) and his explicit defence of Copernicus in his textbook
Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (1621). From the 1630s many more astronomers
and ‘natural philosophers’ were thereby converted not only to the Copernican
system but to the broader scientific and philosophical implications of this challenge
to traditional learning. But such ‘conversions’ were not without their dangers, as
the career of another epoch-breaking early ‘scientist’, Galileo (1564–1642), was
famously to demonstrate.
By the 1590s this remarkable Italian champion of science and intellectual
freedom, already a convert to Copernicism, began to design his own scientific
instruments such as the pendulum, and scorning mere speculative hypothesis,
combined mathematics and empirical experimentation to uncover and formulate
the fundamental laws of motion and mechanics so essential to physics. His work
convinced him that ‘matter is unalterable, i.e., always the same, and . . . because
of its eternal and necessary character it is possible to produce demonstrations of it
no less straight and neat than those of mathematics’.5 He was aware, of course, that
such a statement concerned not merely physics but also held enormous
philosophical and theological implications because it subverted both the authority
of Aristotle and the Catholic Church. But by 1613, some three years before the
authorities declared a ban on Copernican ideas, Galileo had used the telescope he
had designed to empirically demonstrate the falsity of traditional ideas. Increasingly
under threat for heresy by both the Church and academics, Galileo tried to avoid
controversy but kept on with his scientific work, eventually entering the public fray
again with a work in 1625 which the Church censors at Rome allowed to be
published in 1632 as the Dialogue on the Two Principal World Systems. In this work
(on the respective merits of Copernican and traditional Ptolemaic astronomy)
Galileo himself summed up the reasons for resistance to the emerging new ‘science’
by having one of his characters say, ‘this way of thinking leads to the subversion of
all natural philosophy [‘science’] and stirs up confusion and disruption in heaven,
on earth, and in the whole universe’.6 Despite such manoeuvrings (and official
permission to publish), he was sentenced a year later by the Inquisition to life
imprisonment for heresy. Living out his years, in fact, under house arrest he
continued working, thereby contributing further stimulus to what we now call
the properly scientific approach to natural phenomena. In less than fifty years after
his death, the English mathematician and physicist, Isaac Newton (1642–1727),
brought the synthesis of mathematics, physics, and astronomy to a famous
summation in his Principia (1687), which demonstrated the law of universal
gravitation.
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If the Scientific Revolution originated in astronomy and physics, it was not

limited to them. As early as 1605 the English philosopher-statesman Francis Bacon
(1561–1626) published The Advancement of Learning in which he critically
considered the present state and achievements of knowledge – a theme he revisited
in his 1620 Novum Organum in which he poured scorn on purely ‘theoretical’
approaches to the natural world, and even more so on traditional ideas about it.
Instead he insisted on the value of observation and experiment in order to reach
reliable, objective knowledge (what came to be known as ‘the experimental
philosophy’ or ‘empiricism’), and would have been delighted when some twenty
years after his death a group of like-minded individuals formed a scientific society
along the lines he had proposed, not only to promote learning but to make for a
better world, which became the Royal Society in 1660. This famous institution,
amongst whose members were Boyle, Hooke, and Newton himself (who became
its President in 1703) was matched by the founding of the Royal Academy of
Sciences in France in 1666, whilst elsewhere in Europe other such societies emerged
during a seventeenth century in which increasing numbers of intellectuals were
fascinated by, contributing to, and convinced of the validity of ‘the new learning’.
The societies published numerous papers on new inventions in, for example,
mechanics, clockwork, agriculture, and navigation, as well as research into
medicine, optics, statistics, astronomy, geography, and mathematics.
Thus by the later seventeenth century, when Vico was a young man, the Scientific
Revolution was well under way and the claims for the ‘new learning’ were well-
known. Amongst these was the notion that, far from being heretical, the increasing
revelation of the laws of the natural world was bringing people closer to God
by discovering the true workings of His marvellous creation. However, others
in addition to the Catholic Church were disturbed by what they saw as the
replacement of their traditional beliefs about the cosmos and the natural world by
a cold, mechanistic philosophy which offered neither spiritual solace nor moral
certainty in a universe now no longer conceived of as finite and meaningful but as
an infinite complex of, simply, ‘matter in motion’. In short, the Scientific
Revolution was far more than a ‘revolution’ in ‘science’ – it offered a new way of
looking at the universe, a new set of presuppositions regarding the natural world
and man’s place in it, which sat antagonistically not only with the received wisdom
of the ancient classics and of the Catholic Church but increasingly with the
classics-orientated humanist heritage of the Renaissance. Although the contri-
butors to the Scientific Revolution were of course interested in the natural world
and cosmos rather than theories about history, we have already seen in preceding
chapters how closely earlier ideas about the course and meaning of human history
intertwined with both religion and ideas about Nature. Sooner or later the
connection, already intuited by many enquiring minds, would be made again –
but now by a thinker, Vico, consciously set on working out an explicit theory of
history which would coherently reintegrate these diverse components. But before
we see how Vico responded to the emergence of ‘science’, we must look at another
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major intellectual movement of the post-Reformation sixteenth and the ensuing

seventeenth century which he was also responding to – namely, developments in
philosophy.
Seventeenth-century philosophy
Nowadays, apart from its loose popular meaning, we regard ‘philosophy’ as a distinct
academic discipline generating a specialised vocabulary and limited to considering
only certain issues. But until modern times the term had a much broader
connotation derived simply from its Greek origins as ‘lover of knowledge’, whereby
the distinctions between, for example, the study of law, theology, medicine,
political constitutions, astronomy and astrology, and even history, were subsumed
under the generic term, ‘philosophy’. In particular, the modern distinction between
science and philosophy did not apply, the former being referred to, even in the
eighteenth century, as ‘natural philosophy’. Thus it is that many of the above-
mentioned ‘scientists’ who contributed to the Scientific Revolution were called
‘philosophers’. And so they were, in the primary sense that they studied ‘the nature
of things’. However, for a complex of reasons including the Renaissance humanists’
rejection of scholasticism, the expansion of the known world through voyages of
exploration, technological innovation, and a freer intellectual atmosphere in some
now Protestant countries, the seventeenth century witnessed the beginnings of a
disentangling of what we now call ‘science’ (‘the natural sciences’) from the general
amalgam of ‘philosophy’.
Vice-versa, however, the same began to happen to ‘philosophy’ itself, as it began
to disentangle itself from that same amalgam. Thus it is that if Galileo was the
father of modern science, in this same seventeenth century modern philosophy (i.e.,
‘philosophy’ in its narrower sense) was fathered by René Descartes (1596–1650).
Both are still described as ‘philosophers and scientists’, and rightly so. This is
because of the seeming paradox that ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ only became distinct
from each other by initially sharing the same characteristic of wishing to begin
anew the study of ‘the nature of things’. Thus Galileo the scientist needed a new
method of approaching knowledge (i.e., needed ‘philosophy’) to support his ideas,
while Descartes the philosopher needed an open book on ‘the nature of things’
(i.e., needed ‘science’) to complement his ideas. These two stimuli came together
in the seventeenth-century intellectual achievement of 1) detaching the physical
world as a field of study which 2) required its own form of knowledge. In short, that
the origins of both modern science and modern philosophy occurred together in
time is no coincidence.
‘Empiricism’
We have already noted how as the sixteenth turned into the seventeenth century
some inquisitive minds had become thoroughly impatient – indeed, contemptuous
– of traditionally received knowledge regarding particularly the physical world. A
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century earlier, of course, the Renaissance humanists had already rejected the
medieval scholastic approach to learning. But apart from showing interest in
the classical materialist/atomic theories of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius
(but even here, because of their moral ideas), the Renaissance humanists did not
focus their attention on the study of the natural world. Rather, their invaluable
researches were directed on the ‘liberal arts’. By contrast, the exponents of the
‘new learning’ of the seventeenth century focused their thinking on the natural
world. They thus found themselves not only at odds with medieval (and religiously
inspired) scholastical thinking and methods (as had the Renaissance humanists)
but also with classical (Aristotelian and Ptolemaic) theories of ‘natural philosophy’,
which derived less from observation and experiment than from speculatively
rationalising the remnants of earlier ‘mythopoeic’ concepts of nature. After all, if
one could now show that ‘things in motion’ do not have an ‘appetite to rest’, but
that the laws of physics determine in exact degrees that a thing in motion has to
be prevented from continuing in motion because of measurable forces – or that the
sun and moon are not perfect spheres but spotted and cratered purely material
phenomena – then the facts could speak for themselves.
Thus a school of philosophical thought emerged, prepared to re-open the book
of Nature because it was discovering a new set of presuppositions based on the
methodology of actual observation combined with repeatable experimentation – in
other words, empiricism, the taking of one’s starting point for knowledge from the
observed, tested facts. Such a method, ‘way of knowing’, or epistemology (‘logic of
knowledge’) would correct errors and discover new truths. This empiricism did not
necessarily lead to any new overall synthetic or comprehensive theories of nature
– in fact, it was antipathetic towards such ‘theoretical’ constructs. But it did imply
a new ‘theory’ or ‘explanation’ of knowledge itself (involving philosophical
propositions about the nature of the human mind and the ‘objectivity’ of external
phenomena) which was brought explicitly to reflection, argument, and defence in
various works of philosophy. Notable amongst these was Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1689) by the Englishman, John Locke (1632–1704). This work
tells us that to form ‘true’ ideas about the world we should recognise no other
authority than what the senses actually perceive of it, combined with purely logical
reasoning ‘after the event’ to make sense of this empirical source of knowledge.
Indeed, much of the Royal Society’s work (including prior to Locke’s Essay and his
own membership) was premised on this philosophy of ‘empiricism’, its long-serving
Secretary, Henry Oldenberg, being much vexed by more ‘speculative’ frameworks
which ‘the experimental philosophy’ generated in others. A salutary ‘empiricism’
has since remained a strong feature of particularly the Anglo-American philo-
sophical outlook (including the approach to the study of history).
Seventeenth-century ‘rationalism’
The other seventeenth-century principal innovation in philosophy is now called
‘rationalism’, whose original exponent was the Frenchman, René Descartes
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(1596–1650). After moving to the Netherlands in 1628, Descartes wrote a number

of scientific and philosophical works amongst which (in his Philosophical Essays,
1637) was his deeply influential and controversial Discourse on Method. Here again
we encounter a philosopher/scientist deeply sceptical of traditional and ‘received’
knowledge, not prepared to consider any idea as true unless he was satisfied that
the method of acquiring knowledge was indisputably correct. In other words,
like the empiricists, he started his philosophy by enquiring into the nature of
knowledge itself. But unlike them, Descartes did not start from the (alleged) truth
of sense-experience. Instead he was convinced the only statements or ideas which
are indisputably ‘true’, are those which partake of the certainty demonstrable in
propositions arrived at through the process of deduction which is innate to the
mind. As such, geometry and mathematics were the archetypal examples of clear
reasoning untainted by the intrusion of mere opinion, sense-impressions, or ‘received
wisdom’. Hence Descartes’ method was to doubt everything and start from some
indisputable beginning (such as ‘I think’) – and then deduce step by step only what
logically followed (in this case, according to him, firstly ‘therefore I exist’).
It was in this manner that the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid had
uncovered the laws of the triangle, amongst which was his 47th Proposition demon-
strating that for any right-angled triangle, the sum of the squares of the sides must
equal the square of the hypotenuse. A famous anecdote tells of the English
philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ (1588–1679) astonished disbelief at reading this
proposition. Hobbes therefore read back through the propositions from which the
forty-seventh followed and was not only thereby convinced of its truth, but more
importantly, of the indisputable certainty of that method as the only way of reaching
true conclusions about anything. (‘This made him in love with geometry’).7 Later,
in the 1630s, Hobbes travelled in France and met with Descartes and other ‘ration-
alists’, and despite disagreeing with some of Descartes’ ideas (particularly his
exemption of mind from the world of matter) never wavered from his belief in the
‘rationalist’, inductive method of acquiring truth. Indeed, because Hobbes devel-
oped the view that all aspects of existence are solely material, he went on to construct
one of the most sustained ‘rationalist’ explanations known in literature, not of
objects in nature, but of no less a topic than the nature of man and the state – his
Leviathan (1651). In order to ground the work on a method which would provide
‘true’ statements, Hobbes insists that ‘true and false are attributes of speech, not of
things’, and because ‘truth consisteth in the right ordering’ of what we say, then:
By this it appears how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true
knowledge, to examine the definitions of former authors; and either to
correct them, where they are negligently set down, or to make them
himself.8
Reasoning is the process of drawing out the logical implications of definitions.

Hobbes calls the kind of knowledge gained ‘science’, and says ‘this is the knowledge
required in a philosopher; that is to say, of him that pretends to reasoning’.9
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Our final example of ‘rationalism’ in seventeenth-century philosophy was

written by the Dutchman and excommunicate Jew, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677).
Strongly influenced by the rationalist epistemology of Descartes and Hobbes,
(although disagreeing with other elements of their respective philosophies), and
motivated by a spirituality as sublime as it was unorthodox, Spinoza finally
organised his philosophical thinking about ‘God’, the universe, man, and his
ultimate good, into what some judge as among the most profound books ever
written, his Ethics (c. 1674). Significantly, the full title of this masterpiece of
deductive reasoning is Ethics Demonstrated with Geometrical Order, and accordingly
it is rigorously organised in terms of Definitions, Axioms, and Propositions – and
each of the latter are followed by Proofs, referring to earlier Propositions
and Axioms, and ending ‘QED’ (‘that which was to be demonstrated’). Echoing,
but extending, Galileo’s beliefs about the nature of the physical universe, and even
more closely Hobbes’ methodology, Spinoza tells us:
nature’s laws and ordinances, whereby all things come to pass . . . are
everywhere and always the same; so that there should be one and the same
method of understanding the nature of all things whatsoever, through
nature’s universal laws and rules. . . . I shall, therefore, treat of . . . [human]
emotions according to the same method, as I employed heretofore in my
investigations concerning God and the mind. I shall consider human
actions and desires in exactly the same manner, as though I were
concerned with lines, planes, and solids.10
And it is in another work, On the Improvement of the Understanding, that having

insisted that ‘before all things, a means must be devised for improving the
understanding and purifying it, as far as may be at the outset, so that it may
apprehend things without error, and in the best possible way’,11 Spinoza gives an
extended (‘rationalistically’ argued) treatment of the inherent power of the human
mind to deductively apprehend truth and avoid error, based on the notion that in
doing so man ‘tunes in’ to God’s ‘thinking’ (at least in relation to the logical and
material aspects of Existence).
As intimated, these examples of seventeenth-century ‘rationalist’ philosophers

differed significantly in the overall philosophies they produced. Yet they shared
views on the question of method – (it should eschew ‘empiricism’ and rely on truth
being discoverable by the innate operations of the mind) – as well as on the
importance of method as the foremost key to true knowledge; (‘philosophy’ must
begin with epistemology). This latter view they shared, of course, with the
empiricists, with whom in other respects they had no sympathy – and this returns
us to the fundamental point that the novel and diverse developments in philosophy
in the seventeenth century grew from a common and radical source – namely,
an increasingly outspoken rejection of traditional and Revealed knowledge,
particularly regarding the nature of the cosmos and the workings of the natural
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world. In doing this, however, they developed distinctive theories of knowledge

which were later extended to matters other than the physical world. When Vico
entered the intellectual world (the later seventeenth century) the two pillars of
modern philosophy, empiricism and rationalism, were recent innovations which
could neither be taken for granted nor ignored. Their close association with the
Scientific Revolution (and consequent focus on the physical world and cosmos)
has been indicated, and although modern philosophy was beginning to broaden its
focus by the end of the seventeenth century, neither from that direction nor from
‘science’ had any implications for the meaning of history been drawn. Rationalists
might agree with Hobbes that ‘history’ is simply ‘the register of knowledge of fact’
(divided into ‘natural’ and ‘civil’ history – the former embracing empirical
information of ‘metals, plants, animals, regions, and the like’, the latter of ‘the
voluntary actions of men in commonwealths’), whereas ‘science’ or ‘philosophy’
are reasoning disciplines which produce ‘demonstrations of consequences of one
affirmation, to another’.12 Empiricists, on the other hand, might have no
methodological aversion to studying history, but would be as opposed to deducing
any ‘speculative’ or ‘theoretical’ framework regarding its course as they were
regarding anything else. Part of Vico’s originality, however, is that he did take
careful account of the modern developments in philosophy in order to substantiate
his own ‘theory’ of history – and that in doing so, he proposed his own independent
response to methodological theory (or epistemology) which accorded with neither
empiricism nor rationalism. But before exploring what this was, we can indicate
another leading aspect of seventeeth-century thought Vico responded to in his
work – namely, developments in political theory.
Seventeenth-century political thought

The previous chapter concluded in the early sixteenth century with the famous
political thinker, Machiavelli, whose noted cynicism, realism, apparent amorality
and irreligiosity contrasted sharply with contemporary political ideology. Although
the Renaissance humanists had opened up new ways of thinking, and the feudal
political order of ‘Christendom’ was giving way to the early-modern (dynastically
driven) form of independent, sovereign European states – a vast, lengthy process
assisted by the religio-political turmoil of the Reformation – in Machiavelli’s times
most political thinking was dominated by medieval ideas. The civil and Church
authorities still propounded the notion that through God’s will (discovered via
reason and Revelation) temporal order was sustained by an hierarchical order
whose authority was, ultimately, God-ordained. ‘Rights’, privileges, or prerogatives
of both ruled and rulers in the diversely ordered, parochial feudal system were
understood to reflect an ordering of society according to ‘natural law’.
The Reformation (hardly begun by the time of Machiavelli’s death in 1527)
did generate lower-order, quasi-‘democratic’, sometimes millennialist move-
ments which disturbed this consensus on the nature of political society and civil
authority. But as the sixteenth century progressed, the climate of Reformation and
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Counter-reformation hardly conspired to produce any fundamental shift from the

religious basis to political thought. Political theory remained moribund, bound up
with the immediacy of events. It was not until the 1570s that a new departure was
forged by the Frenchman, Jean Bodin (1529–1596), who, although deeply
immersed in Court politics, achieved the necessary detachment in his Six Books of
the Commonwealth (1576) to reflect anew on the principles underlying political
society. Mindful that France had suffered some thirty years of intermittent religious
civil war between factions of Protestants and Catholics, amongst which occurred
the horrors of the St Bartholomew massacre in 1572, Bodin resolved to set down
principles to demonstrate the need for any society to be governed by a single source
of authority (the sovereign power) to which all, irrespective of social rank or religious
persuasion, owe the absolute obligation of obedience. This sovereign power (Bodin
argued it was best vested in a single individual – i.e., a monarch) cannot logically
be accountable to any higher power (other, that is, than facing God’s judgement)
nor, through any constitutional form, to any constraint from its subjects – for in
either case (Bodin argued with perhaps tautologous logic) it would no longer
be ‘sovereign’, since sovereignty means the absolute right to rule. And where a
sovereign power is absent, Bodin crucially argued, a ‘state’ (‘commonwealth’, or
‘republic’) cannot exist, for any state must have a sovereign power at its head,
otherwise it would lose its unity and relapse into the threatening anarchy
of unchecked families at war with each other. In short, law is the foundation of
political society; the power to make law (the sovereign power) must therefore be
absolute; the sovereign power is therefore indivisible (i.e., it cannot be shared
amongst different bodies), inalienable (i.e., it cannot be given away to some other
body or authority), and unaccountable (i.e., cannot be obliged to make laws which
either other powers or its own subjects might wish). Although Bodin’s mode of
arguing mixed up appeals to ‘traditional wisdom’, the Divine Will, the natural
order, and deductive reasoning, it seemed sufficiently religiously based to avoid
giving offence, (although some religious enthusiasts thought it elevated the needs
of political order above the claims of ‘true religion’, and thus contemptuously
named Bodin’s circle ‘les politiques’). On the contrary, his book underwent
numerous editions and retained a currency for at least fifty years. But this was not
only because its arguments seemed steeped in traditional modes of argument – it
was also because it was saying something new which reflected and made sense of
the new political order emerging throughout Europe – namely, the actual
emergence of sovereign, independent states. Indeed, for those today who still think
that ‘sovereignty’ is the hallmark of statehood, Bodin remains relevant – for he
‘invented’ the notion.
As we move into seventeenth-century political thought, Bodin’s new statehood/
sovereignty message not only retained its currency – for many its relevance was
heightened as political structures in Europe grappled with large problems associated
with class tensions endemic to early capitalism, religious dissent, ambitious
monarchs, and embryonic ‘democratic’ impulses. To use the ‘body–state’ analogy
outlined in an earlier chapter, the gestation and birth of ‘the modern state’ were
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rarely easy processes throughout early-modern Europe (to be followed in the nine-
teenth century by a further, ‘adolescent’, phase of development as states turned
into ‘nation-states’). One of the chief responses to these testing political times in
the seventeenth century (sometimes now called ‘the age of crisis’) was advanced
by Hobbes in the midst of civil war in England in the aforementioned Leviathan
(and earlier writings). Not only did he retain Bodin’s concept of ‘sovereignty’, he
sharpened it by honing away even those few restraints on its absolutist message that
Bodin had tried to retain principally through the religious overtones he employed
(whereby a sovereign power ‘ought’ to govern benignly and honourably). Hobbes
did this by omitting religious and moral arguments altogether, instead employing
his purely rationalist (and materialist) approach to argue the same message. Famously,
he claimed men’s emotions and moral sensibilities are reducible to a species of
pain and pleasure, presenting a world of human experience governed, whatever
our illusions, by the purely utilitarian consideration of whether a thing pleases or
harms us. Moral considerations disappear, to be replaced by the notion of the
pursuit of interest, for Hobbes insists that ‘whatsoever is the object of any man’s
appetite or desire, that is it which he . . . calleth good: and the object of his hate
and aversion, evil’.13
Here, Hobbes is evidence of what some scholars14 argue is a new cynicism
underpinning much sevententh-century political thought, whereby traditional,
historically established notions of civic and feudal loyalties, and the reciprocal
obligation of rulers to behave morally, give way to a belief in the kind of amoral
power-politics propounded a century earlier by Machiavelli. But whereas the latter
did not argue his views rationalistically (nor in any other specifically philosophical
guise), Hobbes sought a new understanding of the nature of civic duty and the
powers of the state based entirely on the rational calculation of interest. The result
was his famous political theory whereby, from the premise of a pre-political ‘state
of nature’ peopled by necessarily self-seeking competitive individuals in which life
is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’,15 he deduced the logic of the ‘social
contract’. This erected a (Bodin-type) absolutist sovereign power to escape the
‘state of nature’ by enforcing its subjects’ rational will to ‘do as you would be done
by’. In short, that which should determine the relation between rulers and ruled,
the obligation to obey the law, the limits and prerogatives of the sovereign power,
and all other aspects necessary to the secure existence of political societies, is
derived from the logic of a rational ‘social contract’. It is not tradition, morality,
religion, nor history (nor any combination of them) which explains and validates
political order – its rationale is located solely in logic.
Later in the century, John Locke, objecting to illiberal, absolutist political
theories (whether from Hobbes or from more traditional sources), proposed an
alternative understanding of political society in which individuals’ ‘natural rights’
to life, liberty, and property are protected from arbitrary invasion by the authorities.
In his Two Treatises on Civil Government (1690) he propounded a theory of the state
in which its very rationale is to secure these individual rights – and this is achieved
by a state in which the final (legislative) power is held by society itself, through its
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majority, rather than by an independent, unaccountable sovereign power above

society. Although much of his argumentation is evasive, inconsistent, and eclectic,
as an ‘empiricist’ Locke eschewed the rigours of Hobbes’ rationalist approach to
political theory and instead based his ideas on ‘common-sense’. Yet, to reach
conclusions opposed to Hobbes he nevertheless employed the same framework of
a ‘state of nature’, and proceeded to derive the logic of a ‘social contract’ as the basis
of political society.
Other seventeenth-century writers (including Spinoza in his unfinished Tractatus

Politicus) also adopted the ‘state of nature/social contract’ framework for
understanding the nature of political society, such that in Vico’s lifetime it was a
well-known theory. As indicated, it could be supported by different philosophical
approaches and be used to reach different conclusions. Yet it demonstrated two
common features – an imagined and/or ‘rationally’ derived concept of ‘the state of
nature’, and a logically derived ‘social contract’ providing the rationale of political
society. And these combine to force the observation that this approach was
radically non-historical. The ‘state of nature’ was either unhistorical, because not
based on historical knowledge but simply imagination, or a-historical, because
logically deduced from some axiomatic notion of ‘human nature’ in the raw. And
by the same criteria ‘the social contract’ was both unhistorical and a-historical
because based on what we might call an early version of ‘game theory’ – the theory
which constructs strategies and outcomes in interpersonal situations entirely
according to logic (given certain axioms about individuals ideally calculating their
interests), irrespective of their personalities, times, culture, or social circumstances.
In short, one of the major features of seventeenth-century political theory,
associated with scepticism and cynicism about earlier religion-based political ideas
and structures, was the attempt to understand political society in the abstract and
fictive terms of social contract theory. The actual history of societies was not merely
neglected – it was deliberately ignored in ‘explaining’ or validating the nature of
political society. Since Bodin himself (who, although not employing a ‘state
of nature/social contract’ framework, neither grounded his theory of ‘sovereignty’
in any real historical development) political society, now construed in the form of
‘the state’, was not approached as the product of any actual, historical process.
Indeed, it could be argued that at no time before or since the seventeenth century
was political theory more detached from all connection with any sense of a larger
meaning and/or process in the course of human history (i.e., ‘philosophy of
history’). As we shall see, it was just this feature of political theory which Vico was
interested in, and his independent, critical response to it was to form an integral
part of his ‘philosophy of history’. But there are yet two further features of later
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thought we need to appreciate before turning
to Vico, because his response to them formed another crucial part of his thinking
– namely, the interaction between new developments in historical methodology
and religion, which combined in a new preparedness to engage in Biblical criticism.
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The discipline of history

In the previous chapter, amongst the Renaissance humanists’ achievements, we
discussed their new sense of the historicity of a past they recognised as different and
long-gone, the spirit of which could often only be recaptured through the process
of retranslating ancient texts to recover their meaning. To a certain degree this
same scholarly approach was taken to Biblical texts by figures such as Erasmus and
Luther. Innovative as this was, it would, however, be wrong to suppose this resulted
in new, critical histories of classical times, or in histories of more recent times
which demonstrated anything approaching the meticulous apparatus of today’s
historians, with their critical awareness of sources, references, evidence, inter-
pretation, and the issue of objectivity. The same can be said for Biblical scholarship.
In both cases Renaissance humanists engaged more in a (valuable and necessary)
process of correction of previous errors than in finding a better methodology for
establishing historical truth in general.
Later in the sixteenth century, however, a number of (principally French)
thinkers, including Bodin, built upon the approach of the earlier humanists to
formulate basic rules for internal criticism of historical method in order better
to reach the truth of events.16 This effort was partly prompted by the urge to
understand Roman law better, for they were sceptical of the meaning, authority,
and universality it was alleged to have for their own times. As a result the
foundations of modern historical practice were laid, whereby rules were set down
to judge the reliability of historical sources and how to respect evidence. Thus
historians were now urged not to interject their own religious, social, or patriotic
prejudices into their accounts – to avoid anachronism when studying the distant
past, and to maintain a detachment when studying recent events – to stick to the
facts rather than invent them – to be aware of political or religious influences
constraining previous historians’ and others’ accounts of events, or of their converse
in attempts to flatter particular figures and/or the authorities – and to write in a
sober manner appropriate to a dispassionate account of the past rather than seek
to gratify readers’ tastes for literary entertainment.
In addition to the further development of such internal rules of modern
historiography there was ‘from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries of our era
. . . certainly no lack of developments, external to the craft and discipline of history
itself’ which conspired to improve the quality, scope, and expertise of historical
writings.17 Amongst these were the diverse influences of the many ‘national’
struggles over religion and dynasty ensuant upon the Reformation; the continuing
discovery and colonisation of the non-European world; the growth of urban
commercial societies with more educated citizens expanding the market for the
printed word; the new outlook on the natural world generated by the Scientific
Revolution; and (despite censorship) a growing preparedness to challenge
traditional knowledge and superstition. As a result, many aspects of the national
histories of e.g., Italy, France, Spain, England, and the Netherlands were explored,
as well as attempts at compendia and comparative histories, and the devising of
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more accurate basic chronologies. The best of these demonstrated a sharpening of

the critical historical faculties, a heightening of historical alertness, and an enquir-
ing sensitivity into the causes of historical events. Thus it is that by the beginning
of the eighteenth century the (modern) discipline of history was becoming
established as a specific form of literature rich in variety and, even at its most
blandly ‘empirical’, replete with both overt and implicit explanations of historical
change – food for thought for anyone interested in the more speculative enterprise
of making sense of history. Vico was just such a figure and many passages in his New
Science show that his reading of (and frequent disagreement with) recent historians
contributed to his thinking.
Religion and Biblical criticism

The final aspect of later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thought Vico was
responding to in the grand synthesis of his philosophy of history is the large theme
of religious belief in general, and the narrower theme of Biblical criticism in
particular, including the belief in Divine intervention and miracles. As for the
former, since the beginnings of the Reformation both the theological and the more
popular arguments about the nature of ‘true’ religion thundered throughout the
century, their reverberations continuing well into the seventeenth, such that
despite the secular impulse behind much Renaissance thought, consciousness of
religion (even if not religious consciousness) was again as inescapable a factor in
intellectual thought as it had been in medieval times. Initially a controversy
between traditional Catholicism and the new ‘protestants’, by the middle of the
sixteenth century the former attempted to regroup itself through reform, and
the latter, having opened the floodgates for a degree of freedom of religious thought,
began to schism as attempts were made to close them again. Of the numerous issues
involved in this prolonged and heady atmosphere of religious enthusiasm,
controversy, and persecution, we shall mention only those which contribute to
understanding Vico’s philosophy.
First, on the larger theme of religious belief in general we have already indicated
how the Scientific Revolution raised severe doubts about traditional Christian
ideas in many minds. As one author puts it, towards the end of the seventeenth
century, Isaac Newton’s gravitational theory had shown that:
the universe turned out to be a Great Machine, made up of material parts

which all moved through space and time according to the strictest rules
of mechanical causation . . . no room was left for supernatural agencies,
whether divine or diabiolical.18
This did not necessarily mean a denial of the existence of God (something virtually
impossible), but it raised huge questions about the nature of God and His role in
the world. Was He, as some have interpreted Hobbes and others as implying, simply
the great watchmaker who made the world, wound up the spring, set it going,
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but then played no further role in history, nature, and human affairs? In itself
this is not an irreligious view, and can also accommodate some notion of God’s
Providence insofar as, by analogy, He has designed how the watch ticks away over
time. But such a view could not but prompt more thinking minds to query not only
the veracity of miracles but also that which was at the heart of Christianity, the role
and significance of Jesus Christ. Was Jesus a miraculous intervention in history? If
so, why was this necessary, and how is it consistent with the ‘watchmaker’ view of
God’s relation to the world?
Second, the rationalist school of philosophy also could not but raise fundamental
questions about religion, and Christianity in particular. Descartes, we recall, vowed
to doubt everything, including the existence of God, until it could be ‘proved’
through the demonstrative certainty of deductive reasoning. For those who
subscribed to this rationalist notion of ‘truth’ it implied that much that was said
in the Bible about God, and natural events, was radically problematic. A common
way out of this difficulty was prefigured by Galileo’s insistence that where the
indisputable truths uncovered by science conflicted with the word of God in
the Scriptures, then the former should prevail, since words (even those inspired by
God) are subject to the limited power of human understanding, as well as often
being ambiguous in meaning. Just so for subsequent rationalist thinkers where the
indisputable truths uncovered by logic conflicted with Biblical statements. Their
escape from accusations of blasphemy, if not atheism, lay in the defence that the
Bible used human language to express ideas, and therefore need not always be taken
literally. Indeed, this position was expanded by Hobbes into a more full-blown
defence which implies that since language is anthropocentric, anything said about
God is anthropomorphic. Thus, in 1642 we find Hobbes railing against, not the
Bible, but those philosophers and theologians who use statements about the nature
of God to reach conclusions on any number of topics ranging from whether the
universe is infinite in time and space to whether God is the cause of evil.
Personally, while I hold that the nature of God is unfathomable, and that
propositions are a kind of language by which we express our concepts of
the natures of things, I incline to the view that no proposition about the
nature of God can be true save this one: God exists, and that no title
correctly describes the nature of God other than the word ‘being’ [ens].
Everything else . . . pertains not to the explanation of philosophical truth,
but to proclaiming the states of mind that govern our wish to praise . . .
God. Hence those words ‘God sees, understands, wishes, acts, brings to
pass’ . . . display, not the Divine Nature, but our own piety . . . who desire
to ascribe to Him the names most worthy of honour among us . . . Neither
propositions nor notions about His nature are to be argued over, but are
part of our worship . . . .
Thus for Hobbes, because true ‘philosophical / scientific’ ideas are solely the product
of logical propositional reasoning, we cannot use what the Bible says about God
(or much else?) as the basis for discovering truth, ‘for, as I said, the words under
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discussion are not the propositions of people philosophising but the actions of those
who pay homage’.19
Another, different, example of the critical application of rationalist principles
to religion is Spinoza’s aforementioned Ethics. Appearing to contradict Hobbes’
insistence on God as ‘unfathomable’, Spinoza employs a strictly deductive method
to actually determine the nature of God, such that after the eight definitions, seven
axioms, and thirty-six propositions of Part 1 he tells us, ‘In the foregoing I have
explained the nature and properties of God’.20 During his exposition Spinoza
tackles the problem of God’s ‘freedom’ to do anything, and typically employs as an
example of incontrovertible truth, that ‘from the nature of a triangle it follows from
eternity and for eternity, that its three interior angles are equal to two right angles’.
His critics read this as meaning that Spinoza was thereby denying the freedom,
and thus omnipotence, of God, since it implies that not even God can change the
angles of a triangle. Spinoza anticipated such criticism by arguing it stems from
the error of attributing to God what are merely human qualities – in this case,
intellect and will, neither of which ‘appertain to God’s nature’.21 In this important
respect, then, Spinoza agrees with Hobbes, frequently complaining that most of
what is said of God, and the plethora of religious rules taken to follow from His
‘utterances’, derive from speaking more humano – that is, in the manner of human
beings, or anthropomorphically. From today’s viewpoint, that Spinoza and Hobbes
had to argue this at all demonstrates the depths of religious superstition, closed-
mindedness, and fear of the authorities still abounding amongst intellectuals in
the times Vico was born.
Third, and despite this, such views contributed to a developing seventeenth-
century trend to rethink the status of revealed (i.e., Biblical) and theologically
derived religious truth – in particular, to make more of the fact than did the
Renaissance Christian humanists that the Bible is a series of written documents.
This led to a new kind of Biblical criticism based not only on accurate translation
but also on recognising the anthrocentricity of the language used. From this it is but
a short (and logical) step to treat the Bible ‘merely’ as an historically conditioned
set of writings, even if in some sense ‘divinely’ inspired. And this is precisely what
Spinoza did in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1675), thereby scandalising fainter
hearts (and slower intellects) who shrank from what they took to be the clear
atheistical message behind this approach. Spinoza frequently points to where
Biblical passages need to be re-understood in terms of the historical and human
context behind the meanings of the words used. Also, what real history the Biblical
books recount has to be recovered by such techniques – and here we can see the
clear link between the study of history and linguistic analysis presaged in earlier
Biblical criticism and implicit in Spinoza’s thinking. Yet up to this point there is
no evidence that Spinoza was interested in the methodology of secular history, or
history in general. Tragically, he died two years later aged only forty-five, thereby
depriving the world of the possibility of one of its finest intellects perhaps applying
its genius to the study of history – and, given its bent, possibly to theorising about
its course and meaning.
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As for Hobbes, although interested in history (he made a translation of

Thucydides in his early life, and attempted a history of the English Civil War,
Behemoth, in later life), we have already noted the scant attention he paid to the
topic of historical methodology, relegating history to the empirical study of ‘fact’
undeserving of the epistemological underpinnings he insisted on for ‘science’ or
‘philosophy’. As for ‘philosophy of history’ itself, Hobbes would have regarded the
very idea as a contradiction in terms – history (as well as theology) is absent in his
schemata of the ‘philosophical’ or ‘scientific’ disciplines.22
Yet this only highlights that much which was innovatory in the intellectual
context of the later sixteenth and the seventeenth century – the Scientific
Revolution, empiricism, and rationalism – appeared to have nothing to do with the
study of history, let alone invite new insights into its overall course and meaning.
Particularly in the wake of the Reformation, however, a potential link did appear
over the manner in which these developments impinged on religious ideas. These
factors, combined with the nurture of methodological discipline in history,
generated both the willingness and ability to engage in a new kind of Biblical
criticism. At the minimum this involved closer enquiry into the meaning, both
literally and philosophically, of much Biblical language. And at its heights, as in
Spinoza, it pointed to nothing less than a reconstructing of how to understand the
Bible by accepting its historicity. Thus the Bible itself should be approached historically
as a mixture of voices communicating the mind-set of ancient peoples in their own
language. Also, if the Bible is in that sense ‘historical’, it is also (in part) directly a
work of history. But the history it teaches must therefore also be seen as ‘historical’
– that is, as needing to be reconstructed via the same historico-linguistic techniques.
Thus it is that in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (in which, significantly,
he also made a famous plea for freedom of speech) a clear methodological
connection was made between language and historical interpretation of the Bible,
including Biblical history itself. And to the extent the latter involves not only
Christianity but also Judaism, this connection expanded the grounds for exploring
the nature of religious ideas in general. Now, by the later 1600s, not only could
traditional religious ideas be subjected to philosophical criticism from rationalist
philosophers and natural scientists – they were also subject to the different, more
empirically orientated, criticism based on historico-linguistic evidence.
In this manner, then, varied strains of later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

thought, many of which seemed to have no relevance to history, let alone
philosophy of history, began to be drawn closer together – namely, over the
question of religious truth. History, at least with respect to the Bible (regarding its
meaning, its history, and the history in it) appeared as a potentially powerful,
reformed discipline no longer restricted to accounts of events but bearing the
possibility of interpreting the past – and thereby bearing ‘philosophical’ implications
inasmuch as it could occupy as respectable and fruitful (albeit different) a role in
debating religious truths as ‘philosophy’ or ‘science’. To this extent, then, it might
be said that the discipline of history becomes a tool of philosophy. But why limit
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the ‘philosophical’ significance of history to the question of Biblical truth? We

have noted the apparent irrelevance history had for those post-Renaissance/
Reformation rationalists, empiricists, and scientists who were rethinking so many
traditional ideas not only regarding the natural world (and religion) but also in the
areas of politics, law, morality, and human nature. If history could be a legitimate
tool for furthering ‘philosophical’ enquiry into Biblical/religious issues, why not
for these other areas also?
Conclusion
We can usefully preface our exposition of Vico’s philosophy of history by claiming
his response to the above questions would have been, ‘Exactly! And that is the
whole point of my New Science!’. We have already noted his extraordinary boldness
in claiming that ‘for purposes of [his] enquiry, we must reckon as if there were no
books in the world’.23 The subject of his book is indicated in its full title, Principles
of New Science of Giambattista Vico Concerning the Common Nature of the Nations.
In other words, the subject of his study is ‘the civil world’,24 a term embracing all
aspects of human life as organised into societies – family, property, language, customs,
law, political forms, religions, morality, the arts, cultural norms, and ‘mind-sets’ or
‘mentalities’. An alternative title was New Science Concerning the Principles of
Humanity, which captures far better the sheer scope of what Vico understood as his
subject-matter. In these same passages he ‘beg(s) the reader to consider what has
hitherto been written concerning the principles of any subject in the whole of
gentile [non-Hebrew] knowledge, human and divine’, and urges that the reader ‘will
perceive that all that has so far been written is a tissue of confused memories, of
the fancies of a disordered imagination; that none of it is begotten of intelligence
. . .’.25 In other words, (and to retrace those principal aspects of his intellectual
heritage outlined in this chapter), he thought that the Scientific Revolution was
mistaken in some of its claims and he was uneasy over its direction; that the critical
innovations in philosophy, particularly the epistemological theories of both
empiricists and rationalists, led away from the path to the true understanding of
anything; that seventeenth-century political and legal theory, particularly that
based on the ‘state of nature/social contract’ theory, and on Bodin’s explanation
of ‘sovereignty’, was completely fallacious; and that the new breed of more expert
historians laboured under huge misapprehensions about the larger aspects of human
history. The only part of his intellectual heritage which must have seemed
promising to him was the kind of historico-linguistic analysis Spinoza engaged in. But
(publicly reviled by our seemingly ‘orthodox’ Vico), Spinoza had only made a
beginning, and rather than use it to further the true understanding of ‘the principles
of any subject in the whole of gentile knowledge’, had restricted the technique to
the Bible, the one source of ‘knowledge’ Vico wished to appear to exempt from
criticism!
Instead, Vico sought to recast all knowledge about ‘the civil world’. The key to
this reconstruction lay in extending those historico-linguistic techniques prefigured
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by Renaissance humanists and applied to religion. For Vico, a true understanding

of where things come from removes all sorts of illusions – but this involved his
rejecting much of what seventeenth-century philosophers had said about how to
uncover true ideas, and instead propose his own theory of knowledge. It is just this
grounding of his ideas in his own (distinctive) theory of ‘truth’ which makes his
work explicitly philosophical, and was partly in his mind when he entitled it a new
science. But he also called it ‘new’. This was because the central focus of its subject-
matter was nothing less than the origins and development of the principal
‘institutions’ of human societies – an historical study undertaken according to
explicit methodogical presuppositions. As such, his ‘history’ is inspired by theory.
But vice-versa, his theory (or ‘science’) ‘concerning the principles of any subject
in the whole of gentile knowledge, human and divine’ is historical. The key to
understanding any aspect of the human world (i.e., not just the history of this or
that) is to uncover its origins and trace its development in real history, rather than
to hope to find true knowledge (of, for example, justice, or ‘the ideal society’, or
moral rectitude) by some process of logical deduction, empirical observation,
philosophical speculation, or reliance on some ‘received wisdom’ from past
tradition. This approach to settling the diverse issues surrounding human living in
society is nowadays often referred to as ‘historicism’ – an approach using ‘history’
as method, whereby history becomes the tool of ‘philosophy’ or ‘science’. Equally,
however, the latter become enslaved to their servant.
Thus what we encounter in Vico is not simply some new account of human
history, to compete with previous ones. Nor is it simply some new ‘theory’ of human
history, competing with those explored in our preceding chapters. (It turned out
to be both.) Rather, we are at last in the hands of a formidable and independent
thinker for whom history, which should teach us the historicity of things, provides
the true foundations of ‘theory’ or ‘philosophy’ – but also for whom ‘theory’ or
‘philosophy’ provides the true foundations of history. It is this explicitly argued
inseparability of history and ‘philosophy’ which raises Vico above previous attempts
to ‘make sense’ of human history. Indeed, his own audacious estimation of the
significance of his book was that it represented more than a (new) theory of the
course and meaning of human history. Although incorporating history, it was
however an entirely new ‘science’ or ‘philosophy’, which he was convinced would
revolutionise ‘the principles of any subject . . . human and divine’.
This introduction to Vico’s thought has been a necessary prelude in order to explain
the complex intellectual heritage to which he responded. Also, in allowing us to
recount some of the intellectual history between the times of Machiavelli and
Vico, it has gone some way to explaining why this intervening period (however
eventful otherwise) did not itself include any significant contribution to philosophy
of history. Nevertheless, it did provide that complex of ideas which provoked, in
Vico, the first explicit philosophy of history. By this I do not mean to suggest it could
not have emerged at some earlier period, or that it was bound to emerge in Vico’s
time. But neither, it could be argued, was the time of its genesis accidental. We may
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suppose as preconditions a certain sophistication behind the discipline of history,

thought-provoking innovations in philosophy, and an atmosphere of challenge
towards the dominant ideology (in this case, religious truth). But we also need the
individual whose particularity conspired to fulfil their potential.
Because Vico is still relatively unknown compared to famous philosophers and
political thinkers – and because his principal text, New Science, appears formidable
reading at first acquaintance – the ensuing guide offers a combination of some
detail and frequent quotations better to familiarise the reader with the ideas and
style of his work.
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7
VICO’S PHILOSOPHY OF
HISTO RY
Introduction
Vico’s intellectual development

Born in 1668 into a bookseller’s family in Naples, Vico had a sickly, introverted
childhood devoted much to reading. After a typical classical and Catholic
education he attended the University of Naples to study civil and church law, a
popular career path. Through his twenties, although working as a private tutor to
a country family outside Naples, he kept up with the city’s lively intellectual circles,
for as one commentator puts it, ‘despite his self-image of the solitary thinker [in his
Autobiography of 1728] . . . Vico was not unclubbable’.1 Amongst other intellectual
societies, he associated with somewhat subversive intellectuals in an academy
called the ‘Investigators’. They were regarded with suspicion, and some prosecuted,
by the Inquisition because they were proponents of the ‘new learning’ of
rationalists, empiricists, and scientists, many of whom were regarded as ‘atheists’,
particularly by a Catholic Naples (under Spanish rule) somewhat removed from
the centres of European intellectual life. The Investigators’ purpose, however, was
partly precisely to keep in touch with the latter, and thus they found themselves
engaged in the then European-wide controversy over the relative merits of ancient
and modern learning – the ‘Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns’.2 The
Renaissance humanists had of course claimed pre-eminence for the philosophies
and literary graces of the ‘ancients’ (the classical world), but as the seventeenth
century progressed this was increasingly challenged by the ‘new learning’ in science
and philosophy and, especially in France, by those who argued that in the separate
field of the humanities (including poetry, prose, and history) ‘the moderns’ not
only matched but surpassed ‘the ancients’.
As one scholar puts it, ‘this conflict between the new and the old was
undoubtedly the most exciting intellectual event in the Naples of Vico’s youth’,3
and he kept abreast of the issues, joining the Palatine Academy, which continued
the Inquisitors’ modernizing impulse. In 1698, now thirty, Vico became Professor
of Rhetoric at the University of Naples. This post (held until his death in 1744)
obligated him in teaching and research into classical authors, and ceremonial duties
of delivering public orations and writing poetry and some histories. Thus placed,
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as an educationalist Vico could not have avoided ‘the Quarrel’ even had he wanted
to. Rather, he devoted much thinking to the issues during the early years of his post.
Some of this is reflected in a work comparing the ‘modern’ approach to education
with the traditional learning on the classics (On the Study Methods of Our Time,
1708), and in a work which urged, against Cartesian claims that ancient literature
was worthless as a source of knowledge, that the ancient Romans’ writings should
not be neglected, but do need re-studying in terms of the origins of the languages
and myths from which they had evolved in order to arrive at the ‘real’ knowledge
they contain, (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, 1709).
What emerges is that Vico equivocated between different aspects of the ancient
and new learning. He could not gainsay the superior methodologies of modern
philosophy in establishing mathematical, logical, and scientific truths, and was as
impressed as anyone with the associated practical-technical achievements of the
Scientific Revolution (an admiration he never abandoned).4 Yet he was
increasingly uncomfortable with the notion that modern philosophy and science
held the superior key to understanding everything, particularly in the ‘humanist’
areas of history, law, morals, and other human ‘institutions’.
Rather, to think (as some ‘moderns’) that the wealth of classical humanist
literature contained no insights about life contradicted Vico’s intuitions. However,
so various were the perspectives offered by the classics on the vast terrain of human
and civil affairs, it seems Vico could at least appreciate the moderns’ scepticism.
An intricate and entertaining garden in which one could endlessly wander, the
‘ancient learning’ was also untidy and unplanned, demonstrating no commonality
of either method or focus for understanding human affairs. In contrast, the ‘new
learning’ was methodical, organized, and progressive.
Vico’s ‘great discovery’

A fresh outburst of the Quarrel (in France) from around 1710 further prompted
Vico’s ideas, since it revolved around the nature of ancient ‘poetry’ – especially
Homer’s, the (alleged) ninth-century BC ‘father’ of Greek literature. French
Cartesians, battling for the ‘moderns’, refuted traditional claims that the Iliad and
the Odyssey were unsurpassable expressions of philosophical and human wisdom
set down in matchless poetry. Instead, they argued, the Homeric epics were riddled
with ignorance, superstition, and disgraceful praise of barbaric behaviour. Homer’s
defenders, however, stuck to their view of Homer as the teacher of profound
philosophical and historical truths. The dispute continued into the 1720s, and
although it is likely Vico had for many years been independently mulling over the
issues it raised – an alleged ancient wisdom, the interpretation of the nature of
poetry, and the appropriateness of the learning of ancient cultures to modern times
– there can be little doubt he knew of the row over Homer and that it added focus
to his thinking.
This is because it was in relation to Homer that towards the end of the second
decade Vico found his ‘master key’ which (according to him) unlocked the path
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VICO’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
to nothing less than the true understanding of the course and meaning of human
history. This ‘master key’ derived from reinterpreting ancient writings by locating
the meaning of the language they used in terms of the cultures from which they
emerged. Narrow and specialised as this methodology might seem, it was inspired
by Vico’s growing perception that the ‘literature’ of a people (drama, poetry,
philosophy, history, mythology, legal codes, and other proses) should not be read
‘literally’, as from a modern standpoint. Neither (where it is poetic and/or mythical
fiction) should it be read metaphorically, or cabbalistically, as if it was some sort
of code for a hidden, pristine wisdom. Either approach made the huge mistake of
assuming that earlier peoples were so like later peoples, that the ‘knowledge’
contained in their diverse literary products could be judged by the same criteria
modern Europeans applied to themselves. It was not just a question, for Vico, of
recognising that earlier peoples lived in different times – the Renaissance humanists
had brought that to light.
Rather, his ‘great discovery’ was that ancient peoples had a general mentality or
mind-set profoundly different from that of subsequent periods. His contention was
that ancient peoples did not view the world from a rational, objective standpoint,
but from a fundamentally emotive, imaginative perspective which he called
‘poetic’. This notion has strong affinities to that ‘mythopoeic’ outlook we discussed
in Chapter 2, and Vico is at pains to stress the difficulties ‘civilised’ man has in
empathising with this mentality and thus ‘understanding’ what it utters through
its literature (or ‘philology’). Ancient peoples viewed the world figuratively, with
a kind of ‘poetic’ consciousness focused on concrete, expressive, individual features
which they used, via vivid imagination, to describe their world by transposing them
from one thing to another. Thus, for example, if dark clouds portend gloomy rain
a poet might refer to a troubled man as having clouded brows – or use a metallic
quality to describe someone courageous as ‘a man of steel’. ‘Modern’ poets know
when they speak like this – ancient men knew no other way, Vico suggests. In that
sense they were not ‘being poets’ in their utterances – rather, they were ‘natural’
poets, and thus what they said about things has to be taken literally, but only once
one has understood what they are referring to. This requires combining painstaking
research into the ‘poetic’ references their language expresses with an historical-
imaginative reconstruction of the world they experienced themselves as inhabiting.
Only if we engage in this will we understand the knowledge (the ‘poetic wisdom’)
their ‘philology’ contains.
This, then, was the ‘great discovery’ which, according to him, Vico had been
working towards for twenty years, and which he must have experienced as a
moment of enlightenment, for in the early 1720s he began the exposition of his
basic ideas on history precisely in relation to Homer’s epics.
Vico’s ‘master-key’
For Vico, this ‘great discovery’ was a master-key, since it impelled him towards that
reconstruction of the course of human history he set out in his New Science.
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(Although he had already written a massive work, Universal Right, in 1720 – an

intriguing precursor to his versions of the New Science, yet only available in English
translation since 2001, thus inviting much scholarly interest5 – he prepared the first
edition of the latter work in 1725, and continued revising it intermittently until
his death, a second edition appearing in 1730, and the final one in 1744). It
achieved this because his theory about Homer held momentous implications for
Vico. Not only did it ‘unlock’ Homer. In relating the language and ‘letters’ of
peoples to their mentalities, and their mentalities to a (partly imagined) recovery
of the world they inhabited, it opened up a methodology whereby Vico thought
he could retrace distinct historical stages through which all ‘human institutions’
have passed. In addition, his linguistic (‘philological’) researches convinced him
that although all ‘nations’ traverse the same stages, they do so independently rather
than their cultures stemming from some single original source later transmitted to
them. In its turn, this convinced him that all ‘human institutions’ must have passed
through the same stages, and that therefore his work uncovered nothing less than
the universal laws governing the history of ‘nations’ (or ‘gentes’) – what he variously
called the ‘ideal eternal history’, ‘the common nature of nations’, or the ‘principles
of humanity’. Further, his researches also led him to believe that a certain stage had
been repeated in European history, and thus to hint (albeit obscurely) that history
is cyclical overall.
Thus we find Vico claiming that to properly understand the nature of human
societies and all the issues of ‘philosophy’ involved (e.g., methodology,
epistemology, political theory, moral philosophy, comparative law), ‘we must
reckon as if there were no books in the world’ up to now which have been of any
use. This is because all scholars, classical and modern, had failed to appreciate the
truly radical historicity of more ancient times and mentalities which Vico’s work
had uncovered. They therefore held distorted views on the origins of society. And
since, for Vico, there is a strong sense in which the ‘origins’ of a thing equate with
the very ‘principle’ of a thing, then nothing of what they said about human affairs
‘is begotten of intelligence’. Scholars had consequently either praised the ancients
for some alleged esoteric philosophical wisdom or regarded them as unworthy of
attention from a modern age.
Instead, Vico viewed ancient writings as evidence from which he inferred their
‘poetic wisdom’, itself evidence of a different mentality. From there, one could
proceed to infer from the evidence, rather than merely imagine, the actual circum-
stances in which human beings generated the first ‘institutions’ or ‘principles’ of
society, and from which all else followed. And as we will see, Vico did not restrict
his analysis to the first societies. As societies developed over the ages, human
consciousness or ‘mentalities’ changed. Yet significant vestiges of the language of
earlier times lingered on with modified meanings, but still relatable to earlier
circumstances. Thus various seminal documents such as the early legal codes and
historical mythologies of the Greek and Romans were not only hopelessly
misunderstood by later scholars, but were often inherently confused themselves,
often misappropriating words and terms from an earlier age. Vico displays a special
130
fascination in tracing such vestigial meanings in later literatures and employing the
insights gained to better understand (i.e., ‘scientifically’) not only ancient but also
succeeding epochs of human history.
Hopefully this exposition of both the general and more immediate origins of Vico’s
New Science will help in the reading of Vico’s final (1744) version, otherwise a
somewhat challenging experience partly because he is responding to those large and
diverse themes outlined in the previous chapter. Not least amongst that complex,
as we have seen, was the philosophical issue of method for achieving true knowledge.
Reflective on the issue, and sensitive to its primary importance, Vico had his own
ideas – of profound significance to his philosophy of history.
The question of true knowledge
The earlier Vico

Vico grappled with this issue from as early as 1708, and a good case can be made
for claiming he altered his views on it6 by the time he worked on the New Science
(especially from the 1730 version onwards). Nonetheless, aspects of his earlier
theory of knowledge continued to play a part in the latter. In his (1709) work On
the Wisdom of the Most Ancient Italians Vico elaborates his theory that ‘the true’
(verum) is ‘the made’, or ‘that which is done’ (factum). By this he means to refute
the Cartesian notion that ‘truth’ is simply the property we ascribe to statements
which follow logically from definitions.7 Rather, if we want to know or understand a
thing truly we have to be aware of how it was made or done. Everything which
exists (from natural phenomena and happenings to human events, institutions,
and the arts and sciences themselves) is the product of ‘making’ or ‘doing’ (factum).
Since this is the very foundation of all reality, it is also the very foundation of ‘the
true’ (verum). All else is fiction or fantasy. Thus, if only that which is ‘made’ or
‘done’ is the true, equally, only that is ‘the true’ which is ‘the made’ or ‘the done’.
On this basis Vico evaluated the ‘truth’ status of the various branches of human
knowledge. But this exercise was premised by his insistence on the religio-
philosophical notion that God made Nature (including man), and that God did
this out of nothing other than His own intellect. Put simply, Existence in all its
forms is the manifestation or ‘product’ of God’s thinking – not, then, that God
forged the things in Existence from some pre-existing primeval elements, but in the
literally radical sense of conceiving everything ex nihilo from His own mind. Now
(according to the pre-New Science Vico), the nearest human-beings can approach
such ‘making/doing’ is found in mathematical reasoning, because here they engage
in creating ideas and drawing conclusions from them solely from their own minds.
Since, then, the ‘knowing’ and the ‘doing’ coincide in the mind of the
mathematician, this is ‘making’ par excellence, such that mathematical knowledge
achieves that equation of ‘the made’ (factum) and ‘the true’ (verum) nearest to
Divine knowledge. It is the most ‘true’ or ‘certain’ knowledge. Next in order of
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certainty is physics. It shares the exactness and clarity of mathematical reasoning,

yet in dealing with the laws of matter the physicist is not creating (‘making’) the
elements he is thinking about – (God, not the physicist, made Nature).
From this Vico constructs a descending order of disciplines. The more entangled
a subject-matter is in the contingent externalities of the world, the further removed
is the knowledge of that subject from the abstract clarity of mathematical principles.
It is true that the problems of ‘knowing’ things external to the mind can be
mitigated through the process of experimentation, whereby to an extent we
replicate natural processes. Such work was common in physics, and chemistry was
also beginning to benefit from it. But on both counts – their contingent externality
and the difficulty of conducting repeatable experiments – certain topics remain
relatively inaccessible to ‘knowing’, and Vico places ‘ethics’ at the bottom of the
list. By ‘ethics’ he means that venerable and extensive area of (humanist) enquiry
into knowledge of ‘the good’, encompassing justice, morality, and law (and thereby
political institutions). Perhaps to our surprise, then, it is just the study of human
mores, laws, and institutions which is the furthest removed from a ‘knowing’
validated through the equation of ‘the made’ with ‘the true’. In short, for the earlier
Vico, knowledge of what he later called ‘the civil world’, or ‘the world of nations’,
is the least ‘certain’ or ‘scientific’.
Yet over time Vico altered these views to the point where he implies it is precisely
knowledge of the above subject-matter which we can put most trust in, if we follow
the principles he proposes in his New Science. As a change of mind, however, it is
clear it emerged from these interesting earlier reflections on epistemology.
‘True knowledge’ in the New Science

Principally in paragraphs 119 to 164 of the New Science (1744 edition), Vico set
out his considerably revised views on the truth status of knowledge in a set of
propositions which ‘are general and are the basis of our Science throughout’8 and
which, ‘just as the blood does in animate bodies, . . . will . . . course through our
Science and animate it in all its reasonings about the common nature of nations’.9
We have already noted his bold dismissal of all previous attempts to gain proper
knowledge of human affairs, and he begins by saying that ‘the inexhaustible source
of all the errors about the principles of humanity’ is the propensity whereby, when
man is ‘lost in ignorance’, he ‘makes himself the measure of all things’.10 This
spawns two fallacies – first, ‘the conceit of nations’, whereby each nation mistakenly
believes that ‘it before all other nations invented the comforts of human life and
that its remembered history goes back to the very beginning of the world’.11 This
leads to interpreting cultural history as originating in a single source, from which
it was subsequently transmitted to other nations – a grievous error leading
historians, philosophers, and linguists into illusion and confusion. The second is
‘the conceit of scholars’, ‘who will have it that what they know is as old as the
world’12 whereby in trying to give their own ideas a spurious authority they allege
an esoteric and pristine wisdom existed in ancient times, to which their own ideas
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accord. Since no such ancient wisdom existed, Vico insists, this is equally grievous
an error since it generates a complete misreading of ancient cultures, and thus of
history itself.
These remarks already suggest a more confident approach to knowledge of the
human world than in his earlier epistemology, for now he is saying the deficiencies
of such knowledge are not intrinsic to the subject-matter, but are explicable in terms
of those common errors exposed above. Once avoided, he can proceed to establish
the bases for a ‘true’ understanding of the human world. They are as follows: God
created the world, and thus knows it absolutely ‘since in God knowledge and
creation are one and the same thing’:13 men can approach such true knowledge
through ‘science’ or ‘philosophy’, which ‘contemplates reason, whence comes
knowledge of the true’.14 Yet such (logical) reasoning deals only with abstract fictions
of the human mind such as the ‘points, lines, surfaces, and figures’ invented by
geometry (still an archetype of this kind of knowledge for Vico). In this sense,
although philosophy discovers (logical) truth, its knowledge is deficient to the
extent that it deals with abstractions rather than real things. Where, however, such
‘scientific’ or ‘philosophical’ reasoning is applied to real things, two problems
continue to undermine the truth status of the knowledge gained. The first remains
intrinsic, and is where the subject-matter is the natural world (e.g., physics,
mechanics) – for man has not made the natural world, and so natural science,
however expert, must ultimately remain incomplete knowledge. The second is
where the scientist-philosopher, even when contemplating real things rather than
abstractions, does not take sufficient care over the empirical details of his subject-
matter (e.g., misperceiving it because relying on previous assumptions). This can
still be a fault in the natural sciences, which is why Vico so much approves of
Francis Bacon’s ‘method of philosophising, which is “think and see”’.15 But the
philosopher-scientist can also contemplate the human world, and it is here in
particular that Vico believes their knowledge has ‘failed by half’16 through lack of
attention to the empirical facts.
So ‘scientific’ or ‘philosophical’ reasoning, ‘whence comes knowledge of the
true’, gives the certainty of logical truth and can be applied to both the natural and
the human world. But in both cases it must get its facts straight. The facts in the
natural world are made by God, and thus there is a limit to natural science’s grasp
of its subject-matter, although observation and experiment can achieve great
insight. The facts in the human world, however, are ‘made’ in the immediate sense
by men. Knowledge of these facts is what Vico calls ‘philology’, by which he means
‘all the grammarians, historians, critics, who have occupied themselves with the
study of the languages and deeds of peoples: both at home, as in their customs and
laws, and abroad, as in their wars, peaces, alliances, travels, and commerce’.17 Now
the knowledge or consciousness of fact is not the same kind of ‘knowing’ as that of
the philosopher-scientists. They construct ‘knowledge of the true’, whereas
knowledge of fact is what Vico distinguishes as ‘consciousness of the certain’. He
tells us that ‘men who do not know what is true of things take care to hold fast to
what is certain’.18 Knowledge of fact, (i.e., empirically based knowledge), thus bears
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the stamp of ‘certainty’ rather than the hallmark of logical validity (the different
province of philosophy/reason/science).
Now, logically speaking, there seems no reason to restrict knowledge of ‘the
certain’ to the human world. After all, natural scientists-philosophers must also get
their facts straight – and this must involve them in knowledge of ‘the certain’, which
seems to be what Vico praises Bacon for. Yet Vico glosses over this, wanting to
restrict knowledge of ‘the certain’ solely to knowledge of the human world. Thus
where he introduces his distinction between knowledge of ‘the true’ and ‘the
certain’ he writes: ‘Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of
the true; philology observes that of which human choice is author, whence comes
consciousness of the certain’.19
Whether or not this constitutes an error in Vico’s thinking, it evidences a
distinct shift from his earlier epistemology – a shift crucial to the entire logic of his
New Science, and which he therefore impresses on the reader. Now, in the New
Science, ‘the civil world’ has been made by men, and can therefore come to be
‘known’ in a manner superior to the philosopher-scientist’s knowledge of the
natural world. Vico writes that it is ‘a truth beyond all question: that the world of
civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore
to be found within the modifications of our own human mind’, and complains of
the fact that ‘the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of
the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they
should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which,
since men had made it, men could come to know’.20 Again, ‘this world of nations
has certainly been made by men. . . . And history cannot be more certain than
when he who creates the things also narrates them’.21 He thus suggests that his
‘Science’, because dealing with real things created by men, is (potentially) superior
to natural science in respect of its truth status.
Thus the outlines of Vico’s (new) epistemology – so much at the heart of his
philosophy of history – become clearer. But as his response to seventeenth-century
epistemological debate, what is Vico suggesting about the kind of method and
knowledge his book contains? In our modern terms, is it ‘science’ or ‘philosophy’ –
or in seventeenth-century terms, is it simply another example of ‘philosophy-science’
(applied to human institutions)? This is all the more important an issue because,
in approaching the first example (in today’s parlance) of explicit ‘philosophy of
history’, it raises the vexed question of its disciplinary status or integrity. But Vico’s
answer seems clear. Rather than his New Science contributing to or combining any
existing disciplines, for him it seems that (what we now call) ‘philosophy of history’
is nothing less than a new, independent discipline in itself, which his book
establishes.
This is because Vico wanted to supersede the debates between ‘science’ and
‘philosophy’ and between rationalism and empiricism. For Vico, we can call
knowledge of ‘the true’ equally ‘science’ or ‘philosophy, so long as we mean
knowledge derived from abstract logical reasoning. Knowledge of ‘the certain’, on
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the other hand, is empirical knowledge of fact, but he restricts its reference to those
matters of fact of which men are ‘makers’ and ‘doers’.
Here we can properly ‘know’ the facts of the human world, but such empirical
knowledge cannot stand on its own as a comprehensive understanding of that world,
since its mode of knowledge does not involve knowledge of ‘the true’. In short, the
facts of the human world still need to be interconnected through the process of
logical reasoning (science/ philosophy) in order to arrive at ‘the truth’. Thus for
Vico ‘the truth’ must be a mixing of ‘the certain’ and ‘the true’, and is, then, more
than either factual knowledge (‘empiricism’) or science/philosophy (‘rationalism’)
– it supersedes both. Vico calls it ‘new science’. But above all let us note that for
Vico this ultimate form of knowledge is intrinsically and exclusively knowledge of
civil or human affairs, and thus in the broadest sense of the term, historical
knowledge. By this we do not mean (merely) knowledge of history, but a method
of knowing something comprehensively through making sense (‘the true’) of the
facts – (‘the certain’).
And the only things amenable to such complete knowledge are those ‘facts’
made or done by men. This, however, is a huge area incorporating customs,
languages, all kinds of institutions, legal codes, religious beliefs, social structures,
and the arts, sciences, and philosophy – in short, nothing less than human culture
in its broadest sense, or in his words, ‘the principles of humanity’.
Thus we find Vico complaining how, in respect of the human world, ‘the
philosophers failed by half in not giving certainty to their reasonings by appeal to
the authority of the philologians, and likewise how the latter failed by half in not
taking care to give their authority the sanction of truth by appeal to the reasoning
of the philosophers’.22 When the two approaches are fused, according to Vico, the
resulting knowledge is not merely a (now correct) understanding of this or that
detail of civil affairs. Rather, it contributes to the understanding of ‘this world of
nations in its eternal idea’.23 This is the final summit of his ‘new science’, achieving
what he calls ‘an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the history of every
nation’,24 such that we discover ‘the eternal laws which are instanced by the deeds
of all nations . . . even if . . . there were infinite worlds being born . . . throughout
eternity’.25 In short, that which is ‘known’ by Vico’s ‘new science’ – the object of
its knowledge – is nothing less than the universal laws governing the history of all
humanity, whichever cultures, nations, or peoples it is comprised of. It would appear
to be the only object of his ‘new science’, just as his ‘new science’ can only ‘know’
one subject – the universal principles of mankind wherever instanced through men
organising themselves into the societal world.
In his own mind, then, Vico was not simply offering a revised version of human
history on the basis of his discovery of new facts. Rather, he is highly aware of the
radical status of his approach to knowledge – (like blood circulating the body, it
‘courses through our Science’) – and is equally anxious to publicise the fact: ‘Hence
we could not refrain from giving this work the invidious title of a New Science, for
it was too much to defraud it unjustly of the rightful claim it had . . .’.26 It is this
feature of his work which, perhaps above all, justifies the claim that he is the first
135
explicit philosopher of history, and not surprisingly it is the feature which most
continues to interest philosophers and historical theorists.
Vico’s ‘ideal eternal history’
Mankind’s origins – the ‘age of gods’

We may now proceed to Vico’s actual account of the course and meaning of human
history, beginning with its origins. From his reading of Homer, Vico claims that
early men (i.e., before the dawning of classical Greek culture) had a profoundly
different mentality from their more civilised successors. Being brute ignorant,
having neither language or reason, living in dire straits, and prey to urgent fears,
their consciousness was supersensitive to the immediately perceptible qualities of
things they encountered, such that their awareness of the world was solely (and
highly) figurative and imaginative. Initially mute, the earliest kind of language to
emerge amongst these feral beings was, Vico suggests, ‘singing’ (see below). This
evolved into the first spoken words, but these did not denote the common
properties of things (as in our languages). Rather, they marked a thing’s most
importantly sensed impact, irrespective of its other features. And where something
else provoked the same effect, the same word would be used to signify the thing.
It is this propensity to construct imaginative, figurative language that Vico calls
‘poetry’. Interestingly, Vico thinks children’s mentality is the perfect analogy. ‘In
children memory is most vigorous, and imagination is therefore excessively vivid;
. . . this . . . is the principle of the expressiveness of the poetic images that the world
formed in its first childhood’.27 Again, ‘Children excel in imitation . . . they
generally amuse themselves by imitating whatever they are able to apprehend; This
. . . shows that the world in its infancy was composed of poetic nations, for poetry
is nothing but imitation’.28 Vico delights in peppering his New Science with
examples of how the meaning of words in use at a later time can be traced back to
their initial figurative source. For example, referring to the Latin word lex (‘law’),
he writes:
First it must have meant a collection of acorns. Thence we believe is

derived ilex, as it were illex, the oak (as certainly aquilex means collector
of waters); for the oak produces the acorns by which the swine are drawn
together. Lex was next a collection of vegetables, from which the latter
were called legumina. Later on . . . when . . . letters had not yet been
invented for writing down the laws, lex . . . must have meant a collection
of citizens, or the public parliament; so that the presence of the people was
the lex, or “law” . . . Finally, collecting letters, and making, as it were, a
sheaf of them for each word, was called legere, reading.29
The reader of Vico will find numerous such treatments of the origins of words
(etymology), and the point here is not so much their accuracy but the rationale of
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the exercise. For example, we know the word ‘companion’ derives from the concrete
notion of ‘sharing bread’ (com – panis). Similarly, imagine a distant future in which
space-travel is common and in which the term ‘docking’ persists. Then imagine
how enlightening an account of where the term came from in the twentieth century
(i.e., ships ‘docking’) would be. The next step, of course, would be to see where the
twentieth-century term itself originated by consulting an etymological dictionary.
This is the significance Vico attaches to etymology. It tells us where ideas came
from, and thus evidences the manner in which earlier cultures perceived the world
– and, in turn, how it impinged on them. It persuades Vico that when language
emerged from ‘the earliest antiquity’ and was eventually put into writing (initially
signs and hieroglyphics rather than ‘sheafs of letters’), the first men’s knowledge of
the world was comprised of what he calls ‘poetic wisdom’. However, this ‘poetic
wisdom’ has no connection with the (later) rational, analytical apprehension of
things in terms of abstract genera. Rather, it is the expression of the heightened
alertness to the striking features of things, creatively applied through a highly
imaginative ‘imitation’ to identify and describe the surrounding world, and (as in
Homer) it can reach ‘sublime’ heights. Although not ‘rational’, such ‘knowledge’
is thus essentially creative, and characteristically Vico traces the meaning of the
word poet (in Greek) to creator or maker.
With these insights into ‘poetic wisdom’, Vico proceeds to construct the funda-
mental developments in human history since the Flood. Elaborating on the Biblical
account, Vico claims that in Mesopotamia, after the Universal Flood, Noah
established the Hebrew people30 which, through keeping faith with the true religion
of God, continued thereafter on a separate path from all other subsequent gentile
nations (of which more below). But the descendants of Noah’s three sons gradually
renounced their religion and dispersed into three different races and areas of the
world. The immediate post-Flood world, Vico claims, must have been covered in
damp, dense forest full of wild beasts, and as the peoples of Ham, Japheth, and
Shem dispersed throughout it, individuals must have become separated. In this
precarious situation, fleeing from wild beasts, and pursuing women who themselves
must have become increasingly wild and fearful, all vestiges of their previous culture
disappeared.
Mothers, like beasts, must have merely nursed their babies, let them
wallow naked in their own filth, and abandoned them for good as soon as
they were weaned; . . . [W]ithout ever hearing a human voice, much less
learning any human custom, [these generations] descended to a state truly
bestial and savage.
Vico then suggests these feral creatures developed physically, ‘excessively big in
brawn and bone, to the point of becoming giants’31 (much talked of in ancient
fables), and it is from ‘these first men, stupid, insensate, and horrible beasts’,32 that
the history and institutions of all (gentile) nations emerged.
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So (gentile, post-Flood) history began with an age of ‘giants’, horrifyingly and

almost unimaginably sub-human in their brute natures. The stronger ‘giants’
naturally took to the drier safeholds of mountain-tops with caves – and such would
have remained the condition of humanity were it not, according to Vico, for a
dramatic event. After some hundreds of years of drying out, the earth at last
produced sufficient vapour to cause the first thunder and lightning. Never witnessed
before, and of such an awe-inspiring nature, it terrified and traumatized our feral
giants, and none more so than those frequenting the mountain heights. Unaccus-
tomed to pay attention to the sky, they now became aware of it, and,
because in such a case the nature of the human mind leads it to attribute
its own nature to the effect, and because in that state their nature was
that of men all robust bodily strength, who expressed their very violent
passions by shouting and grumbling, they pictured the sky to themselves
as a great animated body. . . . who meant to tell them something by the
hiss of his bolts and the clap of his thunder.33
This is the origin of gentile religion, whereby our ‘giants’ believed in a terrifying
power ‘speaking’ in/from/as the sky, later called Jove. This event must have been
replicated many times and to the same effect – such that ‘every gentile nation had
its Jove’,34 with correspondingly numerous names. Later, ‘the first theological poets
created the first divine fable, the greatest they ever created: that of Jove, king and
father of men and gods, in the act of hurling the lightning bolt; an image . . . its
creators themselves believed in . . ., and feared, revered, and worshipped . . . in
frightful religions’.35
The first effect of this traumatic experience of a ‘voice’ in the sky was to terrify
the ‘giants’ into retreating into their caves, and ‘to check their bestial habit of
wandering wild through the great forest of the earth’,36 making them remain within
a settled territory. This is the very seed from which subsequent social developments
sprang, and without which there would be no societies in the (gentile) world –
such that Vico puts religion as the first ‘institution’ of every nation. The essence
of this ‘religion’ was, from fear of Jove’s authority – (they had never felt ‘authority’
before) – to try to ‘divine’ what the signs made by Jove meant, leading to the
auspices, oracles, and sacrifices of these ‘frightful religions’.
The second effect was to restrain
their bestial lust from finding its satisfaction in the sight of heaven, of
which they had a mortal terror. So it came about that each of them would
drag one woman into his cave and keep her there in perpetual company
for the duration of their lives. Thus the act of human love was performed
under cover, in hiding, that is to say, in shame . . . In this guise marriage
was introduced, which is a chaste carnal union consummated under the
fear of some divinity.37
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In this manner the first proper families emerged – that is, where the offspring’s
parentage was certain. Since Vico insists all nations originated in families, marriage
is thus the second fundamental principle of any society.
The third is burial. Surprisingly, all Vico says to explain this is that it came from
the belief ‘that human souls do not die with their bodies but are immortal’. But he
also links it to the emergence of family lands (property) whereby ‘by long residence
and burial of their dead they came to found and divide the first dominions of the
earth, whose lords were giants, a Greek word meaning “sons of earth”’.38 Be this as
it may, Vico observes that ‘all nations, barbarous as well as civilized, though
separately founded because remote from each other in time and space, keep these
three human customs: all have some religion, all contract solemn marriages, all bury
their dead’.39 One might wonder at the prospects for our contemporary Western
societies, in which all three ‘fundamental institutions’ are increasingly disrespected
through, respectively, atheism, the ‘sexual revolution’, and ‘spare part’ body donor
practices!
There is a sense in which Vico adds a fourth fundamental institution, for he says
these first families cleared the forests around them and made fields. In short,
property was introduced, whereby territory was delineated on family lines, put to
economic use, and its boundaries defended.
In this initial stage, then, some ‘families’ were established, restrained by religion
into the practices of marriage, burial, and settlement. These first cultivated fields
were burnt clearings in the forests, and here we may give another example of Vico’s
intriguing use of etymology as evidence of features of ancient antiquity. These fields
were called luci by the Latin peoples,
in the sense of an eye, as even today we call eyes the opening through
which light enters houses. The . . . phrase that ‘every giant had his lucus’
[clearing or eye] was altered and corrupted when its meaning was lost, and
had already been falsified when it reached Homer, for it was then taken
to mean that every giant had one eye in the middle of his forehead.40
This, then, for Vico is the origin of the myth of the Cyclops, the race of one-eyed
giants, and we can see how he uses it both to arrive at the historical facts he claims
underlie it and to explain their passing into ‘mythical’ form through the corruption
of time. In this case, at an earlier age when the imagery of ‘giants/fields/eyes’ was a
genuine perception of the figurative/associative ‘poetic’ consciousness, it denoted
a true state of affairs. But in later times the different associations of such figurative
language generate misunderstandings and myths whose meanings have to be
interpreted – but not on the basis of some esoteric, hidden philosophical wisdom.
Rather, the meaning and use of words has to be related both to where they originated
and to the present mind-set of the culture now employing them. Their changing
meanings over time are not only a potent clue to their original meaning but also to
the historical circumstances and mentalities of the succeeding cultures who use
them in their own way. He was especially proud of how his etymological/
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philological researches into the earliest documents (Homer – ‘a vast store-house

of knowledge’ – in Greece, and the Roman Law of the Twelve Tables) at last
revealed and proved (according to him) the hitherto unknown or purely fantasised
history of ‘the lost times’.
Vico called this first age ‘the age of gods’ or ‘the age of giants’. As we have seen,
some of these ‘giants’ became subdued by ‘Jove’ and settled into the first form of
social organisation, which Vico calls ‘the family state’.41 But other ‘giants’ (less
‘noble’)42 remained in the forests, and ‘impious . . . , continued the infamous
promiscuity of things and of women’.43 Eventually, however, their miserable
circumstances (akin to Hobbes’ ‘fierce and violent men’44 or Pufendorf’s ‘Big Feet’
giants45) drove them to seek succour in the enclosed ‘fields’ or ‘asylums’ established
by the god-fearing ‘giants’ already organised into family states. But the latter did
not accept these wretched ‘refugees’46 as equals. Rather, they killed the more violent
newcomers and took the remainder under their protection as inferiors obliged to
work and defend the land (belonging exclusively to the ‘nobles’). Vico variously
refers to their status as like that of prisoners-of-war,47 day-labourers,48 slaves,
‘clients’,49 or plebeians.50 It was this development which ‘gave a beginning to
society in the proper sense’, since although a prior ‘society’ had prevailed in the
family state of the noble giants, it had only come about through their being ‘driven
thereto by religion and by the natural instinct to propagate the human race . . . and
thus gave a beginning to noble and lordly friendship’. But, importantly, it seems
Vico denies that ‘friendship’ or ‘sociability’ is the basis for ‘society in the proper
sense’. Rather, the latter only begins when formed from practical motivations.
Society ‘proper’ fulfils practical need, not altruistic yearnings. Thus it was not until
the subsequent stage, when ‘base and servile’ refugees ‘came out of a necessity of
saving their lives’, that society began ‘in the proper sense, with a view principally
to utility’.51
The ‘age of heroes’

Thus we arrive at Vico’s second age, the ‘age of heroes’, in which society proper
began. During this age the small family-states of noble giants evolved into cities,
or city-states, often expanded through military conquest. The form of government
common in the heroic age was necessarily (given its origins) ‘most severely
aristocratic’.52 The descendants of the first noble ‘giants’ retained their ownership
of land through their status, guaranteed via the integrity of their lineage, and ruled
their ‘plebeians, being considered of bestial origin’,53 with what from a later
perspective was barbarous cruelty. Vico does not minimise the brutal aspects of
‘heroic’ natures where, ‘being as yet incapable of reason’, the only law initially was
that of force. But the outcome of force was regarded as a divine judgement and
therefore just. It was ‘the law of Achilles, who referred every right to the tip of his
spear’.54 Thus issues between the noble families would often be settled by bloody
duels, whilst any issue between noble heads of families and their dependents (servile
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‘plebs’ or their own children) would be ruthlessly dealt with by the noble head who
exercised a ‘divine’ right of life and death.
But barbarous as were these early aristocracies of ‘the age of heroes’, Vico insists
we must understand and judge the ‘heroic’ mentality in terms of its own times, not
ours. The noble families saw themselves as descended from a special lineage which
had maintained its integrity through pious observance of the religious heritage of
their god-like ancestors. Indeed, so intimate and integral had been their ancestors’
communion with Jove (and with all the other gods they invented by ‘ascrib[ing]
to physical things the being of substances animated by gods’),55 that they saw
themselves as Jove’s descendants, and jealously guarded their knowledge of
the mysteries, rites, auspices, sacrifices, judgements, and modes of divination from
their plebeian underlings. (Vico thus describes the first city-states as ‘priestly
aristocracies’). Given this mentality, (and the awe in which at least the first
generations of refugees held their lords) a different morality from ours held sway –
the virtues of ‘heroism’. Order was ruthlessly maintained through the sword, and
right amongst equals, including ‘international relations’ between different ‘nations’
or city-states, was established by appeal to divine judgement via force of arms
(sometimes via duelling rather than all-out conflict). Reminding us of the
equivocation in Machiavelli’s notion of ‘virtue’, Vico similarly talks admiringly of
the ‘heroic’ virtues, despite their seeming barbarity. Thus,
the strong, with a fierceness born of their union in the society of families,
slew the violent who had violated their lands, and took under their
protection the miserable creatures who had fled from them. And
above the heroism of nature which was theirs as having been born of Jove
. . . , there now shone forth preeminently in them the heroism of virtue.
In this heroism the Romans excelled all other peoples of the earth,
practising precisely these two aspects of it, sparing the submissive and
vanquishing the proud.56
Large sections of the New Science are devoted to explaining this ‘heroic’ mentality
of barbarous times, the essence being that these peoples had intellects ‘incapable
of abstracting forms and properties from subjects’,57 but attended only to the striking
particulars of matters, generating that vivid and imaginative ‘poetic’ consciousness
described earlier. Combining this fundamental intellectual deficiency with ‘their
recent gigantic origin’, Vico outlines their inextricably linked psychological
character – ‘the heroes were in the highest degree gross and wild . . . very limited
in understanding but endowed with the vastest imaginations and the most violent
passions. Hence they must have been boorish, crude, harsh, wild, proud, difficult
and obstinate . . . and (yet) easily diverted’. But they must also have been ‘bluff,
touchy, magnanimous, and generous, as Homer portrays Achilles, the greatest of
all the Greek heroes’.58 Vico also believes that despite, or because, lacking the
capacity for reason, they must have had exceptional memories, and that prior to
the emergence of written language (at the end of their age) they preserved the
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memory of important events (related to their society’s origins and development)

in figurative signs, later transposed into ‘poetic’ song as verbal language took shape.
But we must understand that these ‘songs’ were not ‘poetic’ because they were
songs. Rather, the first verbal language was ‘poetic’ because it emerged from ‘a
fantastic speech making use of physical substances endowed with life and most of
them imagined to be divine’.59 And it was ‘song’ because ‘mutes utter formless
sounds by singing’, and ‘men vent great passions by breaking into song’ – thus ‘the
founders of the gentile nations, having wandered about in the wild state of dumb
beasts . . . were inexpressive save under the impulse of violent passions, and formed
their first languages by singing’.60
These first ‘songs’ were thus histories of their societies, but posed in the
necessarily ‘fabulous’ terms corresponding to their ‘poetic’ consciousness. Yet this
does not mean the ‘fables’ containing their history were untrue. On the contrary,
Vico insists ‘the fables in their origin were true and severe narrations’,61 and that
they preceded the first written histories which after ‘the long passage of years and
change of customs’62 distorted their meanings, which were ‘altered, subsequently
became improbable, after that obscure, then scandalous, and finally incredible’.63
This corrupting process was well under way even before Homer,64 (whom Vico
doubted as an historical figure, claiming that he stood for a tradition of mythical
narration spanning centuries of Greek ‘heroic’ culture), such that the history of
earlier times which his great myths recount requires a radical reconstruction in the
light of Vico’s method.
In short, what Vico employs in his ‘discovery of the true Homer’ is a highly
suggestive, complex technique which uncovers the ‘heroic’ mentality and
circumstances, which are themselves a product of the earlier, entirely mythopoeic
mentality and circumstances of the ‘age of giants’. Both ‘spoke’ poetically, but the
latter’s poetry was ‘theological’ and spoke only the truth (albeit in its own way),
whilst ‘heroic’ poetry became increasingly fantastical in terms of the ‘history’ it
related (although its meanings and referents can still be recaptured).
In practice (since, lacking speculative reason, they were nothing if not practical
in their mentality) the ‘heroic’ peoples were concerned with what Vico refers to
as the ‘utilities and necessities of life’ – territory, fields, corn, inheritance,
boundaries, family lineage, authority, and terms of protection. Vico uses this notion
to help disentangle the meaning of the words they used. Thus he found the
(Roman) Law of the Twelve Tables especially illuminating. It is the other major
‘document’ he uses to complement the analysis of the ‘heroic ages’ he derives from
Homer. But mention of this Roman source introduces us to the third age Vico
identifies, ‘the age of men’, for in his opening ‘Chronological Table’ he dates the
Law of the Twelve Tables at around the time when in Italy the ‘age of heroes’ had
run its course. Appearing on the cusp of epochal change, the Twelve Tables are
thus of seminal interest as a source both of the age from which they emerged and
of that which was dawning. According to his Chronology, the same significance
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attaches to Homer, for his epics appeared around the time this same epochal change
occurred in Greece – some three hundred years before Italy.
The ‘age of men’

What, then, is ‘the age of men’, and how did it come about? Vico uses the term to
denote the age in which men became recognisably ‘human’ in their mentality. The
fierce, passionate, unreflective ‘heroic’ nature dissipated, along with its purely
imaginative, ‘poetic’ consciousness, to be replaced by ‘human nature, intelligent
and hence modest, benign, and reasonable, recognising for laws conscience, reason,
and duty’.65 Correspondingly, the ‘age of men’ sees the origins of articulate speech
and written words, denoting things in terms of the genera to which they belong.
In short, it witnesses the birth of philosophy and science, in which the world is now
construed rationally by language denoting the properties of things according to
the abstracting of universals. For example:
after the poets had formed poetic speech by associating particular ideas,
the [human] peoples went on to form prose speech by contracting into a
single word, as into a genus, the parts which poetic speech had associated.
Take for example the poetic phrase ‘the blood boils in my heart’ . . . They
took the blood, the boiling, and the heart, and made of them a single word
(‘I am angry’)66 . . . [By these means] the minds of the people grew quicker
and developed powers of abstraction, and the way was thus prepared for
the coming of philosophers, who formed intelligible genera.67
Interestingly, Vico claims the emergence of this ‘human’ language was hugely
significant in political terms, for whereas ‘hitherto [in the ‘age of heroes’] . . . the
nobles, being also priests, had kept the laws in a secret language as a sacred thing’,
‘human language’ used:
words agreed upon by the people, a language of which they are the absolute
lords . . . whereby the people may fix the meaning of the laws by which
the nobles as well as the plebs are bound . . . Hence, . . . once the laws had
been put into the vulgar tongue, the science of laws passed from the
control of the nobles.68
In short, a feature of the benign ‘age of men’ is that ordinary people appropriate
the language. (Here we may be reminded of those concerns expressed today about
scientists – and perhaps Internet users – speaking a different ‘language’, such that
many people feel deprived of the ability to participate in crucial areas of public
policy-making!).
Vico closely associates the gentleness of people in ‘the age of men’ to this
dawning of reason. As he puts it: ‘The people had finally come to understand that
the rational nature (which is the true human nature) is equal in all men’.69 If the
mentality, form of language, and human nature were transformed in ‘the age of
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men’, so were other aspects of their culture, including their socio-political

organisation – and a brief examination of how the latter came about will help
account for the demise of ‘the age of heroes’.
Back in the first age (of gods/giants), order over the first ‘fields’ was maintained
by the few pious giants, who governed theocratically via the taking of auspices and
consulting oracles.70 But as ‘refugee’ giants fled to these asylums for protection,
over time these settlements grew in number and size, as did the number of the
original ‘pious’ giants. A point came when the latter banded together better to
guard their lands and authority against the growing numbers of ‘plebs’ they had
taken under protection. The ‘age of gods’ was giving way to the ‘age of heroes’. In
short, ‘commonwealths’ or city-states emerged, under a now aristocratic form of
government which Vico often describes as ‘severe’. Once established, in these
‘heroic or aristocratic governments, . . . in virtue of the distinction of a nobler
nature ascribed to divine origin, . . . all civil rights were confined to the ruling
orders of the heroes themselves, and the plebeians, being considered of bestial
origin, were only permitted to enjoy life and natural liberty’,71 whereby they ‘shared
only the labours of the heroes, not their winnings, and still less their glory’.72
As these noble aristocratic commonwealths became established, (the nobles
themselves often organised under kings they could not control), ‘at last, after a
long period, [the plebs] grew weary of being obliged always to serve their lords’ and
thus ‘laid claim to the lands and rose in mutiny . . . and revolted against the heroes’.
Some defeated rebellious bands,
committed themselves to the hazards of the sea and went in search of

unoccupied lands. . . . This is the origin of the migration of peoples already
humanized by religion . . . By means of such colonies. . . . the human race
was spread abroad in the rest of our world by sea, just as by means of the
savage wanderings a long time before it had been spread abroad by land.
Vico insists these colonies must have been small, because reached by sea; were
nothing to do with a non-existent empire (allegedly) acquired by the heroic
aristocracies; nor with reasons of trade (with unoccupied lands!) – but were
established because ‘heroic law made it necessary for such bands of men . . . to
abandon their own lands, a thing which naturally happens only under some
extreme necessity’.73
The majority of rebellious plebs, however, remained at home and began to
extract concessions regarding the ownership of land and terms of service from their
noble overlords.
The ‘age of heroes’ was drawing to an end, both in political and in broader
cultural terms, eventuating in the emergence of ‘popular commonwealths’. The
barbarous modes of ‘heroic’ government and mentality were supplanted by ‘the age
of men’ (or ‘human times’), in which ‘in virtue of the equality of the intelligent
natures which is the proper nature of man, all are accounted equal under the laws’.74
Reason now prevailed, and was applied to the practical needs of the (now free)
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citizens in such a manner that ‘universal legal concepts abstracted by the intellect’
brought the citizens ‘into agreement upon an idea of a common rational utility’.75
This new ‘practice of wisdom in affairs of utility’ provides the basis for the ‘mild
law’76 which characterizes ‘the age of men’, and Vico even suggests that the actual
process by which popular assemblies first achieved this ‘coming to agreement in an
idea of an equal utility common to all of them severally’ (as in Athens) prompted
Socrates to ‘adumbrate intelligible phenomena or abstract universals by induction’.
In short, ‘laws came first and philosophies later’,77 suggesting that the very
rationality which lies at the core of ‘human’ men was not so much a product of some
sudden intellectual revolution, but of changes in men’s material circumstances.
Yet it is clear from Vico’s account that prior to the beginnings of actual
philosophical reasoning (in Socrates), the mentality of ordinary people had already
changed from the ‘heroic’. It is just this interplay between ‘mentality’ and material
circumstances which runs like a thread through Vico’s analysis of the origins,
development, and demise of all three different ‘ages’, and is one of the reasons (in
addition to Vico’s emphasis upon ‘class-conflict’) the more erudite Marxists find
in him a precursor to Marx’s ‘historical materialism’.78
Monarchy in the ‘age of men’

Taking his cue from classical history (especially the rise of the Emperor Augustus
in Rome79), and yet happy to generalise from it, Vico claims the ‘free popular states’
characterising ‘the age of men’ are not its only political form. In principle, better
even than such republics are monarchies. His reasoning is that ‘ in the former the
citizens have command of the public wealth, which is divided among them in as
many minute parts as there are citizens making up the people who have command
of it’ (even in republics not all are citizens). This can work, but given that ‘love of
ease, tenderness towards children, love of women, and desire of life’ characterises
today’s strivings towards the ‘utilities and necessities of life’, then ‘men are led to
attend to the smallest details which may bring their private utilities into equality
with those of others’. In other words, (to use modern terms), individualism and
competitiveness always threaten neglect of the public good because individuals’
concern for their own private good ‘is the only reason of which the multitude are
capable’.80 Thus, just as happened in the Roman Republic where, ‘finally, as the
free peoples could not by means of laws maintain themselves in civil equality . . .
but were being driven to ruin by civil wars, it came about naturally that . . . they
sought protection under monarchies’,81 monarchy is the other, better, and ‘natural’
form of government for free, rational, ‘human’ men.
In such monarchies, ‘the subjects are commanded to look after their own private
interests and leave the care of the public interest to the sovereign prince’.82 Lest
this seem ‘undemocratic’ in today’s terms, Vico has a different view, for he construes
monarchy in ‘the age of men’ as having to best represent the common good of
citizens, and thus as ‘by nature popularly governed: first through the laws by which
monarchies seek to make their subjects all equal; then by that property of
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monarchies whereby sovereigns humble the powerful and thus keep the masses
safe and free from their oppressions; further by . . . keeping the multitude satisfied
and content as regards the necessaries of life and the enjoyment of natural liberty’. 83
Thus in monarchies ‘there are needed a few men skilled in statecraft to give counsel’
regarding the conduct of affairs of state, whilst ‘a great many jurists’ are needed to
regulate citizens’ arguments over their private affairs.84 In short, despite the benign
tones in which Vico describes the ‘age of men’, he has a somewhat Machiavellian
view of ‘the multitude’ as ‘naturally’ concerned in their own selfish interests. Thus,
for Vico, ‘monarchy is the form of government best adapted to human nature when
reason is fully developed’.85
The potential demise of ‘the age of men’

There is, then, a certain equivocation in Vico’s views about human nature in ‘the
age of men’ – although essentially ‘intelligent, . . . modest, benign, and
reasonable’,86 Vico’s insistence on the self-interestedness of ‘the multitude’
and their unsuitedness to affairs of state is less than flattering. In fact, it seems Vico
construes the ‘properly human nature’ of the ‘age of men’ as eventually departing
from its optimistic origins to a point where the latter’s very continuance is
threatened. Again he appeals to classical history (especially Rome), but also
generalizes from it. Essentially, ‘the popular states became corrupt’.87 In the case of
Rome and other ‘popular commonwealths’, the common-sense of the (now
reasonable and free) citizens initially determined that responsibility for governing
should (via the census) rest with ‘the industrious and not the lazy, the frugal and
not the prodigal, . . . the magnanimous and not the fainthearted – in a word, the
rich with some virtue or semblance thereof, and not the poor with their many
shameless vices’.88 But there came a point ‘when the citizens were no longer content
with making wealth the basis of rank’, and encouraged by the ‘false eloquence’ of
trouble-makers, ‘strove to make it an instrument of power . . . [and thereby]
provoked civil wars in their commonwealth and drove them to total disorder’.89 In
the case of Rome, the institution of monarchy under Augustus solved the problem
– but clearly not permanently, and it seems that for Vico, whether ‘human
government’ is under a republic or a monarchy a process of corruption is likely
because of a natural evolution of the ‘human’ nature of people away from its benign
beginnings.
He expressed this in two passages generalising from all three ‘ages’. Thus, ‘Men
first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort . . .’. But he
continues, ‘still later [they] amuse themselves with pleasure, then grow dissolute
in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance’.90 Presumably these latter
are still features of human beings in ‘the age of men’, but they clearly point to a
deteriorating scenario. The second passage follows immediately and in similar vein.
Corresponding to the three different ages, ‘[t]he nature of peoples is first crude,
then severe, then benign . . .’ – but then he adds, ‘then delicate, finally dissolute’.91
Should we doubt what these cryptic additions really mean, Vico elaborates on
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them in the concluding passages of his book. We have noted his claim that ‘popular
states became corrupt’. This corruption can reach a stage where peoples ‘become
naturally slaves of their unrestrained passions – of luxury, effeminacy, avarice, envy,
pride, and vanity – and in pursuit of the pleasures of their dissolute life . . . [they
fall] back into all the vices characteristic of the most abject slaves (having become
liars, tricksters, calumniators, thieves, cowards, and pretenders) . . .’.92
This moral decline, whereby ‘such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into
the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached
the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride . . .’ is matched by an intellectual decline
where that reason which dawned in man after the age of heroes becomes abused.
Thus, ‘as the popular states became corrupt, so also did the philosophies. They
descended to skepticism. Learned fools fell to calumniating the truth. Thence
arose a false eloquence, ready to uphold either of the opposed sides of a case
indifferently’.93 If unchecked, this intellectual decline leads to:
the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned [men] into
beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first
men had been made by the barbarism of sense. For the latter displayed a
generous savagery, against which one could defend oneself or take flight
or be on one’s guard; but the former, with a base savagery, under soft words
and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and intimates.94
How far these purple passages are evidence of Vico’s disappointments at being
neglected (e.g., Isaac Newton never acknowledged the first [1725] version of the
New Science Vico sent him) is a matter of conjecture. Not so, however, his clear
account of the gradual moral and intellectual failings of our ‘benign’ and ‘rational’
nature in ‘the age of men’, derived partly from his reading of classical history, but
also elevated to being a general principle of ‘human’ nature. We, (if we can presume
to be living in an ‘age of men’) will ‘finally go mad and waste our substance’!
The recourse of history
The idea of ‘recourse’

In Vico’s account of (gentile) human history we have reached where the ‘age of
men’ is threatened by the moral and intellectual ‘corruptions’ which Vico presents
as integral principles of ‘human’ nature as it slides from benignity and rationality
into ‘delicacy’, casuistry, and dissoluteness. His primary historical model for this is
the transition from republican Rome to the ‘monarchy’ of Augustus – (his brief
remarks on the subsequent downfall of the Roman Empire do not exploit this
model95) – but he clearly believes the same happened elsewhere in the classical
world of ‘the age of men’. The institution of monarchy is one of the ‘three great
remedies’96 which can (possibly) correct ‘the perfect tyranny of anarchy’.97 A
second remedy is that ‘corrupted’ societies ‘become subject to better nations, which,
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having conquered them by arms, preserve them as subject provinces’ and their
inhabitants as ‘slaves’. Again, although thinking of historical examples, Vico sees
them as exemplifying general principles of historical development. ‘Herein two
great lights of natural order shine forth. First, that he who cannot govern himself
must let himself be governed by another who can. Second, that the world is always
governed by those who are naturally fittest’.98
The third remedy is the most interesting – and the most chilling. It is this:
But if the peoples are rotting in that ultimate civil disease and cannot
agree on a monarch from within, and are not conquered and preserved by
better nations from without . . . [then] through obstinate factions and
desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests
into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long centuries of
barbarism, rust will consume [their previous moral and intellectual faults,
such that] stunned and brutalized, [they] are sensible no longer of comforts,
delicacies, pleasures, and pomp, but only of the sheer necessities of life.
[Thus driven (as if in some appalling post-nuclear holocaust)] the few
survivors in the midst of an abundance of things necessary for life naturally
become sociable and, returning to the primitive simplicity of the first
world of peoples, are again religious, truthful, and faithful.99
And from this return to the beginning of (gentile) history, ‘the nations . . . , like
the phoenix, rise again’.100
It is, then, in this account of the third, most dreadful, remedy that Vico’s notion
of ‘recourse’ appears, and we need to be as clear as to what he is not saying as to what
he is saying.
First, by ‘the recourse’ of history he does not so much mean the point where a
‘nation’ might have plumbed the very depths and has to start again, phoenix-like.
Rather, he means that if a nation is subjected to this third remedy, then its re-growth
will ‘recourse’ the same history of the succeeding ages of ‘gods’, ‘heroes’, and ‘men’
– but even here, only all other things being equal. Specific circumstances may
intervene (as, for example, he suggests of the American Indians, who ‘would now
be following this course of human institutions if they had not been discovered
by the Europeans’101). This is why Vico claims his ‘science’ is of ‘an ideal eternal
history’.
Second, (unlike earlier cyclical theories), it is far from clear that all societies will
inevitably undergo a ‘recourse’. Although it seems all will eventually reach that
point of corruption in their ‘age of men’ described above, the return to primitive
beginnings is only the third ‘remedy’. They may be rescued from this by monarchy
or conquest – although whether the monarchy or conquering power itself would
eventually degrade into a corruption requiring the third remedy is another point.
If it would, it looks as if Vico is indeed proposing a full-scale cyclical interpretation
of past and future history. Yet he does not say so. He claims his ‘science’
demonstrates what ‘the course of the institutions of the nations had to be, must be,
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and will have to be . . . even if infinite worlds were born from time to time through
eternity, which is certainly not the case’.102 This ‘ideal eternal history’ is ‘traversed
in time by the history of every nation in its rise, development, maturity, decline,
and fall’.103 He does not add, ‘and its rise again’. In short, the ‘ideal eternal history’
does not mention ‘recourse’, and the most we can say is that whether ‘recourse’ is
inevitable for every society in history remains unclear in Vico’s logic.
‘Recourse’ in post-Classical European history

What is clear, however, is that for Vico ‘recourse’ is not only a theoretical possibility
for some societies, but has actually happened in history – and his model is nothing
less than the ‘dark’ and ‘middle’ ages of European history. He calls them ‘the period
of the second barbarism’ and notes that ‘in countless passages . . . we have observed
the marvellous correspondence between the first and the returned barbarian
times’.104 He proceeds to bring these observations together in his sketchy Book
Five called ‘The recourse of human institutions which the nations take when
they rise again’. Emerging from the confusions caused at the collapse of the
(Christianised) Western Roman Empire, ‘when so many barbarous nations began
to inundate Europe and Asia and Africa’, some Christian leaders in Europe held
together their communities, and became akin to the kingly ‘theocratic’ family
leaders of the first ‘age of gods’, fighting barbarous religious wars against like-
organised pagan nations. In these recurred ‘divine times’, slavery, duels, raids, and
reprisals re-appeared, and since ‘everywhere violence, rapine, and murder were
rampant, because of the extreme ferocity and savagery of these most barbarous
centuries’, new ‘asylums’ appeared where people ‘in fear of being oppressed or
destroyed betook themselves to the bishops and abbots, . . . as being comparatively
humane in the midst of such barbarism, and put themselves, their families, and
their patrimonies, under their protection’.105
Then, for the same reasons as in the first ‘age of gods’, Europe evolved into those
feudal institutions of the high Middle Ages, where powerful ‘lords’, barons, and
petty kings formed aristocratic states better to protect their lands and control the
lower feudal orders of serfs and vassals (the equivalent of the first ‘plebs’). The ‘age
of heroes’ was back, and Vico delights in drawing correspondences between its
institutions, mentality, and customs and those of its predecessor. Feudalism, even
where organised under nominal monarchies, was essentially aristocratic and
culturally ‘heroic’.
But just as the first ‘age of heroes’ evolved to a point where pressure from the plebs
combined with factious civil wars amongst the nobles brought it to an end, so in
many parts of Europe the second ‘age of heroes’ was supplanted by a second ‘age of
men’, as feudal aristocracies turned into either ‘free popular commonwealths’ (i.e.,
republics) or ‘perfect monarchies’. Rightly, Vico is not too specific about where and
when this epochal change occurred, since it replicated itself amongst separate
nations at different times. Also, the process was still incomplete by the time he was
writing. For example, he claims that France ‘now’ has become a ‘perfect monarchy’
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– that Sweden and Denmark remained heroic aristocracies ‘until a century and
a half ago’ – and that Poland still is one, although he adds that ‘in time, if
extraordinary causes do not impede its natural course, Poland will arrive at perfect
(that is, at absolute but enlightened) monarchy’.
The inevitability of ‘recourse’?

What seems clear, then, is that Vico sees much of his present Europe as having
entered, or being in the process of entering, a second ‘age of men’. Whether he also
already sees signs of its demise – and may thus be incorporating some political
message into his writings – is another matter, best left to our concluding remarks.
But it does graphically raise the question of whether ‘recourse’ is inevitable. By
this, I do not mean whether, if a recourse occurs, it will run an inevitable course of
repetition of ‘the three ages of men’. Vico clearly affirms it would. Rather, does
‘recourse’ have to happen to all historical societies? Since we have seen Vico’s logic
leaves it unclear, we might try answering this by returning to his account of how
the first, actual, ‘recourse’ came about.
That recourse began with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century
AD. Logically, this means the Roman Empire, despite being under monarchy, must
have reached that point of corruption and dissolution described above, from which
(in its case) the third (dreadful) remedy emerged, involving a return to primitive
times, succeeded by a ‘recourse’. And some such standard notion of the reasons for
the Empire’s collapse seems to be in Vico’s mind. Yet he says surprisingly little
about it. Having explained why all preceding ‘ages’ with their corresponding
institutions inevitably change, he does not conclude his account with any hint
that ‘monarchy’ in the ‘age of men’ must itself eventually decline and collapse. If
he had, then indeed his logic points to ‘recourse’ as the inevitable outcome of the
history of societies – and thus Vico would be subscribing to a full-blown cyclical
theory of history. It is possible that he did, because elsewhere he does occasionally
refer to the instability of ‘perfect’ monarchies. As different emperors succeeded
Augustus (the founder of ‘perfect monarchy’ in Rome), the citizens became
increasingly indifferent to politics to the point where, having become ‘aliens in
their own nations, it becomes necessary for the monarchs to sustain and represent
the latter in their own persons’.106 In short, ‘in proportion as the free peoples relax
their hold the kings gain in strength until they become monarchs’,107 who, ‘by force
of arms, take in hand all the institutions and all the laws, which, though sprung
from liberty, no longer avail to regulate and hold it within bounds’.108 Eventually,
then, true ‘monarchs’ achieve absolute power. Now we have already seen Vico
arguing that ‘in spite of their unlimited sovereignty . . . the very form of the
monarchic state shall confine the will of the monarchs . . . [to] the natural order of
keeping the peoples content’. But closer reading shows that this ‘natural order’
does depend on two factors.
First, ‘without this . . . content of the peoples, monarchic states are neither
lasting nor secure’109 – in other words, if monarchs follow their own interests by
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attending to the peoples’ interests, then they can maintain their states indefinitely.
But this leads to the second condition hidden under Vico’s apparent confidence
in ‘perfect monarchy’ – the monarch must be of sound mind! And much earlier in
the book, in one of his few references to the downfall of the Roman Empire, Vico
blames ‘the dissolute and shameless madmen, like Caligula, Nero, and Domitian’
for having themselves overthrown the Roman monarchy through their actions.110
It seems Vico was returning to this notion in his brief reprise of the major historical
stages in his Conclusion, where as an example of events turning out contrary to
agents’ plans, he says: ‘The monarchs mean to strengthen their own positions by
debasing their subjects with all the vices of dissoluteness, and they dispose them
to endure slavery at the hand of stronger nations’.111
Thus we finally arrive at Vico’s surprisingly brief admission that monarchy itself,
despite being ‘the form of government best adapted to human nature when reason
is fully developed’,112 is inherently vulnerable. The Romans, he tells us, ‘clung to
the monarchy as long as they could humanly withstand the internal and external
causes which destroy that form of state’.113 It is true that even here he is not saying all
monarchies are inevitably doomed, but if we add the preceding scattered references,
a strong case can be made for claiming this as his real view. If it was, then by his
own logic it would seem that recourse in history is inevitable, and that Vico was
therefore advancing a cyclical theory of history. Yet this would require a theory of
the inevitable and cataclysmic downfall of ‘perfect monarchy’ (and/or ‘popular
commonwealths’) which, although hinted at, is not to be found in the New Science.
The theme of the decline of the Roman Empire could have provided Vico with the
opportunity to exemplify such a theory, and yet so far we find only one minimal
reference to it (i.e., the madness of Caligula et al.).
One’s puzzlement might be compounded, then, when we add the only other
reference, and that the most sustained, which Vico makes to the topic, for in intro-
ducing his analysis of the actual recourse represented by the Middle Ages, he says:
When, working in superhuman ways, God had revealed and confirmed the
truth of the Christian religion by opposing the virtue of the martyrs to
the power of Rome, and the teaching of the Fathers, together with the
miracles, to the vain wisdom of Greece, and when armed nations were
about to rise on every hand to combat the true divinity of its Founder, he
permitted a new order of humanity to be born among the nations in order
that [the true religion] might be firmly established according to the natural
course of human institutions themselves.114
Vico continues; ‘Following this eternal counsel, he brought back the truly divine
times, in which Catholic kings everywhere . . . founded military religious orders by
which they re-established in their realms the Catholic Christian religion against
the Arians . . . and numerous other infidels’.115
Here, then, the Roman Empire’s downfall occurs when God, having established
the Christian religion, saved it from foreign hordes by ‘permitting a new order to
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be born’, in which ‘the truly divine times’ (of ‘the age of gods’) were brought back,
thereby instituting a ‘recourse’. Here, whether the downfall of the ‘perfect monarchy’
was natural or not, its drastic replacement by ‘recourse’ cannot be read as ‘natural’.
But perhaps these very passages help settle the issue. They introduce the religious
dimension which we have yet to address. For the present, the textual evidence
suggests that Vico’s otherwise curious reticence to complete his theory of history
by clearly stating and analysing the inevitable downfall of ‘perfect monarchy’ can
be accounted for in terms of his unwillingness to be seen as subscribing to a cyclical
theory. The evidence suggests he might have done (certainly, numerous commen-
tators assume unproblematically that he did), but that he shrank from declaring it,
and even from including those prior considerations (on monarchy) which would
properly lead to it. It is this latter exclusion which smacks of deliberation, suggesting
that he did indeed subscribe to cyclical history, but knowingly concealed it. The
immediate reason for doing this was simply that cyclical conceptions of history
were regarded as pagan. The standard Christian notion of history was linear, with
a beginning, middle, and end, as so fiercely insisted upon by Augustine (to whom
Vico makes a few respectful, yet neutral references in his book). At the very least,
then, the text suggests that Vico deliberately presented his theory of history in
such a manner as to leave open the possibility of defending it from Inquisitorial and
other public accusations of heresy. We might read him as a ‘cyclicist’, but his text
makes it difficult to prove! And as for reading him as a pagan, that is clearly the last
interpretation Vico wants, so numerous and obsequious are his expressions of
Christian piety and devotion! But what part did religion really play in Vico’s
thought?
Religion and the meaning of history

The above reminds us that fear of religious persecution and of thus not being
published were factors in many intellectual’s minds in eighteenth-century Europe,
even in more tolerant countries, let alone a Catholic Naples subject to the Spanish
Inquisition. (Indeed, even a century after Vico’s death, in ‘free-thinking’ England,
such concerns were partly responsible for Darwin’s twenty-year delay, until 1859,
in publishing his On the Origin of Species). Thus we have to be careful not to accept
at face-value what (particularly independent) thinkers wrote impinging on religion.
Various techniques were employed, ranging from simple circumspection to hidden
esoteric messages, to evade the wrath of the religious establishment (as well as
public hostility and political persecution).116 This does not mean, however, that
we should automatically distrust writers’ words and seek to uncover alternative,
devious meanings. But it does mean we are entitled to query those words when
their import is obscure, or inconsistent with other ideas they advance. Vico’s New
Science is a case in point. He had a powerfully independent mind, lived and worked
in Catholic Naples, desperately wanted to be not only published but lauded, and
yet found himself writing on no less a theme than the meaning of human history,
bristling with religious implications! He presents himself in all his writings as a
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devout Catholic, and actually presents the New Science as a new and unique proof
of that religion, as if that were his prime motivation.
Indeed, for those who take Vico at face-value, his New Science is one of the most
sustained theodicies (‘explanation of the ways of God to man’) ever written – and
they may be right.
With these provisos in mind, let us explore what he wrote about God, gods,
truth, God’s Providence, and the role of religions in human history.
Biblical history and the Hebrews

Describing ‘the true God’ as ‘creator of the world and of Adam the prince of all
humankind’,117 throughout the New Science Vico excludes the Hebrews from his
principles of historical development because ‘the entire first world of men [i.e.,
after the Flood] must be divided into two kinds: the first, men of normal size, which
includes Hebrews only; the second, giants who were the founders of the gentile
nations’.118 Those Hebrews who remained true to their faith were distinct from all
other nations because they correctly ‘thought God to be an infinite Mind beholding
all times in one point of eternity’ whereas ‘the gentiles fancied bodies to be gods’.119
The Hebrews were correct because ‘the Hebrew religion was founded by the true
God’,120 and were equally correct in believing that they ‘had extraordinary help
from the true God’121 who ‘either Himself or through the angels that are minds or
through the prophets to whose minds God spoke, gave notice of what was in store
for His people’.122 Because of ‘the particular assistance which a single people [the
Hebrews] received from the true God’,123 there is then a ‘fundamental difference’
between the principles governing Hebrew and gentile history.124 ‘The Hebrews
were the first people in our world’, and Vico insists that ‘in the sacred history they
have truthfully preserved their memories’125 of ‘over a period of more than eight
hundred years [of] the state of nature under the patriarchs’.126 This includes the
times when, ‘since the Hebrews had lost sight of their natural law during their
slavery in Egypt, God himself had to reinstitute it for them by the law he gave to
Moses on Sinai’.127
Therefore Hebrew history is unique – and since their religion and institutions
were never taught them by any outside culture,128 and nor did they themselves
teach other cultures,129 their history should be excluded from consideration of the
principles governing gentile history. It is the latter the New Science is concerned
with. The former have had the benefit of the true religion, and of God’s
extraordinary help. The latter have had to make do with God’s ‘ordinary’ help –
‘providence’ – a notion to which we must shortly turn. First, however, what does
Vico say about Christianity?
Christianity
For Vico, ‘God founded the true religion of the Hebrews, from which our Christian
religion arose’.130 The divine mind is ‘understood only by God’ – but men can know
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of it to the extent it ‘has been revealed to them. To the Hebrews first and then to
the Christians, this has been by internal speech to their minds as the proper
expression of a God all mind; but [also] by external speech through the prophets
and through Jesus Christ to the Apostles, by whom it was declared to the
Church’.131 By these means the Christian religion ‘inculcat[es] an infinitely pure
and perfect idea of God and command[s] charity to all mankind’.132 Apart from the
Hebrew and Christian religions, there are only two other ‘primary’ religions, and
they are both false – the gentile (or pagan) religion which believes ‘in the divinity
of a plurality of gods, each imagined as composed of body and of free mind’, and
‘that of the Mohammedans, who believe in the divinity of one god, an infinite free
mind in an infinite body, for they look forward to pleasures of the senses as rewards
in the other life’.133
As human reason emerged in ancient Greece in the first (pre-Christian) ‘age of
men’, certain philosophers (particularly Pythagoras and Plato) ‘by virtue of a most
sublime human science . . . exalted themselves to some extent to the knowledge
of the divine truths which the Hebrews had been taught by the true God’.134 This
process of confirming religious truth through human reason has been extended in
Christian times through Platonic philosophy and the Aristotelian tradition ‘insofar
as it conforms to the Platonic’,135 as well as through the other ‘most learned
philosophies of the gentiles’ which the Christian religion has appealed to in its
effort to ‘unite a wisdom of [revealed] authority with that of reason, basing the
latter on the choicest doctrine of philosophers and the most cultivated erudition
of the philologists’. Because ‘Christian Europe is everywhere radiant with humanity,
. . . ministering to the comforts of the body as well as to the pleasures of the mind
and spirit’, Vico adds that ‘even for human ends, the Christian religion is the best
in the world’.136
In these ideas Vico is ‘orthodox’ enough. But a problem looms. If the Hebrews
are exempted from Vico’s ‘science’ of historical development because of the
‘extraordinary’ help God gave them, what of the Christians? Subscribing to the true
religion, do they also have ‘extraordinary’ help from God? If so, then most of
what Vico says about European history since the downfall of the Roman Empire
must also be exempted. And if that is exempted, then his theory of ‘recourse’
becomes incoherent. But if the course of European history through the Dark and
Middle Ages down to Vico’s present is a ‘recourse’ based on what governed
historical changes from ancient antiquity to the fifth century AD, (excluding the
Hebrews), then most of it is a ‘recourse’ of a gentile history, where God played no
‘extraordinary’ role – in which case, does God have no special role in Christian
history?
Alternatively, if God does play a special role in Christian history, how can that
history (principally of the Middle Ages) be seen as a ‘recourse’? Yet Vico uses the
content of this ‘recourse’ to support the general principles of historical development
he claims are exemplified in ancient and classical (gentile) history! In short,
whichever way he has it, it seems Vico is treading on dangerous ground. Not only
might his theory of historical development be accused of an un-Christian belief in
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cyclical repetition; it raises fundamental questions about Vico’s beliefs about God’s
role (if any) in history.
‘Providence’
Earlier, we noted Vico’s important claim that God made Nature (which thus
remains ultimately unknowable) but that men have made their civil societies
(whose nature and history can therefore be known). Does this mean, for Vico, that
God plays no part in the course of human history? On the contrary, Vico insists.
Perpetually at work through the actions of free men is God’s providence, which
beneficially ensures the emergence of those institutions and practices which enable
men to live together happily and constructively. In addition, it would seem, God
occasionally intervenes in particular times with special, explicitly ‘supernatural’
help. Let us explore Vico’s thinking here.
In what they do, men have free choice137 – this is ‘by its nature most uncertain’,
but rather than rendering human actions arbitrary, ‘human choice . . . is made
certain and determined by the common sense of men with respect to human needs
or utilities’.138 In other words, practical motivations amidst practical constraints
determine the broad direction of man’s exercise of free will.
Knowing what is best to do is a kind of wisdom – an idea of ‘good and evil’. But
such knowledge was originally prohibited to Adam by God, and it was on this basis
that ‘God ordained his true religion for Adam’,139 ‘from which our Christian
religion arose’. Meanwhile, the (pagan) gentile peoples tried to acquire this
knowledge of what is best to be done, which they believed their gods had, by using
the art of ‘divination’, (taking the auspices and consulting the oracles). 140 The
original ‘divination’ was, as we have seen, the constraining effect of the first giants’
experience of thunder and lightning.
Religious belief, then, can/does affect how people behave – a point we shall
return to. For most of the time people seek the necessities and utilities of life, and
this causes ‘ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three vices which run throughout
the human race’. And yet ‘out of the passions of men each bent on his private
advantage . . . , which could certainly destroy all mankind on the face of the earth’,
orderly societies have emerged.141 This, Vico claims, proves that ‘this world without
doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always
superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves’.
This is what Vico means by ‘providence’ – the notion that there is a mind
(God’s) which, by making means of the ‘narrow ends’ of men ‘to serve wider ends’,
thus employs the former ‘to preserve the human race upon this earth’.142 This
‘providence’ is most clearly shown at each critical stage of the course (and recourse)
human history has taken through the three ages of man.
Let us be clear here. Vico is not saying that providence works in extraordinary
ways. On the contrary, it works through the very nature of things, including
human nature rather than being an external ‘force’ such as ‘fate’ or ‘fortune’
governing history. It is thus not (God’s) mind behind history and nature, controlling
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them from ‘outside’. Rather, ‘this world . . . has issued from’ mind, such that the way
the world works when left to itself, i.e., naturally, guarantees the continuous survival
and sociality of human life. The analogy of the watch and the watchmaker is not
helpful here – rather, we might think of the watch and the watch designer, for if the
watch is the human world and its history, and the designer is God, the watchmaker
is man himself, as Vico so often stresses. It follows, then, that providence is not
concerned with the fate of individuals. For Vico, it would be pointless for any
troubled individual to pray for relief either from or by Providence, for providence
is simply the way things turn out collectively in the natural order of things as (often
unintended) consequences of the interaction of people’s behaviour.
But finally, if providence is ‘simply the way things turn out’, it seems this by no
means diminishes its significance for Vico. On the contrary, he not only claims that
‘providence’ proves the goodness of God, he comes close to claiming his theory of
providence is a proof of the very existence of God. First, since God is infinitely wise,
and since providence is what God has designed, then that design must, ‘in its
entirety’, be one of order. Second, since God’s will is ‘immeasurabl[y] goodness’,
then that design ‘must be directed to a good always superior to that which men have
proposed to themselves’. Third, since God as designer is omnipotent, the design
‘must unfold . . . by means as easy as the customs of men’.143 Thus, if we properly
understand human history, we have to conclude it demonstrates ‘the eternal
goodness of God’, who has by such easy means so beautifully ordered its course that
there is no way ‘human society could be better conducted and preserved’.144
Insofar, then, as Vico’s theory of history demonstrates God’s providence, and in
so doing His omnipotence, wisdom, and goodness, it also attests to the very existence
of God. Vico complains that previous philosophers have either failed to see human
history as evidencing mind or providence, or alternatively have ignored history and
sought to confirm God’s mind by studying the laws governing the physical universe.
But they ought to have confirmed it by studying it ‘in the economy of civil
institutions’ in order to ‘divine’ therefrom ‘what providence has wrought in history’.
Divination properly means ‘to understand what is hidden from men – the future –
or what is hidden in them – their consciousness’, and Vico’s ‘science’ does just that,
he claims. It is ‘a history of the institutions by which, without human discernment
or counsel, and often against the designs of men, providence has ordered this great
city of the human race’.145 And Vico implies that the study of history (if conducted
via his methods) is a surer proof of God’s mind than the study of natural science,
because in tracing what men have themselves made, the knowledge involved cannot
be more certain. In his discovery of ‘the ideal eternal history traversed in time by
the history of every nation’, Vico is thus implying that his ‘Science’ is grounded in
fact (knowledge of the certain), and is nothing less than a proof of the Divine
Mind,146 contemplation of which will give the reader ‘in his mortal body a
divine pleasure’.147
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Divine grace
If Vico attributes God a pre-eminent role in the course of historical development
through ‘providence’, he also refers (much less frequently) to the operation of
‘divine grace’. By this Vico means those occasions when God intervenes in
miraculous ways, unlike the operation of ‘providence’ which is (simply) the natural
order of things. As Vico puts it, ‘man has free choice, however weak, to make
virtues of his passions; but . . . he is aided by God, naturally by divine providence
and supernaturally by divine grace’.148 We noted Vico’s claim that ‘besides the
ordinary help from providence, . . . the Hebrews had extraordinary help from
the true God’149 in the form of ‘particular assistance’150 – and a similar reference
relating to early Christians:
When, working in superhuman ways, God had revealed and confirmed the
truth of the Christian religion by opposing the virtue of the martyrs to
the power of Rome, and the teaching of the Fathers, together with the
miracles, to the vain wisdom of Greece, and when armed nations were
about to rise on every hand destined to combat the true divinity of its
Founder, he permitted a new order of humanity to be born among the
nations in order that [the true religion] might be firmly established
according to the natural course of human institutions themselves.151
Vico nowhere else refers to this ‘extraordinary, supernatural, superhuman’ action

in the course of human history, and we should note that in both instances God
employed it to establish and/or defend ‘the true religion’ (of the Hebrews, then the
Christians). It would appear, then, that ‘the true (Judaeo-Christian) religion’ has
been a literally miraculous phenomenon, not emerging in the natural order of things
(i.e., via providence) like the other (false) religions. Now, we have seen that Vico
exempts the Hebrews from his ‘science’ precisely because ‘divine grace’ intervened
in their history. Does it now seem he wants to exempt Christian nations as well?
If so, this would seem to nullify his account of the Middle Ages as a ‘recourse’ of
the natural (providential) development of ancient and classical history. In short,
although the operation of ‘providence’ is no threat to Vico’s theory of history – on
the contrary, he deems it crucial to it – the (sporadic) operation of ‘divine grace’
seems to stick out like a sore thumb!
Before deciding on this, let us examine the only other two references Vico makes
to ‘divine grace’. A recurrent point Vico is concerned to make, to solve an old
dispute, is whether man is naturally sociable. His answer is that ‘man is not unjust
by nature in the absolute sense, but by nature fallen and weak’. But in addition to
God’s ‘normal’ aid through providence (i.e., the logic of the natural order), ‘the
Catholic principles of grace’ are demonstrated, which ‘give[s] effect’ to man’s
potential for good works.152 Although a sparse remark, Vico probably had in mind
that (Catholic) doctrine propounded by Aquinas that ‘Nature is not destroyed by
grace, but perfected by it’153 – in other words, he takes the opportunity to conform
to (Catholic) orthodoxy.
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His final, longer and more interesting, reference to ‘divine grace’ forms part of
his concluding remarks summarising the New Science’s achievements. He tells us
his book shows that those who believe chance governs human history are wrong
(citing Epicurus, Hobbes, and Machiavelli) – similarly with belief in fate (citing
Zeno and Spinoza). Vico claims ‘the facts’ show that ‘providence directs human
institutions’, and praises those ‘political philosophers, whose prince is the divine
Plato’, (and including Cicero) who agree with this. Both were non-Christian – but
no matter, like the (pagan) Roman law-makers, they insisted on belief in
‘providence’ as the ‘first principle’ for the organisation of society. In short, they saw
religious belief as essential. The fact that their religions were fierce, dreadful, and
linked to barbaric practices – and even more to the point, were ‘false’ in their
knowledge of God – is not the immediate issue. Rather, they saw that ‘if religion
is lost among the peoples, they have nothing left to enable them to live in
society’.154 Thus, says Vico, those who think like Polybius, ‘that if there were
philosophers in the world, living in justice by force of reason and not of laws, there
would be no need in the world of religion’,155 are deluded. Equally deluded are
those who, like the French rationalist philosopher and religious sceptic, Pierre
Bayle (1647–1706), argue ‘there can be nations in the world without any
knowledge of God’. Rather, ‘religions alone can bring the peoples to do virtuous
works by appeal to their feelings, which alone move men to perform them; . . . the
reasoned maxims of the philosophers concerning virtue are of use only . . . for
kindling the feelings to do the duties of virtue’.
Vico is clear, then. Any religion (however false its knowledge of God) is better
than none, for religions appeal to the feelings, and thus to the senses – whereby
even the mute, bestial ‘giants’ actually originated the course of human (gentile)
history. But Vico adds:
There is, however, an essential difference between our Christian religion,

which is true, and all the others, which are false. In our religion, divine
grace causes virtuous action for the sake of an eternal and infinite good.
This good cannot fall under the senses, and it is consequently the mind
that, for its sake, moves the senses to virtuous actions. The false religions,
on the contrary, have proposed to themselves finite and transitory goods,
in this life as in the other (where they expect a beatitude of sensual
pleasures), and hence the senses must drive the mind to do virtuous
works.156
(Does this imply that doing good ‘for its own sake’ is miraculous, and reserved to
Christians?).
Again, then, we encounter that same logic in Vico implying (intentionally or
not) that the Christian religion is literally miraculous, for having earlier claimed
that its institution was through ‘divine grace’, he now implies its truth is based upon
its capacity to move men to virtuous action through the intellect – and that this
is ‘caused’ by ‘divine grace’. Without it, we have to presume Christianity would be
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just one more ‘false’ religion emerging through the ordinary nature of things (‘provi-
dence’). That it is true is not a matter of philosophy (natural human reason) nor
of ‘providence’ (which underlies all religions) – it is a ‘special, supernatural,
extraordinary’ matter provided by ‘divine grace’. With perhaps an appropriate logic,
then, Vico is appealing to a deus ex machina to substantiate his claim that the
Christian religion is ‘true’!
Was he sincere in what he says about ‘divine grace’ and Christianity’s truth?
And more to the point for us, does it matter in relation to his philosophy of history?
Religion and history in Vico

The answer is surely not. Logically, the notion of ‘divine grace’ is not only
redundant to his theory of historical development – it actually interferes with its
coherence. Likewise with the question of the ‘truth’ of Christianity. Both interfere
with the whole point of his ‘science’. But, as seen, Vico includes these otherwise
literally ‘extraordinary’ notions, even ‘conceding’ that the Hebrew and Christian
histories are exempt from his ‘universal history’.
From this we have the probability of a Vico who merely pays lip-service to the
orthodox (Catholic) Christianity of his day. If this is true, of course, it does not
make Vico a closet atheist. On the contrary, there is no reason for disbelieving his
sincerity in claiming his New Science, particularly in its treatment of ‘providence’,
as a confirmation of the existence of God. Also, in praising certain philosophers’
attempts to rationalise the nature of God, there seems little doubt he believed the
Judaeo-Christian notion of God is along the right lines. But there is also no reason
to suppose that Vico, like millions before and after him, kept his own deepest
‘religious’ views to himself, even if it involved his having to jeopardise the outward
coherence of his cherished ‘science’ with arguments as ingenious as they are
disingenuous. In short, unless we are to believe Vico was deeply confused in his
thinking, we should perceive his New Science as a classic and extreme case of that
self-censorship so prevalent in the history of thought. Arguably, only through such
a recognition can the true meaning of his overall theory be revealed and its
coherence be restored. It also removes obstacles otherwise obscuring the political
dimensions intrinsic to his philosophy of history.
Political dimensions
Cyclical depression?
Our claim that Christianity’s truth is irrelevant for Vico clears the way to
discovering those political implications which are to become so allied a feature of
modern ‘philosophy of history’. We have noted the ambiguity surrounding whether
Vico’s theory of history is inherently cyclical. Many have taken his phraseology
(e.g., ‘the ideal eternal history’), particularly in conjunction with his idea of
‘recourse’, as straightforward proof that Vico did believe in a human history
159
which endlessly repeats its developmental stages and thus leaves no role for politics
to be the vehicle for the ‘fulfilment’ of mankind. But that would be a simplistic
reading of Vico. What is true is that Vico’s own religious views did not oblige him
to subscribe to the Judaeo-Christian linear theory of history, culminating in some
kind of millennium. But neither do they oblige him towards classical cyclical
fatalism.
Repeatedly, (as seen), Vico attacks those thinkers who believe in ‘fate’. There
is ‘mind’ or ‘design’ in the course of history – God’s ‘providence’. And what it
provides is not some endless, meaningless repetition of stages of human history.
Neither, however, for some unilinear progression towards human perfection or ‘the
millennium’. Rather, it provides for the formation, from bestiality, of society
amongst men, and its continued re-formation through fundamentally changing
times – in short, what we call ‘civilisations’.
However, we know that according to Vico the first ‘age of men’, or ‘human times’,
succumbed to collapse, followed by a ‘recourse’ of the three ages culminating in a
second ‘age of men’. The huge question (for Vico as well as for those attracted to
his theory) is whether this second ‘human’ age is inevitably doomed to similar
collapse, to be followed by a third cycle of ‘recourse’. To the extent Vico answers
this, we must look in his writings rather than arbitrarily extrapolate from his logic.
And what seems clear is that he nowhere claims that ‘providence’ decrees the
collapse of each different ‘age’. Their decline (including the first ‘human’ age)
happened principally as a result of that self-interestedness and assertiveness of
human nature which generates class-conflict between those controlling power and
wealth and the rest of society. Not the work of ‘providence’, it is the result of
a ‘flawed’ human nature which has free choice. Were the chaotic collapse of a
society’s order and culture the work of ‘providence’, then God would not have
been a benevolent designer. But if not providence, neither is it clear that ‘human
nature’ necessitates it. The point for Vico is that societies have succumbed
to fundamental disintegration in the past, and that when this occurred, then
‘providence’ decrees their re-formulation in a different mode. In short, the collapse
of a form of ‘society’ is not a determined necessity of history (as in classical cyclical
fatalism) – it is not the providential design. But the resurrection of ‘society’ (albeit
in a new form) is the work of ‘providence’ – i.e., the existence of some form of
‘civilisation’ (however unattractive to those of a later period looking back
anachronistically) is a ‘determined necessity’ of history – that is, it is ‘inbuilt’,
irrespective of human choice and intention.
But such solace as this may afford in the abstract must be counterbalanced by two
factors: first, we have seen Vico describe the dissolution of the ‘age of men’ in
particular as an horrendous eventuality where ‘peoples . . . rotting in that ultimate
civil disease . . . live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will’. Only after
‘long centuries of barbarism’ are they eventually ‘brutalized’ back into that
elementary common sense of ‘the sheer necessities of life’ which forces them to
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become ‘sociable and . . . [return] to the primitive simplicity of the first world of
peoples’.157 Second, it follows that a long process of ‘recourse’, through the three
ages, would have to be undergone before a properly worthy ‘human’ civilisation
were regained.
Stopping the rot?

This focuses attention on what Vico thought of his own times. For Vico, man can
do nothing to frustrate the ‘force’ of providence – but neither should he want to,
since it is solely benevolent. It ensures ‘society’. It does not decree its corruption.
But can man do anything to supplement the help of ‘providence’? Translated into
Vico’s own times, this means asking whether men can prevent a collapse of their
society and institutions, which promise so much in this ‘age of men’.
We have seen Vico’s sketch of the historical possibilities. Once that decline
endangers society’s very fabric, it can be stopped by the strong hand of a new
‘monarch’, able to restrain the corruption. The only other possibility – conquest
and rule by another nation – would hardly be deliberately engineered by a people to
maintain its culture. The only other political development Vico mentions – but
not in connection with salvaging a corrupt nation – is the formation of ‘leagues,
whether perpetual or temporary’ between sovereign powers. But rather than see
such unions as progressive (we might think of contemporary enthusiasts for
European political union), he sees them as akin to new ‘aristocratic states into
which enter the anxious suspicions characteristic of aristocracies’, and interprets
them as a regression analogous to the first ‘aristocracies of the fathers’.158
This said, however, we must recognise that Vico says little forward-looking
or judgemental about his contemporary European political scene. Possibly
circumspect, it is, however, certain that his focus was elsewhere than on the
immediacies of European political affairs. Thus in response to our large query as to
whether men themselves can do anything to maintain and promote the ‘age of
men’, it is not surprising he offers no immediate political prescriptions. Rather, his
focus was the much longer one of the philosopher of history, contemplating in his case
huge, holistic, cultural shifts in human history. He thought European nations had
comparatively recently embarked on a second ‘human’ age, and given the epochal
time-scale he finds exhibited in previous fundamental historical change,
contemporary political comment is not part of Vico’s remit.
But he is prescriptive in longer-distance terms – and characteristically, his
messages for his time’s future revolve around that very notion of ‘mentality’ so
prominent in his holistic historical thinking. Given he clearly judges ‘the age of
men’ as superior to other ‘ages’ (despite his otherwise markedly impartial ‘cultural
relativism’), and that its decline is not providentially decreed, a case can be
made that Vico has two prescriptions – one more concerned to stave off those
(human) causes for decline, the other to promote the second ‘human age’ to new
heights.
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Regarding the former, we noted Vico’s prognosis for the way ‘the age of men’
tends towards decline as men deteriorate from being ‘benign’ to being ‘delicate’,
then ‘dissolute’, leading them to ‘finally go mad and waste their substance’.
Although Vico does not comment on whether this disintegration of a people’s
mentality can be halted, his obvious respect for much of the (prior) ‘heroic’
mentality provides food for thought. Frequently Vico writes admiringly of the
bravery, honesty, and straightforwardness of the ‘heroic’ outlook on life. It is true
they also behaved with ‘barbarity’, consulting their feelings rather than their
(undeveloped) ‘reason’, but Vico is more often understanding than condemnatory,
because of their perceptive sense of reality. One senses it is precisely this grip on
reality which Vico fears can get lost, eventually, in the ‘age of men’, and that he
sometimes uses his notion of the ‘heroic’ mentality as a stick with which to beat
its vices – vices linked above all to the disappearing of ‘common sense’. By analogy,
many parents today gladly send off their teenage child to be enlightened, informed,
and fulfilled by what the world of education and work can offer – but also in the
fervent hope that amidst all the marvels and distractions the child will hang on
to its common sense. Quite what Vico would have made of the present state of
European and North American ‘civilisation’ is of course beyond us, but it is
interesting to compare it with some of the ‘heroic’ features Vico asks us to compare
even to his times! ‘Luxury, refinement, and ease were quite unknown’:159 ‘the
[heroic] education of the young was severe, harsh, and cruel, . . . whereas
the indulgences with which we now treat our young children produces all the
tenderness of our [modern] natures’.160 Another example is irresistible in the light
of Vico’s own observation that his wife was not really interested in house-keeping
and child-minding. Is it perhaps ruefully that he remarks that in ‘heroic’ times,
‘children [were] acquired and wives saved for the benefit of their husbands and
fathers; not, as nowadays, just the contrary’?!161
In short, a case can be made for saying Vico thinks that if his ‘age of men’ is to
progress rather than decline, it might need ‘stiffening up’ with some of the ‘heroic’
attitudes. He would be the last, of course, to suggest one could simply transplant
the heroic mentality into the ‘age of men’ – but he asks us not only to understand
it better, but to respect it more and possibly even learn something from it. Some
of the flavour of this is apparent in an oration Vico gave to incoming students to
the Royal Academy of Naples in 1732. Entitled On the Heroic Mind, amongst other
things Vico tells the students not to study in order to become rich or powerful, nor
for the narrow purpose of love of learning for its own sake. Rather, he enjoins them
to be ‘heroic’ and raise their eyes to the purpose of ‘lay[ing] foundations of learning
and wisdom for the blessing of the human race’.162 Significantly, he urges students
to an interdisciplinary approach, and not to be deterred from being ambitious by
‘scholards with petty minds’.163 ‘This world is still young . . . countless possibilities
still remain, so ‘apply yourselves to your studies with heroic mind. . . . Prove
yourselves to be heroes by enriching the human race with further giant benefits’.164
162
A new age?
These passages provide a useful transition to that other aspect of our query as to
Vico’s thoughts on his second ‘age of men’ – namely, in addition to preserving it
from corruption, can men go further and actually promote its possibilities? The tone
of the above Oration suggests they can – interestingly enough, if they adopt an
‘heroic’ spirit. But a more substantial case has been made by those who find a
positive message embedded in the internal logic of the New Science itself, and
perhaps occasionally hinted at explicitly by Vico. This is nothing less than the
view that Vico looked to a higher phase of ‘the age of men’ – maybe a new age
altogether – in which societies would be in conscious control of their own
development. Just as the natural sciences’ discovery of the laws of the physical
world enabled its increasing manipulation to the betterment of mankind, so (it is
suggested) Vico thought his ‘new science’ offered men the opportunity to
increasingly control their own societies through the new understanding of the social
world it offered. After all, it is suggested, Vico is the very one who insists that men
make their own history, and that because of this the workings of the social world
can be understood (better, even, than the natural world). It is true that, up to now,
‘providence’ has seen to it that societies exist in some form or other, often at
variance with the uncoordinated, uninformed designs of men. But now Vico has
uncovered the logic ‘providence’ has implanted into human affairs. The scene is
set, then, for a step advance by humanity towards at last being in control of its
future through the conscious determination of its present.
Such is the interpretation put upon Vico’s New Science by some, particularly
those intellectual Marxists who see in the relationship Vico proposes between
‘philosophy’ and ‘philology’ a precursing of Marx’s notion of ‘revolutionary
praxis’.165 The Marxian notion of a ‘pre-history’, in which men not in control of
the very societies they make, is to be succeeded by ‘human history’ where they are
at last able consciously to create themselves, looms large here. As one commentator
puts it (reminding us of Vico’s equating ‘poet’ with ‘creator’ or ‘maker’), ‘it is
precisely because the first men were poets and hence made their world that this
world can be known. As a science of “the principles of humanity” the New Science
is a science of creativity, of man qua creator’.166
Although these are speculations both about Vico’s real intentions and the
meanings (intended or not) which can be extracted from his work, they may not
be wild. Yet problems remain. For example, it is not clear from his ‘science’ whether
‘human nature’ can itself be subject to such conscious re-formation. Some allege
there are two ‘human natures’ in Vico – that which forms the unchangeable
substratum of humanity at any time (be they ‘gods’, ‘heroes’, or ‘men’), and the
‘nature’ which changes from one ‘age’ to another, culminating in the ‘human’
nature of people in the ‘age of men’. If a correct reading of Vico, this would
presumably impose limitations on man’s capacity to re-fashion himself. A related
problem is whether Vico believed that man can ever ‘know’ his mind. It has been
argued that the earlier Vico believed man could not, since even though man ‘makes’
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his own history, he does not ‘make’ his own mind – but that he altered his view by
the New Science, implying that in understanding previous minds (mentalities) we
retrace the making of our own minds – i.e., as insightful ‘new scientists’ we do
‘make’ our minds.167
These are but some of the disputed meanings extracted from Vico’s logic, and if
nothing else, such weighty themes demonstrate the continued appeal of Vichian
studies. But the other issue is what Vico himself intended to mean about the
prospects for the (second) ‘age of men’, with its larger implications for his entire
philosophy of history. This takes us back to the text itself – but no longer, I suggest,
to its internal details. Rather, we will answer our query better by considering the
rationale of the New Science as a whole. Why did he write it? We know there were
earlier ‘versions’ before the first edition of 1725, and that for the rest of his life he
kept on revising it. What is the overall point he wanted to make?
It is clear Vico thought he had something of great importance to communicate;
namely, nothing less than the ‘logic’ of human historical development – and that
this ‘new science’ at last provided the answers to those numerous fundamental
questions about society, justice, human nature, morality, and government which
philosophers, historians, and political theorists had grappled with over the
millennia. But he did not write his book solely to enlighten others. We have already
found him dismissing study solely for the sake of learning. He clearly believed that
the knowledge conveyed by his ‘science’ (confessedly incomplete) could not only
solve matters which had puzzled others for centuries, but that it should have practical
implications for the way people handled their societies and civil institutions in the
future. Quite what they were he did not spell out in any detail – but perhaps he
could not be expected to. Rather, it seems he hoped for the kind of large-scale, long-
term improvement in the social, political, and cultural affairs of human-beings
which he thought the approach of scientists such as his beloved Bacon presaged
for their physical, economic, and medical welfare.
If this estimation of Vico’s intentions is correct, it would seem wrong to propose
that his theory consigns nations to some inevitable deterioration as they progress
further into the ‘age of men’, ultimately to start their civilisations again in a
‘recourse’ of their previous developmental stages. The pessimism underlying such
a prospect sits uneasily with the optimistic sense of discovery and intellectual
urgency Vico conveys in his New Science. Rather, his commitment to his project
is more suggestive of the notion that he meant his theory of history to be a
transformative ‘science’ or ‘philosophy’ which could not only prevent a ceaseless
recourse of cycles of human history, but also help fulfill the promise inherent in
the ‘human’ age of reason. As such, his philosophy of history assumes an ambition
as vast as its scope – a feature, it would seem, endemic to ‘philosophy of history’
itself as we now proceed to those subsequent thinkers who also put their minds
to it.
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Summary comments
Nowadays, students and scholars will find a wealth of literature exploring whichever
parts of the labyrinth of Vico’s thinking interests them. Accordingly, it seems
appropriate to limit our comments to ‘seeing the wood for the trees’ – and this, I
suggest, returns us to Vico’s method.
Essentially, Vico re-presented the course of human history in terms of its origins,
and in doing so believed he made it ‘make sense’. He devised an account of the very
‘principles’ which drive historical development and inform it with ‘meaning’ (in
the sense that it is not arbitrary, but neither the product of human planning) – and
he did this by claiming to have found an ‘ideal’ (or model) ‘story’ or ‘course’ through
which all nations traverse (other things being equal).
Prior to examining the notion of a model ‘story’, in the first instance this draws
our attention to the ‘logic’ of individual ‘stories’ taken by themselves. For Vico, the
history of any ‘nation’ is not a random collection of disconnected ‘ages’ happening
to succeed each, and neither does it endlessly elaborate around its starting point.
Rather, it is comprised of remarkably different cultures corresponding to remarkably
different ‘ages’, and yet a fundamental continuity is maintained precisely through
this process of change.
This is the logic of ‘stories’, for any proper ‘story’ must feed on change, since if
nothing new happens after the first event there is no story to be told. But equally,
the different events in the story must emerge from each other, otherwise again
there would be no story, but simply a random collection of different anecdotes.
Thus it is that a story is a single thing, an identity, essentially constituted through
change.
Further, a story is not knowable via logical deduction. Nor is it knowable via
understanding each event discretely. Rather, the way we grasp the story is neither
through rationalism nor empiricism, but through an historical consciousness which,
in tracing a thing’s continuity through change, understands its present dispensation
in terms of where it came from.
So far, the analogy with the logic of ‘stories’ is sound enough in following Vico.
Particularly apt is that feature whereby outcomes are the result, not of a necessary
sequence of cause and effect, but of the ‘free’, yet intelligible, responses of human
beings to the circumstances they encounter.
Now, if the story is fiction (e.g., a novel) the outcome at any point will have been
designed by the author in such a way that it ‘makes sense’ by ‘following’ from the
preceding events. Yet Vico, of course, does not believe his (hi)stories of ‘nations’
are fiction. The other kind of story is the factual ‘story’ – that is, history, where the
historian is the discoverer, not the author or inventor of the ‘story’.
Put in this way, we may ask how Vico stands in relation to these alternatives? It
is clear he does not see the course of history as determined through ‘scientific’ cause
and effect. Rather, it displays the logic of a ‘story’. But it is not a story invented by
him – i.e., it is not fiction. But neither does he present its intelligibility as an
historian would – i.e., as simply inherent in the course of events, without the need
165
for an ‘author’ designing it. Vico insists there is an ‘author’, or a ‘mind’, designing
the ‘story’ – and it is understandable that he should therefore call the author ‘God’,
for what other option could there be?
But why does Vico insist there is an ‘author’? Why not simply say that, as an
historian, he has found an intelligibility in what might otherwise appear a random
succession of events? Why does he need ‘God’?
The answer to this, I suggest, rests on the fact that Vico does not understand
himself to be constructing some ‘universal’ history of humankind, in which the
latter is the subject of one single, ongoing story. As we have seen, (unlike a fictional
story), any single factual story does not need, or point to, a designer behind it. Had
the ‘course’ each ‘nation’ underwent simply been different in each case, then one
could present each ‘story’ as an historian, without the need to introduce deliberate
design – i.e., ‘God’. But what so excited Vico was his ‘discovery’ that, despite
contingent differences, each ‘nation’ went through the same basic story, indepen-
dently – in other words, that mankind’s past consisted of numerous versions of the
same story. And one can only wonder at how excited he must have been to
‘discover’ that this same basic story is not only to be found in different cultures, but
has even repeated itself in a ‘recourse’! This could not be chance.
Thus, had Vico only studied the history of the Roman people he might have
found most of what he did find, but still not need ‘God’ to make the development
of its society intelligible. But because he found the same basic ‘story’ in Greece and
elsewhere (and ‘recoursed’ in Europe since the demise of the Western Roman
Empire), the only way he could account for this correlation was the presence of
mind, design, or ‘God’. That Vico should propose, and mean, this is understandable
– for he had stumbled on something then unknown in the intellectual world he
inherited; what we call ‘social science’.
Today’s social sciences employ a variety of methods to understand the social world
(Vico’s ‘the world of nations’) – and the concept of correlation is important amongst
them, inspiring the ‘science’ of statistics to invent the basic concept of ‘significant
correlation’, which discovers predictable regularities amidst the diverse social
world. Also, in addition to a substratum of historical knowledge, social scientists
employ quantitative analysis in graphs, flow charts, and logical models.
But even now, they still debate their fundamental methodology, and are subject
to outside scrutiny on the same count. Is ‘social science’ the same as natural science?
If not, should it aspire to be? Is ‘social science’ more than, or different to, history?
What methods should social science employ? What is the epistemological status
of its disciplines (i.e., their ‘truth’ value)? In short, how we study the social world
remains problematic for some.
Now it is highly unlikely Vico had any concept of a ‘significant correlation’, let
alone of how to calculate it. Also, many have commented on the substantial neglect
of economics in Vico’s otherwise holistic approach to understanding societies. Yet
the ‘sciences’ of statistics and economics, let alone other ‘social sciences’, were
hardly developed in Vico’s day, nor the thinking that underlay them.
166
It is in this context that Vico nevertheless stumbled upon the basic problems of
the ‘logic’ of ‘social science’ – he intuited that the study of the social world could
not rest solely on history (‘philology’), nor model itself on the methodology of the
natural sciences (‘science/philosophy’). Some new way (his ‘new science’) needed
to be forged to properly understand the social world, and having worked towards
it, he ‘discovered’ that the social world must be intelligible because both historically
and holistically it exhibited ‘pattern’ or ‘regularity’.
Many of today’s social scientists, it seems, are happy enough to find such
‘regularities’ without asking why they occur, (e.g., the correlation between crime
and poverty) whilst others seek to explain them, but often through what might be
regarded as the blind alley of searching for what ‘correlates’ to the very correlation
under scrutiny! But for Vico, in the absence of our idea of ‘social science’, his
discovery of a pattern, or ‘model story’, would have been enough to evidence
‘design’ or ‘authorship’, and thus point to ‘God’. That he also found the model
story to be one which benefited mankind only served to encourage this view, to the
point where he claimed his work provided an actual proof of the existence of God
– a view as foreign to the ‘social sciences’ today as it felt natural then to Vico. We
may only ask; although Vico’s reliance on ‘God’ (‘providence’) in ‘making sense’
of the nature and history of human societies is out-dated, is the logic of ‘significant
correlations’ any better? Presumably, when something is ‘significant’ it thus signifies
something? Yet the logic of social science seems reluctant to engage in what Vico
called the art of ‘divination’ to find out what.
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8
SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF
HISTO RY DURING THE
ENLIGHTENMENT
Introduction
Vico and the Enlightenment

Vico was severely neglected until the twentieth century – by which time his
writings could only exercise academic interest (albeit increasingly enthusiastic
since the 1960s English translations of New Science, and poised to continue since
the 2000 English translation of Universal Right). Hence his ideas did not play a role
in the intellectual history of his immediately succeeding generations.
One of the reasons for this neglect was the growing predominance of an
(allegedly) new movement of European thought historians periodise as ‘the
Enlightenment’. In this they accept the movement’s self-identification, beginning
with the French from around the 1730s, and then spreading to other parts of
Europe, the British Isles (notably Scotland), and North America, and culminating
(arguably) in the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 respectively.
Inasmuch as we can characterise the movement as inspired indeed towards ‘enlight-
enment’ by a heady combination of rationalism, empiricism, modern science, and
a belief in resulting ‘human progress’, we can see why (although he was still revising
his New Science when he died in 1744) Vico’s ideas sat uneasily with the developing
intellectual fashion. After all, from the 1690s Vico had already been pondering
these pinnacles of seventeenth-century intellectual achievement and increasingly
developed his own complexly critical stance. There is a sense, then, in which Vico
had already superseded fundamental tenets of ‘Enlightenment’ thought before that
movement began – leading to the suggestion that ‘the Enlightenment’ is either
rather a misleading periodisation of European thought (because its essentials belong
to an earlier century), or at least that those who identified themselves as
promulgating the movement were under the illusion of breaking new ground.
The Enlightenment
Be this as it may, let us accept ‘the Enlightenment’ as that period spanning much
of the eighteenth century in which numerous intellectuals and interested laymen
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DURING THE ENLIGHTENMENT
challenged the intellectual hegemony of the established elites (especially the

church and nobility), and advocated radical reforms in what they perceived as their
backward, tradition-bound, unjustly unequal societies. Thus, numerous aspects of
society were subjected to radical criticism – the institutions of state for venality and
inefficiency, the nobility for its reactionary privileges, and the church for its narrow-
mindedness and authoritarianism. In addition, religion itself was subjected to
rational criticism, and it was at last possible not only to think, but also publish, the
unthinkable – namely, atheist beliefs. Relatedly, morals and customs were
questioned and (as in Voltaire) subjected to ridicule where found ‘lacking in
reason’. Likewise, the economic structures and practices of society were criticised
over their lack of efficiency, their failure to adopt new agricultural and scientific
methods of production, and perhaps above all, as in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of
Nations (1776), for the prevalence of archaic monopolistic restrictions on freedom
of trade and employment. In that same year Jeremy Bentham wrote his Fragment
on Government which poured scorn upon the pretentious, tautological arguments
used to defend the British Constitution, and later he exposed the injustices of
the penal code. Also in 1776 the American War of Independence against the
mismanagement and injustices of an arrogant British ruling elite’s vested economic
interests began the American Revolution, whilst thirteen years later the French
revolution of 1789 shattered forever whatever complacency the European ‘ancien
regimes’ had retained in the face of the upheavals fuelled (at least partly) by
‘Enlightenment’. Indeed, in their Euro-centred periodisations of history, today’s
historians date the beginnings of ‘modern history’ from the 1789 French revolution
and Napoleon’s succeeding revolutionary wars, such were the political, economic,
social, and intellectual changes involved, and to which the Enlightenment
contributed.
The Enlightenment, then, was above all an age of criticism – and its practitioners
understood this to mean the fearless application of reason to society’s institutions,
practices and beliefs. But we should comment that ‘reason’ is not as uni-directional
an approach to knowledge as many think it is. It is true that it is worth
distinguishing ‘reason’ (as a way of acquiring knowledge) from belief or opinion. Just
as a statement based on factual error is ‘unreasonable’, so is one that purports to
factual truth when based on mere belief or opinion. It is in this sense that empiricism
– the grounding of knowledge on observed facts – is part of ‘reason’. Likewise it is
worth distinguishing ‘reason’ (as a way of reaching conclusions) from thinking which
does not ‘follow’ logically, (e.g., ‘the cat is on the mat and is therefore black’) or
which pretends to uncover new information via mere tautologies (e.g., ‘a duty is
that which one ought to carry out, since a duty is something one is obliged to
perform’). In this sense rationalism is part of ‘reason. However, there is far more
to be said about ‘reason’ than these two aspects – and yet it seems that in their
reliance on the power of ‘reason’ to criticise societies, Enlightenment thinkers
meant little more than the above. Thus their reverence for the rationalist Descartes,
the ‘empiricist’ Locke, and the practico-experimentalism of ‘scientists’ such as
Bacon, all figures of the previous century.
169
However, if there was nothing fundamentally new about the philosophical

foundations of Enlightenment thought, what was new was its intense focus on the
character of society rather than on the abstractions of philosophy. This is famously
displayed in the cutting satires by Voltaire (1694–1778) and in the work of other
French Encyclopedists. The latter, under the editorship of Diderot (1713–1784),
contributed numerous articles on the sciences, arts, morals, and practical activities,
eventually constituting a thirty-four volume work which, begun in 1751 and
completed by 1780, underwent many editions despite attempts at censorship. Not
only a vast reservoir of the current state of knowledge, however, it constantly
exhibited the Enlightenment’s critical edge and its enthusiasm for reform,
modernisation, and progress. And it is here, in its constant criticism of tradition,
convention, the ‘irrational’, and the superstitious, that we can derive the sense in
which the Enlightenment embraced a ‘philosophy of history’, for in criticising the
past and present this implied things could be better (otherwise, what is the point
of criticism?).
Enlightenment ‘philosophy of history’

For the ‘enlighteners’, if only Reason could be applied to societies’ problems, wars
could be prevented by a tolerant acceptance of cultural relativism between nations
(albeit backed up by a Western ‘civilising mission’ over ‘underdeveloped’ peoples),
economic production could advance via the application of science and free trade,
social justice could be achieved by the removal of the vested interests of the
privileges of inheritance, free thought could prosper through undermining the
reactionary power of organised religion, and political power could be revolutionised
by being directed solely towards the benefit of all in society, so that (to use a phrase
Lenin echoed in 1917) ‘the manipulation of men would be replaced by the
administration of things’.
In short, the Enlightenment believed above all in progress. As such, it rested
on a broad consensus revolving around a critical (but also self-congratulatory)
posture towards the present, a preparedness to examine other cultures (both
contemporaneous and from ‘mankind’s history’) for what could be learned, and a
confident belief in the possibility of ‘progress’ – all this in the name of ‘Reason’.
Unsurprisingly, within this broad consensus, different views and theories abounded
on politics, economics, religion, and morality – and intelligent and knowledgeable
as were many ‘enlightened’ intellectuals, no singular, innovative, comprehensive
works of ‘philosophy’ emerged to summarise, tie together, and dominate the field.
Perhaps this was because the topics were so diverse. Indeed, in a positive light we
might almost say that the idea behind Diderot’s Encyclopédie (and many other
eighteenth-century encyclopedias) represented precisely such a comprehensive
philosophy in itself. Alternatively, however, it might be because the Enlighten-
ment’s intellectual foundations (the belief in ‘Reason’) were too insubstantial, or
too simplistically derivative from previous theories of knowledge, to generate a
new, all-encompassing, singular philosophy.
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Be this as it may, part of the overall consensus of Enlightenment thought

included philosophy of history. In seeing their own time as (at last) the Age of
Reason, they looked back at history as the movement of humanity from its initial
imperfections of ignorance, stupidity, barbarity, and superstition towards the
eventual enlightened state of knowledge, intelligence, tolerance, and reason which
offered the ultimate achievement of the perfectibility of humankind. Although
not necessarily irreligious, it was a markedly secular outlook on the ‘meaning’ of
history, since even for those who believed in a God who had given man Reason,
history and the future were seen as in man’s hands rather than pre-ordained. Earlier
periods (and contemporary nations) were judged by how far they contributed to
‘progress’ for humankind. As such, for many, their interest in history shifted from
the political histories of kings and constitutions towards a broader, more
anthropologically orientated history of cultures and peoples, (albeit more often to
discover different habits and customs which might be ‘useful’ to an enlightened life-
style rather than from purely historical interest).
However, the same may be said of this Enlightenment ‘philosophy of history’ as
of the broader agreement underlying Enlightenment thought in general. A
consensus can be detected, and although more than one attempt was made to
construct an explicit philosophy of history, none achieved the depth, comprehen-
sivenesss, or impact which allowed us to identify earlier distinctive ‘philosophies
of history’, or which compare with post-Enlightenment theories, particularly those
of Hegel and Marx. One of those who did attempt an explicit theory was the
Encyclopédist, Condorcet. But prior to examining his effort (which perhaps best
exemplifies Enlightenment thinking on the meaning of history) we should not
neglect the contribution within this field of a more famous Enlightenment figure,
the enigmatic Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau
The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences

One of the enigmas surrounding the complex life, personality, and ideas of Rousseau
is that although he lived within Enlightenment culture and circles, much of his
thought was diametrically opposed to its consensus – and perhaps this is nowhere
more the case than in his ideas on the meaning of history.
Born in 1712 in the independent republic of Geneva, at sixteen he rebelled
against being apprenticed as an artisan and ran away in the hope of improving his
lot. This he managed under the tutelage and protection of a wealthy lady, the first
of Rousseau’s many intimate associations with supportive women in his life. Aged
thirty, having acquired education and self-confidence he went to Paris in 1742 to
seek fame and fortune in that most ‘civilised’ of cities. In the former task (albeit
not in the latter) he was to succeed beyond his dreams, for by 1750 not only had
he become friends with many future Encyclopédists including Diderot and his
circle, he shot to fame (but also notoriety) by writing the prize-winning essay set
171
by the Academy of Dijon that year. Reflective of the self-congratulatory

Enlightenment tone, the Academy had posed the question, ‘Has the restoration of
the arts and sciences had a purifying effect upon morals?’. Directly contrary to the
optimism of Enlightenment culture, Rousseau penned his answer emphatically in
the negative – ‘and from that moment I was lost. All the rest of my life and of my
misfortunes followed inevitably as a result of that moment’s madness’.1 Although
not denying progress in the arts and sciences, it ‘has added nothing to our real
happiness: . . . it has corrupted our morals’.2 Doubtless influenced by his amused
reception in smart Parisian salon society as somewhat of a rustic, Rousseau’s basic
argument was that the genuine cultural accomplishments of any society, past and
present, were always accompanied by lesser minds’ corruption into hypocrisy
and superficiality. Impressed by the trappings of high culture, people who would
be better off following ordinary, useful pursuits become seduced into a false
refinement and urbanity of manners – ‘in a word, the appearance of all the virtues,
without being in possession of one of them’.3 Mere wit replaces genuine wisdom.
In order to impress others, ‘we no longer dare seem what we really are, but lie under
a perpetual restraint’4 to appear what we are not. For example, ‘the question is no
longer whether a man is honest, but whether he is clever. We do not ask whether
a book is useful, but whether it is well-written’.5 Ensnared in a web of superficiality,
hypocrisy, and egoistic competitiveness, ‘jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve,
hate, and fraud lie constantly concealed under that uniform and deceitful vein of
politeness, that boasted candour and urbanity, for which we are indebted to the
light and leading of this age’.6
The constant theme is the contrast Rousseau draws between the damaging moral
effects of the artificialities of ‘civilised’ society and the straightforward virtues of
‘natural’ man uncorrupted by the lure of luxury and sophistication.
Apart from this general effect, Rousseau blames two sources in particular. First,
‘even from our infancy an absurd system of education serves to adorn our wit and
corrupt our judgement; our youth are . . . instructed in everything but their duty’.7
The other source is the intellectuals. Apart from those few geniuses – he cites
Bacon, Descartes, and Newton – who genuinely shine above the rest of society,
there are those ‘respectable’ scientists and philosophers who labour away at
mathematics, astronomy, the mind–body relationship, biology, and the like.
‘Answer me’, says Rousseau, ‘you from whom we receive all this sublime infor-
mation, whether we should have been less numerous, worse governed, less
formidable, less flourishing, or more perverse, supposing you taught us none of these
things’. Rather, their effect is to breed idleness among people, and thus it is that
‘the labours of the most enlightened of our learned men . . . are of so little utility’.8
But Rousseau reserves his highest contempt for ‘that numerous herd of obscure
writers and useless litterateurs’ who, simply to please the corrupted taste of the
public, produce specious works of critical pretension. In criticising, analysing, and
pulling everything apart, these pen-pushers breed cynicism and scepticism in a
population already out-of-touch with reality because lost to the artificialities of
‘civilised’ life. In disgust, Rousseau even appears to attack the invention of printing,
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asking us to ‘consider the frightful disorders which printing has already caused
in Europe’!9
Profoundly out-of-tune with his own age, then, one can hardly imagine what
Rousseau would have said of today’s world of constant media outpourings which
bombard people’s thinking, tastes, and sensibilities. But more to our purposes, there
is also in Rousseau’s highly moralising piece an embryonic historical perspective
which he was subsequently to explore much further. He opens the Discourse by
appearing to praise the ‘noble and beautiful spectacle’ of ‘man raising himself . . .
from nothing by his own exertions; dissipating, by the light of reason, all the thick
clouds in which he was by nature enveloped. . . . All these miracles we have seen
renewed within the last few generations’. Referring to the Middle Ages, he claims
that Europe, ‘which is at present so highly enlightened’, had ‘relapsed into the
barbarism of the earliest ages’10, and was only rescued from ignorance by the influx
of literature because of the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, followed
by the rise of the sciences and philosophical writings. It is immediately after this
introductory nod to the Enlightenment, however, that Rousseau inveighs against
the deleterious effects of this ‘restoration’ of the arts and sciences, claiming that
those in power are only too happy because, ‘besides nourishing that littleness of
mind which is proper to slavery, the increase of artificial wants only binds so many
more chains upon the people’,11 as they lose the virtues associated with the original
simplicity of man in his natural state.
But he adds that this corrupting effect of the arts and sciences – (‘as their light
has risen above our horizon, virtue has taken flight’) – is not unique to the
Enlightenment, but that ‘the same phenomenon has been constantly observed in
all times and places’.12 In short, Rousseau proposes a law of human development
from ‘the inductions we can make from history’13, beginning with ancient Egypt.
When it ‘became the mother of philosophy and the fine arts’, it was soon conquered
repeatedly by a series of other nations, culminating with the Turks. The same
happened to Greece, ‘once peopled by heroes’. When the sciences progressed there,
‘Greece, always learned, always voluptuous, and always a slave, has experienced
amid all its revolutions no more than a change of masters’.14 In particular, Rousseau
contrasts Sparta, ‘a city as famous for the happy ignorance of its inhabitants, as
for the wisdom of its laws’ as ‘eternal proof of the vanity of science’ by comparing
it to the cultivated elegance of Athens where the kinds of vices complained of
by Socrates – ignorance of the nature of the true, the good, and the beautiful
– flourished. The same occurred eventually in Rome. Initially peopled by
independent, hard-working peasants who loved their liberty, community, and
country, ‘culture’ invaded and took command. The ‘ancient Roman simplicity’
succumbed to ‘pomp and magnificence’, and from this ‘fatal splendour’, Rome,
‘once the shrine of virtue, became the theatre of vice, a scorn among the nations,
and an object of derision even to barbarians’,15 to whom it inevitably fell. His final
historical example is Constantinople, which in the Dark and Middle European
ages ‘seemed destined to be the capital of the world’ because it was the ‘refuge of
the arts and sciences’. Instead, ‘the most profligate debaucheries, the most
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abandoned villainies, the most atrocious crimes . . . form the warp and woof of the
history of Constantinople’.16
For Rousseau, then, history teaches that people first lived close to nature in a
pristine ignorance which enabled their ‘natural’ virtues of straightforwardness and
honesty to flourish. Although ‘human nature was not at bottom better then than
now’, the transparency and authenticity of human beings ‘prevented their having
many vices’.17 But wherever the arts and sciences were introduced into these simple,
virtuous societies, ‘the effect is certain and the depravity actual’; minds are
inevitably corrupted, for ‘the evils resulting from our vain curiosity are as old as the
world’.18 Although sketchy and unsupported by any real analysis, Rousseau had set
the basis for a closer look at the mechanisms by which, according to his intuitions,
the history of humankind is one in which peoples, ‘originally’ or ‘naturally’ happy
and virtuous (albeit ignorant), inevitably degenerate once embarked upon the path
of ‘civilisation’. The opportunity to fill out this sketch presented itself four years
later when Rousseau responded to another Dijon Academy essay competition,
which asked ‘What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by
natural law?’.
The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality

. . . wandering deep into the forest, I sought and I found the vision of those
primitive times, the history of which I proudly traced . . . I dared to strip
man’s nature naked, to follow the progress of time, and trace the things
which have distorted it; and by comparing man as he has made himself
with man as he is by nature I showed him in his pretended perfection the
true source of his misery.19
Rousseau begins by distinguishing between natural inequalities of body and mind,

and ‘moral or political inequality’. He proposes to explore how the latter came
about, (and whether they can be justified), by starting at man’s ‘natural’, i.e., pre-
social, pre-political, state – man ‘in the state of nature’. Presumably ignorant of
Vico’s ideas, he claims ‘the philosophers, who have enquired into the foundations
of society, have all felt the necessity of going back to a state of nature; but not one
of them has got there’. This is because they have ‘transferred to the state of nature
ideas which were acquired in society; so that, in speaking of the savage, they
described the social man’. Instead, Rousseau proposes to construct a history (in
the absence of the historical facts) derived from ‘conditional and hypothetical
reasoning . . . just like the hypotheses which our physicists daily form respecting
the formation of the world’.20 Referring to his previous Discourse’s declamations
against ‘civilised society’, he tells us that ‘it is, so to speak, the life of your species
which I am going to write’, warning that its message will constitute ‘a panegyric on
your first ancestors, a criticism of your contemporaries, and a terror to the
unfortunates who will come after you’.21
174
The ‘noble savage’

There follows Rousseau’s famous description of ‘the noble savage’, derived partly
from Rousseau’s imagination, partly from deduction by removing what he calls the
‘supernatural’ additions of ‘civilisation’, and partly from contemporary accounts of
‘savage nations’ such as the native Americans and the Hottentots of the Cape
of Good Hope. Initially, man in the state of nature is little more than an animal,
sharing the physical virtues of robustness, keen senses, health, and simplicity of
purpose. But just as domesticated animals lose these virtues, so does man as he
begins to ‘advance’ from his natural state. He is able to do the latter because, unlike
the animal, which Rousseau sees as ‘nothing . . . but an ingenious machine’
governed entirely by instinct, man ‘has some share in his own operations, in his
character as a free agent’.22 Relatedly, man has the ‘faculty of self-improvement,
which, by the help of circumstances, gradually develops all the rest of our
faculties’.23 It is because of this that man has a ‘history’ at all, whereas animals
do not.
Before beginning this history, however, our noble savage’s moral character is
that of a deprived yet happy being. Leading a mainly solitary life (apart from
occasional matings and motherhood), having no language, the savage would be
devoted principally to looking after himself. But according to Rousseau the
consequent inability to think very far and the absence of social life are precisely
what gives the savage his moral strength. Because savages ‘maintained no kind of
intercourse with each other, [they] were . . . strangers to vanity, deference, esteem,
and contempt’. Rather, they were motivated by the virtue of self-respect, as distinct
from the ‘civilised’ vice of selfishness – and in the absence of the rational ability to
think up the maxim, Do to others as you would have them do unto you, would live out
the ‘less perfect . . . but perhaps more useful’ rule, Do good to yourself with as little
evil as possible to others.24 Rousseau insists this was because savage, unreflective man,
although not by nature sociable, naturally feels compassion when he encounters
others’ suffering. It is only when he develops into a social mode of life that he can
deliberately seek to harm others from malevolent motives, or take pleasure in
gaining advantage from others’ misfortunes. And as for being deprived of the power
to think (i.e., much beyond his immediate needs), this is where Rousseau is at his
most characteristically and deliberately controversial, for he says, ‘If she [nature]
destined man to be healthy, I venture to declare that a state of reflection is a state
contrary to nature, and that a thinking man is a depraved animal’.25 It is as if
Rousseau is prefiguring the early twentieth-century existentialist notion that self-
consciousness – the power to reflect – is an unbearable burden.
So much, then, for Rousseau’s perhaps highly romanticised notion of ‘the noble
savage’, except to say that he can see no reason why man should have wished to
leave that state. Rather, the potential for self-improvement – indeed, perfectibility
– inherent in ‘natural’ man could never have developed in itself, he suggests, ‘but
must require the fortuitous concurrence of many foreign causes’. He then turns
to ‘consider the different accidents which may have improved the human
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understanding while depraving the species, and made man wicked while making
him sociable’.26 In Part 2, then, Rousseau attempts to reconstruct the origins and
development of human society and civilisation – a history of whose meaning
and significance he has left us in no doubt about what he believes.
The disastrous progress of mankind

The ascent of man from his happy pristine infancy began, Rousseau surmises,
because ‘difficulties soon presented themselves’ in his circumstances – such as
competition with animals, and population pressures, causing scarcity of resources
– so that ‘it became necessary to learn how to surmount them’.27 Depending on their
location, men invented hooks and lines to become fishermen, or bows and arrows
to become hunters in the forests, or fur-skin clothes in cold regions. This process
must have stimulated the mind to make elementary perceptions of the relations
between things in terms of size, strength, and speed. Also, formerly leading solitary
lives, ‘experience’ now began to teach the advantages of joining ‘some kind of loose
association’ with others, ‘that laid no restraint on its members’ – sporadic groupings
within which the rudiments of language would have begun.
After what must have been ‘a multitude of ages . . . these first advances enabled
men to make others’ – in particular, Rousseau suggests, the increased use of
primitive tools enabled them to make rude permanent dwellings – and this was ‘the
epoch of a first revolution’ because it ‘established and distinguished families, and
introduced a kind of property’. These first proper families generated ‘conjugal love
and paternal affection’, but also began to ascribe different roles to male and female
– ‘whose manner of life had hitherto been the same’ – the women minding ‘the
hut and their children, while the men went abroad in search of their common
subsistence’. This basic division of labour, coupled with the simplicity of their
wants, enabled man ‘a great deal of leisure, which he employed to furnish himself
with many conveniences unknown to his fathers’, whilst family-living must have
advanced the use of language.28 Rousseau then suggests environmental causes
such as floods and earthquakes portioned off numbers of families, compelling
them to live in common circumstances. This is another turning point since
‘everything now begins to change its aspect’, for ‘at length in every country arises
a distinct nation, united in character and manners, not by regulations or laws, but
by uniformity of life and food’, and language. In this greatly expanded social
context,
men continued to lay aside their original wildness . . . They accustomed

themselves to assemble before their huts round a large tree; singing and
dancing . . . became the amusement, or rather the occupation, of men
and women thus assembled together with nothing else to do. Each one
began to consider the rest, and to wish to be considered in turn; and thus
a value came to be attached to public esteem . . . and this was the first step
towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice.
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This is because ‘from these first distinctions arose on the one side vanity and
contempt and on the other shame and envy’.29 With the emergence of self-esteem,
there ‘hence arose the first obligations of civility even among savages’, and what
Vico might have called a ‘severe justice’ whereby ‘every man punished the
contempt shown him by others’ with a ‘revenge’ that was ‘terrible’, ‘bloody, and
cruel’. Because there were as yet no institutions of law, ‘the dread of vengeance had
to take [their] place’.
By this stage of its history, then, mankind had moved some way from its ‘natural’
state, and clearly there are already significant respects in which for Rousseau – ever
the moralist – the potential for ‘decline’ is present. And yet, perhaps curiously, for
Rousseau this stage ‘must have been the happiest and most stable of our epochs
. . . altogether the very best man could experience’30 – our Golden Age, if you wish
– or as he put it, ‘the real youth of the world’, (giving the lie to the common
perception that Rousseau most admired ‘the noble savage’ of mankind’s origins).
This is because of ‘the expansion of the human faculties’ achieved at this stage.
Although the potential for future vice is implicit, it was a period which kept ‘a just
mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our
egoism’. So idyllic was this era, Rousseau suggests, that man ‘can have departed from
it only through some fatal accident which, for the public good, should never have
happened’. But the ‘accident’ did happen – one that ‘apparently [was] so many
steps towards the perfection of the individual, but in reality [was] towards the
decrepitude of the species’.
This second ‘great revolution’ was the invention of metallurgy and agriculture.
Its ‘accidental’ nature, Rousseau suggests, rested on ‘the extraordinary accident of
some volcano which, by ejecting metallic substances already in fusion, suggested
to the spectators the idea of imitating the natural operation’ – and on what must
have been their ‘unusually advanced minds’. As for agriculture, he suggests the
emergence of metal-working caused a shortage of people left to provide food, and
thus prompted the development (helped by iron tools) of tilling the land to grow
crops. But this was not just a revolution in technology. Rather, it was a revolution
in humanity, because men lost their independence by becoming embroiled in the
division of labour – and if there is one characteristic which Rousseau admired in
the two previous eras, it was men’s independence.
But from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of
another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to
have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was
introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling
fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where
slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the
crops. . . . The poets tell us it was gold and silver, but, for the philosophers,
it was iron and corn which first civilised men, and ruined humanity.31
The overall division of labour between agriculture and manufacture was exacer-
bated by further divisions within these activities – and these, along with the system
177
of exchange of commodities they necessitated, further exacerbated whatever natural

inequalities already existed. In addition, agriculture in particular required rules
about property – and taken all together, Rousseau tells us, ‘it is easy to imagine
the rest’; the advancement of other arts and technologies, of language, and of the
inequalities of riches. Men now lived their lives increasingly entangled with, and
in need of, each other – and their own position in the socio-economic field became
crucial to them. For Rousseau, the moral effects of this new situation were appalling.
Because ‘man must now have been perpetually employed in getting others to
interest themselves in his lot’, it now became the interest of men to appear what
they really were not. ‘To be and to seem became two totally different things; and
from this distinction sprang insolent pomp and cheating trickery. On the other
hand, free and independent as men were before, they were now, in consequence
of a multiplicity of new wants, brought into subjection . . . to all nature, and
particularly to one another; and each became in some degree a slave even in
becoming the master of other men: if rich, they stood in need of the services of
others; if poor, of their assistance’.32
The origins of political societies

Rousseau depicts this ‘new-born state of society’ in which equality disappeared as
‘a horrible state of war’ (as some – ‘like ravenous wolves’ – enlarged their possessions
and powers at the expense of others driven to violence or slavery to survive), akin
to Hobbes’ famous picture of ‘the state of nature’. But, as Rousseau had himself
pointed out in criticism of such ‘social contract’ theorists, this was a state already
far removed from man’s ‘natural’ state. On the contrary, he saw the Hobbesian/
Lockean ‘social contract’ theory in a markedly different light, for far from rescuing
man from an appalling ‘state of nature’, it introduced a new, devastating era into
a situation where man had already left his natural state far behind but was not yet
entirely ‘lost’. Rousseau explains: The ‘horrible state of war’ ushered in a further
development in man’s history, for in his insecurity ‘the rich man . . . conceived at
length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of man: this was to employ
in his favour the forces of those who attacked him’. He did this by devising
‘plausible’ or ‘specious’ arguments whereby, pointing out the horrors of the present
anarchic situation, all should join together to ‘institute rules of justice and peace,
to which all without exception may be obliged to conform. . . . Let us . . . instead
of turning our forces against ourselves, collect them in a supreme power which may
govern us by wise laws, protect and defend all the members of the association . . .
and maintain eternal harmony among us’. Because ‘so barbarous and easily seduced’,
the rest agreed. ‘All ran headlong to their chains, in hopes of securing their liberty’,
and as a consequence institutions of law and government arose. But for Rousseau,
this ‘specious’ social contract was simply a confidence trick perpetrated by the rich
(who currently had no right to their unequal status gained by force, cunning, and
intimidation) upon the poor, who ‘had just wit enough to perceive the advantages
of political institutions, without experience enough . . . to foresee the dangers’.
178
The political societies which ensued ‘bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new
powers to the rich’; they ‘irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the
law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right,
and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to
perpetual labour, slavery, and wretchedness’.33
‘Such was, or may well have been, the origins of society and law’, says Rousseau
– and we can see, for him, how much this development revolved around property.
(Indeed, in a rhetorical flourish opening Part 2 Rousseau had already declared,
‘The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying
“This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder
of civil society’).34
Having reached this critical historical stage – ‘the origin of political societies’ –
Rousseau devotes most of the remainder of the Discourse to speculating on the
different forms of government which subsequently evolved. But things did not
improve, because ‘as it had begun ill, . . . the original faults were never repaired’.35
On the contrary, Rousseau presents a rough, and typically pessimistic, theory of the
development of political constitutions. Although initially loosely ‘democratic’ in
form, eventually ‘ambitious chiefs’ began to ‘perpetuate their offices in their own
families, and thereby ‘contracted the habit of considering their offices as a family
estate, and themselves the proprietors of the communities of which they were at
first only the officers’. These chiefs/magistrates thus began ‘regarding their fellow-
citizens as their slaves, and numbering them, like cattle, among their belongings’.
This phase, ‘which is the last degree of inequality’, thus ‘authorised . . . the
condition . . . of master and slave’,36 and is the condition Rousseau implies has
been reached in his own times.
The final stages

Sketchy and intuitive as is this ‘history’ – (unlike Vico, Rousseau offers no actual
evidence) – Rousseau elaborates on his theory that different forms of government
derive from degrees of inequality. There are many sources of inequality, but
Rousseau asserts that ‘wealth is the one to which they are all reduced in the end’.
He claims that this is the measure for analysing a people’s ‘progress towards the
extreme term of corruption’ and for demonstrating what ‘may appear in ages yet to
come’ regarding the nature of government. As money increasingly becomes the
measure of all things, ‘the rights of citizens and the freedom of nations’ will be
‘slowly extinguished’, and in passages prescient of twentieth-century fascism and
totalitarianism,
from the midst of this disorder and these revolutions . . ., despotism,

gradually raising up its hideous head and devouring everything that
remained sound and untainted in any part of the State, would at length
trample on both the laws and the people, and establish itself on the
ruins of the republic.
179
Equally prescient, Rousseau predicts that ‘the times which immediately preceded
this last change would be times of trouble and calamity; but at last the monster
would swallow up everything and the people would . . . have . . . only tyrants’, such
that there is a complete return to the law of the strongest, and so to a new state
of nature, ‘differing from that we set out on . . . [because of] the consequence of
excessive corruption’.
This last stage in political evolution is, then, ‘the extreme point that closes the
circle’, but it does not seem Rousseau therefore means to present a cyclical theory
whereby mankind starts again on the disastrous path to ‘civilisation’. Man at this
last stage is, after all, totally different from the ‘noble savage’ or, for that matter,
from man in the initial stages of society. Rather, Rousseau simply comments that
at this last stage, where force alone ‘justifies’ rule, ‘popular insurrection that ends
in the death or deposition of a Sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he
disposed, the day before, of the lives and fortunes of his subjects’.37 Although
he does not say so, such revolutions could hardly be likely to usher in some new,
benign future for man, but rather to initiate permanent instability and continuing
moral chaos.
Rousseau’s philosophy of history

Such, then, are the gloomy results of Rousseau’s efforts to ‘retrace’ ‘the lost and
forgotten road, by which man must have passed from the state of nature to the
state of society’. He concludes by summarising the unfavourable comparison in
scathing terms:
In reality, the source of all these differences is, that the savage lives within
himself, while social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows
how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the
consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgement of others
concerning him.38
Inasmuch as this passage is a ‘psychological’ observation about man’s consciousness

of his being in the world, it introduces a modern slant into a philosophy of history
otherwise distinctly slight on actual historical facts. What Rousseau has done is
propose an understanding of human history which excludes God, ‘providence’,
and supernatural teleology; avoids the notion of recurrable ‘cycles’ as much as it
does some determinate unilinear future; does not deny the obvious fact of ‘progress’
in the arts, sciences, and technology, and yet still finds a ‘meaning’ or ‘significance’
of human history – not in such ‘progress’, but elsewhere; namely, in the nature of
man’s consciousness of being in the world.
Thus stripped of ‘external’ determinants of history, it is, then, a materialistic
theory grounded on the bedrock of economic life. Economic necessity drove man
to live in settlements, which expanded social intercourse and, correspondingly,
language and intelligence. Then a technological revolution occurred as men
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accidentally discovered metallurgy, prompting the art of agriculture and the

division of labour, thus making people more interdependent. Concomitantly, man’s
consciousness of his identity, worth, and role in life was increasingly mediated by
the socio-economic nexus in which he functions. The first ‘political societies’
emerged, but essentially as confidence-tricks by the powerful and wealthy, leading
eventually to societies where the mass of people are powerlessly entrapped in a
complex web of economic relationships which encourage and feed upon the egoism,
exploitation, and insecurity of all involved, having stripped them of all indepen-
dence, self-respect, and genuine morality. Thus has man, through his history,
become increasingly ‘civilised’.
And as for the future? Rousseau was of course writing prior to the European
industrial revolution and population explosion of the nineteenth century and to
the stunning technological revolutions of the twentieth century. We noted his
gloomy political intuitions – despotism, revolution, turmoil – and must assume he
would have been even more gloomy to witness our ‘progress’ in economics and
technology. But he would have been resigned to them and their consequences,
just as he declared himself to be in his own day when, foreseeing Enlightenment
satire that he wanted man to ‘return again to the forests’ to live in his ‘natural’
state, he dismisses the possibility and argues instead that we must do the best we
can within our ‘civilised’ societies without, however, having any ‘less contempt’
for them.39 And it seems this air of resignation constantly underpins his
interpretation of man’s history, for although there are stages where man would
better have remained (particularly Rousseau’s version of the ‘golden age’ of early
social man), the equilibrium cannot hold. Prefiguring Hegelian dialectics, it is as if
each stage of society breeds the very opposite factors which cause them to change
– although in Rousseau’s case, always to something worse. And, prefiguring
Marxian dialectics, the chief of these factors is economic development linked to
technological changes, which revolutionise the nature of societies and the ‘moral’
and ‘psychological’ character of men. Thus, although we have said that for Rousseau
there are no ‘external’ determinants of human history – that man makes his own
history – it would seem that man is not in control of that history, and thus of his
own destiny as a being innately bearing the seeds of perfectibility. On the contrary,
it seems that every time man takes a step further towards self-improvement (the
development of language, social cooperation, political organisation, the arts and
sciences, wealth creation) the economic factors on which these are based drive
him ever further away from his ‘perfection’. Instead, they lead to his increasing
corruption as a being who, hopelessly enmeshed in an autonomous socio-economic
nexus, further loses what it is to be ‘human’.
Postscript on Rousseau – The Social Contract

Because of its celebrity (although falling somewhat out of our topic), we should note
that only some few years after the resigned tone of his Discourse on Inequality,
Rousseau did propose a positive solution to the current ills of society in his famous
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The Social Contract (1762), a work of political philosophy. But our interest here
must be limited to the question of whether it adds anything to Rousseau’s theory
of history just outlined, and the curious answer must be that in some important
respects it actually contradicts it. Reiterating his complaints about exploitation
and slavery, Rousseau argues that ‘liberty’ is essential for a person’s actions to be
truly ‘human’. This is because man, unlike animals, has free will – and this,
uniquely, allows him to choose between right and wrong. In short, man alone can
be a moral being – but he can only realise this essential aspect of his humanity if he
is free to choose his actions. As Rousseau puts it, ‘Force is a physical power, and I
fail to see what moral effect it can have. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not
of will . . . In what sense can it be a duty?’.40 Thus, to close the circle, because ‘to
remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts’, liberty is
essential to being human, for ‘to renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to
surrender the rights of humanity’.41
Now, given that people live in organised societies requiring rules, how can we
construe such an organisation whereby, in obeying its laws, the citizen does so not
because forced to, but, ‘while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone,
and remain as free as before’?42 In short, is it possible to conceive of a political
society in which it is possible to remain ‘human’. Rousseau’s celebrated solution
revolves around what he calls ‘the general will’, whereby everyone gives up
everything to the entire community, which then makes fundamental laws which all
have a direct say in formulating. Thus gathered together, the people are ‘the
Sovereign’, and in obeying the laws it passes (through each individual voting,
entirely motivated by the good of the community rather than his private or
sectional interests), they retain their freedom, since ‘obedience to a law which we
prescribe to ourselves is liberty’.43 So far nothing said actually contradicts his
Discourse. Rather, it seems to offer a welcome solution to at least the former work’s
political pessimism. However, Rousseau takes his thinking a stage further since, not
only has he devised a way of reforming political society, he now tells us it is only in
and through the political state (properly established) that humankind can achieve
its perfectibility. And here he appears to contradict those thought-provoking
intuitions underlying the Discourse’s philosophy of history.
Now, in The Social Contract, ‘the passage from the state of nature to the civil state’
humanises man by ‘substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his
actions the morality they formerly lacked’. Now, ‘although . . . he deprives himself
of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others; . . . his
faculties are . . . stimulated and developed, his ideas . . . extended, his feelings . . .
enobled, and his whole soul uplifted’. What, then, of ‘the noble savage’? Now, so
great are the above advantages that, ‘did not the abuses of this new condition often
degrade him below that which he left’, man should be ever grateful for being made
into ‘an intelligent being and a man, . . . instead of a stupid and unimaginative
animal’. And returning to his philosophical definition of what it is to be ‘human’,
he concludes, ‘We might, over and above all this, add, to what man acquires in the
civil state, moral liberty, which alone makes him truly master of himself’.44
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Critique
This last phrase should rightly remind us of the crucial role a man’s independence
played in the moral ideas of the Discourse, and yet in that work this is increasingly
compromised as man leaves the ‘natural state’, moving through early non-political
societies, on into the political/civil state. Here, Rousseau appears to turn his ideas
upside down. We have only to compare a passage already quoted from the Discourse
with a further passage from the Social Contract. In the former work which lauds
‘natural man’ and condemns ‘civilised’ man, ‘In reality, the source of all these
differences is, that the savage lives within himself, while social man lives constantly
outside himself’. Now, in the Social Contract, Rousseau emphasises that:
He who dares to undertake the making of a people’s institutions ought to

feel himself capable . . . of transforming each individual, who is by himself
a complete and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from which he
in a manner receives his life and being. . . . He must . . . take away from
man his own resources and give him . . . new ones . . . incapable of being
made use of without the help of other men . . . so that if each citizen is
nothing and can do nothing without the rest, . . . legislation is at the
highest possible point of perfection.45
Then, it seems, ‘the general will’ can properly function, and mankind can thereby
not only rescue, but perfect, its human nature.
The ideas behind these contrasting passages are perhaps impossible to reconcile
– but then neither should we necessarily try to, but leave room for thinkers to
develop their ideas even to the point where they change their minds. But our
interest is that these ideas in The Social Contract invite the comment that Rousseau
perhaps underestimated the implications of that sketchy philosophy of history
he presented in the Discourse on Inequality. There, he suggested his approach
(which, pace Vico, he regarded as entirely novel) furnishes ‘the solution to a number
of problems of politics and morals which philosophers cannot settle’.46 What he
seemed to mean is that the grounding of the course of history on the practical
matter of how, over time, the development of man’s faculties, moral ideas, and
modes of social organisation were determined by the economic facts of his material
existence, demonstrates the futility of abstract philosophising about, for example,
the moral nature of man or the ideal logic of the State. The centrality of the
economic factors of property and the division of labour as determinants of man’s
history is clear. And yet when, in The Social Contract, Rousseau attempts to offer
some positive solution to those problems of ‘civilised society’, it is one which ignores
those inescapable economic mechanisms underlying historical development and
focuses instead on some a priori, abstract, purely political notion of ‘the general will’.
(Ultimately, all we know about ‘property’ under this new dispensation is that ‘the
right which each individual has to his own estate is always subordinate to the right
which the community has over all’.47 In short, it is up to ‘the general will’, starting
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from a clean slate, to determine the nature of the economy). This can be seen as a
phony solution which relapses into just that abstract political philosophising whose
utopianism Rousseau had earlier criticised in the philosophy of history contained
in his Discourse on Inequality.
Those earlier intuitions were later to find their expansion in Marx’s historico-
economic theory. On the other hand, the basis of the Social Contract – the concept
of freedom of the will – was to be expanded (through an extraordinary philosophical
historicisation) by Hegel. Thus in waving adieu to Rousseau we leave a thinker
whose intuitions in the field of philosophy of history, as in other areas, pointed in
so many of the different directions modernity was to explore.
Turgot
Rousseau’s Discourses remain as testament to his reaction against that implicit
Enlightenment consensus on ‘philosophy of history’ outlined at the outset of this
chapter. Clearly, Rousseau was aware of this consensus which so closely linked the
idea of ‘progress’ with an implicit ‘philosophy of history’, and he set out to attack
both. But there was as yet no celebrated individual exponent to target – rather, he
was attacking a general trend which was to find a systematic individual exponent
only some twenty years after his death, in Condorcet’s (1794) Sketch for a Historical
Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (which singled out Rousseau’s two
Discourses for attack). But if Condorcet’s work summarised preceding Enlighten-
ment sketchy efforts into ‘a definite philosophy of history’,48 and ‘was the form in
which the eighteenth-century idea of progress was generally assimilated into
Western thought’49, the consensus it represented was already implicit by the 1750s,
and perhaps no better example need be found than the scientist-statesman Turgot
(1727–1781) – ‘of the middle generation of the philosophes’50 – who in 1750
delivered two lectures which ‘framed a new conception of world history . . . and
constituted the first important version in modern times of the ideology of
progress’.51 That Turgot befriended and advanced Condorcet, and that the latter
admired him to the extent of writing his biography, exemplifies the basic similarity
of their, and their numerous philosophe contacts’, views on the meaning of history.
Thus, to more closely explore the typical Enlightenment philosophy of history, let
us begin by outlining Turgot’s ideas on this theme, particularly as set out in
Manuel’s account in his stimulating book, The Prophets of Paris.52
On ‘progress’ and ‘rationality’

Like other philosophes, Turgot passionately believed in ‘progress’, and this ‘progress’
was measured by, and depended on, the extent to which mankind could become
ever more ‘civilised’ through applying ‘reason’ to achieve the fully happy life. To
Turgot and many others of his generation the application of ‘reason’ meant
following the ideas of Locke and Condillac, whereby all knowledge is derived
from sense-experience. There are no innate, pre-existing ideas, concepts, or values.
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Rather, all knowledge should be shorn of such mysteries and depend instead
upon the gradual uncovering of reality through observation, comparison, and
experiment. Other ideas – derived from imagination or superstition (including
many religious ideas), or merely accepted on grounds of tradition and convention
– are deeply suspect and lead to irrational thinking.
For Turgot this belief in ‘progress’ looked in two directions. First, it meant a
belief in the inevitable triumph of reason governing human affairs in the (hopefully
non-too distant) future, whereby mankind could finally realise its perfectibility in
‘one enlightened world with a uniform culture’ – indeed, ‘one political world’.53
Here, the irrationalities of war, economic deprivation, political oppression,
ignorance, and exploitative inequalities, would be abolished, never to return
because of the ineradicability of the accumulated knowledge of the physical and
social sciences. Also, however, it meant understanding the meaning of all previous
human history from this same perspective of ‘progress’ dependent upon the
development of ‘rationality’. This is how Turgot looked at, and what he sought in,
the history of humankind. For him, human history was the long ascent from
ignorance and the rule of passion to the reign of ‘scientific’ knowledge and reason.
It was, he claims, what history itself tells us from the facts we can observe or
otherwise rationally hypothesise. Although for him there may be some kind of
divine providence underlying this encouraging history, more prosaically he
construed the determining mechanisms behind the inevitability of ‘progress’ as
being the utilitarian impulse of the search for pleasure and happiness, combined
with the capacity to accumulate ever more, and more certain, knowledge through
experience, observation, and reflection. In short, there is a ‘law’ governing human
history. Sooner or later – in this nation or that – the law of the inevitability of
‘progress’ has prevailed (and will continue to do so).
But this is not to say ‘progress’ was easy. Rather, throughout history the spark of
innovation is held back by the forces of routine. These negative forces are not so
much some innate conservatism in human nature. On the contrary, Turgot believes
the impulse to discover new knowledge and create new things is basic to human
nature. Rather, they originate from established institutions which labour ‘to stall
man in the rut of sameness, . . . in a state of treadmill repetitiveness’, to defend their
vested interests.54
Thus Turgot’s perspective on history focuses on the gradual development of the
human mind, and he saw this process as evidenced primarily by the evolution of
language and modes of thought. Initially, the ancients ‘communicated their ideas
as a sort of baby-talk’, in ‘metaphors and images’. This was linked to what Turgot
saw as a basically ‘theological’ view of the world. But as the human mind developed,
this theological approach to existence was replaced by the metaphysical approach,
reflected in correspondingly more abstract language (e.g., the philosophical
achievement of the Greeks and its subsequent heritage).
But the third (and final?) stage is the growing recognition of ‘the real objective
nature of things’ achieved through the application of empirical, ‘scientific’ method,
and it is at this stage that reason, in coming to fruition, increasingly begins ‘to
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formulate . . . relationships [between things] in mathematical terms’.55 Now, the

metaphysical view of existence is superseded by the ‘positive’ view, and Turgot
clearly meant by this the transforming (or ‘reducing’?) of as many facets of existence
as possible into the rational purity of mathematical relationships. Quite how far he
thought this could be extended is difficult to say.
The monitoring of ‘progress’

In his thoughts about history Turgot identified four general areas which interplayed
in different ways and at different rates. Technological innovation was the most
reliable and enduring of these. Closely linked were developments in speculative
science. But if, for Turgot, ‘science owed more to technology than technology
to science’, it was ‘a relationship Turgot was prepared to see reversed by the
imminent explosion of speculative science. . . . For the future the scientists were
the unchallenged vanguard of the battalions of progress’. Another area in which
‘progress’ could be assessed was in the arts, but here Manuel tells us that ‘Turgot
modified his theory of limitless infinite progress’ on the simplistic grounds that ‘the
fine arts aimed only to please’. Once good taste had established the proper
parameters of aesthetic pleasure, and the properties of human psychology involved
were understood scientifically, then the knowledge appropriate to the arts was
achieved, and no further progress would be possible since ‘a specific art object either
obeyed . . . the rules or violated them’. Since Turgot’s view was that artistic perfec-
tion had been achieved in the age of Virgil and Horace, the only question was
whether the good taste involved could be recaptured, or imitated properly in
different societies.56
The other area in which ‘progress’ could be monitored was that of moral
behaviour, or put in modern terms, ‘the social sciences’. Here, Turgot adopted a
standard view of the cruel nature of early societies with their fierce natural religions
and barbarous practices. Unlike some of his anti-clerical, even atheistic, fellow
Enlightenment philosophes, however, he praised the achievements of Christianity
in overcoming many pagan practices, and saw the church as ‘one of the great
civilising and moralising forces in the history of mankind’.57 But he looked forward
to further ‘moral’ progress towards the ideal of peace-loving, tolerant, just,
prosperous societies in which ‘reason’ prevailed. Above all was his hope that the
keys to unlocking the problems of how to organise society to maximise individual
happiness with ‘social order’ could be found in the further application of reason
to social science. And this, of course, meant ‘the mathematicisation of the study
of man’, whereby ‘moral problems would be removed from the disputes of
the marketplace’, where there would be ‘no room . . . left for vagueness, for the
exaggeration of enthusiasts, for superstition’ and other baggage of the pre-scientific
approach.58 Then, whereas progress throughout (previous) history had often
resulted from the clash between the forces of innovation and those of reaction
and evil (thereby affording the latter a positive role nevertheless), future progress
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would be self-sustaining because based on the universal growth and application of

educated rationality.
The direction Turgot’s ideas were taking, particularly his view of the meaning of
history from which they derived, is clear. But his increasing embroilment in French
politics from the early 1760s, culminating in his office as Comptroller-General of
Finance in 1774 and his downfall two years later, never permitted him to properly
systematise his historical ideas or pursue his hopes for the ‘mathematicisation’ of
the social sciences. Had he done so, Manuel for one believes ‘he would have ranked
with Vico as a creator of the “new science”’.59 As it was, it fell to his protégé
Condorcet to develop Turgot’s typical Enlightenment philosophy of history into
a systematic treatise.
Condorcet
Born in 1743 and educated by Jesuits, the young Condorcet achieved some
distinction as a promising mathematician, a talent he kept in touch with and whose
possibilities always fascinated him as he moved forward to achieve increasing
eminence as a ‘scientist-policy-maker’, elected at the age of twenty-six to the
French Academy of Sciences in 1779, and becoming its permanent Secretary
in 1785. Involved in the fervour of the Revolution of 1789, he was elected to the
Commune of Paris and then to the 1791 Legislative Assembly, which in
recognition of his extensive intellectual connections and organising abilities
commissioned from him a Report on Education – (a matter central to Condorcet’s
hopes for the future) – which ‘was to have great influence on the revolutionary
remodelling of the French education system’.60 Then elected to the National
Convention, Condorcet’s downfall began as he fell out with the more extreme
policies of the Jacobins. Denounced as an enemy of the Republic in 1793, he went
into hiding in a house in Paris, and when some eight months later he tried to escape,
was captured and died the next day in somewhat mysterious circumstances. During
those eight months, as a kind of summation of his life-long involvement in scientific
and intellectual matters and of his ideas as a philosophe, Condorcet wrote his Sketch
for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, (the Esquisse).
In this work, Condorcet tried to collate the many observations and reflections
he had indulged in throughout his life regarding the past development of human-
kind and its future prospects. In short, he tried to make systematic sense of his (and
other Enlightenment) views on the significance of human history, views in his case
strongly influenced by his knowledge of the history of science. Also he was clearly
influenced by Turgot’s ideas regarding ‘progress’ in history and by the latter’s
intuitions about the prospects which a ‘social art’ based on ‘positive’ social science
held for the future. However, he differed from Turgot in being unambiguously
atheistic, and this perhaps allowed him a bolder view of history and a more radical
tone – in addition, the circumstances under which he wrote the Esquisse, bereft of
his home and library, concentrated his attention on the essentials.
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For Condorcet, history should be a ‘science’, essentially like any other science.
God and/or ‘providence’ can be removed from the study altogether, and to the
extent that ‘the history of man . . . is linked by an uninterrupted chain of facts and
observations, [so that] the picture of the march . . . of the human mind becomes
truly historical’, then philosophy can also be taken out of the study. As Condorcet
put it, ‘Philosophy has nothing more to guess, no more hypothetical surmises to
make’. History is a matter of gathering and ordering the facts, and then of showing
‘the useful truths that can be derived from their connections and causality’.61 That
the latter exercise is surely a form of ‘philosophy’ (if only because, from our point
of view, so obviously ‘value-laden’) Condorcet might have accepted – but in
apparently relegating ‘philosophy’ in favour of ‘science’ he was primarily objecting
to those, like Pascal, who insisted on a sharp distinction between the objects of
scientific study (with its mathematical approach) and the objects of moral study
(with their historical and philosophical approach). In that sense, for Condorcet,
the study of the history of man should be a science rather than require an explicitly
non-scientific, ‘philosophical’ approach.
But there is also a more radical sense in which Condorcet relegated ‘philosophy’
in favour of ‘science’. If the study of history should be ‘scientific’ rather than
‘philosophical’, that same study demonstrates that, ultimately, the study of anything
(including moral questions) should abandon ‘philosophy’ and become ‘scientific’.
In short, philosophy is not only inappropriate to the study of history. Rather, history
itself teaches us that ‘philosophy’ was but one phase of human understanding of
reality which should be superseded by ‘science’ in all areas of knowledge. For
Condorcet,
Metaphysicians and system-makers in all ages . . . were as inimical to

progress as priests and religious enthusiasts. . . . True knowledge was
restricted to . . . simple straightforward empirical science, preferably with
a mathematical base . . . Philosophies were disguised religions and they
invariably led to the decline of true science.62
In being a typical part of his overall interpretation of the sweep of human history,
this idea can introduce us to the larger picture he drew.
Historical premises
According to Condorcet, the history of humankind can be divided into nine stages,
with a tenth about to dawn. Similar to Turgot’s approach, his underlying premises
are that historical progress is basically accountable for in terms of man’s capacity
to receive knowledge through his sense-experiences, and accumulate and organise
such knowledge in order to further his utilitarian impulse to achieve a more pleasing
life. (Note an even more basic premise at work here – that ‘history’ is the history
of ‘progress’). Thus for Condorcet ‘history’ is basically the interplay between man’s
intellect and the fulfilment of his needs and desires, and progress occurs when
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intellectual innovations break down the resistance of traditional ways of doing

things and change the way people live. The source of such resistance, rather as in
Turgot, is the opposition of vested interests concerned to perpetuate the status quo.
But unlike Turgot, in Condorcet’s case it is not only superstition and convention
that have upheld erroneous knowledge, but religion in particular – including, in
the West, the Christian church. Also, ‘philosophy’ has perpetuated erroneous
knowledge, particularly when it spawns ‘schools’ anxious to uphold their ideas
against competing ‘metaphysical’ systems. Indeed, it would seem that for Condorcet
there is little difference between superstition, religion, and philosophy as
reactionary forces, although it is true that philosophy has sometimes stimulated
‘scientific’ ideas, the only source of truth. History, then, has been the grand
battlefield between truth and error, and as such Condorcet construes its different
stages in ‘primarily intellectual and cultural’ terms. Yet this is not because of any
high-brow elitism on his part. Rather, it was because he was convinced – by his
‘historical observations’ – that ‘scientific’ progress led to political, economic, and
social betterment, i.e., ‘moral’ progress. Thus it is that, although Condorcet’s stages
of history often relate to economic factors in particular, he was (as Mazlish notes)
‘basically not an economic determinist . . . [but] far more interested in the “moral
relations”’ of societies.63
The ten stages of history

Eschewing reference to Biblical accounts, or to philosophical constructions of a
‘state of nature’ (as in, for example, Rousseau), Condorcet identifies the first stage
of human history as that in which people lived in small tribes and survived by
hunting and fishing. The second stage is the change to an agricultural way of life,
where even at this early stage (as indeed Rousseau had suggested) sufficient material
welfare was achieved to produce a surplus – and this allowed the emergence of a
‘priesthood’ which, although it might have initially fostered new knowledge of, for
example, astronomy, exclusively guarded its knowledge, partly by obscurantist
language (as in Vico, whose ideas it is doubtful Condorcet or any other philosophe
was properly familiar with). The third stage of history is the development within
simple agricultural societies of the division of labour. This enhanced economy, in
which the emergence of artisans and traders extended human communications, was
assisted and encouraged by the invention of the alphabet. But it also spawned the
feudal system whereby an hereditary nobility governed over ‘a common people
condemned to toil, dependence and humiliation without actually being slaves’.64
Although Condorcet claims that feudalism is a feature (and a ‘curse’) in most
societies’ histories, rather than constituting one of his ten stages it spans some of
them as a long-standing phenomenon where priesthoods and aristocracies hold
back innovation by trying to maintain an ideological hegemony based on
superstition and reactionary philosophy. This, combined with Condorcet’s
approach of identifying ‘stages’ in terms of intellectual progress, involves him in re-
periodising European history, for (as Mazlish points out) he does not refer to ‘the
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Middle Ages’, normally associated with feudalism. Rather, feudalism seems to

encompass a broader span of time (and place) for Condorcet, and always to have
been an underlying ‘social’ source of error and ignorance. Thus the fourth actual
stage of history he identifies is that of the intellectual achievements of the Greeks,
followed by the fifth, ‘the progress of the sciences from their division to their
decline’ with the Romans. His sixth stage spans the period of ‘darkness’ from the
decline of Rome up to the eleventh century, when the crusades provoked a revival
of knowledge, and his seventh stage covers the restoration and further development
of the sciences (preserved by the Arabs) to the invention of printing – i.e., the
Late Middle Ages. Throughout these seven stages ‘the human mind’ had made
obvious progress in scientific knowledge and technology despite the resistance of
obscurantist religion and entrenched philosophical absurdities common to basically
feudal overlordship. But the battle against error and illusions had been hard and
erratic, as, for example, the enlightenment the Greeks fostered became but a flicker
not to be relit until Europe began to recover its highlights from Muslim and
Byzantine sources (in what we currently call the High and Late Middle Ages).
The eighth stage of ‘the progress of the human mind’ was greatly stimulated by
the invention of printing in the West – (a good example of technological
innovation causing rather than following scientific progress) – and coincides
roughly with what we now call ‘the Renaissance’. Printing vastly extended the
variety and communication of ideas as well as facilitating the Renaissance secular
impulse. In challenging the straight-jacket of religious authority and ideological
dominance (including Aristotelian ‘scholasticism’ in philosophy), this stage
prepared the way for the ninth epoch, where the foundations for a ‘new enlight-
enment’ were laid by such seventeenth century heroes of rationalism and
empiricism as Descartes and Locke. In short, the ninth stage equates partly to what
we now call ‘the Scientific Revolution’ (which, as we saw in an earlier chapter, had
ramifications far beyond the realm of the natural sciences), but also to the
Enlightenment itself, (where so many of those ramifications matured).
At last, ‘reason’ was emerging triumphant, not only in the understanding of
natural phenomena but also in man’s view of society, politics, and morality. The
forces of reaction, holding up the progress of the human mind (and thus of progress
in the utilitarian quest for a happier, fairer, more prosperous and fulfilling life for
the masses of people) were on the brink of defeat. Irrational, speculative
philosophies were being swept away by the fresh air of empirically based, rationally
organised knowledge. Religious superstition and metaphysical absurdities were
being exposed for what they were – lamentable errors exploiting the ignorance of
the mass of humanity in the interests of outmoded elites. Yet the world-historic
battle between truth and error, with all that meant for Condorcet for the progress
of mankind, was not yet quite won at this ninth stage. But all the prospects of
victory were there – the apparent dominance of Enlightenment ideas themselves,
the American Revolution of 1776, and of course the French Revolution itself, were
ample evidence. In addition, Condorcet’s whole view of human history was that
‘progress’ is inevitable – and although he would be the first to deny any ‘supernatural’
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determinant behind history, there is a strong sense in which the inevitability of

progress is itself a force driving history. When the battle was won, then a tenth
stage of history would be reached, where all vestiges of ignorance, superstition, and
error would be flushed out of societies, and unhampered ‘reason’, based on ‘science’
now including a new social science (or ‘social art’), would govern the bright future
for mankind.
Overview of Condorcet’s philosophy of history

We will explore this proposed tenth stage shortly, but since it concerned the future
for Condorcet let us first review his philosophy of history so far. Perhaps primarily,
Condorcet’s nine stages do not seem to make for convincing history since there is
clearly so much else ‘going on’ which he ignores. In short, we might agree with
Mazlish that ‘it is poor history . . . because it is so far removed from historical reality’
– and that ‘it is also bad, that is, non-instrumental or operational, science’, because
‘he has no notion at all about the actual, historical transitions – and the way in
which they occurred’.65 However, it could be argued that the details of Condorcet’s
stages do not matter so much as his overall idea. It centres on his identification of
human progress in general with the progress of rational knowledge.
But what about the subject of history itself, irrespective of its narrowing down
to ‘the history of progress’? Condorcet’s answer seems to be that as the ‘progress of
the human mind’ approaches the full rationality of ‘science’, that very ‘science’
instructs us that the study of history itself should also be ‘scientific’ – that is, be
divested of religious and philosophical notions and be subject to the same tests of
empiricism and of the probability of hypotheses as any other science. This achieved,
Condorcet finds that this new, ‘scientific’ approach suggests history is inevitably
progressive regarding mankind’s welfare, and that this progress is principally the
product of man’s intellectual development. In short, we might give Condorcet the
benefit of the doubt by claiming he has proposed a coherent, self-supporting
argument about the nature of history both as a content and as a discipline. The
alternative is to suggest his approach to history derives from his prior interest in
the history of ideas (especially the mathematical sciences), which he tautologically
transposes into ‘history’ per se – in short, that only because he already sees history
in terms of the history of ideas, his historical studies show him that history is,
effectively, the history of ideas!
Whichever, it follows for Condorcet that, in becoming a ‘science’ of the progress
of the human mind, history provides a lesson-book and its study should thus be
useful rather than merely an academic exercise. As he put it, ‘the history of the
progress already achieved must be [the] foundation . . . [of] a science for predicting
the progress of the human race’.66 This exemplifies another aspect of Condorcet’s
approach to history – namely, that by comparing the histories of different peoples,
his aim is ‘to extract the hypothetical history of a single people’,67 by which he
meant ‘mankind’ in the abstract. In itself this may appear a reasonable project to
some, for how often does the term ‘mankind’ roll off the tongue! Yet it can imply,
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and seemed to unconsciously for Condorcet, a philosophical position which

believes in the reality of this abstraction – and almost inseparably, believes ‘it’
(humankind) has some ideal (Platonic) form which demands and awaits ultimate
‘realisation’ in the future. This is hardly a ‘materialist’, ‘scientific’ conception, and
probably points to a central inconsistency in Condorcet’s thinking. From a
‘scientific’ point of view there is surely no such (real) thing as ‘mankind’. There are
only actual, empirical men and women. This must be even more the case for the
historian, the object of whose study may be all men, all societies, all nations, but not
a phantom being, ‘mankind’?
This premise about ‘mankind’ relates to another feature of Condorcet’s philosophy

of history – its teleological character. Taking his cue partly from Turgot, what
Condorcet’s ‘scientific’ approach told him was that, whereas when ‘science’
examined the material universe it discovered ‘the principle of recurrence’ in its
laws, when applied to ‘the human order’ it uncovered ‘an antithetical principle –
Progress’.68 This principle is at work from man’s beginnings, but not because of any
divine plan or mysterious help from ‘providence’. Rather, it derives from the
combination of a ‘sensationalist’ theory of knowledge (whereby men, in perceiving
the world through their senses, are able to build up ever more true and useful ideas
through experience) and man’s utilitarian instinct towards pleasure. This
combination generates progress. Two more factors in Condorcet’s mind added to
this stamp of inevitability in the march of progress. First, knowledge is by its nature
relentlessly cumulative. It is remembered, recorded, and built upon, despite wars
and natural catastrophes. Looking to the future, Condorcet is even more sure of
this, for in looking to a single whole world sharing ‘enlightenment’, nothing short
of a global catastrophe could then extinguish the light of human knowledge already
attained.
Second, Condorcet ‘shared a widespread hypothesis among many eighteenth-
century thinkers’ that ‘acquired characteristics were inherited’. Thus ‘the
intellectual and moral attainments of one generation could be passed on intact to
its successor’, a process which he presumably thought had occurred throughout
history, and which he believed would accelerate as scientific knowledge (and
manipulation?) of the human organism would be developed in the tenth stage.
Thus, as Manuel expresses it, ‘[a]ny possible remnant of doubt about the inevitable
and infinite progress of the human spirit was dispelled once the human organism
was shown to be subject to biological perfectibility’.69
Perhaps none of these reasons sustaining Condorcet’s teleological thesis are
especially persuasive, despite his rejection of any supernatural influence. Indeed,
one could claim that it is his very attempt to ground his teleology on aspects of
man’s naturality which provides the weakest of his arguments – namely, his reliance
on man’s utilitarian nature. Although the appearance of ‘utilitarianism’ falls outside
our remit, it nevertheless attracts comment insofar as Condorcet embraces its
outlook, and falls captive to its typical shortcomings. Fundamentally, as explained
by Bentham in his A Fragment on Government, the utilitarian philosophy insisted
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that all human behaviour is reducible to the impulse to seek pleasure and avoid
pain. It is, so to speak, as simple as that – an irreducible fact of life about which it
is therefore as pointless to complain as it is futile to argue. Philosophical systems
which contradict it are sophistries; moral theories which introduce transcendental
concepts such as ‘duty’ and ‘obligation’ mystify matters; and ethical or social systems
which conceive of ‘the good of society’ in any terms other than the straightforward
aim of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ are not only erroneous, but
mischievous. It can be seen how readily these tenets of utilitarianism fitted in with
a ‘scientific’ attitude to both individual and collective life, and Condorcet agreed
with them, especially the last in terms of the purpose of his proposed ‘social art’ –
but even more fundamentally with the starting point, that human behaviour is
determined by pleasure and pain. As we have seen, it is this to which he appeals
in his naturalistic teleology. It is because man seeks a more pleasurable, less painful
life that his mental abilities are used in such a manner as to promote ‘progress’.
The problem with this ‘utilitarian’ idea is not that it is simple – rather, it is
simplistic. In explaining everything, it explains nothing. It explains why I bought
that bar of chocolate and why I gave it away to a beggar in the same terms – both
actions ‘pleased’ me. Thus unselfish, principled actions are no differently motivated
at base than selfish actions. By thus removing a multitude of otherwise diverse
motivations in human conduct, we might say ‘the principle of utility’ is of no use
whatsoever to, above all, the historian, who needs to take account, not of people’s
‘desires’ and ‘aversions’, but of their principles, their religious ideas, their moral
preferences, their sense of identity, their desire for respect, and other such ‘non-
material’ factors, in explaining the complex interplay that goes to make up human
history. To imply, instead, that people who commit heroic acts, unselfish acts,
principled acts, loyal acts, even suicidal acts, are acting out of delusion is a profound
insult to the subtle complexities of the human spirit.
To the extent, then, that man’s fundamental ‘utilitarian’ nature provides a basis
for Condorcet’s belief in the inevitable ‘progress’ of mankind towards perfectibility,
it is weak support indeed for his teleological theory.
The tenth stage

For Condorcet, his predictions about the future course of human affairs – a ‘future-
history’, if that is not a contradiction in terms – are an integral part of his
‘philosophy of history’. This is because, like many previous ‘theories’ of history
dealt with in this book, it conveys a message. His message is primarily a socio-
political one regarding the new future he sees for Europe and North America, and
eventually world-wide, which the ethos and events of his own time presaged. It
presaged it because all of Condorcet’s philosophy of history pointed to it. The tenth
stage would follow from the present ninth stage, since the seeds were already there.
They just needed to be nurtured. In this tenth stage Condorcet looked to the final
triumph of ‘reason’ governing the affairs of societies. The ‘scientific’ spirit would
reign not only in technology and philosophy, but also in the ‘moral’ affairs of
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society. A ‘perpetual and universal’ scientific academy would hopefully emerge,

eventually on a worldwide scale (using the universal, neutral ‘language’ of maths
and symbolic logic), to whose organisational aspects he gave much thought.70
Independent of governments, whom the ‘universal republic of the sciences’ would
advise and whose plans they would review, a crucial area of practical and theoretical
research would be the social sciences. Here, ‘the social art’ would research and
devise ways of achieving political rights and equality for all, and the equitable
distribution of wealth and income.
To achieve the former, the ‘social art’ would explore means of calculating the
truth regarding public preferences. Theoretically, this attempt at calculating a neo-
Rousseauistic ‘general will’ could approach something like the mathematics of
‘game theory’ through its ‘calculus of combinations and probabilities’.71
To achieve the latter he looked to a capitalist, market economy tempered by
institutions of a welfare state which, again via mathematical and statistical
techniques, would fairly provide social security for all citizens. Above all, the
general purpose of ‘the social art’ would be to advance the theory, and devise
institutions, whereby the interests of each individual and those of society at large
could be identified and reconciled in all spheres of life. The further dimension to
his hopes/predictions for the tenth stage were that this new society, initially
established in ‘advanced’ European countries, would be exported world-wide, such
that ultimately there will be ‘the abolition of inequality between nations, the
progress of equality within each nation, and the true perfection of mankind’.72
Fittingly, then, in this formulation we have the notion advanced by his predecessor,
Turgot, of the emergence of ‘one political world’,73 united in a common culture
of harmony, justice, prosperity, and tolerance, infused with the ‘rationality’ of
‘scientific’ or ‘positive’ philosophy.
Politics and philosophy of history in Condorcet

Of course, it is not difficult to see Condorcet’s philosophy of history as justifying
the French Revolution and mapping out its future direction. As such, it might be
claimed his philosophy of history is simply apologetics for 1789. However, this is
to go too far, and to oversimplify this episode in philosophy of history. First,
although the Esquisse was indeed written in unusual and ironic circumstances – by
1794 the Revolution was under dire threat from Robespierre’s ‘reign of terror’, as
was Condorcet himself – many of the essay’s sources of inspiration reach back into
Condorcet’s earlier life (including Turgot’s influence) and are scattered throughout
his earlier writings. In this light, the Esquisse is much more a broad summation of
Enlightenment ‘philosophy of history’ in general rather than mere contemporary
political apologetics.
Second, there is surely much to be said for the common-sense perception that
human history has indeed been a history of ‘progress’ – and that overall this progress
has been relentless, however sporadic and unpredictable. Further, there is surely
equally much in Condorcet’s observation that this progress can principally be
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measured in terms of ‘the progress of the human mind’ as it accumulates knowledge

and understanding of both the natural and human world. It is true that terrible
counter-examples both to the belief in progress, and to the role the human intellect
played in it, abound in history (including since Condorcet’s times) and this can
suggest that he was naively foisting his local Enlightenment optimism upon history
as a whole.
However (and third), this would be to neglect the fact that Condorcet did not
underplay the darker moments of history. Indeed, he also voiced serious worries
about the future, for example about the exploitative nature of European
colonisation and the troubles it was storing up for the future of international
relations.74 Far from ignoring negative episodes, he nevertheless remained
optimistic – but not because of any thoughtless naivety. Rather, as Manuel observes,
‘like many philosophers of history prior to Hegel, [he] made frequent use of a
primitive sort of historical dialectic’, whereby good grows out of, and because of,
evil. For example, the Crusades (contrary to their religious aims) helped undermine
superstition by opening up Arab knowledge of the sciences; the discovery of the
destructive power of gunpowder enhanced the military role of ordinary soldiers at
the expense of the nobility, and repelled the terrible threat of cultural annihilation
from invasions by uncivilised barbarians.75 In short, although as an atheist he does
not present history as a theodicy justifying the existence of evil as part of God’s plan
for man’s development, he was approaching that cast of mind which sees evil as
vindicated by history. To return to the French Revolution, we can be sure Condorcet
was as aware as anyone of its darker sides, and yet saw his uneasy present as
historically justified.
For the above reasons, then, Condorcet’s philosophy of history rises above mere
manipulative ‘ideology’. It was reflective; it was not naively optimistic; and its
emphasis upon progress, and the role of the human intellect, cannot be dismissed
out-of-hand. Yet this is not to deny that it is ‘political’ in the broad sense of the
term, for its message is one of vindicating his present revolutionary times and of
encouraging further intellectual and practical struggle. As such, it is highly
politically-charged – and from Condorcet’s times onwards the link between
‘philosophy of history’ and political philosophy took firm hold. The latter became
‘historicised’ in the sense that no respectable political philosophy from the French
Revolution onwards could be sustained without the support of some accompanying
‘philosophy of history’ – whilst the former became ‘politicised’ in the sense that its
exponents from then on derived explicit political messages from their efforts.
As we now turn to our final instance of philosophy of history in ‘Enlightenment’
times, we will find these closing thoughts on Condorcet vindicated by the example
of Edmund Burke, for here was a figure whose most famous work, Reflections on the
Revolution in France, was written some four years before Condorcet’s Esquisse, and
in which the symbiosis between political philosophy and philosophy of history is
just as clear as in the latter work. Yet the message Burke drew was in stark contrast
to Condorcet’s.
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Edmund Burke
Born in 1729 in Dublin, after graduating from Trinity College in 1748 Burke left
Ireland to make his career in London. Making some headway as a writer, he
nevertheless graduated towards a political career which found him elected to
Parliament by 1766, where he stayed until retiring in 1794, three years before his
death in 1797. As a Whig opponent of governmental maladministration, Burke
defended the 1776 rebellion of the American colonies, spoke up for his native
country when he sensed British policies reflected ‘the malignity of the principles
of Protestant ascendancy as it affects Ireland’,76 and objected to what he saw as the
British exploitation of India through the East India Company. Thus he was a man
of ‘liberal’ principles in today’s loose sense of the term. Yet as French republican
and revolutionary ideals fomented like-minded movements in England during the
1780s, a different side to Burke’s thinking (that for which he has since been famous)
was increasingly brought into play. Opposed to radical political thinking and its
revolutionary practical import, this side of him was galvanised into action in the
early months of 1790 as he articulated his detestation of the revolution that had
broken out in France in his book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, published
in November 1790. Because it contained theoretical arguments addressing general
principles of politics and history far beyond the immediate context of the French
Revolution, it has entered that rarefied catalogue of famous texts where often a
book’s reputation (and its author’s) is more important than the real subtleties of
both. In Burke’s case, his Reflections have established him as ‘the father of modern
conservatism’, because he provided coherent and persuasive arguments for those
in modern society who are sceptical of radical political and social thinking and
fearful of the sudden, drastic changes which would follow from taking it seriously.77
The argument of the Reflections

Burke was not of the cast of mind to present his ideas in logical sequence, but as
your guide I will attempt to. We can best begin with his notion that societies
(particularly by the eighteenth century) are immensely complex phenomena. They
comprise political institutions, legal systems, economic structures and practices, and
different social classes; religious beliefs, customs and habits, and moral ideas;
families, schools, and industries; armed forces, priests, administrators, and private
occupations; the fine arts, the natural sciences, literature, and popular culture and
entertainment; diverse geographical features and natural resources; and human
resources; and a language.
Usually, these complicated societies (‘countries’, ‘nations’) nevertheless manage
to hold together these multifarious components, whose particular nature and
interactions constitute their unique identities. Although societies may contain
anomalies, irrationalities, even contradictory elements, they nevertheless continue
to function in their way. Indeed, Burke specifically recognises that sentiment and
indeed prejudice not only abound in any society, but are integral parts of its identity,
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significantly helping to make it what it is. The same is true of inequalities, even
injustices. There must therefore nevertheless be something ‘coherent’ about
societies, despite their complex intricacies. What lends them their identity and
coherence?
To begin in the negative, Burke is clear that societies are not the product of
deliberate human design. In this vein he reserves particular criticism for the
seventeenth-century ‘social contract’ foundations of liberal political theory. For
Burke this is simply non-historical fiction. Rather,
[S]ociety is indeed a contract . . .; but the state ought not to be considered

as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and
coffee . . ., to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on
with other reverence. . . . It is a partnership in all science; . . . in all art;
. . . in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership
cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not
only between those who are living, but between those who are living,
those who are dead, and those who are to be born’.78
Similarly, he dismisses the related Benthamite utilitarian view that a society ‘is a
fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are . . . its members’.79 On
the contrary (and to coin a phrase), for Burke there is ‘such a thing as society’. And
this brings us to his positive argument, for he insists that a society is a real organic
unity whose identity extends beyond the people who live in it at any one point in
time. The term ‘organic’ is important here, for he means to point not only to the
intricacy of any society but also to the idea that it is a complex which has evolved
over time. In short, societies are historical phenomena which have taken centuries
to develop into what they are. They are the work, then, not of human contrivance
but of ages of accumulated growth and adaptation to diverse, unforeseeable
circumstances. The immediate mechanisms involved are the manner in which
particular generations find means to respond to contingent problems arising in
their society. And this has always been a practical matter – not only in itself but also,
according to a Burke acutely aware of the unmappable complexities of a society’s
organic makeup, because it is usually achieved through trial and error. (However,
as we shall see, a special kind of insight can also be applied).
The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or

reforming it, is . . . not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience
that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of
moral causes are not always immediate; . . . very plausible schemes, with
very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable
conclusions. In states there are often some obscure and almost latent
causes . . . on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may
. . . depend. The science of government being therefore so practical in
itself, . . . a matter which requires . . . even more experience than any
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person can gain in his whole life, . . . it is with infinite caution that any
man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered
in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society.80
Thus societies are evolved phenomena, however ‘untidy’ the resulting ensemble.
The lessons of this practical experience in maintaining the coherence and identity
of a society are not to be found in any book on statecraft, political science, or ethics
– and certainly not in the moral catchphrases of temporary dissaffected elements
(e.g., ‘the rights of man’). ‘The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes;
and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically
false’.81
Rather, they are ensconced in the existing traditions and conventions of a society.
These encapsulate the hard-won lessons of the past. That which has become
conventional has done so because it works; likewise, a tradition is by its nature
something which has stood the test of time. There is, then, no surer guide to the
appropriateness of any particular arrangement in society than its having been
historically established. For example, those who drew up the Petition of Right against
Charles I ‘claimed their franchises not on abstract principles “as the rights of men”,
but as the rights of Englishmen . . . derived from their forefathers. . . . (T)hey
preferred this positive . . ., hereditary title . . . to that vague speculative right’.82 It
is in this immensely powerful sense, for Burke, that history vindicates the present.
Things are as they are at any point in time because that is how they have come to
be. In other words, there is ‘reason’ in history – but not the kind of abstract,
scientific ‘reason’ so lauded by Enlightenment thinkers: rather, something not only
different but more profound. And to the extent a society respects its traditions and
conventions, it avails itself of this ‘reason’, this practical wisdom forged by time and
circumstance. For a society to neglect this inestimable inheritance by pursuing
some allegedly ‘rational’ principles derived from enthusiasts for radical change
would therefore, in fact, be ‘unreasonable’.
Does this then mean that a society should never embrace change? Burke’s answer
is clear. Inasmuch as societies have evolved over the ages, this has precisely
involved their changing. But these changes have been adaptations to circumstances
rather than the deliberate replanning of society through human design. And
the essence of an adaptive, evolutionary process – in addition to change – is the
maintaining of identity throughout the process. Any society incapable of change
would sooner or later disintegrate in the face of new circumstances. But the slower
such change can be, and the smaller in immediate impact, the better for main-
taining the identity of that society, given the complexity of its interrelated features.
Thus the art of the statesman is, not to resist changing anything, but to conserve
the essential identity of society precisely through a careful management of change
based on respect for the past’s legacy. This means, first, that one should
not automatically succumb to urges for change which emanate from only this or
that present, localised discontent. Second, one should resist all philosophical,
‘scientific’, or ‘rational’ schemes for re-constituting society along the lines of some
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purported perfect model. ‘When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and
boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the
artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade’.83 Rather, the art of the statesman
depends on a largely intuitive grasp of the manner in which things have come to
be as they are in their complex interconnectedness – i.e., on understanding the
historical ‘reason’ in them.
Should readers nevertheless find this ‘intuitive’ knowledge rather mysterious,
consider the analogy of ‘knowing’ an individual and of ‘knowing’ how to handle
their interests. One does not want a ‘scientific’ (e.g., biological) account of the
individual, nor some guru-guide to ‘the perfect human-being’. Rather, one wants
to know what makes that person tick, so that any proposals one makes about their
present problems are indeed appropriate for that person (unless one has the audacity
to wish to completely transform them into effectively someone else). What could
be more suitable as the required knowledge of that person than knowing as much
of their history as possible? The ‘reason’ that makes them who they are is contained
in their history, and that ‘reason’ is appropriated by us insofar as we have insight
into that history.
Just so with Burke’s view of societies. Inestimably valuable, when it comes to
handling their problems they are complicated phenomena for which ‘scientific’ or
‘philosophical’ knowledge is inoperational, despite the conceits of radical (and
particularly, revolutionary) thinkers. Rather, it requires having one’s finger on the
historical character of society, whereby one understands the reason inherent in
the present. Although primarily a political message (Burke’s ultimate aversion is
to radical change of the formal political constitution itself, as in 1789 France) it
is intimately dependent upon a distinctive ‘philosophy’ of history, whose main
features we can now summarise.
For Burke, the notion of ‘a history of humankind’ was a nonsensical rationalist

abstraction. Each society’s history is explicable in terms of an evolutionary process
(which he sometimes refers to as ‘divine’, although it adds nothing to his idea)
whereby, in adapting to new circumstances, change gradually occurs. For Burke,
there is no millennialist perfection towards which history is inevitably moving.
Neither is there any pristine ‘golden age’ to hark back to. Although there is
a certain teleology implicit in the idea of an evolutionary process of adaptation, it
is by no means clear that ‘things get better’ as the centuries roll on. All that is clear
is that things change. And it would seem unlikely that, as of some necessity, things
would change back to how they were at an earlier stage – so the notion of a history
revolving in recurrent cycles is also ruled out in Burke’s philosophy. And as for the
role of human agency in determining the course of history, his position on this can
hardly be overstated. Just as no animal determines its own evolution, (although
Darwin’s theory of evolution was of course unknown to a Burke long dead) so for
Burke no society can determine its own ‘evolution’ over time. First, this evolution
spans numerous generations and is thus unamenable to any one generation’s
manipulation. Second, since evolution proceeds because of new circumstances
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(some so apparently slight that they escape notice by those first affected), it is
inherently unpredictable. Third, given the strictly practical nature of the complex
interconnections within societies, no new ‘science’ could ever so encompass the
ensemble as to render its development subject to human planning. What human
agency can achieve, however, is to conserve the holistic identity of a society
through the wise introduction of such modifications as are required to meet the
contingencies of changing times and unforeseen events. As we have seen, for those
who govern, this necessitates patience, restraint and, above all, that special kind
of intuitive insight into the historic rationale of why things are as they are.
Thus, although Burke eschewed abstract philosophical concepts, his overall
view of history is that societies do ‘develop’, and that there is a ‘logic’ underlying
this. This ‘logic’ or ‘reason’ in history, however, would not seem to be some ‘pure’
or ‘rational’ logic (and thus graspable through science or philosophy), nor reducible
to a simple formula such as ‘the history of progress’. Rather, the ‘logic’ of history
derives from the interplay between the given present identity of a society and the
diverse, contingent circumstances it encounters and adapts to in practice. It is thus
an ‘untidy’ logic, inherently unpredictable, and only chartable after the event. In
one sense – that is, for the grand and illusory project of ‘man’ designing and fulfilling
his ‘destiny’ – history thus tells us nothing. But in another sense – that of attaining
what is possible – it tells us everything.
Conclusion
This last point provides our bridge to the following chapter on perhaps the most
explicit and audacious attempt at (speculative) philosophy of history ever
undertaken – that of Hegel. In his seminal History of Political Theory, Sabine rightly
observes that Burke was no philosopher – that although his ideas ‘have the
consistency that is the stamp of a powerful intelligence and settled moral
convictions’, ‘he could not have given systematic form’ to them. Sabine goes on
to say: ‘But what Burke had taken for granted Hegel tried to prove: that the
apparently fragmentary social tradition can be placed in a general system of social
evolution’. This is fair comment and a good way of introducing Hegel’s political
and historical philosophy – but in adding that Burke never thought of this,84 Sabine
might have underestimated Burke’s sense of the inherent ‘untidiness’ of the ‘logic’
of history. Burke had intuited that the much vaunted ‘Reason’ of the Enlighten-
ment was as poor a vehicle as it was an arrogant one for understanding the ‘logic’
of society and the meaning of history. Thus, had he lived to witness Hegel’s
astonishing attempt to rationalise the ‘logic’ of history he would doubtless have
thought it futile and vain because causing us ‘to be entangled in the mazes of
metaphysic sophistry’.85 Whether Hegel’s effort helps prove Burke wrong, or instead
dramatically vindicates Burke’s anti-rationalism, readers can judge for themselves
as we now turn to explore Hegel’s philosophy of history.
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9
HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF
HISTO RY
Introduction
The scope, rich complexity, and fascination of his ideas, and the profound influence
he has exercised, bestow G.W.F. Hegel his reputation as one of the greatest of
modern professional philosophers. Although his overall philosophy (incorporating
his philosophy of history) generated hostility particularly from the Anglo-
American empiricist tradition, it is still studied, argued about, and exploited.
Perhaps unusually, Hegel’s personal life is unimportant in accounting for his ideas.
This may be because it was relatively quiet. He was born in 1770 into a modestly
well-off family in the southern German city of Stuttgart, where he was schooled
until he went to study theology at Tübingen University. There he pursued
his interest in the classical world, and also caught the ‘philosophical bug’ from his
friend Schelling. After graduating in 1793 Hegel worked as a private tutor for seven
years – a period of intensive philosophical and religious reflection – before taking
up a teaching post at the University of Jena in 1801, then one of the most
stimulating centres of German intellectual life. But this same city was to be the
battleground of Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia in 1806, and when the university was
closed under French occupation Hegel soon moved to Nüremburg, leaving an
illegitimate son born to his landlady in 1807. Perhaps equally productively it was
during these years in Jena that Hegel conceived his fundamental philosophy,
publishing his first major work, Phenomenology of Mind, in 1807.1 After eight years
as a schoolteacher, during which he wrote The Science of Logic (and married, to
become the father of three more children, one dying in infancy) he became
Professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg University in 1816, a brief prelude to his
prestigious appointment in 1818 to the Chair of Philosophy at Berlin University
(in Prussia). He remained there, working at different branches of his philosophy
until his death in 1831, having published The Philosophy of Right in 1821 and leaving
copious lecture notes from which other works (including The Philosophy of History)
were posthumously published.
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The influence of Hegel’s times

If Hegel’s personal life was fairly uneventful, not so his times – and he himself
recognised their role in the formation of his ideas. First, he was born at a high point
in German philosophical culture, when the philosophy of Kant (1724–1804)
exercised the minds of such contemporaries as Fichte (1762–1814) and Schelling
(1775–1854). Influenced by Spinoza’s ideas, Kant tried to show that reason governs
the universe, and developed a moral theory centred on the notion of ‘freedom’,
which he construed as individual self-discipline to follow the dictates of reason. He
also famously argued that the empirical, material world is inherently unknowable
– a mere ‘thing in itself’. Otherwise following Kant, Fichte rejected the latter idea
and hoped to find the basis for systematising all experience in terms of the
confrontation between the freedom inherent in self-consciousness and the
‘external’ world. Schelling (Hegel’s Tübingen friend) pursued these themes,
adopting a theory which overcame the opposition between ‘subject’ (self-
consciousness) and ‘object’ (the ‘external’ world), resulting in a notion of God as
the universe, rather than transcending its laws. Later he altered his philosophy to
argue that human existence is in fact the Absolute’s (or God’s) expression of its
consciousness of itself – and that therefore creative freedom is the essence of
humanity. Hegel’s thinking matured, then, within a context dominated by these
lofty themes of self-consciousness, freedom, the subject-object relation, the nature
of ultimate reality, and its relation to our actual (‘phenomenological’) world (i.e.,
reality as it appears to us). All these themes are deeply embedded in Hegel’s outlook,
demonstrating that his thinking is far from original.
Second, an important yet complex influence was ‘the Enlightenment’ immediately

preceding his times. No late eighteenth-century intellectual remained unaffected
by its ethos, either to deplore its seeming simplicities or to be inspired (however
critically) by its ideals of rationality and progress. Hegel was no exception.
However, matters are more complicated because, although primarily considered a
Franco-British movement, there was also during the eighteenth century a German
‘enlightenment’ – the ‘Aufklärung’. Although, in particular, its proponents’
historical approach differed from the French, and found its fulfilment alternatively
in early nineteenth-century German romanticism and philosophical idealism
(including Hegel and the Rankean school of history2), it has been urged that this
should not exclude them from the Enlightenment, but encourage us to broaden our
conception of it.3 A complex matter for historians of thought, then, the point is
that part of the ethos to which Hegel responded was the work of ‘Enlightened
thinkers in Germany’, since ‘the problems Hegel sought to resolve with the
dialectical method were clearly posed, though imprecisely solved, by the scholars
of the Aufklärung’.4
The third influential aspect of his times was their famously eventful nature. Hegel
was nineteen, at University, when the hugely important French Revolution
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HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
erupted. Like many Europeans he was enthralled by its ideals of Freedom, Reason,
and Progress – inspirations he never abandoned, but within which he was later to
find his own sometimes apparently opposite meanings. After its bloody birthpangs
came ‘the child of the Revolution’, Napoleon, and we can only imagine with what
fascination Hegel followed his career to its doom, having witnessed in awe the
Emperor, ‘this world-soul’, at his defeat of the Prussian army at Jena in 1806, riding
though the streets on his historic mission to change the world. These profound
events surrounding his otherwise routine academic life offered Hegel not merely
food for thought, but a gargantuan feast for reflection as to their meaning and
significance – resulting in a lifetime of philosophical work pervaded by the notions
of Freedom, Progress, Reason, portentous political and cultural change, the tragedy
of greatness, and the march of history and its relation to ultimate reality – i.e.,
history’s meaning.
Introduction to Hegel’s thought

It is impossible to understand Hegel’s philosophy of history without some grasp of
his overall philosophical approach, yet this is famously difficult to understand fully.
This is partly because his thinking functions at a markedly abstract level – namely,
in the domain of ultimate Being, or ‘ontology’ – where behind the empirical
realities we perceive is the higher realm of the logic or ‘Reason’ pervading existence.
It is the bringing together of the world as we know it (its ‘phenomenological’
character) with this underlying ontological dimension of Absolute Reality, which
Hegel calls ‘philosophy’. ‘Philosophy’, then, is the key to understanding reality, for
it is his abiding belief that what we call ‘existence’ or ‘actuality’ is imbued with Mind
(or Reason). The task of ‘philosophy’ is to discover this Reason inherent in the
world as we know it. We may call this Reason (or Mind), ‘God’, as does Hegel
frequently. But he himself argued that religious notions of ‘God’ are but symbolic
expressions of rational truths, so when he uses the term ‘God’ he means it
philosophically as one term amongst others (e.g., ‘the Absolute’) to denote ulti-
mate reality. The religious expression of this belief is the symbolic notion that ‘God
created the world’, but even symbolically this is simplistic, vague, and possibly
misleading. It is too simple because it suggests a one-off act of self-manifestation of
Mind, whereas for Hegel ‘creation’ (i.e., Mind’s objectification of itself in/as the
actual world) is a process of development in distinct stages. It is too vague because
it gives no indication of the mechanisms driving this developmental process nor
of the instruments employed. And it is possibly misleading insofar as it suggests a
transcendent Mind or agent, i.e., ‘above and beyond’ the world, in some undefined
sense causing and governing it.
I stress ‘possibly’ because this is a controversial aspect of Hegel’s philosophy. The
issue is this: is Hegel’s ‘God’ or ‘Mind’ some transcendent force, or is it co-equal
with the universe as the immanent principles of its constitution and workings? This
latter theory – namely, equating God with His creation – is called ‘pantheism’ in
theology, and is regarded as religious heresy by Christians. (Both Spinoza and
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Schelling, for example, were accused of it.) It is important because, for many, it is
the crux on which depends whether Hegel’s philosophy is worthy of study or
whether it should be dismissed as the indulgences of a philosophical dreamer. Why
is this so? Many will think that, if construed as a transcendent Being responsible for
willing and designing the universe, ‘God’ should be removed altogether from
rational, ‘scientific’, explanatory discourse (the position of both classical and
modern materialists, and atheists) on the grounds either that no such ‘Being’ exists,
or that if it does, its disconnection from the universe other than through an
unknowable, hence unintelligible, act of wilful creation makes it an absurd thing
to appeal to in trying to explain existence.
The alternative is the immanentist position, which construes ‘God’ as
synonymous with the known principles inherent in Existence. The analogy of a
spontaneously evolved system may help. Such a system (e.g., the ecological system)
is not designed by anyone, yet the interconnections between its parts can be
explained (via cause and effect). Alternatively, however, the different laws
interplaying within the parts of the system can be seen as implying an overall ‘logic’
which encompasses but is not exhausted by its component parts. In this sense the
system is more than simply the sum of all its parts interacting individually. Now,
the immanentist position on ‘God’ is analogous to construing the universe as ‘a
system as a whole’, and to denoting this by the term ‘God’ or, philosophically, ‘the
Absolute’, or ‘Substance’.5
The point of this is that an immanentist concept of ‘God’ makes the universe
far more amenable to explanation (both of what goes on in it and of its overall-ness)
than the concept of a transcendent ‘God’. If the latter, it may be good religion but
as a philosophy it promises ultimately nothing in terms of rationally explaining
existence, and should accordingly be derided (as many have Hegel’s philosophy).
If the former, however, the apparent absence of the supernatural, coupled with its
potential for explanation of the whole (rather than only the interactions of
individual things, as, arguably, in modern science), persuades many intellectuals
to take such philosophies with the utmost seriousness, as many have Hegel’s
philosophy.
Whichever interpretation one puts on Hegel in this respect, above all our initial
task must be to approach his thinking with this awareness that Hegel did profoundly
believe in ‘Mind’ or ‘God’. This so pervades his entire philosophy that, according
to one scholar, it causes many to ‘believe that in Hegel the profoundest thoughts
of God became articulated in man’;6 in other words, that in exposing the nature
and workings of ‘Mind’, Hegel’s philosophy is nothing less than ‘God’ explaining
himself to himself, i.e., through the vehicle of Hegel’s thinking!
Mind objectifying itself

To understand Hegel, then, we need to grasp this central notion of ‘Mind’
objectifying itself. In one sense this is a familiar notion if we leave aside ‘Mind’ as
‘God’ or ‘the Absolute’ and think instead of an individual human mind. Here, we
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can say that any artefact created by an individual is the product of his mind. He
has an idea, and ‘objectifies’ it by making an actual object. The object ‘realises’ or
‘actualises’ his idea. Two points can be added to this straightforward example.
To outsiders encountering the artefact, it is often obvious that it is the product
of someone’s mind. In other cases this may not be obvious, as in an abstract painting
mistaken for an accidental spilling of paint. Here, it is up to the art expert to
demonstrate it is the product of an artist’s mind – and he does this by exposing the
thought implicit in the artefact. Similarly, whatever topic Hegel gives a
philosophical exposition of, be it Nature, history, or the State, in insisting they
exemplify Mind he does not ask us simply to believe him, but instead to attend to his
exposition of the ‘logic’ in things. Importantly, then, the notion that reality
exemplifies Mind is not regarded by Hegel as an article of faith: rather, the proof
of the pudding is in the eating.
The other point is that, in ‘objectifying’ his idea of something, as in a potter
making a pot, that which he makes is his, in the double sense that it expresses or
‘objectifies’ both his idea of the pot and of himself as a potter. It is, then, part of his
self, if by ‘self’ we mean that of which we are conscious when we describe ourselves
as ‘self-conscious’. This shows how the mundane fact of someone making an artefact
can be expressed esoterically as an act of ‘self-realisation’. The point of so trans-
posing it is that, in introducing the notions of consciousness, self, objectification,
and the subject–object relation, it enables deeper analysis. Let us now go further.
Dialectics
Let us suppose our potter initially only aspires to be such. He has yet to actually make
a pot. At this point we have to make a supposition crucial to Hegel’s approach –
namely, that his first attempt to make a pot is a crude effort. For example, he gets
the shape right, but in order to do so has had to make the body excessively thick.
Thus, surveying his pot, he does not want to be pinned down by this object – it is
not the full expression of his idea of the pot, and hence neither of himself as a
potter. He considers it, to that extent, an alien object, not his. (In Hegelian terms,
his act of self-objectification turns out to be an act of self-alienation). Thus he rejects
(or ‘negates’) this first pot, and makes another which corrects its deficiency by
making its sides less thick. But in doing so, the pot lacks the strength to sustain its
original shape. Like the first effort, it also is a one-sided, incomplete objectification
of his idea. What is required is thus a third pot which ‘negates’ the deficiencies of
both the first and second, and instead synthesises their positive aspects, where shape
and thickness combine successfully in a new effort. As such the third pot is not only
different from both the earlier ones – it is more complex and more fully objectifies
the potter’s idea of a pot. But it has not sprung from nowhere. On the contrary, its
‘logic’ is precisely the product of that prior progression whereby the first pot
generated the second, and the second the third. In that sense we may call it the
necessary consequence of the logical development of the potter’s idea, not only of the
pot, but of himself as an actual potter.
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To complete the analogy, we may suppose this third pot, although resolving the
contradictions generated by the first two, is itself still less than the completely
satisfactory actualisation of the potter’s idea. For example, it may still be deficient
in aspects of its functionality or of its external decoration. The third pot thus
becomes a new starting point, (now from a higher stage), which through the same
‘logic’ of producing and resolving contradictions will achieve a yet higher, even
more complex, stage – and so on, until the point is reached where all the apparently
conflicting features of ‘the perfect pot’ are reconciled and superseded in the final
creation. In surveying it, the potter at last takes satisfaction in his ‘self-
objectification’ as a potter. This last pot is, then, a complex artefact which has
worked out such apparently diverse features as shape, thickness, function, colour,
and so on, into a coherent whole – i.e., there is more to ‘the perfect pot’ than meets
the eye!
It is just this way of looking at things Hegel calls ‘dialectics’. This term is
reminiscent of its classical Greek usage referring to ‘argument’, where (like
Socrates) one would establish the truth about something by raising a point,
contradicting it, finding some common ground, then contradicting that, and so on,
until all the apparently opposite perceptions would play their part in the full
exploration of the truth. It is in this (now Hegelian) sense that our potter’s pots
are ‘dialectical’ in nature. Rather than given, fixed objects (examples of Being),
each is replete with the tension of change. In other words, each is a manifestation
of Becoming. The proper understanding of this or that pot requires, then, not only
that we understand it is a pot rather than an arbitrary natural object – i.e., that it
is a product of someone’s mind. It also requires that we penetrate to the idea which
the potter is trying to actualise, and thus see this or that pot as, so to speak, an
unstable thing caught up in the process of the ‘coming-to-be’ of that idea which
the potter aspires to fully objectify.
Impersonal ‘Reason’
So far, in conveying Hegel’s conviction of an underlying ‘logic’ to existence, we
have used the potter analogy. This shows some of Hegel’s meaning, including
dialectics. But Hegel goes further. We may observe from our potter analogy that,
although the dynamic driving his successive ‘objectifications’ comes from him, there
is a sense in which he is not in control of the process because the implications of
his idea of the pot seem to take over the process as they seem to determine his
successive efforts. It is almost as if the potter becomes a prisoner of the process
which he consciously initiated but unknowingly fulfils.
It is to just this impersonal level that Hegel moves, for in his philosophy the logic
embedded in the actual world is not that which human-beings impose upon it
through their activities. Rather, the mind endowing the world with rationality is
a metaphysical entity, the ‘World-Mind’, the ‘Absolute’, (or ‘God’). Thus we need
to move from the analogy of a human-being creating an artefact to a more advanced
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one where the human mind (although involved as an instrument) plays no conscious
role in the gradual unfolding of the logic behind reality, but where the ‘Idea’ being
actualised belongs to impersonal ‘Mind’.
Suppose two people, Peter and Paul, entirely in the abstract – neither has ever
had contact with another person. Suppose they simply appear on an island, and
meet. Initially each may like, dislike, or be indifferent to the other. Let us suppose
that, at some time, they ‘like’ each other. Peter asks Paul to help him chop down
a tree; (he expects Paul to help him because he knows Paul likes him). Paul,
surprised, says ‘No, I’m too tired’. Peter is offended and is thus unpleasant to Paul.
Paul finds Peter’s new antagonism uncomfortable since, after all, he had enjoyed
Peter’s company. Paul therefore apologises and helps cut down the tree. (Paul has
realised his tiredness is not as important as their liking each other). Peter and Paul
continue to meet, and help each other with their tasks. They thus begin to rely on
each other’s help, and get to know each other better, so that they feel they can take
their mutual help and liking for granted. One day Peter is ill, and correspondingly
ill-tempered. He tells Paul to do all his tasks for him that day. Paul, taken aback,
says ‘Don’t tell me what to do! If you ask me, I’ll do it’. Peter apologises, and asks
Paul nicely. Paul does Peter’s tasks, and cares for him while he is ill. Peter is truly
grateful, the experience cementing their mutual respect, trust, affection, and
support. They become life-long friends.
The point of this little fable is that at the beginning neither Peter nor Paul had even
met anyone before, but at the end they were true friends. In understanding this
outcome, at no point in the story was it necessary that either player knew what
friendship is, nor aspired to it. Yet the ‘logic’ of their encounters and immediate
impulses drew them on from merely ‘liking’ each other (a merely implicit idea of
friendship) to a higher relationship which finally fulfils the complex requirements
of ‘true’ friendship (i.e., making it explicit). It is true our little story contained two
crisis moments, but it appears these were necessary to the further development of
the players’ relationship, and thus ultimately powerfully productive. To an extent,
they also appeared as consequences of the previous (happier) situations, such that
overall we might recognise an Hegelian dialectic at work, including ‘the power of
the negative’. And this is partly the point of the analogy.
But more than this, there is a sense in which the true subject of the story is neither
Peter nor Paul, but the idea of friendship. This idea was not something Peter or Paul
were either conscious of or intending to achieve. They were merely the instruments
the idea employed to become actualised. Unlike our potter analogy, here ‘the idea’
being ‘objectified’ owes nothing to human intentions. Rather, it is part of a
completely impersonal mind. Pre-empting his Philosophy of History, we can say that
in its Introduction Hegel devotes considerable space to explaining (similar to Vico)
that, although men’s pursuit of their needs, passions, and convictions might seem
to determine the course of history, these ‘manifestations of vitality on the part of
individuals and peoples, in which they seek and satisfy their own purposes, are, at
the same time, the means and instruments of a higher and broader purpose of which
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they know nothing – which they realise unconsciously’.7 Although Hegel does
recognise certain exceptional people as ‘world-historical individuals’ (he cites
Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon) even these ‘had no consciousness of
the general Idea they were unfolding’. However, they were remarkable for having
‘an insight into the requirements of the time – what was ripe for development’, and
may thus even be excused for actions judged immoral by ordinary standards.8
These latter observations, however, go beyond the scope of our little island-story,
to which we return to extract another of its implications – namely, that in
demonstrating the true nature of friendship, the story only shows this at the end of
what has been a dialectical process. Were we, without hindsight, to have stopped
the story half-way through, we would not know what it was about – or rather, be
under the illusion it is about Peter or Paul. But at the end one can say: ‘Now I see
what this is the story of’. This insight enables one also to comprehend what was
truly going on half-way through the story, removing one’s previous illusions by
showing what was irrelevant because devoid of significance in the dialectical
unfolding of the idea of friendship.
Our little story is, then, markedly selective, and this exemplifies what might be
seen as a problem endemic to Hegel’s approach. Because ‘philosophy’ is the
revelation of Mind at work in the world, then only those things which are
dialectical moments of the ‘objectification’ of Mind are philosophy’s concern.
Other phenomena are mere ‘appearances’, which can be studied from numerous
viewpoints – for example, what kind of tree did Peter and Paul chop down?, what
was the nature of Peter’s illness?, and so on. But such discourse is not philosophy
because it is not cast in terms of revealing the operation of Mind. Thus numerous
things are removed from ‘philosophical’ understanding and relegated to other
discourses. Only that which is ‘rational’ (i.e., a manifestation of Mind) is ‘real’;
conversely, only that which is ‘real’ is ‘rational’ – a double dictum Hegel famously
formulated.9
But it could be argued that this makes Hegel’s philosophy one giant tautology,
since to claim the world exemplifies Mind is only acceptable if the world can be so
shown. But in Hegel only part of the world can be so shown – namely, that which
suits the showing. The rest remains inaccessible to philosophy, which many think
should explain all. Indeed, we will see him putting huge restrictions on what
historical material is relevant to philosophy of history.
Alternatively it could be that, rather than presenting an empty tautology, Hegel
is right to so differentiate things in the world. Let us not forget his own claim that
he is not suggesting this a priori, but that the logic which pertains to (some) things
is demonstrable – in just the same way as we claimed an observer can show that
this object is, in fact, a pot whereas that object (e.g., a piece of mud) is meaningless
– i.e., ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’.
However one sees this, it as well to raise the issue now, when it already surfaces,
since it is a problem from the outset and permeates all his subsequent arguments.
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To summarise, then; the overall point of our little island-story is to suggest an

analogy for Hegel’s notion that ultimate reality is Mind, and that the logic
pervading the phenomena of the actual world is the product of the inherent
dynamic in (impersonal) Mind to objectify its nature and Ideas. The range and
nature of these Ideas are expounded in different parts of Hegel’s philosophy
(whereby the corresponding features of the actual world are explained, including
physical nature, consciousness, art, religion, politics – and, indeed, ‘history’). When
considering an aspect of the actual world, then, it is crucial to discern what Idea is
being realised in order to comprehend the reality underlying its appearance.
But how one does this is difficult to ascertain, and here we should leave analogies
and let an example from Hegel speak for itself. Perhaps the clearest exposition he
gives of this exercise is his discerning of the Idea underlying politics in his Philosophy
of Right. Also, because The Philosophy of History is most intimately related to the
former work, it is doubly helpful to summarise his text.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
Right, will, and freedom

In German, ‘Recht’ (Right) means both the (abstract) moral notion of ‘right’ and
actual law. Law, then, is the objective form ‘right’ assumes in the real world. As
such, it is inseparable from what we loosely call ‘politics’, and Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right is his political philosophy. Thus the aspect of the actual world under Hegel’s
scrutiny (i.e., politics) is clear enough, as (provisionally) is the sense in which it
manifests an ‘Idea’ – i.e., the idea of right. But since ‘any genuine philosophy must
in Hegel’s view form a systematically and organically developed whole’,10 it is
crucial for Hegel not to take the idea of ‘right’ as given, but to show it as part of
Mind. He had already done this in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
(1817), where he tried to show that Mind is driven to express its nature through a
dialectical process which ‘passes in its development from feeling, through
representative thinking, to thinking proper’11 – consciousness. From there, moving
to sense-perception and on to self-consciousness, Hegel arrives at ‘appetite’ or
‘desire’ as the form in which self-consciousness is first objectified12 – in other words,
the will. The emergence of ‘will’ is a crucial stage in Mind’s development.
Now, we may recall Rousseau arguing that force and right can have no
connection, since a forced act cannot issue from a sense of duty. Thus, moral action
must be an act of free will. Hegel exploits this. He tells us that ‘the basis of right is,
in general, mind’. Next, that ‘its precise place and point of origin is the will’ (i.e.,
exploiting the above). In other words, in understanding ‘right’ as it appears in the
world, its philosophical referent (as stemming from Mind) is the will, as an aspect of
mind. It is thus this aspect of Mind we need to explore in understanding ‘politics’
or ‘right’. To continue: for Hegel, not unreasonably, the essence of ‘will’ is its
freedom (i.e., compulsion is foreign to its nature). Thus he continues; ‘[t]he will is
free, so that freedom is both the substance of right and its goal’. It therefore follows
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(returning to the actual world) that ‘the system of right [the law and the
constitution] is the realm of freedom made actual, the world of mind brought forth
out of itself like a second nature’.
Here, then, is an example of how Hegel, in looking at an aspect of our actual world,
derives what Idea is being ‘objectified’. But our two analogies should remind us
that, in Hegel, no Idea springs forth fully realised in the actual world. Just so with
the Idea of Right. It is a complex idea requiring a dialectical process via which it
manifests itself. This accounts for the diverse political systems in the actual world,
whereby even primitive examples have some positive element in them, whilst that
which fully realises ‘freedom’ is a complex of apparently contradictory features. But
wherein lies this complexity?
The will is essentially free. It must contain ‘the element of pure indeterminacy’.
On the other hand, the will must will something, for otherwise it would remain an
empty potential. Thus it is driven to will an object, (for example, ‘I will that apple’).
Yet in thus activating itself, it is now pinned down in the external object and (by
analogy with our potter’s first pot) is driven to recoil from its own ‘objectification’.
Thus because will is essentially free, its logic demands that it is not lost in that
which it wills, but that it reflect back into itself, becoming ‘indifferent to this
determinacy’ into which it entered. It must, in short, become self-determined, such
that in willing this or that, ‘it knows it as something which is its own, . . . by which
it is not constrained and in which it is confined only because it has put itself in it’.13
This implies that the will is driven forward (via negative moments) to find an
‘object’ which satisfies its nature as both free and actualised in the real world.
Having abstractly sketched these fundamentals of the complexity of the Idea of

Freedom (or of Right – an unresolved ambiguity in Hegel), the remainder of the
Philosophy of Right involves Hegel in correlating them with aspects of the world as
we know it. Because Hegel’s philosophy of history is so intimately concerned with
‘Freedom’ and its relation to the state, its proper understanding necessitates a résumé
of these key ingredients in advance.
Property and crime

The most primitive expression of the will’s freedom is where someone wills an
external object (e.g., ‘I will that apple’), and this is the basis of the individual’s right
to private property. Now, the individual can contract to trade his property for
someone else’s. This is crucial because it introduces a context where the object of
a person’s will is no longer simply an external object, but the other person’s will.
Both people will that each respect the other as property-owners – and ‘this relation
of will to will is the true and proper ground in which freedom is existent’. As a
salutary example of human-beings being merely the unconscious vehicle of Mind’s
self-development, Hegel adds: ‘[r]eason makes it just as necessary for men to enter
into contractual relationships . . . as to possess property. While all they are
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conscious of is that they are led to make contracts by need in general . . . the fact
remains that they are led to do this by reason implicit within them, i.e., by the Idea
of the . . . existence of free personality’.14
The problem with a contract, however, is that it can be broken. This introduces
the notion of non-malicious ‘Wrong’, or even worse, where a person forcefully
deprives someone of his property, ‘Crime’. This is ultimately a self-contradiction
on behalf of the criminal, because ‘it is an expression of a will which annuls the
expression . . . of a will’.15 Such ‘wrong’ or ‘crime’ cries out to be corrected. (Indeed,
Hegel claims it is the right of the criminal to be punished). But such corrections can
take the form of individual revenge which, meted out differently by different people,
can sometimes be seen as ‘wrong’ by others.
‘Morality’ and conscience

What people therefore yearn for is a common notion of right and wrong – what
Hegel calls ‘morality’. In short, we have arrived at a context where, via the
unconscious vehicle of men’s wills, the will now expresses itself in willing that all
will the same – i.e., it ‘wills the universal as such’.16 Here, Hegel’s referent in the
actual world is that people have a conscience, or sense of what is morally good. Yet
because conscience, albeit directed to the Good, is only a subjective, inward
impulse, it can at the extreme deceive one into thinking the satisfaction of one’s
personal ends is the ultimate good. Not only does Hegel dismiss such thinking as
self-contradictory, sophistical, and hypocritical,17 he adds that it is ‘potentially
evil’. ‘Evil’, then, is qualitatively worse than ‘wrong’ and ‘crime’ since it is the
conscientious dismissal of the common Good and, instead, the ‘elevating above
the universal the self-will of private particularity . . .’.18
Evil (just as ‘wrong’ and ‘crime’) cries out to be defeated. Now, because
the potential for ‘evil’ emerges from the same source as conscience, (namely, a
subjective conviction of ‘the good’), it is precisely the subjectivity of conscience
which has to be overcome. What is required (metaphysically) is that the Idea of
Right is instead embedded in objective institutions which embody a moral structure.
Mere conscience is not enough.
Ethical Life – the family

In turning to this objective arena of (moral) institutions, Hegel calls it ‘Ethical Life’,
i.e., ‘the objective ethical order, which comes on the scene in place of good in the
abstract’.19
Because most natural and immediate, the first manifestation of this higher stage
of Right is the family, which Hegel sees structured on (heterosexual) monogamy
and the rearing of children. Here is an objective moral order where, ‘in a family, one’s
frame of mind is to have self-consciousness of one’s individuality within this unity
. . ., with the result that one is in it not as an independent person but as a member’.20
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The positive side to this is that ‘the will’ now has for its object an actual, concrete
context made up of a unity of wills.
However, the family is too much of a unity since it restricts the development of
each member’s individual, subjective freedom. Given the bonds of duty, and as a
practical environment, the family does not provide the context of individual
ambition and the diverse opportunities needed for a person’s particularity to
blossom. Thus children, once ‘educated to freedom of personality’,21 naturally leave
the family and launch out into the wider world.
Hegel is referring to ‘society at large’ and calls it ‘Civil Society’. Thus, ‘civil society’
may appear the supreme structure fulfilling individuals’ freedom. Yet, in their turn,
features of ‘civil society’ require negating, resulting in the highest structure of all,
‘the State’. Why is this so?
Ethical life – ‘Civil society’

For Hegel, civil society has two contradictory aspects. While giving full scope to
the individual’s freedom to pursue his own aims, this arena only functions precisely
because everyone else pursues their own self-interest. Without each other, this
arena would be an empty opportunity. Thus there is an implicit universality to civil
society. This shows itself inasmuch as ‘the entire complex is built up into particular
systems of needs, means, and types of work . . . in other words, into class-divisions’.22
These generate their own public organisations to promote their interests. This
entire system of interdependence thus requires a system of justice to enforce positive
law regarding the rights of individuals and their organisations. Hence this implicit
universality becomes completely explicit in a public authority to safeguard the
system as a whole – and it is here that ‘the sphere of civil society passes over into
the state’.23
Without the state, civil society could become a turbulent arena of the assertion
of self-interest where injustice, the power of the stronger, and even anarchy hold
sway. Thus its logic paves the way for a separate, qualitatively superior organisation
above the diverse components of civil society.
Ethical life – ‘the state’

Metaphysically speaking, then, what Hegel calls ‘the modern state’ (by which he
means some kind of constitutional monarchy) is the end-journey of the self-
development of the freedom of the will. As Hegel puts it, ‘self-consciousness in
virtue of its sentiment towards the state finds in the state, as its essence and the end
and product of its activity, its substantive freedom’.24 Although referring here to
Mind’s self-conscious freedom, he also means that its final objectification is
exemplified by patriotism, construed as peoples’ willing and rational recognition
that they belong, and have their ultimate duty, to their state.
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Thus, in the actual world, a genuinely universal will with a genuinely universal
object has emerged – the state – via the phenomenon of the patriotic citizen who
feels his freedom realised (rather than restricted) in his dutiful obligation to the
state. In words echoing Burke’s disgust at ‘social contract’ theories of the state,
Hegel says:
If the state is confused with civil society, and if its specific end is laid down
as the security and protection of property and personal freedom, then the
interest of the individuals as such becomes the ultimate end of their
association, and it follows that membership of the state is something
optional. But the state’s relation to the individual is quite different from
this. Since the state is mind objectified, it is only as one of its members
that the individual himself has objectivity, genuine individuality, and an
ethical life.
The state, then, is the context where ‘freedom comes into its supreme right’, and
accordingly it ‘has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to
be a member of the state’.25
If this last phrase seems ominous in the light of twentieth-century totalitarianism,

the attentive reader will know better than to tar Hegel with this brush. True, he
elevates the state above all other objective moral contexts, but we must bear in
mind that, as we will see in his philosophy of history, he is lauding the modern state
as the culmination of an historical process whose metaphysical ‘truth’ is the full
realisation of freedom, not the ghastly twentieth-century experiments in extin-
guishing it. On this point, and also as a summary of his overall political theory, we
may leave the Philosophy of Right with Hegel’s own words:
The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. But concrete freedom

consists in this, that personal individuality and its particular interests not
only achieve their complete development and gain explicit recognition
for their right (as they do in the . . . family and civil society), but . . . they
know and will the universal; they even recognise it as their own
substantive mind; they take it as their end and aim and are active in its
pursuit.26
Hegel’s The Philosophy of History

Hegel had already outlined his views on philosophy of history in the closing section
of Philosophy of Right (having indicated its metaphysical foundations as early as
1807 in the section on ‘Spirit’ in his Phenomenology of Mind). But it was only after
the former’s publication in 1821 that he prepared its systematic treatment. This was
delivered as a lecture course throughout the 1820s, and published posthumously
from his, and students’, notes firstly in 1837, and then (newly edited) in 1840 by
his son Karl.27 It begins with a long introduction where Hegel explains the
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metaphysical basis of ‘world-history’, followed by chapters covering the different

stages in actual history.
‘Spirit’
Hegel’s overall idea is that a principle underlies world-history which determines its
course and displays its meaning. At its heart is what Hegel calls ‘Geist’, translated
as ‘Mind’ or ‘Spirit’. However, the latter is more useful in the context of Hegel’s
philosophy of history. What does he mean by ‘Spirit’? We have seen that, for Hegel,
existence manifests ‘Absolute Mind’ or ‘Reason’ – and have pursued one example
of this, namely, the political world as the Idea of Right. Now, unlike the Idea of
Right, which is a specific ‘product’ of Absolute Mind, ‘Spirit’ is an entire dimension
of the latter’s self-development; namely, when it arrives at self-consciousness. Here
we need to recall Hegel’s overall philosophical system of reality. This includes the
properties of Matter which, according to Hegel, are governed by the principle of
striving towards Unity. ‘The essence of Matter is Gravity’, says Hegel (and if Matter
ever achieved its Idea – Unity – it would disappear, as it were, down a ‘black hole’
of gravity!).28 But Matter is only one dimension of the objectification of Reason.
From the first stirrings of existence eventually comes consciousness, and then self-
consciousness, a qualitatively higher dimension of Being which Hegel calls ‘Spirit’.
Now, ‘consciousness of one’s own being’ is described by Hegel as ‘self-contained

existence’ independent of anything external to it. It thus ‘has its centre in itself’,
and ‘this is Freedom, exactly’. The freedom that is Spirit, then, ‘is to be displayed
as coming to a consciousness of itself (for it is in its very nature, self-consciousness)
and thereby realising its existence’.29 It is this very journey which forms world-
history.
It would be wrong, therefore, to regard self-consciousness as a static frame of mind.

On the contrary, because ‘Spirit knows itself, . . . it involves an appreciation of its
own nature, as also an energy enabling it to realise itself; to make itself actually that
which it is potentially’.30 Seen in terms comparing humans and animals, this
becomes clearer. For Hegel, animals are not ‘free’, for in lacking consciousness of
self, they cannot make their own aims the object of their will and activity. Rather,
they do not have their ‘own’ aims at all – they do not reorganise their world. As
Hegel puts it: ‘what I will I hold before my mind as an idea; it is the object of my
thought. An animal acts on instinct, is driven by an inner impulse . . . , but it has
no will, since it does not bring before its mind the object of its desire’.31 A human-
being, however, in being self-conscious, construes aims in accord with his idea of
‘himself’. It is in this sense that human-beings manifest the freedom that is the
essence of Spirit. (This allows us to appreciate Sibree, in his translation of The
Philosophy of History, where he defends his choice of the word ‘Spirit’ rather than
‘Mind’ by quoting the Biblical passage, ‘Their horses are flesh and not spirit’).32
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‘Spirit’ and World History

The above means there is a specific aspect of the actual world, intimately dependent
upon the constructive energy inherent in humans’ being self-conscious, which is
explicable in terms of ‘Spirit’ actualising its essential nature – i.e., Freedom. What
is this aspect of the actual world? It is nothing less than what Hegel calls World
History, by which he primarily means its political history. An explanation of the
term ‘political history’ should clarify matters.
First, it is history because (as already seen) no Idea or feature of Absolute Mind
realises itself all at once. ‘Spirit’ is no exception. Its manifestation, in involving a
process over time, is ‘historical’ in that general sense of the term. But it is also
‘historical’ in the narrower sense, where we restrict the term ‘history’ to the human
world – for, as we have seen, ‘Spirit’ is solely manifested in human life.
Second, it is political history, because although human history incorporates
numerous aspects of life, the essence of ‘Spirit’ is Freedom – and we have already
established from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that this Idea is manifested in political
structures. In short, the latter work explains the inner dialectical logic of the Idea
of Freedom, culminating in the (modern) State. On the other hand, The Philosophy
of History explains the historical progression of political structures, again focused on
‘the State’, but now in terms of its development from primitiveness to maturity.
In tracing this (earthly) history, Hegel thus understands himself to be revealing ‘the
destiny of the spiritual World’, its ‘final cause’ (i.e., its teleology), which he finds
‘to be the consciousness of its own freedom on the part of Spirit, and ipso facto, the
reality of that freedom’. Thus, ‘Universal History . . . is the exhibition of Spirit in
the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially’.33 So Hegel
insists that, in considering history philosophically, we should concentrate on the
heart of the matter, the above ‘sole aim of Spirit’ – which is to actualise Freedom.
Amidst the myriad of events intertwined in history, including tragedies and horrors,
‘this is the only aim that sees itself realised and fulfilled; the only pole of repose amid
the ceaseless change of events and conditions, and the sole efficient principle that
pervades them’.34 In short, we need to learn how to see the wood for the trees.
Hegel’s method
For Hegel, then, world-history is the arena on which Spirit’s self-consciousness is
gradually realised through ‘a series of increasingly adequate expressions’ of its Idea
of Freedom.35 Although we have yet to explore how this relates to the actual content
of ‘world-history’, we have identified the general area Hegel is referring to – political
history, especially ‘the State’ – and why; namely, that this aspect of history can only
come about because of that property in man we call ‘self-consciousness’. We have
seen why this overall idea seemed so obvious to Hegel – i.e., we cannot but take
account of the fact of complexedly developed political systems (centred on law,
duties, morality, rights) completely absent from animal life. The point is, what do
we make of this fact? How do we account for it?
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This returns us to Hegel’s method. Having boldly announced that ‘the only
Thought which Philosophy brings . . . to the contemplation of History, is the simple
conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history
of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process’,36 Hegel nevertheless
says ‘yet I am not obliged to make any such preliminary demand upon your faith’.
Rather, he claims that the philosophical basis underlying history ‘is only an
inference from the history of the World’, and as such is ‘the result of the investigation
we are about to pursue’. The notion that history is the rational unfolding of World-
Spirit ‘must present itself as the ultimate result of History. But we have to take the
latter as it is. We must proceed historically – empirically’. The only reason that he,
Hegel, knows or ‘infers’ the resulting philosophical framework is ‘because I have
traversed the entire field’.
He is claiming we should study history empirically – but that when we do so,
certain facts will/should stare us in the face, crying out for explanation. In this case,
it is the distinctiveness of ‘the State’ as a phenomenon in the world, and its
historical progression. Thus the only inference which makes sense is that which
Hegel draws – i.e., the facts prove his philosophical theory. Put in this way, he
seems to be appealing to an empirical methodology of science – namely, that one
begins with no presuppositions, but studies the facts, after which one construes the
most likely hypothesis to explain them. Otherwise, if one begins with an hypothesis,
the danger is one distorts the facts to ‘prove’ it.
However, this is not Hegel’s position. Rather, prior to insisting he is not asking
his students to accept anything on faith, he nevertheless expressed the hope
that, ‘If the clear idea of Reason is not already developed in our minds, in beginning
the study of Universal History, we should at least have the firm, unconquerable
faith that Reason does exist there . . .’.37 This perhaps puts a different light on
his subsequent protestations, and later in the Introduction he clarifies the matter
by claiming the investigator into history should not simply uncover and register
the facts, but that ‘it is of importance that the essential should be distinguished
. . . in contrast with the so-called non-essential’. This requires ‘an intimate
acquaintance with the Idea. The investigator must be familiar a priori (if we like
to call it so) with the whole circle of conceptions to which the principles in
question belong’.
So here Hegel accepts the need for a pre-existing analytical framework with
which to approach ‘the facts’. But he does not conceive of this framework as some
kind of (a priori) hypothesis we need to accept on faith. Rather, he claims it derives
from established principles gained from Philosophy, and cites the example of the
scientist, Kepler, as an analogy. The latter ‘must have been familiar a priori with
ellipses, with cubes and squares, and with ideas of their relations, before he could
discover, from the empirical data, those immortal “Laws” [of planetary motion] of
his. . . . He who is unfamiliar with the science that embraces these abstract
elementary conceptions, is as little capable . . . of understanding those Laws, as of
discovering them’. The same applies to the study and understanding of history,
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says Hegel. Thus those who criticise him for introducing ‘the so-called a priori
method, and the attempt to insinuate ideas into the empirical data of history’, are
suffering from ‘a want of acquaintance with the ideas that relate to’ what is essential.
This is, ‘in view of the History of the World in general – the Consciousness of
Freedom, and the phases which this consciousness assumes in developing itself’.38
In short, Hegel is claiming that just as everyone accepts that the physical world
works according to ‘laws’, so does the historical world. And just as it is crucial to
study the physical world empirically, so it is the historical world. But it is equally
crucial to approach the physical world with an established abstract analytical
framework – and so it is for the historical world. And this, I suggest, is for now as
far as we can go in vindicating Hegel’s methodology of studying, and understanding,
‘history’, (although we will revisit the topic in our Conclusion). The logic of his
argument may deserve more respect than most hard-headed practising historians
award it. After all, what is the point of studying history, and how does one separate
the ‘meaningful’ (‘the essential’) from the surrounding kaleidoscope of events? On
the other hand, the substance of his argument must remain dubious. The abstract
principles Kepler employed were already ‘proved’, unlike Hegel’s philosophy of
Absolute Mind and Spirit’s Idea of Freedom. Yet, with a confidence as inspiring to
some as it is offensive to others, Hegel awards the principles of his overall
philosophy the same ‘truth’ status as the tried and tested principles of Euclidean
geometry.
The State and ‘World History’

From the preceding it has become clear why, for Hegel, ‘world-history’ is essentially
to do with ‘Spirit’, and why this implies focusing on ‘the state’ in history – ‘Law,
Morality, Government, and they alone, [are] the positive reality and completion
of Freedom’. Yet in The Philosophy of History Hegel adopts a broader notion of ‘the
state’ than in the Philosophy of Right, for in addition to the state’s formal
(constitutional) features is the entire moral ethos of a nation which has given rise
to the state and which it, in turn, sustains. The state ‘is the moral Whole’,39 and
any particular state ‘is an individual totality, of which you cannot select any
particular side . . . and deliberate . . . respecting it in that isolated form’.40 Rather,
‘the State . . . is . . . the basis and centre of the other concrete elements of the life
of a people – of Art, of Law, of Morality, of Religion, of Science’.41
Having thus broadened the significance of ‘the state’ to include a people’s culture,
and hence potentially expanded the historical content to be included in his
philosophy of history, Hegel’s insistence on ‘the state’ nevertheless causes him to
list a series of exclusions which may invite incredulity from historians unless they
happen to agree with his philosophical reason. Because the State is ‘the basis and
centre’ of a nation’s culture, ‘in the history of the world, only those peoples can
come under our notice which form a state’. Since ‘nations may have passed a long
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time before arriving at this their destination’ (statehood), it follows first that such
‘ante-historical periods’ must be excluded from World-history.42 Thus those periods
– ‘centuries or millennia . . . which may have been filled with revolutions, nomadic
wanderings, and the strangest mutations’, fall outside of consideration. So, second,
do records of ‘family memorials, patriarchal traditions’ and other matters ‘confined
to the family and the clan’.
Third, there are countries of his own time which Hegel excludes from having
played any part in World-history because they never formed proper ‘states’. India
is a prime and interesting example in Hegel’s mind, for he is respectful of ‘the
treasures of Indian literature’, and of ‘a land so rich in intellectual products, and
those of the profoundest order of thought’. Yet he claims that the caste system,
based solely on ‘natural distinctions’, prevented ‘the element of morality’ from
developing in Indian political institutions.43
Fourth, Hegel boldly excludes two entire regions, the ‘frigid’ and the ‘torrid’
zones, where ‘the locality of World-historical peoples cannot be found’. This is
because peoples in these ‘extreme zones’ are unable to escape the ‘pressing needs’
of Nature, being ‘constantly impelled to direct attention’ to it. Thus, ‘man cannot
come to free movement; cold and heat are here too powerful to allow Spirit to
build up a world for itself’. Authentic morality and ethical life (the preconditions
of statehood) are unable to develop, and thus the peoples of these zones ‘have to
be excluded once and for all from the drama of the World’s History’. Instead, ‘the
true theatre of History is therefore the temperate zone’,44 (and even here, Hegel
restricts this to the northern half because, unlike the southern half which ‘runs out
into many points’, as a continental mass it better enabled communication and
migrations).
So far, then, it seems his insistence on ‘the state’ as the essential in World-history
has persuaded Hegel to exclude a vast amount of historical content as ‘inessential’.
But more than this, he narrows his focus even further to only those ‘states’ which
have played significant roles in world-history – namely, those which fully manifest
a recognisable stage in the unfolding of the logic of Spirit, whose essence is
Freedom. To see why this is so takes us now beyond the general principles of his
philosophy of history to its actual historical content.
National Spirits
We have already noted Hegel’s larger, holistic notion of a ‘State’ incorporating
the ‘culture’ of a nation, and his notion that individuals’ immersion in this context
gives them their very being. He develops this further. Not only does the state award
them their rights, but ‘its natural features, its mountains, air, and waters, are their
country’. Also, the history of their state – ‘what their ancestors have produced’ –
constitutes ‘their deeds’ and ‘belongs to them’. Because of this, Hegel refers to ‘the
spirit of one People’, or ‘the Spirit of the State’, as being specific to them. It is ‘One
Individuality’, including its religion, art, philosophy, science, and mechanical skills.
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Taken together, these form the ‘particular National Genius’, and each ‘is to be
treated as only One Individual in the process of Universal History’.
Now, the ‘boundless impulse of the World-Spirit’45 is to successively realise the
different stages of Freedom and is thus manifested, at each stage, by the most
advanced ‘national spirit’. Indeed, this notion draws him into ideas many regard
as deeply unpalatable, because for Hegel the inexorable, impersonal nature of
the project of the ‘World-Spirit’ appears to justify overriding ‘ordinary’ moral
judgements. This is at its clearest in his Philosophy of Right where he says: ‘[t]he
nation to which is ascribed a moment of the Idea . . .’ (i.e., which represents a stage
in the Spirit’s development) ‘. . . is entrusted with giving complete effect to it in
the advance of the self-developing self-consciousness of the world mind. This
nation is dominant in world history during this one epoch. . . . In contrast with this
its absolute right of being the vehicle of this present stage . . ., the minds of the other
nations are without rights . . .’. And, ‘the same consideration justifies civilised
nations in regarding and treating as barbarians those who lag behind them in
institutions which are the essential moments of the state’.46
It is with such ideas in mind that, having dismissed the ‘frigid and torrid zones’
from any significance in history (whether they contained states or not), Hegel also
dismisses the native cultures of North, Central, and South America, Australia,
and Africa. America, he tells us, ‘has always shown itself physically and psychically
powerless, and still shows itself so’. He claims the native Americans showed ‘a mild
and passionless disposition, want of spirit, and a crouching submissiveness’,
concluding that ‘the inferiority of these individuals in all respects . . . is very
manifest’. This enabled Europeans to dominate the native Americans, with the
result that ‘what takes place in America, is but an emanation from Europe’.
But he notes large differences between North America and the remainder of the
continent. The former became one state and is prosperous, whilst the latter consists
of numerous republics mostly dependent on military force, and ‘their whole history
is a continued revolution’. Hegel attributes this partly to the fact that Southern and
Central America were conquered (by Spain) whereas North America was colonised.
Also, the latter, ‘although a land of sects of every name, is yet fundamentally
Protestant’, whereas the former are Catholic. This last may be the reason Hegel pays
no further attention to South and Central America, since (as will become clearer
below) a constant refrain in his historical and political writings is that Catholicism
can no longer feature as the religion of more ‘advanced’ states, having been
superseded by Protestantism.
The USA engages Hegel further, however. The European colonisers were
industrious, and many had emigrated to gain religious freedom. From this arose a
state based on the protection of property and religious freedom. But Hegel viewed
this state as still undeveloped because these two features were too predominant. He
describes as ‘the fundamental character of the community – the endeavour of the
individual after acquisition, commercial profit, and gain; the preponderance of
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private interest, devoting itself to that of the community only for its own advantage’.
Relatedly, their belief in religious freedom led to ‘unseemly varieties of caprice’,
causing ‘the splitting up into so many sects, which reach the very acme of absurdity’.
Thus the USA’s immature political culture, the state being ‘merely something
external for the protection of property’. Also, (writing in the 1820s) he thought
its further political development was inhibited because ‘the immeasurable space
which that country presents to its inhabitants’ has so far rendered them ‘exempt
from that pressure’ caused by the emergence of ‘a distinction of classes, . . . when
wealth and poverty become extreme’, and which would otherwise have caused its
people ‘to be pressed back on each other’. But while ‘the outlet of colonisation is
constantly and widely open . . . the general object of the existence of this State is
not yet fixed and determined, and the necessity for a firm combination does not
yet exist’. Here, for the moment, we leave America – for although we will find
Hegel saying more about its potential future, for him it did not signify in ‘world-
history’ in his times.
Instead, ‘dismissing, then, the New World’ (including Australia),47 Hegel turns
his attention to ‘the Old World – the scene of the World’s History’.48 But again he
excludes another huge area, Africa. He divides it into European Africa north of the
Sahara, the Nile valley region, and ‘Africa proper’, south of the Sahara. Of the
latter, Hegel claims its tropical nature and geographical isolation combine to leave
it ‘beyond the day of self-conscious history, . . . enveloped in the dark mantle of
Night’. He follows this with a deeply unpleasant characterisation of the African
‘spirit’ derived from his notion that ‘in Negro life . . . [the] distinction between
himself as an individual and the universality of his essential being’ has ‘not yet
[been] attained’. In the absence of this consciousness, ‘the Negro . . . exhibits the
natural man in his completely wild and untamed state’, there being ‘nothing
harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character’. He claims African
religion is simply ‘sorcery’ and ‘fetishism’, where ‘the idea of a God, of a moral faith’
is absent, man himself being ‘regarded as the Highest’. With a perhaps curious
logic, Hegel claims ‘it follows that he has no respect for himself’, and this explains
(for Hegel) the Africans’ ‘perfect contempt for humanity’, as exhibited in tyranny,
cannibalism, slavery, ‘want of self-control’, and the non-existence of ‘moral
sentiments’.49
Given these views it is not surprising Hegel claims ‘the entire nature of this race
is such as to preclude the existence’ of political constitutions (or ‘states’ proper).
Only external, tyrannical force ‘can hold the State together for a moment’, and he
then recounts selective dramatic examples of chaotic, barbaric African rule. He
concludes by saying of ‘the character of the Negroes’, that ‘this condition is capable
of no development or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always
been’. And thus ‘we leave Africa, not to mention it again, for it is no historical part
of the World’. Rather, it is ‘the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in
the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the
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threshold of the World’s History’,50 (i.e., the nearest Hegel gets to construing a
‘state of nature’ in either his The Philosophy of History or Philosophy of Right).
‘History proper’
Thus Hegel has ‘eliminated this introductory element’51 – i.e., stateless peoples,
India, the frigid and torrid zones, North, South, and Central America, and sub-
Saharan Africa – from playing any role in the drama of ‘Universal History’. Their
histories, their states (if applicable), their cultures, their ‘national geniuses’, are
inessential in Hegel’s philosophical terms, since they fail to exhibit significant
stages in the developing consciousness of Freedom. That process found its ‘real
theatre’ in the ‘Asiatic and European world’, beginning in the former and
culminating in the latter. How does this story unfold, and what are its counterparts
in the actual historical world?
The Oriental realm

The process, then, does not begin with Africa. Rather, since ‘the History of the
World is the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience
to a Universal principle and conferring subjective freedom’,52 the journey of the
World-Spirit begins with the initial achievement of a primitive, undeveloped
consciousness of universality, where the ‘uncontrolled natural will’ first submits to
an objective order. This first stage is that in which order and right (essential aspects
of freedom) are objectively established in a political system, but where the universal
will is focused entirely at a single point which, through its awe and majesty, extracts
subservience from the remainder of the whole. This stage was manifested in the
‘despotic’ states of ‘the Orient’, China being a prime example. Because the emperor
is regarded as ‘the One individual . . . to which all belongs’, then ‘no other
individual has a separate existence, or mirrors himself in his subjective freedom’.
Rather, in such despotic states subjective freedom is simply absent. All revolves
around, and issues from, the decree of the divine Emperor; and ‘the subjects are
. . . like children, who obey their parents without will or insight of their own’. Thus,
the unity of the state is solely a product of ‘unreflecting use and habit’, rather than
of the rational will of ‘reflective and personal beings having a properly subjective
and independent existence’. These latter features only emerge at a much higher
stage of History, and elsewhere. Prior to that, ‘the political life of the East’, taking
the form of ‘the gorgeous edifices of Oriental Empires’, ‘is the childhood of
History’.53
Where he goes into detail, he incorporates China, India, Persia, and Egypt in an
overall westward movement. Although all manifest the same broad characteristics,
as we move further west into Central Asia and beyond, individual differences are
also identified as complex subdivisions within this first stage – for example, the
disorganisation of the Persians, the ‘voluptuousness and luxury’ of the Syrians,
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the activeness and ‘courage of the sea-braving Phoenicians’, the ‘pure thought’ of
one God in the Jewish religion, and ‘the mental unrest of Egypt’. All these
conspired progressively to make Spirit negate its lack of individual, subjective
freedom and instead manifest itself anew at a higher stage, where the principle of
‘free Individuality’ arose to take centre-stage.54
The Greek realm

We thus arrive at ‘the second main principle in human History’, where the morality
of a people now issues from ‘the free volition of individuals’, or ‘the subjective
Will’. The historical correlate of this was ‘the Greek world’, which Hegel
admiringly calls ‘the Kingdom of Beautiful Freedom’.55 Now, ‘advancing Spirit makes
itself the content of its volition’, and thus individuality is given full reign, prompting
Hegel to say ‘Greece presents to us the cheerful aspect of youthful freshness, of
Spiritual vitality’.56 Wonderful works of art and literature, the fabled ‘democracy’
of Athens and the fierce patriotism of the Spartans – all these epitomise the spirit
of individuality and subjectivity underlying the ethos of Greek culture, qualitatively
different from that manifested in Oriental despotisms. Interestingly, as in some
earlier philosophies of history, Hegel uses the analogy of the individual’s
development from infancy to old age, usually applied to the rise and decline of
individual states. Hegel, however, employs it to describe World-history as a whole!
Since History proper began with Oriental despotisms, this represented ‘the
childhood of history’, and as developing Spirit moved westwards into Central Asia,
whose peoples ‘no longer manifest[ed] the repose and trustingness of the child’ but
instead became ‘boisterous and turbulent’, this period was ‘the boyhood of history’.57
Now, in the Greek world, Spirit exhibits ‘the period of adolescence, for here we
have individualities forming themselves’. It is this youthful factor which makes
classical Greece so attractive.
And yet in good dialectical fashion the positive features of Greek culture are
matched by negative ones, requiring that the Greek world eventually be superseded.
Hegel identifies four drawbacks. First, because of their precocious individuality the
Greeks were divided into numerous city-states rather than making one political
society. Second, despite its sophistication, even ‘the beautiful democracy of Athens’
displayed an immaturity common to Greek political forms, because ‘the Greeks
derived their final decisions from . . . quite external phenomena such as oracles, the
entrails of sacrificed animals, and the flight of birds’, rather than directly from a real
will. This persuades Hegel that, with the Greeks, Spirit’s ‘self-consciousness had
not yet advanced to the abstraction of subjectivity’ where, ‘when a decision is to
be made, an “I will” must be pronounced by man himself’. (This relates to Hegel’s
insistence, in his Philosophy of Right, on a constitutional monarchy as the proper
form of the modern state. ‘This “I will” constitutes the great difference between the
ancient world and the modern, and in the great edifice of the state it must therefore
have its appropriate objective existence’).58 A third drawback is slavery, another
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sign of immaturity insofar as ‘the due satisfaction of particular needs’ (i.e., economic
life) is not incorporated ‘in the sphere of freedom but is relegated exclusively to a
class of slaves’.59 In short, there is no properly developed ‘civil society’. The final
drawback returns us to his analogy of ‘adolescence’, for he reminds us that ‘youth
. . . does not exert itself for a definite intelligent aim’. Rather, the typical youth is
too busy exploring his individuality! By implication, then, Hegel saw the Greek
world as charming, aesthetic, and sensitive, yet lacking in substantial purpose.
The Roman realm

Thus these deficiencies in the Greek world, symptomatic of Spirit’s ‘adolescence’,
had to be superseded by a yet higher stage of Spirit. Continuing his analogy, Hegel
contrasts brilliant but shiftless adolescence to the stability of purpose and character
of a full-grown man, who ‘devotes his life to labour for an objective aim; which he
pursues consistently, even at the cost of his individuality’.60 Put abstractly, then,
Spirit is driven to negate the extremes of subjectivity which it enjoyed, and instead
focus on a truly universal purpose. This third stage was manifested in what Hegel
calls ‘the Roman world’, where subjectivity is now restrained, and ‘the Social aim
absorbs all individual aims’. The Roman state had a universal aim – namely, its
compulsive mission to imprint itself on the known world – and for this reason
manifests ‘the severe labours of the Manhood of History. For true manhood acts
neither in accord with the caprice of a despot, nor in obedience to a graceful caprice
of its own, but works for a general aim’. Individuals now ‘have to merge their own
interests’ in ‘the severe demands of the National objects’. However, this does not
return them to the childlike obeisance endemic to Oriental despotisms. Rather, the
universal aim of the Roman state is inculcated into its peoples’ lives in such a
manner that the Roman citizen ‘realises his own private object only in that general
aim’. Recognising its dependence on this, the Roman state extended ‘definite rights’
to its citizens (and to its conquered territories), thereby establishing them as proper
persons rather than as slaves, or chattels of a despot, or as insignificant ‘individuals’.
However, the dialectic is relentless, and Hegel constantly describes the Roman
state as manifesting a universality which was (too) abstract. He means that Rome’s
aim was power for its own sake, since Rome used it to create a ‘political Universality’
which was relatively indifferent to its actual ethical content. Rome would ‘crush’
the ‘national individualities’ it conquered (just as its rule at home was, within the
law, ruthless), but would then ‘incorporate’ their gods and other aspects of their
culture into ‘a homogenous and indifferent mass’. Because of this mixture of
ruthlessness and liberality, ‘Rome becomes a Pantheon of all deities, and of all
Spiritual existence’, and yet ‘these divinities and this Spirit do not retain their
proper vitality’.61 Rather, in being absorbed into the Roman world they become part
of a culture which does not have ‘a concretely spiritual life, rich in itself’. Instead,
the Roman citizens and territories are subject to ‘the abstractum [abstraction] of
Universality’ whose object, ‘which is pursued with soulless and heartless severity,
is mere dominion, in order to enforce that abstractum’.62
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We have seen Hegel comparing the Roman world to the stage of manhood in
positive terms. But there is also a ‘downside’ to manhood – namely, that in devoting
‘severe labours’ to settling down to a fixed purpose, the grown man becomes too
immersed in his role. There comes a time when the ties it imposes begin to chafe,
and his individuality begins to assert itself in acts of caprice. Such sometimes bizarre
expressions of individuality may remind us of ‘mid-life crisis’ – after which, many
a man decides to continue ‘doing his duty’, but now with less unconscious devotion,
and more an inclination to suit himself as much as possible!
Now, something like this extension of the life-cycle analogy may have been in
Hegel’s mind when he explains the fate of the Roman world. Its deficiency (in
terms of Spirit’s freedom) is that the universality it manifested was too ‘abstract’ –
it lacked ‘concrete’ richness. According to Hegel, this displayed itself in a growing
contradiction between ‘the Aim of the State as the abstract universal principle’ and
the claims of individual personality. Initially in harmony, as time went on ‘individ-
uality gains the ascendant’, and peoples’ obedience, ‘instead of being hearty and
voluntary’, becomes reliant simply on their ‘contingent disposition’. In historical
terms, this corresponded to the growth of quarrelling factions between the Roman
aristocracy and the plebs. As this threat grows, ‘the breakup of the community
. . . can only be restrained by external compulsion’, as a result of which the citizen
is ‘led to seek consolation for the loss of his freedom’ by pursuing his own private
ends. This only exacerbates the contradiction between state and subjects, and
eventually one side of the contradiction, individuality, overcomes its other side
(universality) even at the level of the state itself; i.e., the state became governed
by the ‘contingent’ and increasingly capricious power of ‘one despot’.63
This was the final phase of that stage of Spirit manifested in the increasingly chaotic
Roman world. But its problem was endemic from its inception – in terms of Spirit,
its universal principle was too abstract. In corresponding historical terms, the
founding of the State involved ‘the severest discipline and self-sacrifice to the grand
object of the union. A State which had first to form itself, and which is based on
force, must be held together by force. It is not a moral, liberal connection, but a
compulsory condition of subordination, that results from such an origin’.64 This
underlying deficiency meant that, in its turn, ‘the Roman world’ was necessarily
superseded by a yet higher stage of Spirit, ‘the German world’.
The Germanic realm

Seen in terms of Spirit, the collapse of the Roman world equates with the depths
to which Spirit had sunk in its dialectical development, where ‘insatiable self-will’65
evolved as its sole content. But in reaction to this, Spirit ‘leaves the godless world,
seeks a harmony in itself, and begins now an inner life’. Having been ‘driven back
into its utmost depths’ from a world abandoned to the ravages of pure self-will, it
now enters a higher phase of spirituality where ‘the individual personality, instead
of following its own capricious choice, is purified and elevated into universality’.66
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The result is that Spirit achieves an inner reconciliation to the outside world, derived
from its recognition of ‘the unity of the divine nature and the human’.67 Gradually
the outside world is made to bear the imprint of the unassailable right of subjective
Freedom, such that eventually it is brought into full conformity with it.
In referring to this new consciousness which recognises the essential unity between
the human and the Absolute, Hegel sees this as the principle of Christianity. In
good theological fashion he points to the overwhelming significance of Christ’s
humanity, as God being made flesh, exemplifying the ultimate unity between God,
Man, and consciousness or Mind (i.e., ‘Spirit’) – expressed symbolically in the Holy
Trinity. This final coming together of ‘God’, man, and the world is the grand project
of history, and its final stage is dependent upon the Christian religion for its
underlying principle. As Hegel puts its, ‘The Idea can discover in Christianity no
point in the aspirations of Spirit that is not satisfied’.68
Again he appeals to his analogy of an individual’s life-path, comparing this fourth

phase of world-history with ‘old age’. He tells us, ‘the Old Age of Nature is weakness;
but that of Spirit is perfect maturity and strength, in which it returns to unity with
itself, but in its fully developed character as Spirit’.69 He does not elaborate upon
this analogy. (It seems consolatory, even hopeful!). But more to the point, his
consistent appeal to it perhaps suggests he relied on it more than he supposed – in
other words, that although he grounded his philosophy on the ultimate reality of
impersonal Mind, perhaps what he was actually thinking about was the psychology
of human beings. Not only might this apply to his philosophy of history ( i.e., from
history’s ‘infancy’ to its ‘old age’), but also to his general philosophy of ‘Spirit’ (i.e.,
his distinction between humans and animals).
Be this as it may, ‘the part assigned [the German world] in the service of the
World-Spirit’ has been to realise this final stage of Spirit’s journey to Freedom,
underpinned by the essential principle of Christianity. But again, this final stage
did not unfold itself all at once. Rather, it went through different periods. And
here, Hegel’s historical account (i.e., the ‘earthly’ correlate to Spirit’s unfolding) is
perhaps as suspect as it is audacious – for it spans the entire time from the origins
of Christianity, through centuries of the Roman Empire, then the ‘Dark Ages’,
through the Middle Ages, then the Renaissance, to Protestantism and the ‘modern’
state of his own times.
The first period

The ‘German World’ began, then, with the origins of Christianity, for it was that
religion which established the true principle of the reconciliation between
individual freedom (‘Subjective Spirit’) and the Absolute (‘Objective
Spirit/Mind’). But Christianity ‘needed eight centuries to grow up into a political
form’, by which he means the founding of Charlemagne’s state in AD 800 – a
symbolic restoration of the Roman Empire. Before then, although Christianity had
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introduced the full principles of spirituality, it had only done so through people’s
retreat from the ‘barbarian Real World’ into their own inner spirituality. Initially
persecuted by pagan Rome, Christianity gradually managed to consolidate its
ecclesiastical order despite the collapse of the (Western) Roman Empire and the
succeeding three centuries of ‘Dark Ages’ of barbarian invasions.
The second period

The second period of ‘the Germanic world’ extends from Charlemagne’s ‘empire’
to the sixteenth century. Its chief features were twofold: 1) the reorganisation of
Europe into numerous feudal states. Because the feudal system was based on private
obligations and loyalties, it gave the lie to the hopes for ‘a kingdom of heaven on
earth’ which had been ‘promised to follow in the wake of [the] reconciliation’
between Church and State symbolised by the Pope’s crowning of Charlemagne.
Politically, Europe was anything but united. Rather, the hierarchy of superior and
inferior states linked by complex feudal ties excluded ‘a sense of universality’, just
as did feudalism within each territory. 2) The moral decline of the Church as it
sunk ‘down into every kind of worldliness’, such that ‘instead of a spiritual kingdom
of heaven, the inwardness of the Christian principle wears the appearance of being
altogether directed outwards and leaving its proper sphere’.70 This brought the
Church and the State into constant competition. But this antagonism was not
only an opposition between the secular and the spiritual. Each side was also in
opposition to itself – the secular because European states were devoid of the
principle of universality (owing to their feudal organisation), and the spiritual
because it appeared to have abandoned its true ground in pursuit, instead, of
temporal ambitions.
The third period: The Renaissance

The overall antithesis between the spiritual and secular at last began to be resolved
(for Spirit cries out for it to be superseded) by what we now call the Renaissance
and the Reformation. This is the third period of European (‘Germanic’) history,
and although Hegel dates this period as extending from the Reformation to his own
times, he could not be clearer in referring first to the ethos of the Renaissance – (the
term itself was yet to be coined) – as issuing in this third period.
For Hegel, the Renaissance brought an end to the Middle Ages because it was
the time when, the Church having become desperately corrupt, ‘Spirit, once more
driven back upon itself, produces its work in an intellectual shape, and becomes
capable of realising the Ideal of Reason from the Secular principle alone’.71 In other
words, rebelling against the corrupt spiritual realm, the secular world discovered
within itself a new sense of spirituality centred on man himself. As Hegel puts it,
‘[s]ecularity appears now as gaining a consciousness of its intrinsic worth – becomes
aware of its having a value of its own in the morality, rectitude, probity, and activity
of man’.72
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Although this was partly exemplified by the political collapse of feudalism and
the emergence of sovereign, independent states (Hegel praises Machiavelli’s
ruthless views as necessary) he makes it clear this was far more than a political
movement. Rather, he suggests it began with the new sense of spirituality exhibited
by Renaissance art, which eclipsed the merely representational shallowness of
medieval art and instead produced paintings ‘rich in thought and sentiment’, and
sculptures, ‘in looking at which, soul holds converse with soul and Spirit with
Spirit’. He also praises the work of the Renaissance humanists for reviving Greek
and Roman literature and thereby doing ‘honour to the Human’ by acquainting the
West ‘with the true and eternal element in the activity of man’. The invention of
printing assisted this new consciousness, as (less obviously) did that of gunpowder
(by ‘democratising’ even warfare). Finally, he singles out the voyages of discovery
as exemplifying the ‘urging of the Spirit outwards’ – that is, the ‘desire on the part
of man to become acquainted with his world’.
In these ways, then, the secular world became imbued with a new spiritual
consciousness, centred on the nobility of man himself. In summary,
[t]hese three . . . [Renaissance arts, humanism, and global exploration]

. . . may be compared with that blush of dawn, which after long storms first
betokens the return of a bright and glorious day. This . . . is the day . . .
which breaks upon the world after the long, eventful, and terrible night
of the Middle Ages.73
The Reformation
If the Renaissance revitalised the secular world, in the early sixteenth century the
spiritual world was revolutionised by the Reformation, ‘the all-enlightening Sun,
following on that blush of dawn’. Its significance, for Hegel, lies in ‘Luther’s simple
doctrine . . . that the specific embodiment of Deity . . . is in no way present and
actual in an outward form, but . . . is obtained only . . . in faith and spiritual
enjoyment’. He claims the Catholic Church had sunk to the level of superstition,
putting its faith in a sensuous ‘embodiment of Deity’, generating an ‘absurd and
childish’ belief in miracles, the ‘grossly superficial and trivial’ notion that remission
of sins can be ‘purchased for mere money’, and a ‘slavish deference to Authority’.74
Luther swept away such error, insisting instead that ‘man sustain an immediate
relation to [Christ] in Spirit’ on an individual level. Objective religious truth
(exemplified in Christianity) is thereby recognised as embedded in individual hearts
and consciences, and ‘this subjectivity is the common property of all mankind’
rather than the exclusive possession of a priestly class.
In metaphysical terms, the subjective side of Spirit (so essential to Freedom) is
no longer lost in particular, selfish aims, nor in erroneously abstract universal aims,
but has finally achieved its proper end in ‘the objective purport of Christianity, i.e.,
the doctrine of the . . . Lutheran Church’. Having repudiated the authority of the
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Catholic Church and centred spiritual truth within men themselves (guided by the
Bible), the subjective side of Spirit (manifested in people’s consciousness) is no
longer at odds with the objectively established religion, because the latter is now
based on free, individual consciousness. ‘Thus Christian Freedom is actualised’,
says Hegel. ‘This is the essence of the Reformation: Man is in his very nature
destined to be free’, and since the early sixteenth century, ‘time . . . has had no other
work to do than the formal imbuing of the world with this principle’.75
The emergence of ‘modern times’

The remainder of Hegel’s Philosophy of History explains how Spirit increasingly
exemplifies (in man) this full and conscious recognition of its ultimate ‘divinity’,
and also how it translates this new stage of consciousness from the religious to the
secular world. The Renaissance had already prepared the secular world for
transformation, re-establishing its own independent sense of human worth. No
longer was it ‘regarded as evil only’. Now, with the Reformation, the breech
between religion and the secular world is in principle resolved. This is because the
Church is no longer confronted by a conscience-less secular world devoid of Reason
– and vice-versa, the secular world feels that ‘the Spiritual is no longer an element
foreign to the State’. Thus, gradually during this third period of the Germanic
world, ‘the antithesis of Church and State vanishes. The Spiritual becomes
reconnected with the Secular’ such that, finally, ‘Freedom has found the means of
realising its Ideal – its true existence. This is the ultimate result which the process
of History is intended to accomplish’.76
But again, as in all four principal stages of World-history and their own internal
periods, this third period of the Germanic world is culminated only through a
struggling dialectical sequence. Initially, the Reformation involved substantial
religious reform in parts of Europe, often spilling out into the secular world where
‘rebellion was raised against the temporal authorities’. However, ‘the world was
not yet ripe for a transformation of its political condition as a consequence of eccles-
iastical reformation’.77 Rather, that ‘reconciliation between God and the World’
which is the overall significance of the period from the Reformation to Hegel’s
own times, was first fought out in the consciousness of individuals. This took the form
of peoples’ ‘painful introspection’ into their sinfulness, combined with ‘a
tormenting uncertainty as to whether the good Spirit has an abode in them’. Thus
‘Protestantism . . . was for a long time characterised by a self-tormenting disposition
and an aspect of spiritual wretchedness’. This heightened belief in ‘Evil’ conspired,
as also in Catholicism, to produce a superstitious belief in witchcraft, which was
persecuted by dreadful means (including the Catholic Inquisition) throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, referring to the public burning of a
witch in 1780, Hegel remarks that ‘we have not long been quit of this frightful
barbarity’.78
Whilst the subjective side of Spirit adopted this unfortunate form, its objective
side was developing the secular world towards the emergence of the modern state,
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characterised by its ‘recognition of the universal laws of Freedom’. This political

movement was principally driven by the creation of independent monarchies
which ‘no longer denote[d] a kind of private property, private possession of estates
. . . etc.’, but abandoned such feudal relations, which instead became the trustees
of State-property, administered by a centralised system of law. Standing armies
and centralised systems of taxation developed, and the previous feudal nobility
were transformed ‘into an official position in connection with the State’. But
Hegel’s primary interest in this formation of the early-modern state focused on the
achievement of Protestant countries to attain independent statehood, involving
such struggles as the Thirty Years’ War, the Dutch wars against Spain, and the
Seven Years’ War. The latter consolidated the emergence of Prussia as an
independent Protestant state under the rule of Frederick the Great at the end of
the seventeenth century.
If the secular world in various parts of seventeenth-century Europe was moving

towards the perfected form of the state, we left the spiritual world (albeit set on the
right track by the Reformation) in an undeveloped state of gloomy introspection,
obsessed by the idea of ‘evil’. But this phase gave way to a deeper consciousness
centred on the recognition that all existence (including our consciousness as well
as the external world) exhibits fundamentally the same ‘Reason’. This new
movement – the recognition of the power of thought to understand everything as
rational – blossomed into what Hegel (accepting the French and German terms)
calls the Eclaircissement or Aufklärung. He is referring not only to what in English
came to be called the (French, eighteenth-century) Enlightenment, but also to
the preceding Scientific Revolution. He cites Descartes as laying its intellectual
foundations (what we have called ‘rationalism’ in philosophy), and attributes to
‘Experimental Science’ (what we have called ‘empiricism’) the discoveries flowing
from the recognition that ‘Nature is a system of known and recognised laws’. But
this combination of rationalism and empiricism was not restricted to the
investigation of nature. ‘Right and Morality’ were also brought within the compass
of Eclaircissement, in order to base them on the laws of reason rather than, as
previously, on ‘the command of God . . . written in the Old and New Testament,
or appearing in the form of particular Right in old parchments, as privileges . . .’.79
The 1789 French Revolution

The most dramatic effect of this ‘new world of ideas’ on the secular world was,
eventually, the French Revolution of 1789. Following his general principle that
‘secular life is the positive and definite embodiment of the Spiritual kingdom’,
Hegel praises the Eclaircissement (and the role played by Kant in its German
equivalent) for representing the raising of consciousness to the proper
understanding of Freedom – i.e., (referring his readers to his Philosophy of Right)
where ‘the Will . . . does not will anything alien, extrinsic, foreign to itself . . . but
wills itself alone’. As for the principle itself, he tells us that, partly because of their
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parlous political condition, it was the French who ‘wished to give it practical effect
. . . [and] set about realising it’.80 The initial result was the 1791 Declaration of the
Rights of Man and the Citizen, which began the world-historic mission of
‘remodelling of the State in accordance with the Idea of Right’.81
But Hegel does not underplay the difficulties thrown up during the French
Revolution, for example describing Robespierre’s brief reign as ‘the most fearful
tyranny’. As usual, Spirit has to engage in arduous struggle to fully manifest its
principles, and this last period of history is no exception. Napoleon ‘knew how to
rule, and soon settled the internal affairs of France’ – and then, ‘with the vast might
of his character . . . subjected all Europe, and diffused his liberal institutions in
every quarter’. Yet, it seems, the culmination of Spirit’s long journey to actualise
its full self-consciousness of Freedom (via the political institutions of the real world)
was not to be completed via Napoleon himself. His defeat and (according to Hegel)
spiritual desertion by the French people precipitated France into a ‘fifteen years’
farce’ of constitutional monarchy, succeeded by another revolution (1830). At the
time of his writing Hegel saw this as facing the problem of what he calls ‘liberalism’
– namely, the ‘agitation and unrest’ which is ‘perpetuated’ by the ‘liberal’ principle
which maintains ‘that all government should emanate from . . . the express
sanction’ of the people.82 As previously clarified in his Philosophy of Right, the logic
of the perfected (modern) state requires that public affairs should principally be in
the hands of a professional administrative class, leaving only a limited role for
popular opinion.83
The end of history?

The last point demonstrates that, for Hegel, even the French state of his own day
still had imperfections – in other words, that Spirit’s Idea of Freedom was not yet
completely realised by that nation’s political institutions. Rather, probably more as
a nod of flattery, Hegel appears to reserve that honour for his present-day Prussia.84
It had adopted the French code of Rights, but was a constitutional monarchy which
reserved the monarch the authority to counteract pressures of public opinion. In
any case, according to Hegel, the German people were not infected by ‘liberalism’.
Also, the Prussians were Protestant (unlike the French), and thus the potential for
tension between religious and civic conscience – for Hegel a permanent feature of
Catholic states – did not exist there. These observations might suggest that, in the
Prussian state and culture, Spirit had at last fully objectified its Freedom.
This raises the huge question of whether, for Hegel, ‘history’ had reached its
consummation – in other words, that his times were witness to the end of World-
History – and if so, what this might mean.
Together with a grasp of Hegel’s overall philosophy of history, a close consideration

of the last few pages of Hegel’s text should help determine this issue. What becomes
clear, as he discusses contemporary France, Austria, Spain, and England, is that
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Hegel does indeed see his own times as exhibiting in principle the features
correlating with the final realisation of Spirit’s journey to realise the Idea of
Freedom. We must recall that the journey began thousands of years ago with the
‘Oriental despotisms’ of the East, and that since then Spirit had advanced through
two qualitatively higher stages (the Greek world, then the Roman world) until it
embarked on its fourth stage, the German world. Because Christian, this fourth
stage was premised on a true consciousness of the relation between man and
Absolute Reality (Mind, or ‘God’). But its full implications had to be unravelled
through a complex dialectical process culminating in the religious enlightenment
of the Protestant Reformation and the secular emergence of properly independent
states. But even then, a further process was required to clarify the spiritual truth of
Protestantism, and for the secular world to independently discover the rational
basis to the state and morality. The Eclaircissement achieved the latter.
The final denouement was to bring together the rational principles of the secular
world with the purified spiritual consciousness of man, achieved in principle via the
French Revolution (however imperfectly in practice). Hegel expresses this by saying
that ‘in its substantial import’ the French Revolution was a ‘world-historical’ event,
irrespective of its flawed details. This principle ‘gained access to almost all modern
states, either through conquest or by express introduction into their political life’.85
Broadly, then, it does not appear that there need be any further overall stages in
Spirit’s journey (i.e., a fifth stage beyond ‘the Germanic world’), and there is
nothing in Hegel’s logic to suggest he thought otherwise. Also, each of the four
stages of World-history undergoes its own internal dialectical development through
different periods. The fourth stage has been no exception to this, being composed
of three successive internal periods. And even its third period had to unfold through
its own internal subdivisions, culminating in what Hegel calls ‘Modern Times’,
originated by the French Revolution. Having reached this point, again it does not
appear there is anything in Hegel to suggest the need for a further period (or
subdivision) which would introduce qualitatively new features. Rather, actual
examples of the modern state had emerged, as he had already argued in his
Philosophy of Right – a veritable panegyric on the modern state as the realisation of
freedom.
Loose ends
In this broad sense, then, both Hegel’s logic and writings suggest he thought his
‘modern times’ were the ‘end’ of history – a fortunate phrase since ‘end’ also means
‘telos’ (i.e., the ‘end’ or ‘purpose’ of a thing). It is difficult to read Hegel any other
way. However, it is equally difficult to read him as meaning that, in his time, the
story was completely over. It is clear he thought there were some loose ends – i.e.,
that in practice there remained imperfections. And given the immensity of the
overall time-scale Hegel has been working with, he may well have thought
the required ‘fine-tunings’ could take a century or longer to come to fruition. Apart
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from a despairing reference elsewhere to the problem of the ‘rabble’ disaffected by

poverty – ‘the important question of how poverty is to be abolished is one of the
most disturbing problems which agitate modern society’ – 86 he indicates two
features of ‘the modern state’ which he regarded as present flaws.
First, there is the problem of ‘liberalism’ already mentioned in regard to post-
revolutionary France. For Hegel, so long as the state’s constitution guarantees the
principle of the universal or general will, then there is no necessity that it should
constantly be expected to bow to pressure from ‘the sway of individual wills’
expressed in various interest groups and competing political parties. Yet this is
precisely the expectation of ‘liberalism’, where ‘the will of the Many expels the
Ministry from power’. The Opposition then takes office, only in its turn to ‘meet
with hostility from the Many’ and thus ‘share the same fate. Thus agitation and
unrest are perpetuated’. In short, the balance between the responsibility of the state
for promoting the interest of all, as distinct from the role which what we now call
‘democracy’ should play, is a problem Hegel perceives. Presciently, he claims ‘this
collision, this nodus, this problem is that with which history is now occupied, and
whose solution it has to work out in the future’.87
The problem of (excessive) ‘liberalism’ is, however, merely symptomatic of a
more general threat to the modern state – namely, what Hegel calls the ‘disposition’
of its citizens. Reason requires that although ‘there may be various opinions . . .
respecting laws, constitution, and government, . . . there must be a disposition on
the part of the citizens to regard all these opinions as subordinate to the substantial
interest of the state’. He means there should be an underlying consensus on the
sanctity of the constitution itself, and a corresponding genuine ‘acquiescence in the
laws’, despite opinions otherwise critical of aspects of the nation’s life. Here he
singled out religion for special notice, insisting ‘it must involve nothing really alien
or opposed to the Constitution’, and attacks the Catholic religion in particular,
saying ‘it is a false principle that the fetters which bind Right and Freedom can be
broken without the emancipation of conscience – that there can be a Revolution
without a Reformation’.88 Thus he regards the Catholic states of Europe as either
lost to the principle of the modern state or gravely compromised.
But Protestant states can also suffer from an imperfect ‘disposition’, and here he
particularly cites England for its markedly decentralised system where ‘every parish,
every subordinate division and association has a part of its own to perform’. The
persistence of these jealously guarded rights ‘render a general system impossible’,
and thus, ‘of institutions characterised by real freedom there are nowhere fewer than
in England’. Additionally he points to the ‘utterly inconsistent and corrupt’ system
of bribery associated with Parliamentary seats, but concedes that at least it produced
men schooled from their youth to ‘political business’, and that ‘the nation has the
correct conviction and perception that there must be a government, and is
therefore willing to give its confidence to a body of men who have had experience
in governing’. Clearly somewhat bemused by the ‘disposition’ of the English, he
concludes by wryly querying whether the forthcoming (1832) Reform Bill ‘will
leave the possibility of a government’ at all!89
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These observations provide useful insights into Hegel’s implied ‘end of history’. As
noted, they leave room for future ‘fine-tuning’ of the modern state. But also they
remind us that in no sense does he imply that all states, or even a number of states,
must assume the form which ‘finally’ realises the Idea of Freedom. On the contrary,
throughout his account of its self-revelatory journey, ‘Spirit’ repeatedly exemplified
each of its stages (and subdivisions) in only one ‘State’ at a time. Correspondingly,
even when treating of his contemporary Europe, Hegel claimed many countries
were left behind – and there seems no reason to doubt that, just as in previous
historical periods, this is where Hegel thought they would stay. In short, there is
nothing in his account of previous history to suggest that the ‘end of history’ should
be manifested on a world-wide scale, or even encompass all European states. All
that is (metaphysically) necessary is that Freedom be fully objectified in at least one
instance.
The only alternative is to look not at his historical account of the world but at
the logic of his argument. Does it imply something different when it comes to ‘the
end of history’? For example, is there anything different about this final period to
suggest it should spread world wide? Donning a Hegelian hat, some may argue that
his logic points precisely to that conclusion, since the principle of universality of
will lies at the heart of Spirit’s nature. This could imply either that most of the
world’s states evolve towards Hegel’s model ‘modern state’ (or are brought to it by
conquest) – or even more radically, that individual states will be subsumed under
one world-state. Given the predominance Hegel awards ‘the state’ (and different
‘national spirits’), particularly this latter might appear to stretch his logic beyond
its compass. But does it? We should be reminded that, in logic, Hegel treated ‘Rome’
as one ‘state’.
That we can reasonably raise such speculations about Hegel’s implied ‘end of
history’ suggests Hegel himself is not much help. Rather, he seems to have left us
with a paradox, for on the one hand he has claimed to have exhaustively laid out
the meaning and direction of history up to his present, which he has demonstrated
as nothing less than the culmination of world-history. Yet we do not know what
he thought this meant for his present world, and by implication for its future, either
as its continuance, its eventual decline, or even some further development. Of these
options, the last seems the least likely because ruled out by his logic. Spirit has, after
all, finally realised its Freedom in the manifestation of ‘the modern state’. Yet,
extraordinarily, it is just this last option Hegel appears to point to as a possibility
– and this returns to his view of the USA.
USA – the future?

We saw him earlier denying the USA any significance in world-history up to his
times. Because of its still immense potential for further colonisation, ‘the general
object of the existence of this State is not yet fixed and determined’. But on the
same grounds, Hegel announces that ‘America is therefore the land of the future,
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where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal
itself’. Extraordinarily, this suggests that History has not reached its consummation
in the Europe of Hegel’s ‘modern times’, but that some further stage(s) still beckon
for Spirit’s final realisation – and here, tantalisingly, we can revert to his analogy
of the individual’s life cycle. Elsewhere in his Introduction we saw Hegel liken the
fourth stage of World-history (his ‘German world’) to Spirit’s old age, followed by
his insistence that, whereas ‘the old age of Nature is weakness, . . . that of Spirit is
its perfect maturity and strength’.90 This reinforces the notion that, for Hegel, this
fourth stage was the ‘last’ in History, (other than a fifth – death – which he ascribes
to Nature but not to Spirit).
Yet describing America here as ‘the New World’, Hegel refers to the ‘Old World’
as indeed ‘old’, including Europe itself, saying that America ‘is a land of desire for
all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe’. Quoting his
hero Napoleon who supposedly said ‘this old Europe bores me’, Hegel then
announces ‘it is for America to abandon the ground on which hitherto the History
of the World has developed itself’. Quite how these passages impinge on the
integrity of Hegel’s philosophy of history, especially its alleged ‘end’ or consum-
mation, is difficult to judge – the more so since he then loftily dismisses the topic
of America as ‘a Land of the Future’ and ‘the dreams to which it may give rise’ as
falling outside the compass of history (i.e., ‘that which has been, and that which
is’),91 and thus also outside the compass of philosophy of history. Rather, he reverts
to his insistence that ‘philosophy’ is concerned with the Reason present in things.
He reiterates this in the very closing passages of his book where, if he thought his
philosophy implied a changing future derived from further self-revelations of Spirit,
he might be expected to have said so. Instead, he leaves us on an ambiguous tone,
saying of his times, ‘this is the point which consciousness has attained’. And since
‘the History of the World is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom
. . . we have confined ourselves to the consideration of that progress of the Idea.
. . . Philosophy concerns itself only with the glory of the Idea mirroring itself in the
History of the World’.92 This can be read as leaving open whether ‘consciousness’
has any further ‘point’ to ‘attain’. If he did think some new stage beckoned beyond
the ‘old age’ of Europe, he was hoisted on the petard of his own philosophy which
prevented him from exploring it – for apart from anything else, in his Philosophy of
Right he had already insisted on the futility of expecting ‘philosophy’ to raise hopes
of changing the world – a message which many interpreted as emphatically
conservative: ‘Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very
reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond,
supposed to exist, God knows where . . .’.93
Conclusion
Hegel’s philosophy of history is extraordinarily audacious, and it is perhaps this
very feature which renders its appraisal so difficult. Many historians abominate it
as speculation of the worst kind, founded on abstract principles having nothing to
234
do with history – this despite the fact that Hegel never claimed he was writing
history, but was instead treating history ‘philosophically’. So long as the history he
does treat of is not empirically incorrect, he is exonerated from much criticism for
omitting, and thereby potentially distorting, ‘the facts’. Rather, the whole point of
(speculative) philosophy of history for Hegel – as for anyone – is the endeavour to
extract from the material of history some overall meaning or intelligibility. Thus
we earlier saw Hegel insisting his theory depended on considering the actual
historical facts, from which he was able to derive the framework into which they
fitted. But equally he explained (using the analogy of Kepler’s scientific work) that
this framework did not spring newborn from the historical material but instead
depended upon a previous set of established principles relevant to the topic of
enquiry. However, this draws particular attention to what those principles are, and
as your guide I suggest this is ultimately where each reader should settle accounts
with Hegel’s philosophy of history.
If, for example, Kepler needed familiarity with Euclidean geometric principles in
order to derive, from his empirical studies of planets’ movements, a framework for
the laws of planetary motion, when it comes to the topic of world-history Hegel
tells us we need to be familiar with the principles involved in understanding ‘Spirit’
in order to derive, from the historical facts, the particular framework world-history
exhibits. Those principles, themselves part of a larger set concerning Existence
and Reason, he had set out years before and revolve around notions involving self,
consciousness, the objective world, will, freedom, and right. Hegel brought this rich
philosophical heritage to what he took to be its consummation in his Phenomenology
of Mind, and we have seen how he applies these principles to history.
Thus the challenge Hegel presents is not whether we ‘believe’ him, or in ‘Spirit’,
as in some religious act of faith, but whether we agree history is fundamentally
about what he calls ‘Spirit’. To Hegel a number of things seem obvious: that there
is a qualitative difference between human beings and animals; that in being self-
conscious, humans introduce a revolutionary, fundamental principle otherwise
absent from Existence – namely, that they are beings imbued with a self-directing
energy to strive towards aims, however petty or ambitious; that this is the very
condition of there being any ‘history’ at all; and that the logical heart of this human
activity – will – seeks ‘freedom’, whose ultimate realm cannot but centre on
individuals’ relation to each other in terms of ‘right’ – in other words, the realm of
the political organisation of ‘the state’ broadly conceived. Equally obvious to him
was that different states and corresponding national cultures have arisen in history;
and that, as much because of as despite dreadful setbacks, Freedom’s general
characteristics have been progressively made actual, as shown in certain parts of
the modern world. Viewed as a whole, then, there would be no intelligible history
without the phenomenon of Spirit, expressed via the fact of human self-
consciousness. Therefore, without a prior understanding of what Spirit means and
involves ( i.e., its ‘principles’), we cannot hope to understand history but can only
235
record its facts and, wandering in the dark, make of them (or not) whatever
erroneous ‘framework’ or meaning might occur to us.
Now, one could simply dismiss the notion that history has an intelligibility – or
claim it does demonstrate one, but not that argued by Hegel – or, that history is
indeed made intelligible by the notion of ‘Spirit’, but that ‘Spirit’ does not have
the properties Hegel ascribes it. But in each case, one would have to give reasons
for dismissing Hegel – and it is likely these would need to be philosophical rather
than historical. In the light of the scientific, empiricist, atheistical suppositions
underlying our times, the most likely objection to Hegel is not so much his notion
of the essential ‘spiritedness’ inherent in human-beings, but his apparent elevation
of this crucial feature into an impersonal, supernatural force or ‘Being’ – i.e., that
his thought is simply religion posing as philosophy.
However, let us consider arguments which could salvage Hegel from this
accusation. We take the force of gravity as ‘real’ – we see its effects distributed in
the workings of the natural world. But no one has ever suggested it is a personal or
human force, neither some kind of supernatural ‘Being’. It is an impersonal,
‘disembodied’ reality which not only explains but shapes much of our actuality.
Likewise, then, one might accept something like Condorcet’s notion of ‘progress’
arising from the ‘scientific’ development of the human mind as a principle
continually at work in the world. This principle (or ‘force’) obviously involves
human beings. More than this, it depends on them. But the same can be said for
Hegel’s notion of ‘Spirit’ – it involves human beings inasmuch as it is their being
self-conscious, hence ‘willing’, which manifests the principles underlying ‘Spirit’.
And thus it also depends on them for its working out in actual history. However,
that a principle involves and depends on human actions – such as Condorcet’s –
does not mean that human-beings (or some ‘supernatural’ agent) must have invented
it, nor make the realisation of the principle their conscious aim. In like manner,
the laws of gravity involve and depend on the properties of material objects, but
are obviously not their deliberate product. Rather, they remain an impersonal and
‘disembodied’ reality ‘behind’ material actuality.
This, then, may be a way of understanding Hegel’s philosophy of history. Although

recognising it involves some impersonal ‘principle’, it means we are no more
transported to a ‘supernatural’ realm of fantasy than when we talk of gravity or any
other ‘principle’ we see at work either in the natural or human world. That we
never ‘see’ gravity, or Hegel’s ‘Spirit’, does not matter. What matters is, do we see
these ‘principles’ at work?
One mundane problem is that few people know enough of ‘world-history’ to feel
confident of answering that question – a situation which can only worsen as even
the asking of such a question (i.e., the effort to ‘see the wood for the trees’) is hardly
encouraged by today’s professional historians. In their antipathy towards searching
for ‘principles’ underlying history (Hegel’s or any others) they are often still
influenced by a Western Cold War mentality which, in recoiling against both the
236
horrors of Nazism and the threat of communism, opposed any approach to history
which claimed to find ‘meaning’ in it. The perception was that such ‘theories’
spawned dangerously illiberal political ideologies which inspired mass movements
to believe ‘the inevitable march (or ‘logic’) of history’ was on their side. Curiously
inconsistent, the Western liberal-democratic tradition thus spurned the idea of a
‘logic’ to history, albeit happy to believe in the ‘logic’ of the impersonal forces of
the free market – namely, Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand of God’ at work in the
world, manifest in the beneficent, yet autonomous, operation of market economics.
But apart from such political suspicions some attach to any philosophy of history,
there are many who reject Hegel’s because they do indeed interpret his notion of
‘Mind’ and/or ‘Spirit’ as introducing the ‘supernatural’. But is this Hegel’s position?
It is true that in all his writings Hegel gives the impression that, in being ‘behind’
reality, ‘Mind’ is separate from it, and yet in some mysterious sense determining it
– an impression any guide finds equally difficult to avoid giving. Despite this, I
have tried to suggest how Hegel’s appeal to the operation of impersonal ‘principles’
underlying actuality need not imply transporting us to the incredible realm of some
supernatural agent. More important, however, is that neither did Hegel think it
implies this.
At one level he viewed such ‘supernaturalism’ as religion, which he saw as only
the symbolic expression of rational thought. At a deeper level, however, he did not
believe that the kind of philosophical idealism which proposes the dual reality
described above – the one ‘ideal’, the other ‘material’ – was philosophically true.
Rather, he thought the two are in fact an inseparable unity, which we make the
mistake of separating because we are ‘conscious’ of ‘reality’. This fosters the illusion
of the ‘ideal’ world of consciousness as distinct from the ‘real’ world of material
existence.94 Instead, at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy is his notion that Reality
is Reason, which he tried to express as follows: ‘. . . existence and self-consciousness
are the same being, the same not as a matter of comparison, but really and truly in
and for themselves. It is only a one-sided, unsound idealism which lets this unity
. . . appear on one side as consciousness, with a reality . . . over against it on the
other’.95 Applied to Hegel’s philosophy of history, then, this seems to imply either
that those who reject it because it demands belief in some supernatural agency
directing the course of earthly history have misunderstood him – or that he
misunderstood himself. Either way, this redirects attention to his fundamental
philosophy, and is to an extent precisely the challenge we find Karl Marx accepting
as we turn to explore the last grand example of speculative philosophy of history.
237
10
MARX ON HISTO RY
Introduction
Marx was born in Trier in the Rhineland province of Prussia in 1818 to middle-
class Jewish parents. He went to read law at Bonn University in 1835, from where
he moved to Berlin University, mixing his formal studies of law with his own studies
of history, literature, art history, and philosophy, culminating in the completion
of his doctoral thesis (comparing the classical philosophies of Democritus and
Epicurus) in April 1841. During these Berlin years Marx became familiar with the
philosophy of Hegel (whose death in 1831 had left a powerful legacy), and
associated with a group known as the Young Hegelians. These were radical
intellectuals who, unlike their counterparts, the Old Hegelians, did not interpret
Hegel as implying a staunchly conservative defence of the status quo in Prussia
and other German states. Instead, they seized upon Hegel’s ‘Idea of Freedom’ to use
as a weapon of criticism against Prussian authoritarianism. A passage from Engels
(1820–1895) who associated with the Young Hegelians in 1841 (and was from
1844 to become Marx’s life-long friend and co-worker) gives a flavour of their
idealism. ‘. . . Such is the power of the Idea [of Freedom] that he who has recognised
it cannot cease to speak of its splendour or to proclaim its all-conquering might.
. . . Let us not think any love, any gain, any riches too great to sacrifice gladly to
the Idea . . .’.1
After leaving Berlin University Marx went to Cologne to edit a paper which
became so radical in his hands that the Prussian authorities soon prohibited it,
prompting Marx to resign. That same summer, in 1842, he married, and in the
autumn moved to Paris to edit another German journal. There he wrote ever more
radical articles which evidenced his increasing conversion to communism, until
expelled in early 1845. He moved to Brussels, where he finally resolved his
intellectual doubts about communism, a task which not only involved a critical
examination of various socialist ideas gaining ground around Europe, but also (to
use his own words) involved ‘settling accounts’ with Hegel’s philosophy. Now
intellectually confident of his own distinctive theory of history, economics, and
politics, with Engels he set about working with embryonic communist movements
to propagandise working-class, democratic, and socialist parties towards
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MARX ON HISTORY
international solidarity along the lines of his ‘scientific socialism’, popularly

expounded in their Communist Manifesto published in 1848. Expelled from Belgium
that same year, Marx returned to Cologne to participate in the revolutionary events
beckoning in Germany, but was soon expelled. The French authorities refusing to
have him in Paris, he emigrated to London in August 1849, where (age 31) he
settled.
After these ‘watershed’ years of European revolutions in 1848–1849, Marx spent

most days in the British Museum’s Reading Room, reworking his theory of the
nature of capitalist economy and society (but also writing numerous essays and
articles), which evolved to become Das Kapital, the first volume being published
in 1867. Also, he played a dominant role in the organisation of the International
Working Men’s Association (The First International) in 1864, until its virtual
disbanding in 1872. Thereafter, in addition to continuing his work on volumes
two and three of Das Kapital despite deteriorating health, he took a particular
interest in the development of the German Social-Democratic Party from 1875
onwards, until his death in March 1883.
I have slanted the above sketch to Marx’s early years because it was during them
that he undertook the intellectual journey which explains the theory of history he
formulated by 1846. This remained essentially unaltered as the substratum to his
subsequent economic and political writings, including Das Kapital. This journey,
as indicated, involved Marx’s extricating himself from the allure of Hegel’s general
philosophy, as well as from Hegel’s philosophy of history in particular, to the point
where he formulated his own apparently diametrically opposed historical theory.
The latter has variously been called ‘scientific socialism’, ‘scientific communism’,
‘historical materialism’, or (of course) simply ‘Marxism’, and the journey towards
its formulation is often described as marking the transition from the ‘early’ to the
‘mature’ Marx. Partly because many of Marx’s writings from 1842–1846 were not
published until after his death, some not even discovered until the 1920s, and only
made available in English during the 1960s, this period of his thought has generated
much interest, reflected in many books re-evaluating the ‘philosophical’
foundations of his thinking. Thus we now have a superior understanding of the
philosophical underpinning to Marx’s theories than was available both to those
generations who subscribed to what they took to be ‘Marxism’ (or, Soviet-style
‘Marxism-Leninism’), and to their critics. The (especially political) ramifications
of this endemic ‘misunderstanding’ of Marx fall outside our theme. But the material
exposing it – the transition from the ‘young’ to the ‘mature’ Marx – is central to it,
for in addition to permitting us better insight into Marx’s mind, it also reveals an
early, embryonic philosophy of history preceding the ‘historical materialist’ theory
for which he is most famous.
239
Philosophical foundations: the early Marx

As indicated, at university Marx was attracted to the Young-Hegelian radicals
enthused by their master’s ‘Idea of Freedom’. Indeed, it was only shortly after
leaving university in 1841 that we find Marx idealistically writing about ‘human
emancipation’ and calling for people to have ‘real freedom’. He attacked Prussian
censorship, called for greater democracy, and criticised discrimination of the Jews.
Last chapter we noted room left by Hegel for at least some ‘fine-tuning’ of the
modern state, and Marx was amongst those who used Hegelian logic as a spear of
criticism, arguing that the kind of ‘freedom’ we saw Hegel referring to – that of freely
dutiful citizens of a state respectful of individual freedom within the context of a
communal will – was yet to be attained in Prussia. But it must be noted here that
Marx’s critical stance in no way refuted Hegel’s fundamental (philosophical)
idealism. Rather, it precisely exploited the belief that history is driven by the Idea
of Freedom – i.e., that there is an underlying meaning given to history through some
determining (extraneous?) logic. (In the article already quoted, Engels anticipates
‘the thousand-year reign of freedom’.)2 The problem was, for Marx, that in the real
world the modern state vaunted by Hegel radically failed to fulfil that Idea of
Freedom. Increasingly, this led Marx to criticise Hegel himself, as in his Contribution
to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law [Right].
Written in early 1843, (although not published until 1927, in German), Marx’s
objective in this seminal but difficult work was to show that Hegel’s concept of the
modern state was deeply flawed. It purports to exemplify freedom, yet only does so
at the level of citizenship of the state, which via its institutions claims to be the
unifying factor manifesting the communality of will of freely obligated citizens.
But Marx insists this universality of will and social purpose is phony because
completely abstract. In the real world of work and the concrete organisation of
society (i.e., ‘civil society’) below the state’s institutions, numerous antagonistic
divisions of wealth, status, class, religion, property, and power abound. This is
where individuals live their real lives, and yet as (political) citizens they are all
treated as ‘equal’, afforded the rights to private property, religious expression,
equality before the law, and potentially (via universal suffrage) the right to political
representation. For Marx, such ‘citizenship,’ is a purely abstract expression of man’s
communal nature – in fact, a contradiction to it, since
in order to behave as an actual citizen of the state, and to attain political

significance and effectiveness, he must step out of his civil reality,
disregard it, and withdraw from this whole organisation into his
individuality; for the sole existence which he finds for his citizenship of
the state is his sheer, blank, individuality . . .’.3
Thus, far from experiencing his citizenship as his social participation in a genuine
universality of will, his political existence ‘as a citizen of the state is an existence
outside his communal existences and is therefore purely individual’.
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MARX ON HISTORY
But what of the great advances towards ‘freedom’ which the French and
American Revolutions apparently achieved in their institution of ‘the universal
rights of man and the citizen’, whereby ordinary people were politically
‘emancipated’ from exploitation, inequality, and discrimination on grounds of
religion, social standing, and property? Marx’s reply (even clearer in his article, On
the Jewish Question, written later in 1843) is splendidly ironic. These much-vaunted
‘rights of man’ characterising the modern state do not free people from the divisive
inequalities in actual society. On the contrary, their very function is to copper-
bottom in law the bases of social division by giving all citizens the right, for
example, to freedom of religion and freedom to own private property. Thus, for
Marx, although the modern state does offer political emancipation from religious
and property discrimination (by permitting freedom of religion and removing
property qualifications from citizenship), it does not free people from such
discriminations in real society. On the contrary, it maintains and even exacerbates
it. For example, if by abolishing property qualifications for the vote, ‘the masses
have won a victory over the property owners and financial wealth’, this might mean
the state has freed itself from property restrictions – however, this ‘not only fails to
abolish private property but even presupposes it’.4 Likewise with other ‘universal
rights’, e.g., ‘man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom . . . He
was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage in
business’.5
Thus the problem with the modern state, for Marx, is that in political terms it
establishes a coherently equal society in which the essential communality of man
is no longer divided by wealth, rank, religion, birth, and other divisive distinctions.
Yet it only does so by ‘freeing’ individuals to pursue their own merely individualistic
aims without hindrance from social accountability (i.e., from ‘political’ control).
In passages concerning previous feudal society Marx suggests there was at least
something authentically social about it, now swept away by the modern state. It is
true there were gross inequalities of rank, wealth, and power in feudal society. And
yet at least these differences were given directly political expression in their
hierarchical constitutions, such that the overall social organisation in which each
individual lived was transparent to him. In that sense, there was an authentic
society, governing itself as a society, rather than what Marx saw as the situation
under the modern state, where any sense of social solidarity and communal
consciousness was stripped from man in a ‘civil society’ left to the pursuit of self-
interestedness. As Marx put it, ‘egoistic man . . ., the member of civil society, is thus
the basis . . . of the political state. He is recognised as such by this state in the rights
of man’.6
The solution, for the early Marx, is a society and ‘state’ where Hegel’s ideal of
‘universality’ truly pertains. He refers to this variously as ‘democracy’, ‘the genuine
state’, or the condition of ‘human emancipation’. Quite what this means for the
form of state under his ideal of ‘democracy’ is not spelt out. Yet this may be precisely
the point, for Marx insists that ‘in democracy the constitution, the law, the state
itself, insofar as it is a political constitution, is only the self-determination of the
241
people’.7 In other words, in the ‘genuine’ state it is up to the people to decide what
‘political’ functions should exist and what form they should take – but crucially this
is premised on people not being divided amongst themselves.8
This returns us to Marx’s view of the phony claims of the modern state to
exemplify ‘universality’ via its ‘rights of man’. For example, regarding liberty, Marx
complains: ‘[b]ut the right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man
with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation,
the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself’. Similarly, the right
to private property is ‘the right to enjoy one’s property and to dispose of it at one’s
discretion, without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-
interest’.9
Like Robert Owen, the French ‘utopians’, and other socialists preceding him,
Marx thus identifies individualism, egoism, and exploitation as endemic to modern
society. But he goes much further than them by relating the modern state to this
non-communal society, as being simply reflective and supportive of it. Marx’s
idealistic alternative is ‘democracy’, and we can see how he equates it with ‘human
emancipation’ in the following passage: ‘. . . only when man has recognised and
organised his own powers as social forces, and consequently no longer separates
social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human
emancipation have been accomplished’.10
Towards private property and the proletariat

So far we have seen Marx severely critical of Hegel’s estimation of ‘the modern
state’, yet not because he doubts Hegel’s underlying philosophy centred on ‘the Idea
of Freedom’. But his thinking developed, resulting in an article published early in
1844 as an introduction to his earlier Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
of Law. Here, he turns from ‘the state’, and instead focuses on the reasons why civil
society is so fractious. To do this, he turns to primarily economic factors, claiming
that ‘the relation of industry, of the world of wealth generally, to the political world
is one of the major problems of modern times’.11 In one of the earliest indications
of his subsequent ‘class’ theory of history, he focuses on the connection between
private property and classes or ‘estates’, claiming that periodically in history a
certain class emerges which, in order to emancipate itself from subjection to higher
classes, presents itself as the saviour of the whole of society, and is indeed ‘perceived
and acknowledged as its general representative’. He claims the bourgeoisie played
exactly that role in the French Revolution, in its struggle against the classes which
represented ‘all the defects of society’, namely, the French nobility and clergy. He
even anticipates the time in French history when, as ‘the role of emancipator
therefore passes in dramatic motion to the various classes of the French nation’, it
finally passes to a class which will ‘organise[s] all conditions of human existence on
the presupposition of social freedom’12 – a vague formulation which nevertheless
suggests that changes in the fundamental economic organisation of civil society,
involving the displacement of previously dominant classes, may produce a civil
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MARX ON HISTORY
society no longer riven by egoism and divisions, but instead provide the conditions
necessary for that ‘democracy’ he had described earlier. Indeed, referring to ‘modern
nations’ other than Germany (which he regarded as laughably backward), he looks
forward ‘to the height of humanity which will be the near future of those nations’.13
Tantalisingly, however, he then leaves France aside, and asks what the
possibilities of such a movement are in Germany. Scathingly, he says that in
Germany there is neither one particular class which marks it as ‘the negative
representative of society’, nor one which has ‘the breadth of soul that identifies
itself, even for a moment, with the soul of the nation’, such that the political
progress apparently possible in France and elsewhere seems impossible. This
prompts Marx to ask, ‘[w]hat, then, is the positive possibility of a German
emancipation?’, and he answers that in Germany’s case the only solution is ‘the
formation of . . . a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society’, a class
which ‘claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is
perpetrated against it’, a class which has a genuinely ‘universal character by its
universal suffering’, and which therefore ‘cannot emancipate itself without
emancipating all other spheres of society’. This class is the proletariat. It is unique
because premised on not resting on any share of private property (i.e., ownership
of national wealth and resources) – and it is a definite class because it is not ‘the
naturally arising poor’ which feature as flotsam in any society, but rather is
the specific product ‘of the rising industrial development’,14 i.e., an integral part
of the functioning of society. Marx claims ‘the proletariat is coming into being in
Germany’, and that its demand will be ‘the negation of private property’. Although
he does not elaborate on this here, he makes it clear that the logic of the proletarian
demand – a civil society no longer based on the previous class divisions
symptomatic of differing degrees of ownership of private property – equates with
those necessary conditions of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, or ‘human emancipation’ he
earlier derived from his (critical) interpretation of Hegel.
The other theme emerging in this piece reflects Marx’s increasingly uneasy
relation with idealist philosophy, both of Hegel himself and its radical
interpretation by the Young-Hegelians. Marx begins to display impatience with
philosophical criticism which does not recognise and incorporate the need for
practical change – i.e., a transformation of the nature of civil society. For example,
after famously referring to religion as ‘the opium of the people’, he argues that ‘[t]o
abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real
happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the
demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions’. Thus, speaking of political
theory in general, it follows that ‘the criticism of speculative philosophy of law
turns, not towards itself, but towards problems which can only be solved by one
means – practice’.15
In this article Marx wrote about Germany specifically, and yet in the course of his
analysis he stumbled upon the principal ingredients of the version of communism
for which he became famous – for within a few months, in his 1844 Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts, he generalised these thoughts on class, private property, the
243
proletariat, and ‘human emancipation’, to all modern societies. No longer

concerned with Hegel’s theory of the state, he concentrates on criticising the
capitalist basis of modern civil society. Capitalist society is deeply divided, contra-
dictory, and fundamentally inhumane, as evidenced most sharply by the situation
of the proletariat (the industrial wage-labourer). Marx observed that ‘the worker
becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces’, that ‘with the increasing value
of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of
men’. This is because ‘labour produces not only commodities: it produces itself and
the worker as a commodity’.16 From here, Marx elaborated his now famous theory
of ‘alienation’, deriving from that Hegelian notion of ‘self-objectification’ explored
in the previous chapter.
Marx first adapts the notion to man’s labour generally, saying that ‘the product
of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object, which has become
material: it is the objectification of labour. Labour’s realisation is its objectification’.
Yet in the actual world of capitalist economic relations, ‘this realisation of labour
appears as loss of realisation for the workers; objectification as loss of the object: . . .
as alienation’. This, however, is not merely a subjective feeling on behalf of the worker.
Rather, in the actual world, ‘the more objects the worker produces the less he can
possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital’.17
Marx then extends this notion to the activity of work itself, for he claims that
because the worker confronts the objects of his labour as ‘alien’ to him, then the
very activity of producing the object is also ‘alien’ to him. ‘If then the product of
labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation
of activity . . .’. This is demonstrated by the fact that in his work, the worker ‘does
not affirm himself but denies himself, . . . does not develop freely his physical and
mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.’ He ‘therefore only feels
himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself’. The key to this is
that labour is forced upon him by someone else (the capitalist), and thus, not being
‘his spontaneous activity, . . . it is the loss of his self’. Indeed, Marx observes that
‘man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating,
drinking, procreating . . . and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to
be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human
becomes animal’.18
This takes us back to Hegel’s distinction between humans and animals, and
Marx elaborates upon this in order to bring his moral objection to capitalism to its
dramatic culmination. For Hegel, (self-)consciousness differentiates man from
animals. Just so for the early Marx. He asserts that the character of the human
species is ‘free, conscious activity’. According to Marx, ‘the animal is immediately
one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it’, whereas ‘Man makes
his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness; . . . his own life
is an object for him’, and because of this, his activity is essentially (i.e., in principle)
‘free activity’.19
In other words, the essence of being human is freedom, the necessary condition
of which is self-consciousness, by which man can make his own life an object of his
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MARX ON HISTORY
will. The italicised words are precisely the terms in which Hegel explained
‘freedom’. But what Marx has done is unequivocally to transfer this Hegelian logic
from ‘Spirit’ to man, and his complaint is that under an economic system in which
capital employs labour, ‘man’ is alienated from his essential human nature, because
that nature is freely productive work. Under capitalism, work is imposed by others
(for selfish ends) upon men who are thereby deprived of the capacity to make their
lives the object of their will. Instead, in a cruel reverse, men are forced to sell what
should be their human-affirming activity simply to keep alive.
Marx’s ‘immature’ philosophy of history

If such ideas might appear over-dramatised, we should recall that Marx was referring
specifically to the plight of the industrial wage-labourer (the ‘proletarian’) of the
early decades of the nineteenth century, during which it has been claimed, for
example, that one generation of northern English mill-owners would run through
three generations of mill-workers. However, in these 1844 Manuscripts he
generalised his analysis to imply that ‘man as such’ has become radically alienated
from his human essence. This is because Marx conceives of man’s history as a process
whereby, through his productive activity (‘work’), man has progressively ‘objecti-
fied’ or ‘realised’ himself in the actual world, altering it in accordance with his
human needs. The combination of modern industrial production and the natural
sciences, however, has enormously accelerated this process of mankind’s self-
expression, whereby ‘the nature which develops in human history . . . is man’s real
nature’. Marx claims that ‘we have before us the objectified essential powers of man
in the form of sensuous . . . useful objects . . . displayed in ordinary material industry’.
Nature has become increasingly ‘humanised’, such that ‘history itself is a real part
of natural history – of nature developing into man’.20 And yet the huge irony, for
Marx, is that as man ‘duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually,
but also actively, in reality, and therefore . . . contemplates himself in a world that
he has created’, he does not recognise himself in that world. Why? Because ‘in
tearing away from man the object of his production, . . . estranged [alienated] labour
tears from him his species life, his real objectivity as a member of the species’.21
The private ownership of the means of production thus exemplifies this giant
irony of ‘alienation’ in human history. For Marx it seems that just as, via modern
industry and science, humanity is approaching conditions which promise its full
self-objectification, it has never been more cut off from experiencing its self-
fulfilment. This is because of the modern system whereby capitalists (the property
owners) pay others (the property-less proletariat) a wage to work the means of
production so that they (the capitalists) can make a profit by the sale of the
proletarians’ work. Thus the almost mystical significance of ‘the proletariat’ for
Marx. As claimed in his earlier article, on the one hand it is a distinctive class
because integral to the functioning of modern industrial society, but also there is
a sense in which it is not a class because, unlike other classes, it occupies no rank
whatsoever in property-holding, but is merely a commodity to be variously
245
exploited by them. By a plausible, even elegant, logic it follows for Marx that the
only ‘class-interest’ of the proletariat is to abolish private ownership of economic
resources altogether. But in removing the very basis for its existence as a class, it
would also be removing the basis of any classes in society, since their existence
derives from a civil society organised around private property.
The logical result, then, of the proletarians’ interest is a classless civil society
characterised by the social ownership of the means of production. These would no
longer be worked to make a profit (for capitalists), but be worked to meet the agreed
needs of society. In short, we arrive at the practical basis for that ‘universality’ of
will underlying Hegel’s notion of freedom – and this is why Marx refers to the
proletariat as providing ‘the key to the riddle of history’. Its unique destiny is to
emancipate not only itself but, in so doing, the whole of society by realising the
universal will of man. Marx refers to this new society as ‘communism’, and describes
its significance in thoroughly Hegelian terms. It is ‘the positive transcendence of
. . . human self-estrangement, and therefore . . . the real appropriation of the human
essence by and for man’. It is ‘the genuine resolution of the conflict between man
and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between
existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, . . . between
the individual and the species’. Moreover, still thinking in Hegelian terms, Marx
suggests that the movement towards ‘communism’ is in fact nothing less than the
meaning of world-history displaying itself.
Communism [is] the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e.,

human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the
entire wealth of previous development . . . Communism is the riddle of
history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. The entire
movement of history [is communism’s] actual act of genesis . . . [and] also
. . . the comprehended and known process of its becoming.22
Here, then, in these abstract formulations, is nothing less than an (undeveloped)

‘philosophy of history’ from an early Marx clearly indebted to Hegel, despite being
centred on the self-realisation of ‘man’ rather than on that of Hegel’s ambiguous
‘World-spirit’. However, another revealing feature of the 1844 Manuscripts is
Marx’s increasingly ambivalent attitude towards Hegel’s fundamental philosophy.
Although captive to Hegel’s logic regarding ‘freedom’, ‘universality’, ‘self-
objectification’, and ‘alienation’, we have already seen Marx’s growing impatience
with abstract philosophising which ignores practical reality. This reappears imme-
diately after the above ‘philosophical’ passages on the movement of history as ‘the
return of man to himself’, for Marx adds: ‘It is easy to see that the entire
revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical
basis in the movement of private property – more precisely, in that of the economy’.23
This suggestion – that economic factors underlie the movement of history – is of
course thoroughly un-Hegelian, since for Hegel it is Spirit’s impulse towards self-
consciousness of its essence, Freedom, which underlies world-history. Marx’s
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MARX ON HISTORY
thinking, it seems, may be losing its coherence just at the point where he attempts
to formulate his own philosophy of history. Why was this so?
Feuerbach and ‘materialism’

A key factor in explaining Marx’s philosophical difficulties in these 1844 texts is
Feuerbach’s strong impact on his thinking. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) was
until 1839 a follower of Hegel’s philosophical idealism, believing that reality is
infused with Reason. But he then radically altered his ideas, and propounded a
materialist philosophy based on sense-perception. Now, for Feuerbach, reality
consists solely of the material world, whose nature is apprehended through the
senses. The reality of the material world of objects is irreducible and unsurpassable
– there is no ‘logic’ behind it. Existence is not the Hegelian fusion of Being and
Thought, of the ‘real’ and the ‘rational’. ‘The real in its reality . . . is the real as an
object of the senses; it is the sensuous. Truth, reality, and sensation are identical’.24
What, then, becomes of ‘God’, (or of Hegel’s ‘Mind’)? Feuerbach’s answer is that
God is simply man’s idealised image of man himself. ‘God is nothing other than
the original and the model of man; corresponding to how God is and what he is,
man must be and wants to be or at least hopes to be in the future’. . . .25 This is
because ‘the essence of a being is recognised . . . only through its object. . . . Thus,
the object of the eye is neither tone nor smell, but light. In the object of the eye,
however, its essence is revealed to us. . . . He who cultivates the soil is a farmer, he
who catches fish is a fisherman’. He observes that ‘God is an object . . . only of
man’, and thus ‘what is expressed in the being of this object [God] is merely the
peculiar essence of man’.26 Thus, God ‘is man’s own essence and goal conceived as
a real being’. This explains the attributes of God in theology – e.g., omnipotence,
omnipresence, and omniscience. They are simply man’s own consciousness of the
capacities of mankind’s nature.
And yet because man’s actual possibilities have historically been limited, man
idealises his nature into a transcendent, unapproachable being – ‘God’ – and bows
down in self-abnegation before his own fetish. ‘Where else than in the pains and
needs of man does this being who is without pain and without needs have its ground
and origin? . . . Only in man’s wretchedness does God have his birthplace’.27 In
short, man alienates himself in religion.
From this standpoint Feuerbach launches his fundamental criticism of Hegel’s
idealism. He tells us that ‘the culmination of modern philosophy is the Hegelian
philosophy’, and yet ‘it is . . . nothing other than theology . . . transformed into
philosophy’.28 But he, Feuerbach, has rumbled Hegel, and instead proposes a
new philosophy which will at last emancipate man from the debilitating influence
of (religious) alienation and Hegelian ‘speculative’ philosophy. This new
philosophy rests not on ‘God’ or (philosophically) on some disembodied Reason.
Rather, ‘it rests not on a beingless, colourless, and nameless reason, but on reason
saturated with the blood of man’. Repeatedly, Feuerbach stresses that man is a
sensuous being of flesh and blood, and therefore the new philosophy ‘corresponding
247
to the needs of mankind and of the future’29 ‘declares that only the human is
the rational; man is the measure of reason’,30 – man, that is, as the species, for ‘the
single man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself as a moral
being nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in
the community and unity of man with man’.31
Feuerbach, Marx, and Hegel

Marx was impressed by Feuerbach’s ideas, and in the 1844 Manuscripts he furthered
the task of criticising Hegel’s philosophy at its very heart – i.e., idealism. Marx’s
essential complaint is that instead of viewing self-consciousness as a property of
human nature, Hegel regards human nature as ‘a quality of self-consciousness’.
Because of this mystification, in Hegel man is essentially ‘regarded as a non-objective,
spiritual being’.32 It follows, for Hegel, that if in his actual material life man does
not feel fully objectified (i.e., is alienated), then the solution lies in re-arranging
his consciousness, i.e., in ‘re-thinking’ himself, rather than re-arranging his material
conditions – akin, arguably, to psychotherapeutic theories which purport to solve
psychological problems on the couch, through altering one’s consciousness via a
revised self-knowledge, rather than addressing the actual circumstances causing the
psychological problem.
But for Marx, (as Feuerbach had argued), ‘Man is directly a natural being . . . a
corporeal, sensuous, objective being’, and this means that ‘he has real, sensuous
objects as the object of his being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in
real, sensuous objects’. Thus, because Hegel’s philosophy depends on the notion
that material reality (including human history) is the expression of disembodied
Mind, it is fundamentally flawed. According to Marx this entraps Hegel into the
notion that all materiality, whatever form it takes, is an alienation of Spirit and thus
ultimately something to be spurned by ‘self-consciousness’ – akin to the mystic’s
rejection of the actual, material world and his retreat into his self. As we have seen,
Marx’s view is different. If one is alienated by one’s actual circumstances, then it
is those circumstances which need to be changed.
The importance Marx attaches to man as an objective being, a part of Nature, is
thus clear enough. However, this does not mean man is like any other animal, for
we have already seen Marx stress his uniqueness in being self-conscious. He returns
to the point. ‘But man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being.
That is to say, he is a being for himself. Therefore he is a species being, and has to
. . . manifest himself as such both in his being and in his knowing’. What does this
imply? Again, Marx reverts to that embryonic theory of history expressed earlier:
[t]herefore, human objects are not natural objects as they immediately

present themselves, and neither is human sense . . . immediately . . . human
sensibility . . . Neither nature objectively nor nature subjectively is
directly given in a form adequate to the human being. And as everything
natural has to come into being, man too has his act of origin – history –
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MARX ON HISTORY
which, however, is for him a known history, and hence as an act of origin
it is a conscious self-transcending act of origin. History is the true natural
history of man.33
These are difficult passages, but taken in conjunction with his previous references
to labour as man’s objectification, and to ‘communism’ as the solution to the riddle
of history, we can reconstruct Marx’s thought. Having dismissed both Hegel’s
‘Spirit’ and Hegel’s man as fantastical non-beings because non-objective, Marx is
arguing that man is nevertheless unique in being self-conscious. This permits man
to produce his own conditions, by changing the world given him in nature. In his
activity of changing the world, man is thus ‘producing’ himself, and is conscious of
that ‘self’ as imprinted on, or expressed in, the world he produces. In this sense,
then, history is the process of human self-realisation – the process of man’s ‘coming-
to-be’. Yet although this giant process of world-history has made huge strides
particularly since the Scientific Revolution and the increasingly cooperative nature
of productive activity, man fails to experience his increasing self-fulfilment and
‘species nature’ because of the alienating impact of private possession of the
economic resources which underly class-divisions. The industrial proletarian,
whose working life is merely a commodity, is the supreme exemplar of this
alienation. And this is why ‘communism, as the supersession of private property,
is the vindication of real human life as man’s possession’34 – that is, ‘communism’
provides the objective circumstances, through social control of the productive
process, for the realisation of man’s potential to experience the world as his own,
thus ‘solving the riddle of history’.
This, then, is the embryonic philosophy of history amongst these disorganised 1844
Manuscripts. For Marx, history is nothing less than the process whereby a species
whose essence is self-consciousness undertakes the long journey of fulfilling its self
(its nature) via the mediation of ‘objectifying’ itself in the real world. Both the
concepts and the logic of this theory derive directly from Hegel, revolving as they
do around the interplay between a subjective consciousness and the external,
objective world it engenders, and how in experiencing this ‘self-objectification’ as
alien to itself, it progresses (dialectically) to overcome this defect. And yet the
influence also of Feuerbach is dramatic, for whereas in Hegel this being is Mind or
‘Spirit’, for Marx this being is ‘man’ – and ‘man’, moreover, who although indeed
self-conscious, is an objective, natural, sensual being of flesh and blood. Man’s
project (the meaning of history) is to ‘realise’ his nature via a process of mediation
between his consciousness and the external world – and he does this by
‘objectifying’ himself in productive activity. But whereas for Hegel (at least,
according to Marx) the external world manifested by ‘Spirit’ is always alien from
that of pure Self-consciousness, such that the latter must always transcend it and
return to its self as ‘Mind’, this is not the case with ‘man’. Because ‘man’ is an
objective, natural being, the objective ‘external’ world is not alien to him. It is true
that as raw nature it is alien – it does not reflect human nature. But in his work
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in/upon the external world, man constantly alters it to accommodate it to his bodily
and mental needs. Thus, ‘objectification’ is not ultimately alienating (as in Hegel),
but is in principle direct ‘self-realisation’.
However, that the world man creates is not experienced as self-realising, or
‘human’, but as alienating, is because of the divisive factors of power and property
relations which reduce most of mankind’s productive activity to the status of a
commodity. This perverts the living experience of the affected class not only
‘subjectively’ in terms of how they feel but objectively insofar as they are poverty-
stricken, insecure, and powerless amidst a land of plenty – and (it is fair to assume
from Marx’s comments) it is equally alienating for the rich and powerful who,
although materially comfortable, have an equally perverted consciousness of what
it is to be ‘human’ in their exploitative, egoistic lives.
The resonance of Marx’s ‘immature’ philosophy of history

Although much interest in this early, neo-Hegelian, philosophy of history by Marx
centres on its relation to his later theory of ‘historical materialism’ (treated below),
its scope and audacity merit considering it in its own right despite its sketchy nature.
Noticeable first is the obvious moral dimension the concept of ‘alienation’
introduces into it, reminiscent of Rousseau’s strictures on ‘civilised’ society. Second,
the theory continues that ‘politicisation’ of philosophy of history we noted as a
feature developing in the Enlightenment. In Marx’s case this clearly revolves
around the reconstructing of a civil society no longer based on private-property-
based economic and social relations – ie ‘communism’, (‘practical humanism’, or
‘true democracy’). Today this belief in ‘communism’ can seem outdated, although
what Marx meant by it in the 1844 Manuscripts is extremely general – but even as
such, seems far removed from its controversial twentieth-century versions. (Neither
is it clear that in this early theory Marx saw ‘communism’ as historically inevitable.)
Rather, it is another feature of Marx’s theory which resonates in today’s world
– namely, his notion of the overall meaning of human history as the process of
altering the external, natural world to accommodate it to our human nature – i.e.,
that history is man ‘humanising’ the world. We now know Marx was merely on the
threshold of the advances since made in ‘man’s conquest of nature’. And even now,
these advances promise to accelerate at a pace and encompass a scope unheralded
in history, such that increasing numbers of people question the wisdom of the
process. Ecological concerns abound as human activity deliberately or otherwise
alters the planet’s systems. Medical possibilities raise increasingly fundamental
dilemmas regarding our notions of how, and how long, we live our lives. And
perhaps above all, genetic engineering, not only of plants and animals, but of
human beings, raises into the starkest relief the issue of what it is to ‘be human’.35
In short, if in Marx’s day, questions regarding what it actually means to ‘humanise’
the world could be judged rather speculative, in today’s world it beckons to have
literal import. In this light it is worth revisiting the efforts Marx made to directly
address this question as central to his early philosophy of history.
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MARX ON HISTORY
His thinking on this begins with his notion that ‘in his work upon inorganic nature,
man proves himself a conscious species being, i.e., as a being that treats the species
as its own essential being. . . . [a]n animal only produces what it immediately needs
for itself or its young, . . . whilst man produces universally’. What Marx means is
that man’s productive activity is not limited to his individual physical needs, but
reflects the multifarious attributes of his species, sensual and intellectual. Thus,
‘the universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which
makes all nature his inorganic body’, but a body ‘which he must first prepare to make
[it] palatable and digestible’.36
Further on, Marx tries to explain what the truly human experience of the
objective world should be. Ideally,
[m]an appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive

manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the
world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing,
experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – . . . are in . . . their orientation to
the object, the appropriation of that object; . . . their orientation to the
object is the manifestation of the human reality.
Ideally, then, ‘all objects become for him the objectification of himself, become objects
which confirm and realise his individuality. . . . The manner in which they become
his depends on the nature of the objects and on the nature of the essential power
corresponding to it’.
What does this mean? Marx explains that any individual’s experience of the world
depends upon what ‘essential’ powers he has. For example, ‘the most beautiful
music has no sense for the unmusical ear’, and this is (presumably) simply a ‘natural’
misfortune. However, any such block to the possibility of human experience pales
into insignificance compared to the damage caused by the alienating effects of a
private-property based society and culture. ‘Private property has made us so stupid
and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as
capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc. – in
short, when it is used by us’. Referring to man’s ‘essential’ powers, Marx complains
that because of this utilitarian attitude to the world, ‘In place of all these physical
and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these
senses – the sense of having’. (We might today gloss this as the ‘commodification’
of experience in our ‘consumer’ societies).
Instead, he looks forward to a time when, via ‘the transcendence of private
property’ ‘all human senses and attributes’ will be ‘emancipated’. This emancipation
is based upon a new society where ‘need or enjoyment has . . . lost its egotistical
nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use’. In this new
situation, man’s senses will ‘relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing’,
by which Marx means that one will be able to find in the thing or object that which
stimulates our human sensibilities. For example, ‘For the starving man it is not the
human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It could just
251
as well be there in its crudest from’ – or, ‘[t]he dealer in minerals sees only the
commercial value but not the beauty and the specific character of the mineral’.37
Finally, however, we return to Marx’s theme of the ‘universality’ of man, for he

claims the most pervasive block to human experiencing of the world has
been because individuals live in circumstances which alienate them from their
species-consciousness. We have already noted Marx’s rejection of egoism and
individualism, and he seems to suggest that such a ‘non-social’ consciousness blunts
the capacity for human sensitivity because individuals are unable to benefit from
an openness to the multifarious ‘essential’ capacities of mankind. For this reason,
‘the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social man’, and it is in
elaborating on this apparently bizarre claim that his assorted ideas on human
experience and the meaning of history reach their summation.
Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being

is the richness of subjective human sensibility . . . either cultivated or
brought into being’ – that is, ‘a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in
short, senses capable of human gratifications, senses affirming themselves
as essential powers of man.
He continues: ‘For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the
practical senses (will, love, etc.), – in a word, human sense – comes to be by virtue
of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. The forming38 of the five senses is a
labour of the entire history of the world down to the present’.39
Sufficient has been said to justify our claim that in the 1844 Manuscripts Marx sets
out the principles of a ‘philosophy of history’. Indeed, given his interest in Hegel
it is difficult to see how he could have avoided doing so. However, his ideas only
amount to a framework of key concepts. The reader cannot fail to notice that Marx
has not offered any actual history as yet! However, we can see the direction his
mind was taking. Shortly after the above passages on history as the ‘objectification’
of man and the ‘humanisation’ of nature, he says that if we wish to trace this
formative process we must look at man’s work or industry, since then ‘we see how
the history of industry . . . [is] the open book of man’s essential powers, the perceptibly
existing human psychology’.40 Clearly, then, although the framework of his (1844)
philosophy of history was infused with aspects of Hegelian philosophy, its empirical
content would have been markedly different because it would have focused on
man’s productive activity – ‘the history of industry’ – rather than on (Hegelian)
changing phases of Self-consciousness. And this is precisely what his ‘mature’
theory of history is to focus on. However, having argued that ‘history is the true
natural history of man’, Marx added, ‘on which more later’.41 But he does not fulfil
this intention. Instead, in the few remaining pages of the 1844 Manuscripts Marx
returns, like a dog worrying a bone, to criticising Hegel’s concept of Mind and the
alienation of Self-consciousness, at which point he abandoned the Manuscripts,
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unfinished. When, more than a year later, he returned to flesh out his theory of
history, that theory appears to have undergone a transformation.
Marx’s revised theory of history – ‘Historical Materialism’
From ‘philosophy’ to ‘practice’: Marx’s epistemology

The reason Marx abandoned the 1844 Manuscripts (only written for self-
clarification in any event) was partly that he had argued himself into a blind alley.
In talking of history as man’s self-objectification, throughout the Manuscripts he
employs the concept ‘man’, meaning the abstraction ‘mankind’. But when he posed
the question, ‘how . . . does man come to alienate his labour?’, suddenly this
abstraction ‘creates the domination of the person who does not produce’42 – a
confused answer because somehow real, class-divided men have emerged as if
produced by ‘mankind’. As he explored this further, he realised the need to abandon
such ‘philosophical’ abstractions as ‘man’, and talk only of actual men (i.e., real men
and women). But this was no mere technical point for Marx. On the contrary, it
persuaded him there was something fundamentally wrong with ‘philosophy’ itself
insofar as, at least in its idealist tradition (exemplified by Hegelianism), it sets up
abstractions and treats them as real things. Hence the blind alley he had
encountered when asking how ‘man’ came to alienate ‘himself’. In short, it may be
reasonable to talk abstractly of ‘mankind’ as comprising both masters and workers,
but it is as difficult to see how a ‘mankind’ solely comprised of workers can somehow
become a real agent and produce masters as, presumably, also part of ‘mankind’ – and
an ‘alien’ one at that!
By 1845 Marx’s doubts about the efficacy of (idealist) philosophy to talk sensibly
about reality crystallised into his Theses on Feuerbach, where he laid the basis of
‘historical materialism’ as an alternative approach to understanding the world.
Now, Marx not only dismissed Hegelian idealism, but also criticised Feuerbach on
the grounds that his materialism was in fact just another species of idealism. This
issue gets to the heart of the ‘mature’ Marx. He complains that all previous
materialist philosophies (including Feuerbach) are incorrect because they believe
in the self-sufficient reality of ‘objective’ things in nature – i.e., they assume there
‘really’ are ‘trees’, ‘rocks’, ‘horses’ existing as such, and which the human senses
straightforwardly perceive as if the mind were like a mirror, reflecting a given reality.
Marx calls this ‘contemplative materialism’, and says it is erroneous. Rather, our
ideas of things in the external world are not simple ‘reflections’ but are mediated
by how those things impinge upon our practical experience as beings in that world.
As beings of flesh and blood (rather than pure intellects) we notice things and
their properties insofar as they are relevant to us ‘in practice’
This can be explained by some simple examples. Imagine the proverbial cave-
man bumping into something hard, which hurts him. He will therefore notice ‘it’,
and let us suppose he calls ‘it’ a rock. He has become aware of ‘rocks’, but all he
means by ‘a rock’ as yet is something hard which hurts if one bumps into it. ‘There
253
are such things as rocks’ – this idea about the world, albeit crude, is at least some
help to him. Now suppose he bumps into another thing which is hard, but it drops
fruit he can eat. He will thus notice this object, and rather than call it a rock,
distinguish it by calling it, e.g., a tree. There are now such things as ‘rocks’ and
‘trees’, but their meaning is established through man’s experience of them in
practice. By the word ‘rock’ our cave-man now means something which is not only
hard and can hurt, but something which does not bear fruit. This is how we can
conceive the development of human consciousness of the external world, whereby
through ‘practice’ (i.e., the manner in which we respond to ‘objects’) we extend our
‘understanding’ of that world’s nature. Whether there are ‘really’ such things as
‘rocks’ or ‘trees’ is a meaningless question. The point is, are they useful ideas in
practice? (Let us note it was not until the 1960s that people became aware of
‘teenagers’, and not until people flew airplanes that they became aware of ‘air-
pockets’. Does this mean that teenagers, or air-pockets, did not exist in previous
history? Alternatively, does this mean that teenagers and air-pockets will always
exist?)
Thus we see the force of Marx’s assertion that ‘the question whether objective
truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a
practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-
worldliness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality [validity] or non-
reality of thinking which isolates itself from practice is a purely scholastic question’,
(e.g., such futile ‘philosophical’ questions as ‘how many angels can stand on the
head of a pin’). All such erroneous thinking stems from the fallacy whereby ‘things,
reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation,
but not as sensuous human activity, practice . . .’.43
The trouble with Feuerbach, according to Marx, is that despite talking of ‘real,
living’ men, he is still wedded to the abstract concept, ‘man’. Hence, although he
gets as far as to see ‘man’ alienating himself in religion, he attributes this to the
‘essence of man’ as an abstract category, and thus fails to explain why this ‘man’
alienates himself. But now, for Marx, just as there is no such reality as ‘the essential’
rock or tree, so there is no such thing as ‘the essence of man’. There are only real,
actual men and women, and their nature or ‘essence’ is no more than how, in
practice, they relate to each other. ‘The essence of man is no abstraction inherent
in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations’. Thus,
if ‘man’ is alienated in religion, we should recognise that this is a property, not of
‘the human essence’, but of actual men who ‘belong in reality to a particular form
of society’ – i.e., religion ‘is itself a social product’.44
Just so, then, with ‘man’s self-alienation’ in the productive process. It is not a
property of ‘man’. Rather, it is a feature of actual, real men who live in the particular
social relations which produce alienation.
A crucial implication of this new approach was that Marx abandoned belief in
‘truth’ as some kind of philosophical absolute, and instead judged the validity of
ideas in terms of their efficacy in practice. Two things followed regarding socio-
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political thought and its role in historical change. First, people can imagine or
philosophically ‘deduce’ whatever ideas they like about society, justice, freedom,
and the like – but unless these are grounded in the actual nature of material reality
they are barren. If new, they are likely to be utopian because merely wishful
thinking disassociated from the realities of the actual world. But, second, it also
follows that where new ideas derive from a practical awareness of how reality is
actually impinging upon people in a new way, then these new ideas will have a
genuine currency whereby they can indeed ‘prove the truth. i.e., the reality and
power, the this-sidedeness’ of their thinking ‘in practice’.
This latter thought finally released Marx from the last restraint he felt Hegel
imposed, for Hegel had famously said of his book of political philosophy, that ‘as a
work of philosophy, it must be poles apart from an attempt to construct a state as
it ought to be’. Rather, what philosophy achieves is ‘to recognise reason as the rose
in the cross of the present’.45 This gigantically conservative judgement on the point
of political and social ‘philosophising’ – that it cannot lead to bringing about a
better world – had impressed and perhaps restrained the young, radically-minded
Marx, despite the preparedness of his less intellectually conscientious radical
colleagues simply to ignore it. Indeed, we have just seen that a part of Hegel’s
stricture was to remain integral to ‘historical materialism’ – namely, Marx’s lifelong
battle against ‘utopianism’, begun back in 1842 when he voiced scepticism over
French socialist and communist ideas.46
Historical materialism: The German Ideology

The Theses on Feuerbach thus represent a distinct shift in Marx’s thinking. Rather
than continue ‘philosophising’ about the ‘essence of man’ and alienation, Marx
turned to seeking explanations of problems by looking at people’s actual
circumstances, especially their social organisations at any particular time. Indeed,
so marked is this shift in approach, and so certain was Marx of its validity and
significance, that he set about writing The German Ideology with Engels in late
1845. The intention was to publish his new outlook and to roundly criticise those
‘radicals’ who continued to base their thinking on Hegelian premises. Amongst
them he now included Feuerbach, because he ‘never arrives at the actually existing,
active men, but stops at the abstraction, “man” ’. This is a ‘relapse into idealism’.47
Marx calls his new theory, ‘the materialist conception of history’, and in a head-
on clash with Hegel and his philosophical legacy, contrasts it to ‘the idealist
conception of history’. But as already hinted, there is now a sense in which for
Marx all ‘philosophy’ is ‘idealist’ to the extent it relies on the efficacy of pure
thought, dissociated from the concrete social mediation in which it arises, to
‘objectively’ understand reality.
For this reason, in expounding his basic theory of society and history, Marx’s tone
is scathing about the claims of ‘philosophy’ to speak sense. His first point is that
there would be no human history without the existence of actual human beings in
their real historical circumstances – and these human beings have first and foremost
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to survive, which involves ‘eating and drinking, housing, clothing . . .’. Human
beings, unlike animals, do this by producing the means to satisfy these basic needs,
and thus this production is the first properly historical act.48 Already we see how
Marx’s views have changed, for whereas a crucial notion in the 1844 Manuscripts
was that ‘man’ is distinguished from animals by self-consciousness, now Marx says:
‘[m]en can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything
else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as
soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence’.49
His next point is that in producing to meet their needs, new needs are generated,
and he reminds us that the productive process ‘today, as thousands of years ago, must
daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life’, a fact he deplores
historians and philosophers for neglecting.50 This is because, ‘by producing their
means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life’ – and at any
one time, how men produce (i.e., the ‘mode of production’) not only keeps them
alive: ‘Rather it is a definite form of activity . . . , a definite form of expressing their
life, a definite mode of life on their part’. Having dismissed all philosophising about
the nature of ‘man’ as so much verbiage, Marx completes the point by saying: ‘As
individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with
their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. Hence
what individuals are depends upon the material conditions of their production’.51
His next point is ‘that men, who daily re-create their own life, begin to make
other men, to propagate their kind’. In short, some kind of family structure pertains,
and this is a cooperative context involving a division of tasks. Alongside this, other
forms of cooperation emerge to facilitate the activity of production, such that,
it follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage,

is always combined with a certain mode of cooperation, or social stage,
and this mode of cooperation is itself a ‘productive force’ . . . hence, the
‘history of humanity’ must always be studied and treated in relation to
the history of industry and exchange.
Within these basic ‘premises’ underlying history, Marx has so far ignored
consciousness, or the role of ideas. This is because he argues that consciousness is
from the beginning a product of those material conditions of human life already
outlined. He links it to the origins of language, which itself emerges ‘from the need
. . . of intercourse with other men’ in the productive process. Thus from its origins,
‘language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well’, and thus
‘consciousness is . . . a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all’.
Marx claims that initially men’s consciousness was thus only a limited awareness
of each other (and hence of themselves) because of the restricted social relations
in primitive modes of production – ‘mere herd-consciousness’. Also, ‘because nature
is as yet hardly altered by history’ and thus ‘confronts man as a completely alien,
all-powerful . . . force’, men’s first religion is that mere ‘natural religion’ in which
nature itself is animated.52
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MARX ON HISTORY
However, because population growth generated an increase in needs and greater

productivity, cooperation extended – and these conditions promoted a
development of men’s consciousness to the seminal point when ‘a division of
material and mental labour appears’. Indeed, Marx claims it is only then that
division of labour truly becomes established, when ‘ideologists’ separate themselves
from material labour and become ‘priests’. In scathing terms Marx claims that from
this point, ‘consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and
to proceed to the formation of “pure” theory, theology, philosophy, morality, etc.’,
and that it can now ‘flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of
existing practice, that it really represents something without representing
something real’. But, for Marx, ‘it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to
do on its own’. This is because it is only possible for it to propose ideas at odds with
the world around it – ‘all this trash’ – insofar as that real world itself exhibits
contradictions. The latter arise because ‘intellectual and material activity, . . .
enjoyment and labour, production and consumption, devolve on different
individuals’,53 and this is due to the division of labour.
Division of labour
‘The division of labour’ is a key concept in Marx’s theory of society and historical
change. Although practised in varying degrees for millennia, the concept was
famously brought to prominence by Adam Smith, who opened his Wealth of Nations
(1776) by showing how the productive process – (he used the example of pin-
making) – is enormously enhanced by dividing the separate actions involved in
production between different individuals, thus allowing specialisation and saving
time (and also facilitating the use of machinery). This extends from the operations
involved in manufacturing a single article to the division between different
occupations, and as Smith pointed out, it is primarily due to the division of labour
that, relieved from having to produce everything for themselves, individuals enjoy
vastly increased wealth. As such, ‘the division of labour’ seems a solely technical
matter of the efficient deployment of work-activity.
For Marx, however, although ‘the division of labour’ indeed means the above,
it also means much more. This is because of the economic and social implications
inseparable from it in actual history. Marx claims the first division of labour was in
the family, ‘where wife and children are the slaves of the husband’. This was ‘the
first form of property’, for although crude, ‘even at this stage it corresponds perfectly
to the definition of modern economists, who call it the power of disposing of the
labour-power of others’ – (i.e., by ‘property’ Marx, like economists, is not referring
to mere personal possessions). Even at its inception, then, the division of labour
implies ‘the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and
its products’.54
The division of labour extended beyond single families to a division of labour
between different families, and then into the tribe. Later, as nations emerged, it led
‘at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour,
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and hence to the separation of town and country . . . Its further development leads
to the separation of commercial from industrial labour’. Subsequent divisions of
labour within these different branches result in different relative positions of groups
depending on ‘the way work is organised in agriculture, industry, and commerce’.55
At each stage, however, these further divisions of labour are not merely technical
improvements in the organisation of productive capacity. Rather, because ‘division
of labour and private property are, after all, identical expressions’,56 then ‘the
various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different
forms of property’, which ‘determines . . . the relations of individuals to one another
with reference to the material, instrument and product of labour’.57 In short,
historically any mode of production functions through a particular division of
labour, and thus generates a certain set of social relations based on the ‘labour-
disposing’ powers of private property. In this sense, all societies have been ‘class’
societies, where different classes occupy different positions of relative inequality and
privilege.
The state
Marx then extends this analysis to the political aspect of societies. Overall, the
division of labour helps generate a society’s total production by which its members
are sustained. But the society is divided into unequal parts, and therefore there is
a ‘contradiction between the interest of the separate individual . . . and the
common interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another’. This
‘common interest’ exists ‘as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among
whom the labour is divided’, yet individuals are unable to relate to this genuine
common interest because restricted, in their unequal societies, to seeking ‘only
their particular interests’.58 Because of the threat of continual discord, the
‘common’ interest has to be asserted, and this is exactly the function of ‘the state’.
Yet Marx distinguishes between the genuine and the illusory ‘common’ interest,
claiming that in reality the state only asserts the latter. Why? Because ‘the state is
the form in which individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests’, 59 and
thus it functions to maintain the property-relations which correspond to the
division of labour. Being therefore always the agent of the dominant class (apart
from tumultuous revolutionary times), it is not surprising that numerous individuals
should experience the so-called common interest asserted by the state as ‘alien’ to
them.
In a rare contribution to this part of The German Ideology, Engels puts its clearly:
‘Out of this very contradiction between the particular and the common interests,
the common interest assumes an independent form as the state, which is divorced
from the real individual and collective interests’. It is only ‘an illusory community’,
and ‘it follows from this that all struggles within the state . . . are merely the illusory
forms . . . in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out’. As
such, the state is always the creature of ‘civil society’, reflective of the power and
property-relations within the latter – just as the latter has in its turn been shaped
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by the productive forces which underlie the whole edifice of ‘state’ and ‘society’.
Engels’ complaint, that ‘of this the German theoreticians have not the faintest
inkling’60 is generalised in Marx’s conclusion that ‘we see that this civil society is
the true focus and theatre of history, and how absurd is the conception of history
held hitherto, which neglects the real relations and confines itself to spectacular
historical events’. Marx is not only criticising ‘mere’ empiricist history, but also the
Hegelian approach to history. For Marx, ‘alienation’ is now clearly the effect of
private property and the division of labour, which with its further development
through history ensures that individuals ‘become more and more enslaved under a
power alien to them’. This power is in fact ‘the world market’, but for the Hegelians
is ‘a pressure which they have conceived of as a dirty trick on the part of the
so-called world-spirit’!61
Superstructure and ideology

So far, Marx has argued that at the basis of any society is its mode of production
and the attendant property-relations which its division of labour generates. He has
also argued that, because the state’s function is to fix and defend the existing
privileges of the dominant propertied class, then the political dimension to societies
is merely a superstructure emerging from the ‘true theatre of history’, namely, civil
society. According to Marx, this realisation should amend much of the way history
is understood, for it means that political struggles have not caused historical change,
but are rather the effects of changes ultimately traceable to economic factors.
But Marx is not only concerned to downplay the role of politics and state-activity
in historical change. He also wants to downplay the role of ideas – i.e., widely
construed as all the products of consciousness. Although particularly concerned to
attack Hegelianism as the most extreme version of the illusion, he generalises this
to all approaches which elevate ‘consciousness’ into a determining factor in
historical change. Instead, he insists that his conception of history – ‘historical
materialism’ – which starts ‘from the material production of life itself’ and explains
the nature of ‘civil society’, also shows how the latter in its turn explains ‘how all
the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy,
morality, etc. arise from it’.
To justify this huge claim (as influential as it has been controversial) Marx
reminds us of his fundamental proposition that ‘life is not determined by
consciousness, but consciousness by life’, and that therefore the correct approach
to history ‘does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of
ideas from material practice’.62 Elsewhere using the term ‘ideology’ to encompass
all modes of thought, Marx is therefore insisting that the ideological dimension to
any society is, like its politics, merely superstructural – i.e., that it is explicable via
the nature of ‘civil society’, itself made up of social relations dependent upon the
mode of production. Thus, for Marx, philosophy, legal ideas, morality, and even
art, do not even generate their own self-contained history, let alone determine
history’s course, but should be explained in terms of their origins in practical life.
259
For example, regarding philosophy, he claims that when ‘the reality’ of ‘the
practical process of the development of men’ is described, then ‘a self-sufficient
philosophy loses its medium of existence’.63 This completes that growing disillusion
over the nature and function of ‘philosophy’ we noted as a feature of Marx’s
intellectual development. It implies that one may philosophise as much as one
likes about e.g., the nature of justice, love, or God, and construct a ‘history’ of how
these ideas have been differently construed over the ages by philosophers – but the
only worthwhile questions are, not ‘what is justice?, ‘what is love’?, ‘what is God’?,
but first, what was meant by these terms in ancient Athens, or in Renaissance
Florence, or in the writings of Plato or Hegel? – and second, why did they construe
these meanings? This latter question resolves into an enquiry into the social
relations pertaining at the time in order to explain why these ideas made sense, or
‘worked’ for them, (or alternatively, was being challenged by alternative notions
by those for whom the present understandings did not help make sense of their
actual experience).
In short, to understand Marx’s theory of ideology it is worth reminding ourselves
of his epistemological dictum, ‘The question whether objective truth can be
attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question’.
On this basis, then, Marx attacks the tendency ‘common to all historians,
particularly since the eighteenth century’, to attribute historical change to changes
in ideas and values – i.e., ‘ideology’. For Marx, they have got matters upside down,
and he exposes their error as follows:
If . . . in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling

class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent
existence, . . . without bothering ourselves about the . . . producers of
these ideas . . . and world conditions which are the source of these ideas,
then we can say, for instance, that during the time the aristocracy was
dominant, the concepts of honour, loyalty, etc. were dominant, during the
dominance of the bourgeoisie, the concepts of freedom, equality, etc.,
[were dominant].64
And in repeated sections of the German Ideology Marx reserves special scorn for the
extreme version of this error – the Hegelian philosophy of history – for it is precisely
this ‘trick’ which the Hegelians exploit, for
once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individuals and,
above all, from the relations which result from a given stage of the mode
of production, and in this way the conclusion has been reached that
history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to abstract from
these various ideas “the Idea” . . . as the dominant force in history, and
thus to consider all these separate ideas and concepts as “forms of self-
determination” of the Concept developing in history
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MARX ON HISTORY
thus leading to the ludicrous conclusion that ‘the philosophers, the thinkers, have
at all times been dominant in history’.65
The course of history: historical change

For Marx, on the contrary, the history of states and of ideas has always been merely
reflective of what really determines historical epochs, namely, the economic basis
to actual material life. The final component which completes his overall theory of
history is his theory of historical change.
In The German Ideology Marx claims that the motor behind major historical
changes is the repeated emergence of a contradiction between ‘the productive forces’
(i.e., the mode of production) and ‘the form of intercourse’ they generate, (i.e.,
‘the relations of production’, or property-relations). For Marx, ‘the conditions under
which individuals have intercourse with each other’ are ‘the conditions under
which alone these definite individuals . . . can produce their material life and what
is connected with it’.66 These conditions, because generated by the mode of
production, are appropriate whilst it prevails as the dominant form of a society’s
productive forces. There is thus a period of comparative stability where the social
relations, political system and legal code, and the ideological superstructure,
efficiently correspond to the fundamental mode of production. However, there
comes a point where the existing productive forces become held back from further
expansion because they begin to outstrip the ‘social relations’ appropriate to them
up until now. A huge contradiction develops, and is only resolved by a period of
revolutionary turmoil during which the social/property relations are transformed
into new ‘forms of intercourse’ which correspond to the new mode of production
harbingered by the further development of the productive forces.
In short, there comes a point where the relations of production and corres-
ponding superstructure become a straightjacket, rather than a cosy glove, for
economic development. They become ‘fetters’, and it is their transformation into
a new set of social/property relations necessary for the expanding mode of
production which is the very stuff of history. ‘Thus’, Marx writes, ‘all collisions in
history have their origin, according to our view, in the contradiction between the
productive forces and the form of intercourse’.67 The motor of history is driven
forward as ‘an earlier form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, is replaced by
a new one corresponding to the more developed productive forces . . . – a form
which in its turn becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another’.68 This, then,
is a process ‘which . . . has occurred several times in past history’, and ‘necessarily
on each occasion burst out in a revolution, taking on at the same time various
subsidiary forms, such as all-embracing collisions, collisions of various classes,
contradictions of consciousness, battle of ideas, political struggle, etc.’.69
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Historical sketch
Having set out this overall theory, Marx devoted considerable space in The German
Ideology to therefore sketching out the principal periods of history in terms of how
the productive forces generated their specific property and class relations via the
division of labour. He begins with ‘tribal property’, which ‘corresponds to
the undeveloped stage of production’ revolving around hunting, fishing, cattle-
raising, and primitive agriculture. The division of labour is ‘still very elementary’,
being merely an extension of that in the family, such that ‘patriarchal chieftains’
exercise power over the tribe and its slaves. The next stage of society was classical
antiquity (i.e., exemplified by Greece and Rome) based on what Marx calls ‘ancient
communal and state property’. This emerged ‘from the union of several tribes into
a city’, which is the communal property of its citizens, via which they ‘hold power
over their labouring slaves’. But gradually these societies based on ‘communal
private property’ were undermined by the development of ‘immovable private
property’, whereby patrician families began to own parts of what had been common
land farmed by ‘the plebeian small peasantry’. Marx claims this process of the decay
of communal private property ‘began very early in Rome . . . and proceeded very
rapidly from the time of the civil wars’ (amongst the patrician class of Rome) ‘and
especially under the emperors’ (i.e., beginning with the fall of the Republic in
AD 30). He suggests that one of the effects of ‘the concentration of private property’
was ‘the transformation of the plebeian small peasantry into a proletariat’ – in other
words, as with (later) industrial private property, a property-less, wage-labouring
class – but that ‘owing to its intermediate position between propertied citizens and
slaves’, this class ‘never achieved an independent development’.70 In this important
respect, then, the ‘proletariat’ of the classical world was unlike the modern
proletariat because there existed a class below it – the slaves.
Feudalism and the Middle Ages

If classical antiquity was based on the city (and its surrounding agriculture), the
succeeeding form of society was based on the country, and here Marx is referring
to the Middle Ages following the decline of the Roman Empire. This decline,
coupled with ‘conquest by the barbarians, destroyed a considerable part of the
productive forces’. Industry ‘had decayed for want of a market’, trade had been
violently disrupted, and coupled with ‘the influence of the Germanic military
constitution’ of the invaders, these conditions led to the development of ‘feudal or
estate property’. This form of society was based primarily on the rural agricultural
economy and, according to Marx, was, ‘like tribal and communal property . . . also
based on a community’. But in this case ‘the community’ was that of the
landowning nobility, which held power over ‘the directly producing class’, namely,
‘the enserfed small peasantry’ – still, then, ‘an association against a subjected
producing class’, but different to antiquity ‘because of the different conditions of
production’. This feudal landed hierarchy ‘had its counterpart’ in the ‘feudal
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MARX ON HISTORY
organisation of trades’ in the towns of the Middle Ages – again, a kind of communal
private property in which ‘the gradually accumulated small capital of individual
craftsmen’ was organised into guilds which controlled the employment and training
of journeymen and apprentices, and protected the merchant/industrialists against
‘the robber-nobility’ and from ‘the growing competition of the escaped serfs
swarming into the rising towns’. Marx summarised medieval rural and town
organisation by saying it ‘was determined by the restricted conditions of production
– the scanty and primitive cultivation of the land’, (the strip-system), ‘and the
craft type of industry’. Although the overall social/property division into
hierarchical estates was ‘strongly marked’ – ‘princes, nobility, clergy and peasants
in the country, and masters, journeymen, apprentices and soon also the rabble of
casual labourers in the towns’, the actual modes of production involved ‘little
division of labour in the heyday of feudalism’.71
Pre-industrial capitalism
For Marx, what began the break-up of medieval, feudal society was precisely
a development of the division of labour. Whereas in medieval towns those
who manufactured also promoted and sold their goods, in the Renaissance era
there ‘was a separation of production and intercourse, the formation of a special
class of merchants’. The effects of this crucial development in ‘commercial
communications’ were that the merchants extended trade ‘beyond the immediate
surroundings of the town’; ‘new tools are brought from one town to another’, which
now enter into reciprocal relations, generating a further division of labour whereby
each individual town ‘is soon exploiting a predominant branch of industry’. This
greatly expanded the forces of manufacturing production, indeed to the point where
the guild-system and its accompanying property-relations were ‘outgrown’. Whilst
this economic expansion was initially limited to the home market in England and
France, in Italy and Flanders it took off because of ‘intercourse with foreign nations’,
and it is this latter eventuality which Marx calls ‘the historical premise for the first
flourishing of manufactures’. He observes that this depended upon an increase
in the concentration of capital both in the private hands of the merchants and, ‘in
spite of the guild regulations’, in the guilds themselves, (symptomatic of their
decline). He points to a symbiosis between the growth of trade, the merchant class
with its capital, and the development of manufacture as a mode of production,
because ‘the kind of labour which from the first presupposed machines, even of the
crudest sort, soon showed itself the most capable of development’. Weaving became
the principal manufacture because of factors which gave it ‘a quantitative and
qualitative stimulus, which wrenched it out of the form of production hitherto
existing’. In addition to country peasants who began to make weaving their primary
rather than merely secondary occupation, ‘there emerged a new class of weavers in
the towns’, serving domestic and foreign markets with increasingly luxurious goods.
All this depended upon the gradual transformation of fixed, immovable capital
(i.e., ‘natural capital’ as ownership of land in the country and guild-property in the
263
towns) into movable capital (i.e., the fluid mobility of investment money). The
capital of the merchants was of the latter kind from the beginning, and the second
impulse for its growth was manufacture itself, ‘which again mobilised a mass of
natural capital, and altogether increased the mass of movable capital as against
that of natural capital’. (The enclosure of land for pastoral farming, resulting in a
leap in vagabondage, is a well-known example of this process, and was complained
about by Thomas More in his Utopia in 1513). Technical as this may be, for Marx
it was a crucial economic, even historic, development, for it transformed property
and hence class relations. Above all, increasingly ‘the relations between worker and
employer changed’ from the patriarchal relation between journeyman and master
in the guilds into the purely ‘monetary relations between worker and capitalist’.
Although feudal relations persisted in the countryside, increasing numbers of
peasants fled from their landlords to the towns, which were already becoming more
important than the countryside as powerhouses of production.
One of the chief features of this period spanning the fifteenth to the seventeenth
century was that ‘manufacture and the movement of production in general received
an enormous impetus through the extension of intercourse which came with the
discovery of America and the sea-routes to the East Indies’. Countries ‘entered
into competitive relations . . . fought out in wars, protective duties and prohibi-
tions’, and ‘the masses of gold and silver which came into circulation’ stimulated
the growth of a world-market dependent upon an expansion of commerce, manu-
facture, and movable capital.72 Nevertheless, Marx claims that compared to later
periods, ‘the movement of capital . . . still remained . . . relatively slow’ because of
the protectionist policies of the manufacturing and trading nations. Corres-
pondingly, merchants rather than manufacturers were the dominant new class.
Nonetheless, this ‘mercantilist’ attitude did not prevent ‘the beginning of money-
trade, banks, national debts, paper money, speculation in stocks and shares . . . and
the development of finance in general’,73 thus preparing the conditions for an ever
greater transformation of capital from its ‘natural’ form in physical resources into
infinitely mobile capital, i.e., pure money.
Industrial capitalism
Sometimes the above is described as the era of ‘pre-industrial capitalism’, and this
captures Marx’s approach, for he claims it was succeeded by what became a
qualitatively different period, ‘the third period of private property since the Middle
Ages’, namely, the era of large-scale industry characterised by ‘the application of
elemental forces to industrial ends, machinery, and the most extensive division
of labour’. Because of the special ‘concentration of trade and manufacture in one
country, England’, which thus developed a ‘relative world-market’ for its goods, a
point was reached when the demand for its manufactures ‘could no longer be met
by the industrial productive forces hitherto existing’.74 This circumstance provided
‘the motive power’ for the emergence of large-scale industry, the chief mode of
production of Marx’s own times, and in addition to the scientific and technological
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MARX ON HISTORY
advances involved, it also depended on the development of freedom of competition

within nations (i.e., a market economy) – something that ‘had everywhere to be
won by a revolution – 1640 and 1688 in England, 1789 in France’.
For Marx, the emergence of large-scale industry as the dominant force of
production had dramatic effects upon the nature of societies. Increasingly, it
‘universalised competition’ within and between countries, which ‘forced all
individuals to strain their energy to the utmost’. It ‘established means of
communication and the modern world market’, which ‘produced world history for
the first time, insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual member
of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world’. It
‘subordinated trade to itself, transformed all capital into industrial capital, and thus
produced the rapid circulation . . . and centralisation of capital’ – in other words,
it created the big bourgeoisie and the modern industrial proletariat, removing from
the division of labour, and from labour itself, ‘the last semblance of its natural
character . . . as far as this is possible’, by destroying ‘the crafts and all earlier stages
of industry where it gained mastery’. In creating ‘the modern, large industrial cities
which have sprung up overnight’, it ‘completed the victory of the town over the
country’. In creating ‘everywhere the same relations between the classes of society’,
it ‘thus destroyed the peculiar features of the various nationalities’, creating ‘a class
[the proletariat] which in all nations has the same interest and for which nationality
is already dead’.
Although elsewhere Marx was to lavish praise upon pre-industrial and then
industrial capitalism for opening up the world and gigantically expanding the
productive forces of society, in the above passages he has stressed the negative
effects in an almost wistful way. As noted earlier, Marx thought that in previous
eras there was at least something ‘natural’ in people’s relation to their work-activity,
however restricted (e.g., the medieval craftsman) – and something authentic about
their social relations, however unequal, because based on more ‘natural’ communal
distinctions (e.g., feudal relations of reciprocal obligation between lord and serf).
We have even seen him distinguishing between ‘natural’ (immovable) capital
based on physical property, and money capital. The latter is completely indifferent
to its use so long as profit is made, and it is this feature of the era of industrial
manufacture and its attendant social relations and ideological superstructure that
prompts Marx to summarise the effects of industrial capitalism as follows: it
‘resolved all natural relations into money relations’, thereby producing an ethos
which ‘destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc. and, where it
could not do this, made them into a palpable lie’.75
The moral dimension

Without such passages involving moral evaluation, the tenets of ‘historical
materialism’ could be regarded as a purely ‘scientific’ approach to human history –
i.e., as an objective theory not dependent upon ‘philosophical’ assumptions or any
265
particular moral values. And so it has often been viewed, and indeed also utilised
in academic areas ranging from political history to economics, from cultural history
to the history of thought, and to sociology (which partly originated from Marx’s
insights). However, it is not only the hyperbole of the above passages which shows
that ‘historical materialism’ was not conceived as ‘value-free’ by Marx. On the
contrary, a moral position runs throughout the whole text, and directs it to a
dramatic consummation of his theory of history – namely, the call for and
prediction of a communist revolution.
Not surprisingly, this moral dimension harks back to those earlier ‘humanistic’
writings associated with Marx’s first attempt at philosophy of history. There, he
emphasised ‘alienation’ as a grim feature of human history, and proposed the moral
ideal of escaping from it in order to achieve the realisation of the human species,
construed in the neo-Hegelian terms as ‘freedom’ – i.e., man’s experience of full
‘self-objectification’ in his being-in-the-world. Then, in The German Ideology, we
saw him spurn such ‘speculative’ philosophising, not least because of the (to him)
risible philosophy of history underpinning it. But Marx’s volte-face did not involve
ditching his moral ideals – rather, they were recast into a different conceptual
framework and language. In the 1844 Manuscripts he had posed the question as
to ‘why man alienated himself’ through his work, but had aborted the attempt to
answer it because it was a purely ‘philosophical’ question resting on a-historical
notions of ‘the essence of man’. In The German Ideology the problem is redefined.
Now it is the situation of real individuals, as they function in their productive
context and relate to others in their community, which is the focus of Marx’s moral
attention – and he singles out the division of labour as the prime culprit.
Ideally, then, the division of labour needs to be abolished, for it has transformed
all ‘personal powers . . . into material powers’ over which individuals have no
control, such that they cannot feel fulfilled in their lives. This dire situation ‘can
only be abolished by the individuals again subjecting these material powers to
themselves and abolishing the division of labour’. But, Marx insists, this is not
possible without the formation of a genuine community. He tells us that ‘in the
previous substitutes for the community, in the state, etc., personal freedom has
existed only for the individuals . . . of the ruling class’. It was an ‘illusory community’
made up of ‘one class over against another’, which bore down particularly on the
lower classes, since it was ‘for the oppressed class not only a completely illusory
community, but a new fetter as well’. What is needed is a ‘real community’, for it
is only within such that ‘each individual [has] the means of cultivating his gifts in
all directions; hence personal freedom becomes possible only within the
community’.76
The prediction of ‘communism’

Put like this, this ‘real community’ (Marx’s ‘communism’) might be no more than
an abstract ideal following from Marx’s moral preferences. As such, his vision of
communism would have little to do with our theme, philosophy of history. Rather,
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MARX ON HISTORY
we could rest content with ‘historical materialism’ solely as a theory of the past
historical development of societies. However, Marx is emphatic that ‘communism’
is, for him, not merely a moral preference – rather, its actual coming-to-be follows
directly from his philosophy of history. ‘Communism is for us not a state of affairs
which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We
call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The
conditions of this movement result from the now existing premises’.77
In other words, Marx is claiming that history has once again developed to a point
where the conditions for another new era are in place, thus presaging an overall
‘revolution’ in the political, social, and ideological nature of societies. As such,
this coming upheaval will again come about through the same determinants of
previous epochal change – namely, the releasing of the accumulating productive
forces from the property/class relations which have become ‘fetters’ on the
development of the mode of production. In this case, the contradiction is between
the wealth of productive forces harbingered by modern industrial manufacturing
and the extension of a world-market, and the capital-labour, property/class relations
presently pertaining. As in previous revolutionary transformations, this will involve
ousting the ruling, propertied class from its control of the means of production, and
thus be driven by class-struggle.
However, for Marx there is a crucial respect in which the forthcoming upheaval
will be different in its outcome, and of the utmost significance in world-history. This
is because, whereas all previous transformations have replaced one form of class-
rule with another, the coming revolution will abolish class-divided societies
altogether, and instead usher in societies where the means of production will be
owned and controlled, not as some form of private property, but at last by the ‘real
community’, no longer divided into separate classes. This will be truly ‘world-
historical’ because ‘in history up to the present . . . individuals have . . . become
more and more enslaved under a power alien to them, . . . a power which has
become more and more enormous’. The coming (communist) revolution will at last
put a stop to the paradoxical dialectic whereby, as men increasingly master and
‘humanise’ the world through their productive activity, they are increasingly
dominated by the very world they are creating, and consequently feel increasingly
‘dehumanised’. Instead, the communist revolution will, from the logic of the
premises which have made it imminent, transform this powerless dependency ‘into
the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men
on one another, have till now overawed and ruled men as powers completely alien
to them’.78 Years later, in referring to the significance of the new era beckoning,
Marx expressed the idea as follows: ‘The prehistory of human society accordingly
closes with this [new] social formation’79, paving the way for history proper, i.e., a
new world-order in which human-beings consciously (freely) make their own
history as their own deliberate creation.
As noted, Marx is emphatic that the above is not simply a wished-for ideal, but
follows from the ‘laws’ of historical change he has set out, such that his prediction
of the new era is an integral part of his theory of history. Why is this so? The answer
267
reverts to those first intimations he expressed in 1843 about the proletariat’s

uniqueness. His view then was that, specifically in relation to Germany, the only
class which could ‘emancipate’ German society into ‘true democracy’ was its
developing proletariat, because it was not suffering a particular wrong done to it
by a higher class, but was suffering ‘wrong generally’ in that its total lack of property,
power, and status epitomised the negative aspects of private-property based society.
Its class demand could only be the abolition altogether of private ownership of the
means of production, thereby abolishing the very basis of class-divided society. We
saw Marx generalise this idea in the 1844 Manuscripts to apply to all modern
countries. Yet he was still under the allure of the Hegelian concept of ‘the
universality of will’. His theory about the proletariat derived directly from deducing
what the achievement of that ‘philosophical’ ideal would imply.
When, however, in The German Ideology he came to abandon Hegelianism (and,
arguably, ‘philosophy’) altogether, he did not abandon this theory of the proletariat.
On the contrary, he incorporated it into ‘historical materialism’. In the latter work
he advances the notion that the ‘subsuming of individuals under definite classes
cannot be abolished until a class has evolved which has no longer any particular
class interest to assert against a ruling class’.80 Now, historical development has
generated precisely such a class – the proletariat. Unlike the serfs, who when they
broke from their feudal servitude, ‘did not free themselves as a class’ and ‘did not
break loose from the system of estates, but only formed a new estate, retaining their
previous mode of labour even in their new situation, and develop[ed] it further by
freeing it from its earlier fetters’, Marx claims that,
for the proletarians, on the other hand, the condition of their life, labour,
and with it all the conditions of existence of modern society, have
become something extraneous, something over which they, as separate
individuals, have no control, and over which no social organisation can
give them control, [i.e., as a class].81
Indeed, whereas ‘all earlier revolutionary appropriations were restricted’, the

proletariat’s plight is such that ‘things have now come to such a pass that the
individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to
achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence’.82 Likewise,
Marx claims, ‘in all previous revolutions the mode of activity always remained
unchanged and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a
new distribution of labour to other persons’. Here again the logic of historical
development dictates the uniqueness of the proletarian situation, because,
the communist revolution is directed against the hitherto existing mode

of activity, does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with
the classes themselves, because it is carried through by the class which no
longer counts as a class in society . . . and is in itself the expression of the
dissolution of all classes . . . .83
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MARX ON HISTORY
In short, then, the laws of historical development have generated the situation
where modern industrial-capitalist societies are on the cusp of epochal change to
‘communism’, construed as, amongst other things, classless societies, ‘stateless’
societies (i.e., in the sense of being ‘true democracies’), and societies where the
forced division of labour is abolished, along with ‘labour’ itself, (i.e., productive
activity as a commodity to be bought and sold).
Later developments
The historical imminence of ‘communism’, then, is the dramatic consummation
of Marx’s ‘mature’ theory of history first worked out in 1845 in The German Ideology.
Not published until 1932, aspects of it were instead exploited by Marx in
subsequent works published at the time of writing – for example, in The Communist
Manifesto in 1848, and in Das Kapital in 1867 as well as in his unpublished extensive
preparatory notes to Das Kapital since published as Economic Manuscripts of
1857–5884 (in both of which latter works Marx includes sections analysing in
greater detail the origins of capitalism itself) and in politico-historical works
analysing key episodes of recent and contemporary French history in class terms.
But as a theory of history he did not change it. Rather, it is the bedrock on which
he developed his further political, historical, and economic ideas, (for as he tells
us himself, it had achieved its ‘main purpose – self-clarification’ after his earlier
wrestlings with Hegelianism). For example, because of its obvious political message
he frequently simplified the role of class in history – e.g., ‘The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggles’,85 this despite the fact that in the
German Ideology we saw him saying that when epochal revolutions occur because
of contradictions ‘between the productive forces and the form of intercourse’, then
these collisions take on ‘at the same time various subsiduary forms, such as . . .
collisions of various classes, contradictions of consciousness, battle of ideas, political
struggle, etc.’.86 In other words, class-struggle is but a part of these huge movements.
Likewise, for good propagandist purposes Marx was wont to declare that the victory
of the proletarian revolution was inevitable, whereas nowhere in The German
Ideology did he claim such a cast-iron necessity. Rather, although the economic
determinants of a society are crucial, so is the more subjective factor of the degree
of class-consciousness and initiative. ‘Both for the production on a mass scale of
this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration
of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a
practical movement, a revolution’.87 It is true Marx did see capitalist society as on
the threshold of epochal change towards ‘communism’, and thus in that sense as
historically determined or inevitable. However, there is a certain tension between
his saying, in the German Ideology, that the abolition of private property is necessary
because ‘only in a revolution’ can the proletariat ‘succeed in ridding itself of all the
muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew’,88 and the notion that such
a revolution is inevitable, and will inevitably succeed. The term, ‘necessary’, could
be read as referring to the logical necessity of the abolition of private property as the
269
‘only’ way of overcoming class division, given the logic of ‘historical materialism’.
This is different from claiming an empirical or ‘scientific’ necessity, whereby an
event is indeed construed as inevitable.
Although Marx was to use the latter language on later occasions, it was far more
a feature of Engels’ formulations. Engels developed his own version of Marx (called
‘dialectical materialism’) in which historical development is presented in
unambiguously mechanistic terms, as if social change followed autonomous ‘laws’
akin to the scientific laws governing the natural world. As noted by the best
commentators,89 this was not Marx’s position, since in his more subtle approach
human beings play an active, constitutive role in historical development, albeit
often deluded in their consciousness about the world. Thus (rather as with Vico)
for Marx, human beings make history (albeit under definite conditions), not some
autonomous ‘laws’ of social development. A certain latitude is therefore justifiable
where Marx in later writings seems to present the transition to communism as
inevitable. Whilst it is true that his theory in The German Ideology indeed looks to
the collapse of the capitalist society he was familiar with, quite how and when this
would happen is not predicted in historical terms. And quite sensibly so, we might
judge, considering that (like Hegel before him) Marx was working out a theory of
history that analysed huge changes which often took centuries to work out all their
manifestations.
In this light it is instructive to note Marx’s relative openness over the actual
manner in which capitalism would be replaced, and the time-span involved. For
example, when he first formulated his (mature) philosophy of history in 1845, many
European countries were deeply embroiled in their particular nationality problems,
in facing strident calls for ‘democracy’ from large radical movements, and in
confronting the ubiquitous problems of poverty, unemployment, and urbanisation
known then as ‘the social problem’. This heady mixture was to lead to 1848, that
‘watershed’ year of European revolutions, and later in his life Marx admitted that
he and fellow radicals thought they were ‘witnessing the death-throes of capitalism’,
only to find that what they were actually witnessing was its ‘birth-pangs’. Indeed,
it was partly this shock (along with his own assessment of ‘the new stage of
development which this society seems to have entered with the discovery of gold
in California and Australia’)90 that encouraged Marx to engage on a close ‘scientific’
study of capitalism (leading to Das Kapital) from the 1850s onwards. Similarly, in
his political thinking, it was not until the Paris Commune of 1871 that he construed
the notion of a transitionary phase from capitalism to communism via ‘the
dictatorship of the proletariat’. In addition he came to speculate that a peaceful
transition might, unusually, be possible in Britain and the USA. Such observations,
then, should encourage us better to understand the epochal perspective from which
Marx was viewing history than has many an impatient, dogmatic Marxist since, as
well as many a scornful critic alleging that history has shown Marx wrong.
Feudalism, after all, lasted centuries, and took centuries to be discarded – and even
now, not globally.
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Comments
‘Progress’, ‘determinism’, and inevitability

Having already remarked on his early, ‘immature’ philosophy of history, I will
mainly restrict comment to ‘historical materialism’ – firstly as an example of
‘philosophy of history’ in general, and secondly to its status as either ‘philosophy’
or ‘science’.
Regarding general observations, first it is clear that in both his earlier and
‘mature’ theories, Marx did not see history as cyclical. This is not to say, however,
that distinct forms of society do not collapse, particularly in his mature (‘historical
materialist’) theory. On the contrary, history moves through epochal changes.
(Perhaps confusingly, these changes are called ‘revolutions’, a term suggestive of
history ‘going round in circles’).
Second, is history driven forward? i.e., is it progressive? Marx’s answer (apparent
in both his theories) is in the affirmative, yet the matter is not straightforward.
This is because history is not unilinear for Marx. Rather than a relatively
uncomplicated march of progress, integral to Marx’s theorising was the notion that
as some things get better others necessarily get worse, precisely leading to
fundamental upheaval ushering in a new era. This is reminiscent of Hegel’s notion
of dialectical change (through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis). In Marx, however,
the dialectical nature of change stems from practical, not logical, contradictions –
and even here, was later presented too mechanistically by Engels and ‘orthodox’
Marxists. Rather, it was a general framework of explanatory and predictive value
– for example, his graphic notion that capitalism produces its own gravediggers by
generating the proletariat. Third, it is clear that for the atheist Marx there is no
‘God’ or immaterial ‘Mind’ behind the course of history. However, this does not
exclude its course being ‘determined’ by factors (outside of human design) which
shape a discernible pattern to the major outlines of historical development. But just
how far this lends an inevitability to historical change and its direction has often
been overstated by Marxists and critics alike.
Perhaps a clear way to address this much-debated theme is, first, to ask: could
the course of history have been different as far as Marx was concerned? The answer
must surely be ‘yes’. For example, there is nothing in his theorising to suggest the
Scientific Revolution was ‘inevitable’, nor that it should have made the particular
discoveries it did. (Likewise with the new discoveries of gold whose significance we
saw Marx noting in the 1850s). Without it, however, we can assume the large-
scale industrial manufacturing mode of production would not have emerged. More
to the point for Marx is that, once it did emerge, many changes in class-structure,
property relations, political systems, and ideology/culture did indeed come about
necessarily, ‘inevitably’, or were ‘determined’ (i.e., to use these terms inter-
changeably). But their exact nature and timing is not something Marx’s theory
ever purported as ‘inevitable’.
Second, then, we may ask; could the future course of history Marx predicted be
different as far as he was concerned? The answer to this hot potato is surely to
271
be found in the remarks just made. Marx did regard the collapse of capitalism as
historically inevitable. In one sense, given the scope of speculative ‘philosophy of
history’ this eventuality should occasion no surprise to anyone, whether of a Marxist
persuasion or not, since the alternative is to suggest that the remainder of the
world’s history will permanently be restricted to ‘capitalism’. One hardly needs a
‘theory’ of history to express astonishment at such a lack of imagination.91 But
Marx did not base his prediction on such obvious historical instincts. Rather, he
claimed to find present reasons (further researched in Das Kapital) in the make-up
of capitalist societies which not only spelt their demise but also ‘determined’ what,
in broad terms, would replace them – i.e., ‘communism’. However, ‘capitalism’ is
a term used by Marx to denote the social relations of modern society, not its mode
of production – and according to ‘historical materialism’ it is because of changes in
the latter that capitalism will be discarded by the course of history.
This puts a different complexion on whether, for Marx, that course could be
different from what he predicted, for it depends not so much on the nature of
capitalism as on movements in the nature of modern productive forces. In his own
times, Marx was witnessing the rapid development of large-scale industrial
manufacturing as the predominant ‘mode of production’ in modern societies. His
predictions about capitalism were not based on the demise of industrialism, but on
its future expansion and development, potentially, he believed, to where poverty
could be eradicated (eventually world-wide). Modern production was becoming
ever more highly ‘socialised’ in its exploitation of resources world wide, including
the work-activity of human-beings. Yet the means of production were still owned
as private property, and worked by wage-labour to make a profit for the capitalists.
It was this contradiction which prompted Marx’s prediction that, as in all earlier
epochs, the relations of production were becoming fetters on future development,
and would inevitably be broken by the sheer needs of those suffering most from their
disadvantages. This was what Marx saw as ‘inevitable’, or ‘determined’ by the course
of history.
But since his death in 1883, it could be argued that a second ‘industrial
revolution’ began towards the end of the nineteenth century, incorporating
electricity and petrochemicals, dramatically altering numerous aspects of society,
albeit still under capitalist relations. (Lenin was not alone in suggesting the latter
were significantly altered through the growing internationalisation of capital and
the new wave of ‘imperialism’.)
Again, it could be argued that in the third quarter of the twentieth century a
third major development in the ‘mode of production’ of advanced countries was
the growing automation of industrial processes, changing working lives beyond
recognition compared to Marx’s day. Finally, it is now suggested we have entered
the ‘post-industrial’ era, dominated by ‘service industries’, electronic technology,
pharmaceuticals, and the new economies based on the ‘information technology
revolution’. (And bio-engineeering beckons!) Yet it is true that capitalism,
understood as competitive commodity production by privately controlled interests
employing the labour force, survives as the predominant socio-economic system
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MARX ON HISTORY
under which these contemporary forces of production operate. In that fundamental

sense it could be argued nothing has changed since Marx’s times, despite economic
‘globalisation’.
For some this suggests not only that Marx’s predictions have been proved wrong
but that the persistence of ‘capitalism’ through vastly expanding and altering
‘modes of production’ disproves the entire principles of ‘historical materialism’.
Others, however, have argued that the course of history since Marx’s death has
exemplified these principles in ways obvious to any thinking person. It is true that
‘capitalism’ has not yet succumbed to pressure from the disadvantaged ‘classes’ it
produces, but this is because it has still yet to reach as far as Marx himself saw as a
necessary precondition of its demise. When he first formulated his theory in 1845
he made clear that amongst the material, practical premises of the coming of
communism was the necessity for capitalism to have ‘rendered the great mass
of humanity “propertyless”, and moreover in contradiction to an existing world of
wealth and culture’. This necessitates the ‘universal development of productive
forces’ such that ‘a universal intercourse between men’ would be established, which
‘produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass
(universal competition), making each nation dependent on the revolutions of the
others, and finally puts world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place
of local ones’. He concluded from this that communism (and hence the collapse
of capitalism) ‘is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and
simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces
and the world intercourse bound up with them’.92 It is because, in 1845, he saw
capitalism already (and necessarily) developing on these lines that he said the
premises for communism were already present.
Whether this universalisation of capitalism he stipulated is nearing completion
after its fearsome battles of the twentieth century is conjectural, although one
cannot fail to reflect on our present terms, ‘global capitalism’ and ‘the world
economy’. But what is beyond doubt is that Marx could not have been expected,
and never claimed, to predict the actual events and time-scale it would entail.
Also, from the perspective of the ‘philosophies’ of history we have been examining,
the course of history moves far more slowly than its prophets like to think – which
might prompt us to suggest (Marx notwithstanding) that the attempt to use
‘philosophy of history’ for political purposes has been, and will continue to be,
ludicrous. Along these lines, then, it is not that with hindsight Marx would have
predicted some alternative course of history, as if its principles of development had
suddenly changed. Rather, he might have congratulated himself on the accuracy
of his prediction of the world-reach of capitalism, but have been as fascinated as
anyone by the actual historical events involved. And as for his prediction of
‘communism’, there would seem no reason to suggest he would jettison it in
principle, although many reasons to suggest he would amend what little he
predicted about its concrete nature and manner of coming about.
273
‘Science’ versus ‘philosophy’

It is perhaps appropriate that now our final comments on Marx’s theorising about
history should coincide with ending the first Part of this guide, devoted to
‘speculative philosophy of history’. This is because, ironically, Marx understood
himself to have dealt this branch of philosophy a death-blow. Arguably he was
right, insofar as it could be claimed that since his writings no new, great speculative
philosophy of history has been conceived. But however much this is attributable
to his impact, it is also the case that towards the end of the nineteenth century
‘science’ increasingly replaced ‘philosophy’ in the explanation of numerous aspects
of social reality.
In this light it is worth commenting upon whether ‘historical materialism’ is
indeed part of ‘speculative philosophy of history’ or, instead, ‘science’. As far as
Marx was concerned, from 1845 he stopped writing ‘philosophy’. Instead, he is
always translated as claiming ‘scientific’ status for what he called ‘the materialist
conception of history’, even though the term ‘science’ in translation rarely appears
in The German Ideology, and is in any event ambiguous in the German: ‘Where
speculation ends, where real life starts, there consequently begins real, positive
science, the expounding of the practical activity, of the practical process
of development of men’.93 Indeed, when famously distinguishing his version of
socialism from others in The Communist Manifesto, the term is not used at all.
Rather, the language is as follows:
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on

ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered by this or that
would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual
relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical
movement going on under our very eyes.94
The emphasis upon ‘historical materialism’ as a science, meaning the model of

natural science whereby things happen through the iron necessity of ‘laws’
independent of human control, came later from Engels, particularly in his dabblings
with the natural sciences in his Anti-Duhring of 1875, (where Marx never dabbled)
and later, more famously, in the very title of his work, Socialism – Utopian or
Scientific?, which was the most influential popular exposition of ‘Marxism’, running
through numerous editions and translations. It was perhaps from this work most of
all, especially in its English title,95 that readers derived the view that the march
of history was viewed by Marx as ‘scientifically inevitable’, the exact impression
Engels wished to make.
Thus questions arise as to how far Marx meant to afford his ‘theory’ or ‘conception’
of history the status of ‘science’ in that strong sense defined above, or meant
something nearer to what we would call a ‘philosophy’, despite his rejection of the
term. The answer lies partly in semantics. For centuries, in different languages,
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MARX ON HISTORY
what we translate as ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ were used as interchangeable terms

for ‘knowledge’.96 Even when the specifically factual, empirical knowledge we call
‘scientific’ began in the seventeenth century to be detached from a priori concep-
tual thinking, it was often called ‘natural philosophy’. There are also the related
terms, ‘a theory’ and ‘to theorise’, with their own contradictory meanings. Such
ambiguities demonstrate that we are far from having a uniform, clear, vocabulary
to denote the status of ‘knowledge’, and that particularly as we go back into history
caution is needed in ascribing what writers mean when they employ such terms,
their contextual use often being a surer guide than dictionary definitions.
In Marx’s case it seems clear that when attacking ‘philosophy’ he is attacking
thinking which proceeds purely through deduction from logical categories. This is
not to say he dismissed the power of logic – rather, he rejected the validity of
treating universal terms such as ‘man’ as if they denote real phenomena. In this he
was following earlier ‘nominalist’ thinkers (such as Hobbes) as distinct from the
‘realists’ who thought otherwise. By his day, this traditional dispute was couched
in terms of ‘materialist’ versus ‘idealist’ philosophy, and thus when attacking ‘philos-
ophy’ it could be argued Marx was only attacking idealist philosophy (i.e.,
particularly Hegel). However, we also saw him attacking materialist philosophers
(including Feuerbach) on somewhat similar grounds – namely, their belief that in
talking of material things (rather than logical categories) they were talking of things
whose reality, meaning, or nature was objectively fixed through sensual perception
as by some external diktat. For Marx such thinking was equally flawed, for it still
believed in things having fixed essences, despite being apparently grounded in
empirical, material reality rather than abstract concepts. It is in this larger sense
that Marx attacked both idealist and materialist ‘philosophy’ as a mode of
apprehending and understanding the world.
Instead, Marx’s proposed new method, ‘historical materialism’, was ‘scientific’
in the sense that, for him, it was derived from the facts of practical reality rather
from fixed or a priori concepts. It was also ‘scientific’ in the sense that, from this
‘real actuality’, it proposed a general ‘conception’ or framework of central tenets
which explained the connections between things – akin to the role ‘scientific laws’
play in explaining nature. However, unlike the latter, the subject-matter of
‘historical materialism’ was not nature, but the human world – and this distinguishes
it from the model of the ‘hard’ physical sciences, since the ‘laws’ governing the
development of societies are not some extraneous ‘principles’ directing how things
function, but are what he calls ‘premises’ derived from straightforward practical
reality, (e.g., the production of means of subsistence). In understanding the human
world, then, we must be ‘scientific’ in the sense that we should begin from its strictly
material ‘premises’. History must be understood materialistically. So, we might say,
must natural science. However, it is equally important that this materialist basis
to human life must be understood historically – i.e., as subject to continuing
alteration over time, partly (but significantly) because of the impact of human
activity itself – and this is not a feature of natural science. Put simply, then, in
‘historical materialism’ it is as important that human life be approached historically
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as that it be approached materialistically. ‘History’ thus becomes integral to the

understanding of social reality, as method, rather than being merely something
whose facts might interest one.
It is just this restricting of the scope of ‘historical materialism’ both to human affairs
and to their historicity which prevents Marx’s theory from being ‘scientific’ in our
contemporary sense of the term.
But how far is his theory of history ‘scientific’ in what he meant by the term? Some
have argued that, whatever he meant by claiming he was not ‘philosophising’ but
was instead being ‘scientific’, he failed because of the inclusion of moral judgements
in his historical theory. Similar doubts are raised about the ‘objectivity’ of his
specific theory about economics in Das Kapital, a work so clearly fired by the same
moral impulses present twenty years earlier in The German Ideology. The argument
is that, whatever we mean by ‘scientific’ knowledge, it must at the minimum eschew
the intrusion of moral evaluations about its subject-matter. If not, it is being
‘philosophical’ rather than ‘scientific’ because introducing ideas unamenable to
empirical verification. On these grounds, Marx’s theory of history is ‘philosophy’.
Moreover, it could be claimed that it is ‘philosophy’ in bad faith because it purports
not to be philosophy. This is because Marx himself appears to dismiss ‘moral’ ideas
as simply reflections of different material (class) interests. An important
achievement of ‘historical materialism’ is, after all, to explain where moral ideas
come from, thus stripping them of any claim to universal ‘truth’. But by these same
criteria, then, the moral impulse underlying Marx’s own theory relegates it to ‘mere
ideology’ – certainly not ‘science’, and arguably not even ‘philosophy’ because the
latter, where value-orientated, is supposed to argue its values rather than assume
them as given.
The demise of ‘philosophy of history’?

Such arguments raise considerable questions about ‘historical materialism’ as a
method of understanding the course of history. However, a case exists for suggesting
they arise from false expectations derived from the belief that Marx understood
himself to be proposing a rigidly determinist ‘science’ of history. I have tried to
indicate that this is a false reading. No ‘science’ or ‘philosophy’ of history can ignore
the role human needs, desires, illusions, and ambitions play in human history. That
is, after all, what makes it human – or put the other way round, is what makes it
history. Marx was acutely aware of this, as demonstrated firstly by his turn away
from Hegel’s ‘Spirit’ as the central figure in historical development, replacing it with
‘man’ – and then his turn away from (Feuerbach’s) ‘man’, replacing it with actual
men embroiled in and responding to their material circumstances. He undertook
this intellectual journey – away from ‘philosophy’ towards ‘real’ knowledge – better
to understand the grand scope of history. But making that journey did not involve
his abandoning his previous thinking in toto. His earlier, merely general, notion of
history as the process of human self-objectification through productive activity is
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MARX ON HISTORY
strongly present in his (mature) historical materialist theory, albeit stripped of its
abstract connotations. Likewise his earlier notion of ‘alienation’ continues to
resonate in his mature theory, except that the abstract ideal of ‘freedom’ is
transposed into the more prosaic ideal of individual fulfilment within the context
of a fully enabling mode of social and productive organisation. Also, the centrality
of private property, class division, and the proletariat in his earlier ‘philosophising’
about history persists into his mature theory, but now as real operative factors in
explaining actual historical epochs and their changes. It is true that a moral
standpoint underlay this overall conception, from his earliest ‘philosophising’ to
the ‘scientific’ claims of historical materialism. But Marx never made any secret
about it, nor felt the need to apologise for it on the grounds that it might invalidate
his theory.
Perhaps one reason for his lack of concern was that the moral views he expressed
were not, as far as he was concerned, intrinsic to any particular class-interest, and
thus not narrowly ‘ideological’. Rather, it is a morality which reviles any limitation
upon individuals’ ability to explore and fulfil their capacities because their activity
is treated simply as a means to be commandeered and exploited for others’ selfish
ends. As such, it is a ‘general’ moral value which may be expressed differently, and
involve surmounting different problems, throughout the history of societies – but
one that, for Marx, has doggedly shown itself throughout the practice of human
beings’ history. And it is this latter observation which perhaps provides a more
satisfactory explanation for why Marx never flinched from incorporating his moral
perspective into his thinking and writing. By doing so he was hoping to insert his
ideas, including their moral imperative, as a factor in people’s understanding of
the world – because it is human beings who, in their thoughts and actions, are the
stuff of world-history. But the corollary to this (which Marx’s own logic dictates)
is that it is up to them, through their continuing activity in history, to ‘prove’
whether the meaning he claims to find in that history is valid. ‘The question
whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question
of theory but is a practical question’.97 Have better historical understanding, or
subsequent events, consigned Marx’s theory of history to the proverbial dustbin,
or is the jury still out?
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Part II
ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OF
HISTO RY
11
ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OF
HISTO RY
What is it and why study it?
Analytic philosophy of history

As explained in Chapter 1, ‘philosophy of history’ has two branches; speculative
and analytic. Part I of this book offered a guide to the former. This Part treats of
the latter branch, analytic philosophy of history – and again, does so in the form of
a ‘guide’. This means that it is neither offered as an exhaustive treatment of the
subject, nor as a particular contribution towards it (although even as a ‘guide’ it is
on occasions impossible to avoid engagement in the issues because they relate to
the very premises underlying thinking). Rather, its purpose is to familiarise readers
(especially students of history) with the principal features of this area of study, and
to incorporate some critical awareness of the issues raised.
We should begin elaborating upon the brief account already given in Chapter 1 of
what analytic philosophy of history is, and by addressing those same questions we
asked of speculative philosophy of history – namely, how far is it relevant and
worthwhile for students of history to get involved with?
Whereas its speculative branch treats of history as past events and circumstances
(i.e., history as ‘content’), analytic philosophy of history enquires into history as
the discipline (or ‘form’) which discovers and understands that past. Its enquiry is
‘analytic’ because it critically analyses the thinking behind the ways in which
historians undertake their discipline. For example, what conditions must be met
for a statement about the past to be ‘true’. Is there an exclusively ‘historical’ way
of explaining the past as distinct, for example, from a scientific way? Is narrative a
satisfactory vehicle for historical knowledge? Do historians implicitly rely on
certain ‘laws’ of human behaviour in their understanding of history? If so, what are
they, and are they valid? How far are an historian’s perceptions and judgements an
extension of his or her own ‘unconscious’ or ideological views – in other words, can
the historian reach objective truth, or is he or she captive to subjective accounts?
Historical methodology – an important distinction

The above might suffice as a general indication of the nature of analytic philosophy
of history, but to stave off potential confusion it is worth distinguishing between it
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ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
and historical methodology. Many history students will have been introduced to the
latter, generally by practising historians rather than by philosophers. Partly because
the topic is addressed by, and clearly relevant to, working historians it tends to
deal with the more intimate ‘nuts and bolts’ issues which arise in the actual practice
of researching, understanding, and constructing writings in history. For example,
where is it appropriate to use statistical data, and what pitfalls await such use? How
reliable are oral accounts as evidence and/or proof of events? Likewise regarding
film. What is the distinction between ‘primary source material’ and secondary
sources, and can it become blurred? Are State papers and other official records
unusually reliable as documentary evidence, and/or do they require special
techniques of interpretation? How might one best approach ‘non-traditional’ kinds
of history, such as women’s history, the history of the media, or the history of sport?
What should be the focus of ‘social’ history? How should one judge between
different historical accounts of the same events?
If dealing with these more ‘technical’ questions of direct practical relevance to
actual historians is one reason for distinguishing between historical methodology
and analytic philosophy of history, the other reason is allied to it – namely, the
latter asks more abstract, general questions which focus not so much on how ‘best’
to engage in the existing practice of being an historian, but rather on ‘what is the
discipline of history?’. Here the meaning of ‘is’ is ambiguous, however, because
the analytic philosophers, although concerned with the straightforward empirical
answer to the question, also mean ‘what should the discipline of history ‘ideally’ be?’,
and ‘does the discipline of history make sense?’. The difference, then, between
historical methodology and analytic philosophy of history exemplifies that between
the practical (or ‘technical’) and the theoretical (or ‘critical’) study of an activity,
generating the different sorts of questions posed above.
The difference between historical methodology and analytic

philosophy of history
Because this is not only a difficult distinction, but also a controversial one for some,
it is worth elaborating on by means of an example. Let us take the activity of
building a house. Our ‘methodologist’ will critically study the problems involved,
examine the techniques used, judge the suitability of the materials used, and assess
the skill and qualifications of the builders. In short, he studies the practical aspects
of house-building. Unless something is radically wrong with the normal results of
‘house-building’, then in his capacity as ‘methodologist’ he will be exercising his
critical faculty within the existing practice of house-building and within the existing
notions of what a ‘house’ is. He is not involved in re-examining what ‘houses’ are,
nor in revolutionising the activity of house-building on the grounds that the existing
practice is fundamentally flawed, or even senseless. The same applies to our
historical methodologist. The activity he is studying is the discipline of history. But
as practically inspired, his study invites only certain questions and excludes others.
His thinking proceeds within the ‘normal’ parameters of the discipline. His
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practical stance does not invite fundamental questions regarding what the past is,
neither to what extent the discipline of history makes sense.
The case is different with a theoretical, rather than practical, study of an activity.
Returning to ‘house-building’, our analytic philosopher of house-building adopts
the properly ‘philosophical’ stance of ‘astonishment’ at the activity. Eschewing
existing ideas of it which emanate from the practice and are thus ‘captive’ to it, he
wishes to understand what this activity called ‘house-building’ ‘is’. For example,
what ‘is’ a house? Is it a functional thing, and if so, are its functions sensible? Could
the same functions better be served by some other structure, or in some other way?
Does it matter what it looks like? Is a ‘house’ different from a ‘flat’, a ‘tent’, a ‘hut’?
What makes ‘the ideal house’? Regarding building ‘houses’, is the character of houses
determined by building techniques? Could one envisage a more efficient way of
‘building’ them? Is house-building a worthwhile activity, or might resources be
used better elsewhere?
We can see from this, then, how the theoretically inspired study of ‘house-
building’ differs from its practical study. Now, just as ‘house-building’ is an activity,
so is the discipline of history, and thus the same principles apply. It can be studied
practically – that is, historical methodology; and theoretically – that is, analytic
philosophy of history. The two approaches differ, generating different sets of
questions.
The blurring of the difference

This said, however, the difference between the two can become blurred. Why can
this happen? This can be shown by returning to ‘house-building’ and observing
there are times when it undergoes significant changes. This may be because of some
revolutionary technology which transforms building techniques (making possible
‘houses’ unthought of before), or because ideas of what a house ‘is’ shift radically
from existing norms, (for example, because of new ideas regarding life-styles, or new
circumstances such as population pressure or change of habitat). In such periods
of radical transformation we can expect a certain coming-together of the kinds of
questions posed by both the practical and theoretical study of ‘house-building’. Its
practical study no longer has a sure ‘norm’ from which it emanates, for the new
technology raises unprecedented challenges and possibilities which generate those
more abstract questions usually reserved to the theoretical study of house-building.
For example, in the absence of any existing norms, the issue of how best to
incorporate electronics into the building of houses brings to the fore the question
of the function of ‘housing’ – is a ‘house’ a place for working, or is it ‘home’, or can
both functions be incorporated, and if so, what is the best way to tackle it? Similarly,
if ‘house-building’ is changing because of new life-styles involving a radically
different concept of a ‘house’ – the practical study of ‘house-building’ will again
have points of intersection with its theoretical study. For instance, what exactly is
it the builder is supposed to achieve?
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But if there are pressures which can broaden the practical study of ‘house-
building’ towards issues more theoretical, so the same pressures work in the other
direction, ‘narrowing’ the scope of its theoretical study towards practical issues. For
example, where the nature of house-building is radically altering then the
theoretical study of it, simply to understand what is in front of one, is drawn more
closely than usual to the details of its practice. The theorist, now bereft of a
traditional norm to criticise in terms of its presuppositions, instead needs to look
closely at the ‘nuts and bolts’ of what house-builders are doing simply to discover
what its presuppositions actually are, (which he wishes to critically explain and
assess). For instance, why do these house-builders include so many cable-layers
and electronics engineers – what is their significance?
Thus it is particularly in the context of rapid and/or fundamental changes to an
activity, I suggest, that its practical and theoretical studies approach more closely
together in the kinds of questions they ask. Returning to the discipline of history,
there have indeed been times when just such a relative coming-together of
historical methodology and analytic philosophy of history has occurred, appearing
to confuse them. One such was during the sixteenth century when a variety of
thinkers began to put together the very foundations of the modern discipline of
history. Partly prompted by a growing scepticism regarding the relevance, meaning,
and historical authority of the Roman Law, their ambition was to change the way
in which history was studied, not only to make it make more sense but also to make
its study more ‘useful’. Through adopting a comparative approach they hoped to
find some universal patterns and lessons within the legal, cultural, and political
histories of nations, and this involved them in some ‘re-thinking’ of history both
in terms of what the discipline should aspire to and in terms of the ‘nuts and bolts’
of a proper methodology designed to achieve that end. Not least among them was
the French philosopher, jurist, and political theorist, Jean Bodin. Dissatisfied with
the way history was studied, written, and read, in his Method for the Easy
Comprehension of Histories (1566) Bodin advanced ideas which ‘approach a genuine
system of internal criticism’ of historians and historical sources, and contributed
significantly to ‘the first extensive formulation of the rules and conditions of
historical belief’. For example, he recommended that the ‘good’ historian needs to
be neither too close nor far away in time from the events he recounts. He should
be honest, avoid value-judgements altogether, and any bias which might arise from
his patriotic or religious feelings – i.e., he should strive to be objective. He should
not invent speeches, nor use flowery language, for his purpose is not to entertain
but to render the truth of events; and we should take care, in reading historians,
that they were not writing under constraint of persecution or in response to bribery.1
Elementary as Bodin’s ideas might now seem, (although then radical in the light
of previous historical writings), the point is that they demonstrate a perspective on
the discipline of history which exemplifies that intermixing of the concerns of
historical methodology with the more theoretical ones of analytic philosophy
of history; and I am suggesting that this is hardly surprising given the context of
major change in which the thinking emerged. It would appear another such period
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of change is with us now, when again the (present) foundations of the discipline
of history are under attack by the so-called ‘postmodernists’. Their thinking
radically challenges the very possibility of viable historical knowledge, involving
critiques aimed both at the methodological procedures of historians and at their
broader presuppositions of a knowable past, thus tending to merge concerns of
historical methodology with analytic philosophy of history.
The relevance of analytic philosophy of history

Having explained the approach of ‘analytic philosophy of history’ and distinguished
it (in principle) from ‘historical methodology’, we may now ask of it what we asked
of ‘speculative philosophy of history’ – namely, what (if any) is the relevance of
analytic philosophy of history for historians? Should historians be concerned by the
‘philosophical’ analysis of how they think about their subject? The initial response
may be that historians should indeed be interested in studying how they themselves
‘think’. Does what historians tell us make sense? – what kind of sense? For instance,
can they be said to be thinking scientifically? If not, are they instead engaged in
their own (‘historical’) way of thinking? Can the way historians think and write
be trusted in terms of truth? – and (a separate matter) in terms of objectivity? Are
there necessarily hidden (‘unconscious’) assumptions influencing how historians
construct or recover the past, (for instance, a reliance on ‘human nature’, on ‘laws’
determining the behaviour of organisations and institutions, and on cultural
norms)? If so, are these assumptions valid? Is it possible to avoid ‘assumptions’?
Should historians be focusing on issues different from those they normally address
(i.e., the origins and consequences of things)? Are there certain topics which cannot
by their nature be the subject of a history, or does ‘anything go’, such as a history
of racism, of the Atlantic Ocean, or of beauty?
The supposition is, then, that historians who are critically aware of the thinking
processes they engage in will be that much more thoughtful, perceptive, and
confident of the value of what they do, making them ‘better’ historians. This,
however, is a rather simplistic answer, and in addition is unlikely to convince those
historians who are antagonistic towards such ‘philosophising’, preferring to get on
with their work without such outside interference. The more satisfactory answer
as to why historians ought to reflect on their own thinking-processes is longer and
somewhat different.
We may begin it by observing that the short answer given above suggests the
historian should, so to speak, pay occasional health-giving visits to the foreign
terrain of analytic philosophy of history, thereby returning refreshed to his own
native terrain. One problem with this is that, as with visiting any health-clinic, one
needs to trust the doctors there. But a more fundamental flaw is the assumption that
reflective analysis of the assumptions underlying his own thinking is not an integral
part of the historian’s task as an historian – that it is, indeed, foreign terrain (however
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beneficial a visit might be). This is an assumption of some historians, and it is as

false as it is damaging. Why? The answer revolves around the fact that the discipline
of history is a ‘theoretical ‘ activity rather than a ‘practical’ one, and should
therefore intrinsically involve reflection on one’s thinking. History is a theoretical
subject. What does this mean?
Theoretical and practical studies

The difference between studying something theoretically and studying something
practically rests on the motivations of the enquirer. For example, one may study a
neighbour’s activity in her garden to understand what she is doing. One does not
understand what she is up to, and is curious to find out. Why is one curious in this
instance? Simply because one is averse to not understanding what one is observing
– one is puzzled. Alternatively, one might recognise she is planting potatoes, but
still be simply curious as to how she goes about it. In both cases one wants to
understand what one is observing solely for the sake of understanding, as an end
in itself. One is not observing her in order to achieve some purpose or objective,
for which understanding her actions is a means. This latter ‘kind’ of understanding
or study is practically inspired, as, for example, wanting to understand what she is
doing in order to check on her state of mind, or because one hopes to learn how to
plant potatoes. The same distinction between theoretical and practical
understanding can apply to numerous objects of study. For example, one may study
politics simply to understand it better, (theoretical study) – or to learn how to
become a politician, or to bet on an election, or stage a coup, (practical studies).
The same applies to the study of history. For instance one may study past events
in Ireland solely to understand them (in terms of what happened and why, how they
originated, and what their consequences were). Such a study is history proper and
is, then, ‘theoretical’. Alternatively, one may study past events in Ireland in order
to find support for one’s political views, or to produce a flattering biography for
publication, or to prepare a revolutionary manifesto. Such studies are practically
inspired, not seeking understanding for the sake of it, and are consequently not
examples of the discipline of history, but variously exercises in propaganda, rhetoric,
or ideological literature. It is not that such studies are poor history; they are not
history at all. It is true there can be better and worse history, but different criteria
are involved in that distinction. Far more fundamental is the distinction between
the discipline of history and other studies of the past, and it rests on the difference
between the theoretical and practical approach to the past.
‘Observing’ things
Why is this difference fundamental and what are its effects? The original meaning
of the Greek verb ‘to theorise’ was ‘to observe’. This meant that, as observers of
things, we are not part of them. We neither hope for, nor expect, anything from
them. We simply observe them ‘from a distance’ in the hope of making sense of
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them. In solely wishing to understand them, with no practical objectives to realise

through understanding them (such as making money, achieving fame, or learning
a skill), we are essentially dis-interested in what we are observing (however
fascinated we may be by it), and dis-interested in the results of our observing other
than how adequate or true our understanding is. For instance, one may attend a
pop-concert simply as ‘an observer’, wanting to understand what goes on for the
sake of it. One is not there in order to enjoy the concert, nor because of a crush on
a member of the pop-group, nor for any other self-interested motivation. In short,
one is not a participant involved in what one is observing. Neither does it affect one’s
interests what understanding one gains of the event – for example, one has not
attended to find out how to become a successful pop-star, or how best to organise
a concert. The essence of the ‘observer’ (or ‘theorist’) is that he has no axe to grind
either about what he is ‘observing’ (or ‘theorising’), or about the conclusions he
reaches in his effort to understand what he observes. Further, in his stance as
‘observer’ there is thus nothing to influence either what he studies in the pop-
concert, or whether he rejects or approves whatever ideas he forms as part of his
understanding of the event.
This is not so with a practically motivated study of the pop-concert, because the
practical objective (whatever it might be) affects what one chooses to examine –
much of what is happening is irrelevant to one’s purpose, and is consequently
neglected. Similarly with how one studies the pop-concert in terms of the thinking
one pursues – some lines of enquiry will be ignored because they are irrelevant to,
or even interfere with, what it is one needs to think about to achieve one’s
objective.
Thus a practically motivated study of something is partial both in the sense that
it does not study its material fully but only those ‘parts’ relevant to its objective –
and in the sense that the thinking involved demonstrates a ‘partiality’ towards
lines of thinking and conclusions appropriate or ‘convenient’ to one’s purposes.
Although this does not mean the understandings achieved will necessarily be false
(although such a danger threatens), it does mean the study, as angled towards the
ends sought, will be ‘distorted’.
A theoretically motivated study, on the contrary, is ‘impartial’, because as the
disinterested ‘observing’ of something, any and every of its aspects is open to
enquiry, however obscure it may appear. It is also ‘impartial’ in the sense that, as a
non-participant in that which he studies, the observer (‘theorist’) does not ‘take
sides’ in his thinking. Having no aim other than understanding, no lines of enquiry
or ideas reached can be ‘unwelcome’ or ‘inconvenient’. The only ‘unwelcome’ idea
would be one that was untrue; the only ‘inconvenient’ conclusion one that did not
follow. The theorist simply seeks ‘the truth’ – or more accurately, in seeking
understanding solely for the sake of understanding, what else can this mean than
seeking true ideas about something? (Although this is far from meaning the
theorist’s conclusions must always be true – mistakes can be made). Unlike
the practical study of something, where the relevance or usefulness of the ideas
reached provides the rationale of the exercise, the only rationale of a theoretical
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study is the adequacy or truth of its ideas. Further, this is why an integral aspect of
the theoretical study of something is that the ‘theorist’ reflects on his own thinking,
both in terms of whether there are aspects of the object of study he has neglected,
and whether the direction his thinking has taken and the conclusions reached are
logical and unsullied by ‘partiality’. Reflexive thinking, or ‘thinking about one’s
thinking’, is, then, a crucial feature of theoretical study because the latter, as directed
towards the truth or intellectual adequacy of its conclusions, demands one checks
one’s thinking for logical consistency, accuracy of facts, and ill-founded or
unexamined assumptions.
Thus it is, then, that integral and crucial to the discipline of history, inasmuch
as it is a theoretical study of the past, is the historian’s perpetual preparedness to
revise his ideas, approaches, reasoning, and conclusions via an ongoing critical
awareness of his own thinking. Insofar as this part of his work constitutes ‘analytic
philosophy of history’, the latter is, then, an important part of the historian’s own
work. It is not foreign terrain to be visited occasionally like a health-farm. It is
native territory.
‘History proper’
I will make two further observations on the overall issue of the relevance of ‘analytic
philosophy of history’ to historians. First, the reader may think the above reasoning
amounts to a circular argument – namely, ‘history is a theoretical discipline
– theoretical disciplines involve critical awareness of the thinking involved –
therefore integral to the discipline of history is historians’ self-critique of their
reasoning’. In other words, the conclusion is implicit in the premise, for having
initially defined history as a theoretical subject the rest follows. This is fair enough,
although it is far from the case that nothing is gained by exploring the implications
of what a ‘theoretical’ approach is. Nevertheless, the spotlight does turn upon the
fundamental premise, that ‘history proper’ is a ‘theoretical’ discipline. I have
asserted it, but in showing what it means I have implicitly shown what the
alternative would imply, and I invite any who challenge its ‘theoretical’ nature to
defend that alternative. I believe they would not only be defending something
deeply contrary to historians’ impulse towards ‘impartiality’ but also something
which would disintegrate into such piecemeal sundry discourses that all hopes of
rescuing the foundations of a coherent discipline would be lost.
Foreign territory?
The second observation returns us to the analogy of visiting a health-farm. We
noted it matters whether the doctors know their business. But I have argued that
the analogy is misleading in any event because the terrain of analytic philosophy
of history is not foreign territory for the historian. He or she should be their own
‘doctor’ as an integral part of their work. But, it may be asked, surely the doctor at
the health-farm is the expert, whilst the patients are amateurs? In other words, is
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not the job of critically analysing historians’ thinking best left to the professional
(analytic) philosophers of history, rather than demanding that historians, who are
at most amateur ‘philosophers’, do it themselves? But this is where the analogy
breaks down. Analytic philosophers of history are not, in the main, historians; they
are philosophers. And insofar as it is in fact they who are visiting foreign territory
– namely, the discipline of history – when they engage in analytic philosophy of
history, we could just as well say it is they who are the amateurs. Do they know what
they are trying to talk about? The historians, on the other hand, are in home terri-
tory; we should assume that if anyone is entitled to talk about the way historians
think it is the historians themselves from their own intimate knowledge of what
they do.
It is in this manner that arguments can be turned on their head, and it is fair to
remark that the indifference of some historians towards the critiques from analytic
philosophers of history stems from a scepticism regarding how far the latter have a
genuine acquaintance with the discipline of history. Equally, however, philosophers
can have a point when they expose inconsistencies or other inadequacies in an
historian’s thinking. But the truth surely lies somewhere in the middle. It is not
unreasonable to expect the analytic philosopher to be acquainted with the
discipline he is analysing (i.e., history). Equally, however, it is not unreasonable
to expect the historian to be capable of critical analysis of his own thinking – in
other words, to engage in ‘philosophy’. If, then, the analytic philosopher of history
runs the risk of ‘amateurism’ regarding the discipline of history, so the historian runs
the risk of ‘amateurism’ regarding ‘philosophy’. Both risks are avoidable, but
particularly the latter once we recognise that ‘philosophy’ is not some mysterious,
exclusive ‘way of thinking’, but simply reasoned argumentation regarding questions
inaccessible to established disciplines.
In the above exposition of what analytic philosophy of history is about, I have
given a number of examples of the questions around which it focuses – for example,
how generous can the subject-matter of ‘history’ be? How do we judge the truth of
an historical account? Are there ‘hidden’ assumptions interweaved into
understanding past events? These questions alone generate numerous ancillary
issues (often treated independently in journal articles) such that there is a danger
of becoming so immersed in the minutiae of complex arguments that the larger
purpose of analytic philosophy of history escapes the reader. This would be all the
more regrettable for students of history, for whom this guide is written. Therefore
I have collated (without academic references) what I take to be the most recurring
and relevant issues under just two general chapter headings, within whose broader
scope they are treated. Given its contemporary resonance, I have reserved
treatment of the postmodernist position to a separate chapter (opening Part III),
which may serve as both a continuation of this ‘guide’ to analytic philosophy of
history, and (as now specifically focused) as an example of some of its specific
argumentations.
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12
THE ‘WHAT IS HISTO RY?’
DEBATE
Introduction
For students of history the considerable, often complex, and apparently diverse
subject-matter of analytical philosophy of history is best made accessible by
subsuming it under two general enquiries – ‘what is history?’, and ‘what is history
for?’, (i.e., ‘history’ as discipline, not ‘content’).
My intention is not to give detailed accounts of particular contributions to these
questions, nor to explain where and why such debates originated. Rather, the
aim of these two chapters is best met by a general presentation of the issues,
unencumbered by academic references and excursions from the highways down
the sometimes intricate byways (amply covered by the reading list).
Just as objectivity is one of the issues related to the nature of historical writings,
so it is for theorists’ writings. Thus it is appropriate to make clear that the following
account of what analytical philosophy of history is about is based upon an earlier
attempt I made to expose the theoretical underpinnings of history as a discipline
(undertaken, incidentally, better to see how far ‘the history of thought’ is a viable
subject).1 Although in itself this need not concern the reader, it is fair to remark
that where in the following I offer specifically critical points and/or refer to other
theorists, these mainly derive from those arguments and references.
This chapter comprises five sections, beginning with some preliminary observations
necessary to clear the ground, followed by four sections reflecting the principal
areas of discussion involved in theorists’ closer reflections on ‘what is history?’ –
namely, types of history, the epistemology of history, ‘historical explanation’, and
historical subject-matter.
Theoretical preliminaries
‘Actual’ and ‘ideal’ history

The question ‘what is history?’ is two-faced. On the one hand it could simply be
asking ‘what is history’ as a straightforwardly empirical matter – and the obvious
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THE ‘WHAT IS HISTORY?’ DEBATE
answer would be to say ‘what historians actually do, today’. (If they used to do
something different, that would simply answer the question, ‘what was history?’).
On the other hand, in asking ‘what is history?’ one might really mean, ‘what
ought history to be?’ – in other words, what should someone called ‘an historian’
(ideally) be doing in order to properly qualify as such? What in principle should the
subject of history entail?
Understandably, these two sides often become entangled, since the dichotomy
is not unique to the question ‘what is history?’. For example, if asked ‘what is
marriage?’, many would be hard-pressed not to combine an idea of what it actually
is in their present society with some idea of what marriage is in principle (i.e., what
it ought to be). And if ‘marriage’ might seem a special example, it is not – for one
might say the same about questioning what anything ‘is’. What is a car? A Mini is
a car, and so is a Ferrari. But isn’t a Ferrari more of a ‘real’ car? The same problematic
applies to any ‘thing’, both natural and man-made (e.g., ‘what is a tree?’, ‘what is
a chair?’), for in every case some idea of what a certain thing is ideally probably
intrudes into our answer. (In Western philosophy this dichotomy began with the
different approaches adopted by Plato and Aristotle towards ‘the nature of things’).
The question, ‘what is history?’, then, is not unusual in inviting answers which
combine both the empirical and idealist approaches. It is true that some practising
historians are likely to restrict themselves to an empirical answer, whilst it is equally
evident that some analytic philosophers of history seek some idealised paradigm of
history as a discipline, yet to be practised or attempted. But the thinking of most
historians and analytic philosophers of history, however varied or even confused
their answers might be, commonly reflects both sides to the question. For example,
however dissatisfied we will find some philosophers are with the notion that
narrative is an important element of history, they recognise it as an empirical fact
(however reluctantly) and include a critical exploration of narrative in their
considerations of ‘what is history?’.
Words and ‘reality’

These considerations straight away confront us with a dilemma, for it seems those
even posing the question, ‘what is history?’, are immediately cast into philosophical
issues. However, this dilemma of what we mean by the question can be, if not
solved, at least diverted by adopting the following approach: the word ‘history’
(i.e., the academic subject) is but a word. Whatever else we might say about words
(such as their fascinating etymological origins, their changing meanings), like any
word, it was contrived by human-beings to denote or ‘single out’ something in the
‘world out there’ worth noticing and distinguishing from other things. Now,
the reasons humans have had for thus ‘noticing’ this or that are as numerous as their
interests (material, practical, emotional, aesthetic, scientific, et al.). For example,
for us it is worth noticing things we can comfortably sit on. We call them ‘chairs’
to distinguish them from things we notice for other reasons – e.g., ‘trees’. We use
words, then, to map out our experience of ‘the world out there’ in terms of the
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relevance, and hence noticeability, of the differences we find ‘out there’. And it is
fair to assume that intelligent beings with other senses from humans might find,
from their experience of ‘the world out there’, ‘things’ unknown to humans – just
as within the human world, different cultures and different times have generated
(to a degree) different ‘perceptions’ of the world. The ancient Romans had no
concept of ‘an air-pocket’. There are societies today which have no concept of
‘teenagers’.
This shows that the meaning of words reflects the ways in which the myriad
aspects of the world impinge upon us – and the question of whether chairs, trees,
teenagers, or air-pockets ‘truly’ or ‘really’ exist, such that when these concepts
emerge we have in some sense ‘tuned in’ to objective, pre-existing ‘truths’ about
the world, does not arise. Rather, the point is, do the distinctions we make about
‘the world’, which are denoted by the different meaning of words, ‘work’ for us in
practice? Are they reliable? Can I ‘drive’ a ‘chair’? Can I ‘eat’ an ‘air-pocket’? Are
‘teenagers’ ‘right-angled’? Will ‘taking a holiday’ ‘refresh’ me? Is it ‘dangerous’ to
approach ‘snakes’? What is the ‘cause’ of this ‘war’?
All this is not to say that ‘things’ do not ‘really’ exist – that the world is simply
our idea of it. For of one thing we can be sure: if there were not (what we call) ‘the
world out there’, and were we not beings for whom (what we call) different ‘things’
were relevant, then we would have no ideas and thus no words. But neither is this
to say that ‘things’ really do exist, as if chairs, trees, and teenagers were in some sense
pre-existent, meaningful ‘things in themselves’, rather than simply words denoting
our experience.
The word ‘history’

Now, applied to ‘what is history?’, we can say that in their experience of the world
humans have found it worthwhile to distinguish things called ‘activities’ (separating
them off from other things such as emotions, objects, qualities and so on). And they
have also found it worthwhile to distinguish different ‘activities’ – e.g., skiing,
reading, courting. Amongst these numerous activities are intellectual activities, and
one of these they have thought worth differentiating is ‘doing history’. In other
words, the word ‘history’ has been used not only to refer in some general way to ‘the
past’ as a vast arena of events and circumstances no longer present to us, but also
to denote the (intellectual) activity of establishing and studying the details of this
‘past’. From this viewpoint, the question of the nature of ‘history’ becomes sensible
and manageable, for it neither invites the trite notion that ‘history’ is simply the
catch-all of the various things ‘historians’ do, nor philosophical flights into a fantasy
world of some ‘ideal’ existent or ‘essence’ called ‘history’, which ‘really’ exists if
only we poor mortals could see it clearly – (an occupational hazard of historical
theorists). This latter notion is the (idealist) philosopher’s conceit, and misdirects
many a poor soul’s attempt to understand ‘what history is’.
Rather, the question of ‘what is history?’ divides into two: first, what is it about
the activity we call ‘history’ that has made it worth noticing and distinguishing from
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other (intellectual) activities? And second, how useful or ‘workable’ is this

distinction?
History as ‘the study of the past’

All theorists agree that the subject called ‘history’ studies the past. On this there
is no room for debate, (except to ponder whether this excludes those who, in the
guise of historians, discuss both the present and the future – an issue reserved for
the following chapter on ‘what is history for?’). ‘The study of the past’, however, is
too broad a notion with which to define ‘history’ very usefully. On the one hand
‘the past’ simply means any and every thing which ever was or happened, and on
the other hand ‘the study of’ means any and every thing which can be said about
this ‘past’. It is when we start to narrow down this profligate notion of ‘history’ as
simplistically meaning ‘the study of the past’, to make it more manageable and
useful, that the work of analytical philosophy of history begins and the debates
develop.
The catch-all notion of ‘the past’, (meaning so little because embracing so
much), thus needs slimming down. And it seems that the first step, recognised in
conventional wisdom, is to restrict the discipline of history to the (past) world of
human affairs. It is true the term, ‘history’, has also been used (and still is) in relation
to the natural world. For example, the identification and classification of species of
animals and plants used to be called ‘natural history’, and nowadays we are familiar
with the notion of ‘the history’ of the Earth’s geological formation, ‘the history’ of
its climate, and so on. However, we recognise the difference between these latter
‘histories’ and what is conventionally meant by ‘history’. Tellingly, in dealing with
the natural world their accounts are presented in terms of cause and effect; in other
words, the understanding they offer is ‘scientific’. This, at least for most historians
and analytic philosophers of history, clearly distinguishes such ‘histories’ from what
they mean by the discipline of history – and this immediately suggests something
important, for it implies that the kind of understanding historians engage in is not
structured in strictly cause/effect terms.
It is true that the language of ‘cause and effect’ appears frequently in historians’
writings – however, I suggest it is rarely meant in literally scientific terms. Rather,
where they say such things as ‘the assassination of President Kennedy caused
numerous conspiracy theories’, or ‘the introduction of income tax was the effect
of the Napoleonic Wars’, they are using ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ in the same way most
of us do when we say, for example, ‘my friend’s plight caused me to lend him my
car’, or ‘his decision to leave town was the effect of his having lost his job’. In these
cases we use the language of cause and effect simply as an alternative to saying ‘he
did this because of that’ – i.e., as a way of formulating why something happened or
was the case. In ordinary conversation, where rigorous analysis is out of place, such
terminology does not matter. However, if we are seriously concerned to explain
something, we all recognise the difference between eating contaminated food
causing one to be ill, and one’s friend’s plight ‘causing’ one to assist him. In the
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former, we mean strict ‘scientific’ causation – a determinate process over which we

have no control. In the latter we do not mean this – we recognise the role of human
choice or ‘response’. The difference, then, between ‘natural’ and ‘human’ history
is telling since it suggests the latter (as ‘proper’ history), because limited to human
affairs, does not literally offer scientific accounts and explanations of the past. (We
have yet to see if there is, instead, a ‘kind’ of account and/or explanation special
to history).
But apart from this difference, equally telling is something shared by both ‘proper’
history and ‘natural history’, at least in the latter’s more contemporary guise of
tracing e.g., climatic and geological ‘history’. Rightly or wrongly, these topics are
called ‘histories’ because they not only focus on past natural processes, but also on
change over time – and it is this latter feature which correlates with an important
notion behind the concept of (human) history, since it suggests that essential to
the notion of ‘history’ is the notion of ‘change’, whether in the human or natural
world.
So far, then, in refining the initial notion that the discipline of ‘history’ studies ‘the
past’, we have restricted its compass to human affairs, and noted the importance of
the notion of change over time. Although both these restrictions may appear
sensible and may accord with what most people are differentiating by pointing to
a thing called ‘history’, further exploration of their implications has not courted
universal agreement, (maybe even casting doubt on their viability in the first place),
but has instead provided a rich arena of argument amongst analytical philosophers
of history. To see why this is so, we can now turn to the first of those four broad
areas of discussion generated by theorists’ closer reflections on ‘what is history?’.
‘Types’ of history
Descriptive history
One of the more obvious yet controversial implications stems from the second
restriction just mentioned – namely, the focus on change. If an important element
in differentiating ‘history’ is that it specifically deals with a changing past, then it
follows that to describe or identify some past scene or artefact is not enough to fully
qualify as ‘doing history’. This is because to describe, e.g., London in 1666, or to
identify, e.g., the remains of a Roman villa, is to talk about something static in
time. One is dealing with a ‘circumstance’, not with change. It is true that in order
to trace change (e.g., the development of London during the seventeenth century,
the origins of the Roman settlement of the North of England) it is essential to
know what was the case at particular points in time. But if one’s discourse is
restricted solely to this – describing/identifying moments in the past – why call it
‘history’? Why not call it ‘antiquarianism’ or, often, ‘archaeology’?
The counter-argument is that this criticism is outrageous, for it implies that the
painstaking research into details of the past – sometimes literally unearthing
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artefacts, or identifying manuscripts, or meticulously recovering the details of an

organisation, or establishing the class background to a religious movement – is not
‘doing history’. Indeed, it would be easy to find many, disappearing to obscure places
and recondite archives and returning to present in invaluable articles the
information they have uncovered about the past, who would be grossly offended
at the suggestion they were not engaged in the discipline of history. On the
contrary, they may even retort that theirs was the real historical work, all else written
about the past being mere idle talk of one sort or another!
However, does this answer the point? Although it may indeed be outrageous to
suggest they are not being historians, is it not fair to remark that their activity is
only a part (however essential) of what is involved in ‘doing history’, and that if all
their careful research is left at the production of descriptions, identifications, and
accounts of things in stasis, then they have fallen short of actually producing
‘history’. In short, what is the point of their work if left at the level of describing some
past situation or circumstance? Although we will be addressing the general question
of ‘what is the point of history?’ in the following chapter, does not the notion of
‘history’ demand that, for example, our historian of art goes further than describing
different paintings and/or painters, to link them into some notion of painting
changing over time, or that our historian of a religious movement goes further than
collating the class-composition of its members at any one time, and link this infor-
mation into part of an account of change (e.g., origins, development, decline)?
To do justice to such work, however, perhaps it is better not to press the point
any further, but to suggest instead that, insofar as it is so intimately concerned with
discovery of aspects of the past, it be called ‘descriptive history’ and accorded the
massive respect it deserves. But from a philosophical perspective, it can still be
argued that its only claim to be a distinctive activity rests on its connection with
‘the past’ (which is too general a claim), since to describe something is hardly unique
to writing history. In short, not all information about the past, nor all that is said
about the past, is ipso facto ‘history’. We mean to differentiate something more
specific by the term, such that ‘descriptive history’ is at the least inadequate, and
at worst an oxymoron.
Analytic history
The implication of the above is that ‘history’ goes beyond describing how things
were – and this is indeed the case with many students of the past, for in addition
to (or instead of) describing something past they also analyse past circumstances
or situations. By this I mean the work and thinking that goes into attempts to
generalise from particulars in order to arrive at useful notions about past phenomena.
By a process of analysis, certain common features of things and situations otherwise
unique can often be abstracted to show in what respects they were predictable in
character and/or behaviour. For example, analysis of different medieval courts may
indicate something common about their composition: the aims and methods of
different Victorian craft-unions may indicate something common about their
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character: the economic status of different Renaissance sculptors may indicate

some common insight into the nature of their artistic works. Such analytic work
(so long as it is reliable) provides useful knowledge of the past because it provides
us with generalisations which enable us better to ‘understand’ past phenomena.
Such notions as ‘the typical Victorian craft-union’, ‘the typical medieval court’
and ‘the typical Renaissance sculptor’, afford a kind of short-hand which not only
helps describe this or that particular thing but also helps explain some of its features.
It does so insofar as to identify any ‘common type’ of a thing is, in a sense, to explain
why any particular example of it is as it is, or behaves as it does. For instance, to refer
to a particular sculptor as ‘a typical Renaissance artist’ may indicate not only that
he is male, works to commission on both religious and secular topics, and uses
certain techniques such as perspective, but also ‘why’. The ‘reason’ is that he was
a typical Renaissance sculptor, and analysis has not only shown they shared these
features, but in doing so, has also implied a reason for this. To this extent, then,
the hard analytic work which goes into abstracting instructive generalisations
about past phenomena contributes towards making aspects of particular individ-
uals, organisations, and so on, more intelligible than they might otherwise be; and
to make something intelligible is, of course, to go beyond describing it. It is to
‘explain’ it.
This said, however, there are two reasons for caution regarding the explanatory
power of what I have called ‘analytic history’. It is true that to discover significant
and reliable regularities in past phenomena (including otherwise particular ‘events’
such as wars, revolutions, partitions, treaty-making, peace-keeping, and so on –
the realm of what is called ‘comparative history’) is to offer valuable insights into
‘why things were as they were’, or ‘why things happened as they did’. But first,
generalisations not only vary enormously in their precision, e.g., from the simple
term ‘medieval’ to the notion of ‘a typical late-nineteenth century French career
diplomat’; even such detailed generalisations as the latter rarely if ever bear the
stamp of scientific certainty. In history, we might say, when explaining things we
should not only respect the particular, but almost expect it. Second (and from a
philosophical viewpoint, more importantly), in what sense, exactly, does a
generalisation explain something particular? I can notice several pieces of furniture
in my room, all individually different. Yet three of them share features worth
noting. They have legs supporting seats. They are ‘chairs’. My little boy points to
the largest of the three and asks why it has legs. I reply, ‘because it is a chair, and
chairs have legs’. I have used a generalisation to explain a particular circumstance.
It is ‘reasonable’, ‘intelligible’, or ‘explicable’ that this thing has legs, because it is
an example of the generalisation, ‘a chair’. Chairs have legs because they need to
seat someone above the floor-surface. That is (part of) the rationale of ‘chairs’. It
‘explains’ them in general, and therefore in particular examples.
What can be overlooked, however, is that when I say that ‘this thing has legs
because it is a chair’, I have not explained why this thing has legs. Rather, I have
explained why, in having legs, it is called ‘a chair’. I have explained (part of) the
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meaning of the word ‘chair’. And to revert to our earlier discussion of words, we
recall that any word denotes something which is from our point of view worth
differentiating from other things ‘out there’. The ‘reason’ which is in ‘a chair’, then,
is in fact the reason we have for differentiating or noticing it. Things ‘in themselves’
have no ‘reason’. They are radically non-explicable. What we can explain is why,
in having certain features, they are denoted by this or that word – namely, in giving
the meaning of the word we reveal why we have differentiated a particular class of
things.
Thus, I have not explained why this particular object has legs by saying ‘because
it is a chair’. Rather, I am suggesting that (some) particular things are predictable
in terms of their characteristics and (where relevant) their behaviour.
There is a strong sense, then, in which to subsume particular things under a
generalisation is not in fact to explain why a particular thing is as it is or behaves
as it does. And this is one of the dangers of ‘analytic history’ – that the concepts
or generalisations it produces are appealed to in order to explain individual
circumstances, as if for instance one could explain some particular feature of English
society in 1660 by saying that 1660s England was ‘a typical pre-industrial capitalist
society’. We should bear in mind that ‘the typical pre-industrial capitalist society’
(like ‘the typical Renaissance artist’ or ‘the typical chair’) is an abstract concept,
and that as such it could never have ‘caused’, contributed to, or even influenced
any actual thing, situation, or event. To be sure, analytic history can provide a
rich and changing harvest of concepts, some more useful than others in terms of
their reliability and fecundity, which are strongly suggestive of how this or that
particular thing might be explained. But the concepts themselves cannot explain
any actual circumstance, situation, or event. That task requires that each past
phenomenon be studied in its actual particularity: i.e., that one appeals to ‘facts’,
not concepts.
These cautionary notes demonstrate the kind of arguments which analytic

philosophers of history get involved in. However, even more central to the issue
of whether ‘history’ is best construed as analytic in approach, is another of the latter’s
features – and this returns us to the notion of the relation between ‘history’ and
change. Analytic history is not essentially concerned with a changing world. An
expert who analyses different medieval villages, different industrialising societies,
or different Renaissance artists, is not so much concerned to trace change in this
medieval village, that industrialising society, or this Renaissance artist’s work.
Rather, he either wants to analyse (e.g.) this medieval village on its own merits,
or abstract features from several which they share in common, in order to arrive at
some insightful notion of ‘the typical medieval village’. In either case, just like
descriptive history, it is not intrinsic to his project to deal with a changing
phenomenon. On the contrary, even where the analytic historian is dealing with
events (where, as we shall see, ‘change’ is intrinsic to understanding them),once he
has discovered common features to, for example, different revolutions, religious
revivals, or economic slumps, he will (so to speak) stop the film rolling and set his
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mind to constructing a suggestive general rationale to the way revolutions, religious

revivals, or economic slumps happen. Rather than concerning himself with change
his hope must be that, whatever concept he constructs of, e.g., ‘the typical religious
revival’, it will remain applicable despite changing particulars. In short, his project
is concerned precisely to supersede changing circumstances rather than focus on
tracing a changing world.
Because of this, we might view ‘analytic history’ similarly to ‘descriptive history’ –

namely, that to claim it equates with what we mean by ‘the discipline of history’
is at the least to go too far, and at worst to mislead. This is because, as an activity,
it is only distinctive insofar as it studies past phenomena – (too general a feature)
– and only does so by ‘analysing’ them – (again, too general a feature, since just as
the discourse of ‘description’ has no intrinsic connection with either the past or
with change, neither does the process of ‘analysis’). Again, although to suggest
that those engaged in the demanding work of analysing past phenomena fall short
of ‘doing history’ may be a notion which outrages them, the philosophical point
needs to be made. Although there is indeed a loose sense in which ‘doing history’
encompasses such things as describing and analysing past phenomena, it is that
same loose sense which permits not only whatever is said about the past to be called
‘doing history’, but even includes reading history books! If left at that, there is
nothing left for the philosopher of history to say about ‘what is history?’, for in
being nothing more nor less than anything which, willy-nilly, is said or even read
about the past (with the proviso that it be ‘true’), the subject of ‘history’ defies
further analysis.
Doubtless there are some content to construe ‘history’ in this markedly generous
sense, appealing to the way the word is often used in practice. But even here, there
is an aspect to the word’s use which hardly needs esoteric reflection to bring it to
prominence – namely, that however vaguely the term can be used, ‘history’ not only
purports to tell us ‘what it was like’, and try to explain why, but it also tells us ‘what
happened’; i.e., historians have always concerned themselves with events. Events
may require explanation: they may lend themselves to analysis as in comparative
history: but first and foremost they have to be apprehended – and the only way to
do this is to piece together a sequence of happenings into a narrative. Narrative
discourse (as distinct from descriptive or analytic discourse) is uniquely the form
of following and articulating ‘what happened’ – and inasmuch as ‘history’ (even in
its vaguest sense) is perhaps above all about change, it feeds upon ‘what happened’.
This intimate connection with narrative thus promises far greater and more precise
insight into ‘what is history?’ than either ‘descriptive’ or ‘analytic’ history, or both
taken together.
Narrative history
The connection, then, between what is even loosely meant by ‘history’, and
narrative, is accepted as a fact of life even by those who (as we shall see) regret it.
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However, as suggested above, there are good reasons in any event for claiming it
is precisely in the area of narrative history that the intellectual challenge of
‘slimming down’ the otherwise profligate notion of ‘history’ can most satisfactorily
be met. But this does not mean that all problems are thereby suddenly solved, since
the exploration of narrative generates its own controversies.
Let us begin by clarifying what is meant by ‘narrative history’. A ‘narrative’ is an
account of ‘what happened’, understood as a sequence of occurrences. Essentially,
then, a narrative is structured in terms of ‘this happened, then that happened, then
that happened’, and so on. It is, in other words, the familiar form any story takes.
(The proviso that narrative history should be a ‘true’ story rather than fiction is a
separate matter considered later, and does not affect this fundamental feature of
any narrative or story).
We should immediately notice three things from this. First, narrative feeds on
things which happen. It is not focused on describing an object, circumstance, or state
of affairs, nor on analysing (e.g., explaining, comparing) objects, circumstances, or
states of affairs. As already seen, neither description nor analysis is essentially to
do with happenings. Narrative, on the other hand, cannot but be structured on
‘things happening’, and in that strong sense, on change. (And we might want to say
that if nothing ever changed, there would be no history).
Second, a narrative does not deal with single happenings, but links two or more
happenings by the formula ‘this happened, then that’. A single happening is simply
expressed by the appropriate verb – for example, ‘he ran down the street’, or ‘Little
Red Riding Hood entered her grandmother’s cottage’. Now it is true that when we
denote a single action or happening (by a verb) it could be argued that the action
itself can be broken down into ‘he did this then did that’. For example, in ‘running’
one puts one leg forward, and then the other leg, or in ‘entering’ a room one moves
from not being in the room, to then being in the room, such that a single
action/happening seems to express a changing situation. However, I believe closer
analysis shows that this is an illusion. When we say someone is ‘running’ or
‘entering’ (or ‘loving’ or ‘thinking’, and so on) we do not mean to differentiate a
changing situation from the myriad of situations ‘out there’. Rather, the way we
apprehend a changing situation would be, for example, to say ‘he ran down the road
and then entered the house’. In short, we do not narrate a single action/happening.
We simply identify it via a verb. Narrative, on the other hand, only comes into play
when we put different actions into a sequence of ‘doing this then doing that’, thereby
denoting a changing situation. I have explored elsewhere the apparent paradoxes
of the interplay between single happenings and narrative, elaborating on the point
that any ‘single’ action can indeed be broken down into a narrative sequence –
indeed, much history is focused precisely on doing just that (e.g., ‘Cromwell
invaded Ireland’!). But it remains important to demonstrate that amongst the
various ways in which we differentiate ‘the world out there’, apprehending a single
happening or action is different from apprehending a changing situation. When we
do the latter we cannot but use a different form of apprehension – namely, the
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sequencing of different actions into ‘this happened then that happened’, which is the
essence of narrative.
What this shows, then, is that one of the ways we make sense of ‘the world’, in
addition to singling out different objects, qualities, relationships, and indeed
happenings/actions, is to single out a class of things which might technically be
called ‘narrative identities’, or more suggestively, ‘story-objects’. The story, or
narrative form is ubiquitous in all human language and experience, from the most
trivial – ‘he came out of the house and then walked down the street’ – to the most
complex. The form of discourse corresponds to the nature or ‘structure’ of that
which we are apprehending when we ‘see’ an intelligible sequence of happenings/
actions. In short, it is no more an arbitrary matter that we ‘see’ story-objects than
that we ‘see’ physical objects. And as urged earlier in our remarks on the relation
between ‘reality’ and words, where we dismissed the question of whether ‘this chair’
really exists, the same can not only be extended to single happenings/actions –
(‘was that really ‘running’?) – but also to ‘story-objects’. They are as ‘real’ as the
different objects, actions, and qualities which we differentiate in ‘the world out
there’ – which means that to ask of the ‘story’ that ‘he came out of the house and
then got into his car’, is this ‘story’ real?’, is a non-question. It is the same as asking
whether ‘this wedding’ or ‘that war’ (or, indeed, ‘weddings’ and ‘wars’ in general)
were ‘real things’. The point is, does singling out this sequence ‘work’?; is it a
relevant and reliable understanding? (Notice that we are not here addressing the
issue of ‘truth’. This will be dealt with below, but suffice it to say here that
the question, ‘is it true that this is a chair?’, is answerable simply in terms of whether
what is stated as the case is in fact the case. ‘Truth’ applies to statements, not things.
Just so, then, with the question, ‘is it true that he came out of the house and then
got into his car?’. The statement is either true or false, not the sequence itself).
If it is true that not all analytic philosophers of history would agree with the
preceding analysis of what constitutes ‘narrative’ – (in the extensive literature on
‘historical narrative’, readers will find either different analyses of narrative, or
discussions about narrative based on an unexplored, impressionistic notion of what
it is) – most would agree with the third point we should notice; namely, that a
narrative is different from a chronicle. A chronicle is the ordering of a class of
phenomena in terms of their dates, from the earlier to the later. They may be Acts
of Parliament, the battles in a war, the models of a make of car – indeed, any class
of things whose instances can be put into succession. Thus a list is produced in
‘chronological’ order; i.e., this (then) this (then) this, and so on. As such, a
chronicle tells one no more nor less than when a thing was, or happened, and when
the next instance occurred, and so on. It is not identifying something specific ‘out
there’, but remains a self-confessedly abstract exercise.
The case is different with a narrative. In identifying/apprehending a sequence it
is doing something different from ordering things into a succession of ‘this (then)
that’. Rather, what is crucial in a narrative is that ‘this happened and then that
happened’, or ‘he did this and then he did that’, whereby the force of the term ‘then’
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is transformed from its operational muteness in a chronicle – ‘this (then) that’ –

into a meaningful linking of ‘prior and subsequent’ – ‘this then that’. In short, a
narrative is pointing to something intelligible ‘out there’ – (a sequence or ‘story-
object’) – whereas a chronicle is not. This difference between chronicle and
narrative also reinforces the fact that although chronicles can list virtually anything
(objects, situations, and happenings), the operational force of the term ‘then’ in a
narrative is only meaningful when it links happenings (‘actions’, or ‘occurrences’).
For example, it makes no sense to say, ‘his trousers were grey and then he ran down
the street’, or ‘he ran down the street and then his trousers were grey’. Narrative must
link occurrences – ‘he left the house and then ran down the street’ – such that if there
were no occurrences in the world, or only one, narrative would be impossible. In the
former case, where nothing ever happened, ‘the world’ would be changeless – and
this, I suggest, would preclude the possibility of history. In the latter case, where only
one thing had ever happened, the same applies – nothing would actually change;
history would not arise.
Thus this analysis suggests there are inextricable links between ‘things happening’,
narrative, and change – and thus between all three and ‘history’, (unless we are
happy to construe ‘history’ as simply the description, and/or analysis, and/or
chronicling of objects, situations, or circumstances). To the extent this is correct,
‘history’ therefore revolves around narrative – that is, the apprehension of situations
which change because of things that happen. Or put another way, narrative is not
some extra technique or type of discourse we might or might not choose to employ
in ‘doing history’. Rather, it is a way of ‘seeing’ and saying ‘things about the past’
which is sufficiently distinctive to differentiate, from within that broad field,
something we call the discipline of ‘history’ in an identifiable, manageable, and
relevant sense of the term.
But even if these arguments hold, they do not answer all the issues involved in
‘what is history?’.
The epistemological status of ‘history’

Apart from ‘types’ of history, another debate which emerges in analysing ‘history’
is the problem of the status of knowledge of ‘the past’. Here, we do not need to
restrict ‘history’ to a narrative, descriptive, or any other approach to the past.
Rather, all analytic philosophers of history, and historians themselves, recognise
there are special problems regarding the credibility or ‘truth’ of what historians say
about the past. The problem arises primarily because the past is no longer present,
and therefore we cannot ‘know’ a past phenomenon directly, as when we see an
object before us or witness an event taking place. ‘History’, then, as (at the mini-
mum) ‘knowledge of the past’, is a discipline which must partly be identified in
terms of its epistemological specialness; i.e., the special problems it has (as distinct
from many other disciplines) both in acquiring ‘knowledge’ and trusting its veracity.
What are these problems, and what issues do they raise?
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Acquiring knowledge of things past

Because what was, and/or what happened, in the past is no longer ‘visible’ to us,
there appear to be only three ways of acquiring ‘knowledge’ about something past.
First, one can either be told it by hearsay or (hopefully better) by a history book. In
the former case one is at liberty to mistrust ‘memories’, either individual or
collective – and in the latter case, although history books may be more reliable,
reading them is merely consuming knowledge already acquired.
A second way now available is to watch and/or listen to actual recordings of past
circumstances and events, (sometimes professionally collected in film and sound
archives). Clearly, such recordings can only deal with that portion of the past since
this technology became available, and to that extent its applicability is limited.
However, there is a case for claiming that, unlike verbal or written accounts of the
past, whose reliability is always open to question, there is a qualitative difference
to the information captured in contemporary recordings because they transport us
back ‘directly’ to the circumstances which pertained and the events which
happened.
However, both theorists and historians have argued about the nature of the
information thus acquired. For example, that film and/or sound recordings are not
simply a ‘mirror’ of what they record, but are produced by those doing the recording,
suggests to some that their reliability as a source of information from the past is, in
principle, as ‘tainted’ as oral or written accounts based on memory, although partly
for different reasons. For example, although the camera does not ‘lie’, it nevertheless
has to be pointed by someone. What it records is therefore restricted in content,
and selected. Indeed, in practice, most film and sound material is also edited after
the event. Again, even where a recording shows a demonstrable ‘fact’ – for example,
the famous film of President Kennedy’s shooting in Dallas, or film of the First World
War trenches – the ‘facts’ recorded still have to be ‘interpreted’, and often establish
less than we think. In Kennedy’s case, the film shows him being shot. But whether
it was an accident, a murder, or an assassination is another matter. Perhaps the
neutral term, ‘a killing’, is the most we can safely say the film tells us. But even that
is not the case, since he did not die at that point. On the contrary, many suspicious
things might subsequently have happened (not on film) before he actually died!
Similarly, although First World War recordings might help recover ‘what it was
like’ in the trenches, in practice the information is again both limited and partly
pre-selected.
Such reservations about the role of recorded (contemporary) information are,
then, understandable, and have occasioned considerable ambivalence regarding
their relevance to ‘what is history?’. From our theoretical stance, this is perhaps
most interestingly displayed in the issue of whether a recording should be viewed
directly as a ‘source’ of information (i.e., as conveying ‘facts’), or only as evidence
which needs to be ‘processed’ into ‘fact’. And this leads us to the third way in which
we get to ‘know’ things in the past – namely, the reliance on evidence.
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Evidence, inference, and facts

Both historians and theorists recognise that in order to establish some fact about
the past, the historian must go through the mental process of inferring information
from the evidence. This means regarding things we can experience here and now
as evidence of things of which we cannot be immediately aware because they are past
and gone. And the essential technique or mental process involved is inference. For
example, we infer from these stones and other objects present to us that there used
to be a bridge here: or we infer from this 1860s Irish Fenian newspaper present to
us (e.g., preserved in a library) that, although it does not say so, it regarded such-
and-such as the movement’s main enemies, was indifferent about a possible alliance
with socialists, and so on. Inferences thus produce ‘facts’ from the past – i.e.,
statements of ‘what was the case’. And as indicated earlier, any ‘fact’ is either true
or false depending upon whether what it states to be the case is, or was, the case.
Where a fact derives from an inference, then, it is clear that the ‘truth’ or reliability
of that ‘fact’ depends on the inference – and inferences vary in their strength. For
example, from seeing smoke pouring from a gun-barrel I infer that someone has
recently fired it. I thus propose ‘the fact’ that someone fired the gun, even though
I was not there to witness the happening – and this ‘fact’ (i.e., statement of what
was the case) is unlikely to be wrong. But it could be, as must be the case with any
inference. Why?
Let us suppose another case, where I infer from a piece of pottery I find at a
certain site, that there used to be trade between this and that town. Here, the
inference is more speculative, and we would feel it needs to be supported by other
evidence from which we can infer the same ‘fact’. What this shows is that, with any
inference, some unstated ‘theory’ or hypothesis about ‘the way the world works’ is
at play in the mind of the historian, prompting him to link one thing to another
intelligibly. In short, because of what he knows about the particular matter in hand,
be it bridge-building, Irish politics, firearms, or trading, he assumes that one thing
follows from another within how these things ‘work’. This brings into play the
historian’s own assumptions about ‘how things work’ – including, of course, human
psychology on numerous occasions – and for some theorists this at the least raises
questions about the ‘facts’ historians employ (since most are inferred), and at worst
renders ‘the facts’ inherently biased or distorted because of this or that historian’s
‘way of looking at the world’. If the historian is white, middle-class, male, and
American, might this not lead him to make inferences which ‘unconsciously’
depend on his particular way of understanding what is relevant in a certain area,
and how things ‘work’ within it? The point can be compounded by noting my
selection of ‘white, middle-class, male, and American’, for why did I not select a
‘ginger-haired, slim, and sporting person’ as an example? Clearly, because given the
topic in hand – namely, ‘bias’ – my understanding of ‘how things work’ in that area
is based on certain ‘theories’ or ‘assumptions’ about the kind of characteristics
which produce bias!
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The reliability of ‘facts’

As we will see later, although it is more usually whatever historians do with the
‘facts’ they uncover (e.g., describe a medieval village, analyse the membership of
a Victorian craft-union, narrate the origins of the Vietnam War) which raises issues
about the truth, objectivity, and general status of historical knowledge, it could be
argued from the above that even before they proceed to incorporate them into a
‘history’ of this or that, the ‘facts’ themselves are suspect in terms either of their
truth or their objectivity. In short, because so much historical information is
inferential, then the very foundation of history – ‘the facts’ – loses credibility.
This, however, would surely be to go too far. Rather than destroying our faith in
the factual foundation of history, it should merely make us more aware of this
feature of its epistemology so that we can exercise scepticism where justified. The
above analysis of the process of ‘inferring from evidence’ has shown something
interesting and instructive about historians’ thinking – namely, that the vital
process of inference does not involve any distinctive kind of knowledge which may
be called ‘historical’. On the contrary, we have seen that inference depends upon
the accepted or ‘conventional’ understandings of ‘how the world works’ in relation
to whatever matter is at hand. If I infer, from seeing my friend arrive unexpectedly
in a new car, that she has come into some money, I am using an ‘ordinary’ set of
assumptions about money, spending, and life-styles. Similarly with the Irish
newspaper – I employ an ‘ordinary’ understanding of political matters, as I did
above regarding psychology and sociology and their relation to bias.
This shows that the historian does not need some special ‘historical’ technique
of ‘knowing’ the past – indeed, one wonders what such a uniquely ‘historical’ set
of assumptions could be, despite attempts to identify just such a ‘mode’. Rather, to
make his inferences he needs to know about, e.g., military affairs if he is to pursue
military history, political affairs if he is to uncover political facts, human psychology
if he is to focus on biography, and so on. And in all these and other possible areas,
he will do best to employ their ‘ordinary’ ideas rather than some obscure ‘theory’
of his own. This is because their ‘ordinariness’ evidences their reliability. It is true
they may be proved incorrect or inadequate at some future date, and be successfully
supplanted. But until that happens, I suggest that to the extent historians employ
conventional assumptions about ‘how the world works’ (as applied to any particular
matter), then we should not be unduly pessimistic about the ‘factual’ foundations
of historical knowledge. Only where assumptions of an unconventional nature
(deliberately or ‘unconsciously’) underlie his inferences should we feel justified
prima facie in doubting the reliability of the facts an historian uncovers.
Proof and ‘sources’

In addition to such reassurance there is of course a further reason for confidence –
namely, that (where they can) historians look for proof of the truth of what they
infer. For example, I might infer from this stonework that there used to be a bridge
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here. I may find other evidence from which the same inference can be drawn. This
strengthens it, but still cannot ‘prove’ it correct. However, I may find a map, drawn
at the time, which indeed places a bridge on the spot. This map is present to me
(even though drawn centuries ago) and can be seen to prove the correctness of my
initial inference; that is, it shows the (inferred) ‘fact’ that there used to be a bridge
here to be true; (whether we believe the map is a separate matter). The point about
proof, then, is that it derives from something present to us which we construe as
proving some inferred knowledge of something not present to us.
Although this shows that to infer a fact from evidence is to do something
different from proving a fact to be true, it also demonstrates there is room for
confusion between the two procedures. Our map can be seen as ‘proof’ of inferences.
But we may also view this old map as evidence from which to infer knowledge about
the past which it does not contain – e.g., that a military build-up was underway, or
that trade increased between two districts.
The above is important because it draws attention to the equivocal nature of what
historians call ‘the sources’, and upon which they lay such emphasis in explaining
and, if necessary, defending the nature of their discipline. To recoup a little, the
status of historians’ knowledge is influenced by being of things past, no longer
present to us. Rather than rely on hearsay or imagination, they find things present
to them (buildings, objects, preserved documents) which they view as evidence
from which to infer things about the past. They also find things present to them
which they view as proof of inferred facts. In both cases, that which is present to
them is called a ‘source’, or ‘source-material’. Although in theory perhaps anything
present is potentially a ‘source’ (either as evidence or proof of something), in
practice it is of course those things which have survived from the past into the
present which most naturally offer themselves as ‘sources’. And amongst these,
again in practice, written ‘sources’ are the most sought after – for example, letters,
parliamentary and legal records, parish registries, trading inventories, rules and
membership lists of organisations, autobiographies, newspapers, and so on.
‘Sources’, then, are the invaluable bedrock upon which historians both infer and
prove ‘facts’ from the past (again, irrespective of what they go on to do with ‘the
facts’ – i.e., describe, analyse, explain, or narrate past phenomena). That they deal
in ‘facts’, and that these ‘facts’ are supportable and sometimes verifiable by ‘sources’
open to examination because they are present to us, lends the same kind of
credibility to what historians say about the past as does the production of tangible
pieces of evidence and proof in a court of law.
This said, there are however two kinds of limitations to the knowledge acquired,
and here we may be reminded of our earlier remarks on the usefulness of surviving
film and/or sound recordings as ways of finding out about past situations and incidents.
In fact, we can now see that such recordings constitute sources in just the same way
as, for example, parish records, except that the former are on film whilst the latter
are written – and in principle the same two drawbacks we ascribed to the former
also apply to the latter.
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Written sources: their limitations

First, written records are restricted in what we can either infer or prove from them
because of the limited forms they take. Just as the camera and microphone have to
be pointed by someone, written sources only convey or suggest the kind of
information appropriate to the form or rationale of their construction. For example,
much can be gleaned about a village population from a surviving parish register of
births, marriages, and deaths. But equally, there is much we might want to know
for which that source, by its very nature, is useless. The same can be said for
parliamentary records, or the minutes of meetings, and so on. In short, generous
and varied as is the written word as a fund of sources, its capacity to communicate
information is nonetheless restrained (like film) by its nature as a medium. To a
certain extent, ‘the medium is the message’.
This may be an obvious point, but it is worth setting out because it tells us
something about the epistemological scope of history. Because history is source-
based, historical knowledge is limited to what sources are available. Indeed, in
practice, much history is produced because such-and-such sources are available,
rather than ‘the past’ offering itself, so to speak, as an open area simply waiting to
be explored by enterprising historians. Some even see this as the tail wagging the
dog, and thus complain of the restricted scope of historians’ attention. For example,
it could be argued that so much history until recent decades – and still much today
– was political history simply because political matters have been so prevalent
amongst written records (i.e., sources such as parliamentary debates, cabinet
minutes, diplomatic notes, international treaties, newspaper reports); and that
because of this, many a poor soul grew up to equate ‘history’ with political history,
and even worse, with his or her national political history!
The second drawback to written sources reverts us to the parallel with film and/or
sound recordings as sources. In the latter case we noted the potentially serious
‘criticism’ that a film is produced by someone. Because the filmer selects what to film,
then even though what is filmed is indeed ‘true’ (e.g., President Kennedy is shown
being shot), the motivations of the person wielding the camera raise issues about
the objectivity of the information the film conveys – issues ranging from the simple
practical inability to capture ‘everything’ relevant to the incident, to the more
threatening one of the deliberate (or unconscious) intrusion of the filmer’s own
assumptions and prejudices into what he films and how he films it (e.g., close-ups,
camera panning, exploitation of lighting, and so on). Leni Riefenstahl’s filming of
the 1936 (‘Nazi’) Olympics is a classic, because extreme, example of such
deliberately manipulative techniques used for ‘ideological’ purposes.
Less obviously, such drawbacks also apply to written sources, because (in addition
to taking some or other form) they also are of course produced by the writer. We are
not here thinking of cases where a written source obviously bears the writer’s
influence (as, for example, any autobiography). Rather, some analytical
philosophers of history have raised the issue even in the case of the most apparently
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‘innocuous’ written records used as sources. For example, parish records had to be
produced, and we have noted their form partly determines what kind of information
they contain. As with a film, they do not record ‘everything’ about the parishioners,
(nor ever could). But also (as with a film) it is possible that, even with the
information which is selected, (e.g., births, marriages, and deaths), details which
should be included are omitted or otherwise ‘distorted’ because of the recorder’s
assumptions and/or prejudices (e.g., illegitimate births, ethnic minority marriages,
deaths through sheer poverty). It is not difficult to see how the same doubts can be
raised about other apparently ‘innocuous’ sources such as economic statistics,
written recordings of court cases, prison files, and so on. Indeed, where ‘records’ are
literally produced as such, particularly ‘official’ records, we might say they are by
their nature ‘tainted’. In addition, some have argued that where documents of one
kind or another are later assembled into an archive or collection, similar questions
can be raised about the unspoken focus and motivations of the archivist.
Now it could be argued that, because written ‘sources’ are so intrinsic to the ‘nuts
and bolts’ of their work, practising historians are perfectly aware of these two
potential drawbacks. As such, discussions of particular historians’ employment of
sources fall more properly under historiography, whilst awareness of the various
techniques and precautions involved in using them falls under historical methodology,
rather than the more ‘abstract’ approach of analytical philosophy of history.
Without recapping the distinction between the latter and the former discussed in
the previous chapter, the reason these issues arise here is that, although they are
indeed the meat and drink of much historiography and historical methodology,
neither of the latter usually question the very nature and use of ‘sources’ per se as
the foundation of the discipline of history. Analytic philosophy of history, on the
other hand, takes a step back to theorise on the general significance of the fact that
any ‘historical’ knowledge is ‘source-based’, however that is handled in particular
cases. And as we have seen, such consideration opens the opportunity for differing
degrees of scepticism regarding the possibility of grounding history on ‘objective’
and ‘true’ facts at the outset. Some theorists (see Chapter 14) appear to have
lost faith altogether in the ‘factual’ basis to history, which leads them into
correspondingly strange territory when grappling with ‘what is history?’.
One can see the force of such complaints. For example, it is true that in practice
much historical research is chosen because of the ready availability of particular
sources. There may be lessons to be drawn here, although in recent decades some
historians have been more imaginative in construing things as sources. Also, it is
probably true that some historians are insufficiently critical of the potential for bias
and/or distortion in apparently ‘innocuous’ source-material, and perhaps ‘sources
and methods’ courses should be even more alert to that possibility.
One lesson which should not be drawn, however, is that because of the
limitations imposed upon history by ‘the sources’, its claims to objectivity
are invalidated in principle. Rather, we should insist that history remain source-
based, but avoid being source-driven; and that where a ‘source’ is the product of a
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human being (from the most harmless parish registrar to the most meticulous
statistician, from the most scrupulous clerk of court to the most clinical
documentary film maker), that should always be taken into account if justified. The
alternative would appear to throw the baby out with the bathwater – and although
some analytic philosophers of history might threaten just that, it is surely a position
which is as regrettable as it is exaggerated.
‘Historical explanation’
So far we have discussed different ‘types’ of history, and the epistemological
foundations of historical knowledge. But these are not the only considerations
involved in reflecting on ‘what is history?’. Many analysts have proposed that a
major part of this enquiry should focus on how historians explain past phenomena.
Is there anything ‘special’ about the way historians explain things? And even if
there is not, the way they do it still requires a critical understanding in order to give
further insight into what ‘history’ is.
This topic (‘historical explanation’) would take us into much difficult and
recondite territory, at least if we were to believe those who propose that there is in
fact a specifically historical way of explaining things. Rather, let us proceed as clearly
as the topic allows, and defer consideration of the latter claim until the appropriate
place, beginning instead with less esoteric notions. The question is, do (or should)
historians explain things in a particular manner? Or put the other way around,
does ‘history’ as the content of the past (i.e., rather than the discipline) require a
particular ‘kind’ of explanation because of its nature?
Scientific causality
At first view there appear to be three possible approaches to this question. First,
we know that one of the commonest ways we explain something is to employ the
notions of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. We have already commented on this, noting that the
terms can be used loosely simply as a substitute for ‘because’ – e.g., ‘her distress
caused me to comfort her’; ‘I comforted her because she was in distress’; or ‘the
huge waves were the effect of a hurricane’; ‘the waves were huge because of a
hurricane’. However, we also noted the paradigm of science, where ‘cause’ and
‘effect’ are appealed to as a strictly determinist framework articulating the physical
laws governing the universe. Most theorists agree that, although historians may
need on occasions to exploit this strict scientific meaning of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’, it
should not be a model which generally characterises their explanatory discourse.
There can be two reasons for this. Either it is thought that, even if in principle
everything is indeed ultimately only explicable in terms of the workings of a
material universe, it is simply impossible in practice to do this for the kaleidoscopic
multitude of events and circumstances which make up the panorama of history
(i.e., understood here as ‘content’), or it is thought that the scientific model of
causality is in principle inapplicable to history understood as focused on humans’
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interaction between themselves and between them and their surrounding world.
(We have already noted, and approved of, this latter position when distinguishing
between human and ‘natural’ history, without at that point, however, suggesting
any alternative way of explaining things appropriate to history).
‘Covering-law’ models
The second possible approach to ‘historical explanation’ is to suggest that what
some have called ‘covering-laws’ underlie the multitudinous particulars of (human)
history, which therefore provide a general ‘model’ or template followed in the
historian’s explanatory discourse. Although a somewhat vague claim in the abstract
– (indeed, there seems no reason to suggest ‘scientific causality’ is not just such a
‘covering-law’) – what its proponents seem to mean is that the diverse and
particular actions, events, and circumstances of a (past) scenario are not explicable
with reference to their individuality in each case, but need subsuming under some
general ‘laws’ which ‘govern’ or feature in all history. What these ‘covering-laws’
are may vary from one historian to another; and it is far from clear whether our
analysts actually approve of historians using them, irrespective of what particular
covering-law (deliberately or unconsciously) is allegedly in operation. Rather, their
point is that, in their view, ‘historical explanation’ relies on ‘covering-laws’ of one
kind or another, whether historians realise this or not.
Perhaps the clearest example of a deliberate use of ‘covering-laws’ is Marxism,
particularly in its more vulgarised sense as described in our Chapter 10. Here, the
formulae that ‘the mode of production determines the relations of production,
which in turn determine the superstructure of any society’, and that ‘all history is
the history of class-struggle’, provide the underlying backcloth or framework into
which the diverse particulars are assimilated, thereby ‘explaining’ them. But the
same can be said for the great bulk of that speculative philosophy of history explored
in Part I of this book, of which Marx’s ‘historical materialism’ is only one example
– for what is a backcloth, framework, or imposition of overall meaning to history,
other than a ‘covering-law’, (in these cases made explicit via argument)? We
explored Hegel’s complex framework, and how he employed it to explain not only
‘world-history’ as a whole but numerous episodes within it (e.g., Hellenic Greece,
the Protestant Reformation). Far less specific, but nonetheless operational, were
classical theories of eternally recurrent cycles, or Christian ideas of ‘history’ being
governed by God into one huge, linear ‘story’, from Creation, through the Fall of
Man, to the eventual ‘millennium’ of the Second Coming. However, in all these
and in other examples of speculative philosophy of history, the fact that they might
be called different examples of ‘the covering-law model of historical explanation’
adds as little to understanding them as, I suggest, it does to understanding ‘historical
explanation’ by claiming it is modelled on ‘covering-laws’.
The vagueness of the latter notion is compounded by the fact that it can also be
used – and has been – to suggest that even where historians do not subscribe to any
explicit overall ‘theory’ (or ‘speculative philosophy’) of history, but instead
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understand themselves to be explaining particular events and circumstances in

their individual discreteness, they nevertheless (usually unconsciously) exploit
some ‘general laws’ about human behaviour. Put together and made explicit by
analysis, the ‘covering-laws’ used by this or that historian can thus be identified and,
if necessary, criticised. However, other analytical philosophers of history have
criticised, not this or that example of such ‘covering-laws’, but their use at all in
historians’ explanations. Their argument is that to explain something by implying
it is an instance of a ‘covering-law’ is therefore to derive or deduce the event or
circumstance from some abstract principle – and to do this is thus not only to
neglect the particular in circumstances, but also lends them an inevitability which
sits uneasily with what they take to be the forum of historians’ attention, namely,
the contingent and unique.
The latters’ rejection of the ‘covering-law model’ for ‘historical explanation’
implies, then, not just the possibility, but the necessity, of the historian explaining
things without ‘covering-laws’, and debate has ensued as to how to do this ever since
the latter were claimed (in the 1940s) as an inevitable feature of historians’
thinking.
However, how far this debate actually offers insight into whether history is
(partly) characterised by a distinctive way of explaining things – and if so, what it
is – must remain dubious. The problem is that insofar as the notion of a ‘covering-
law’ can extend from explicit speculative philosophies of history to implicit
‘assumptions’ about human behaviour, for example, it says nothing of any value.
As a catch-all notion one is reminded of Edward Bernstein’s observation (in
criticising the emphasis crude Marxists put upon ‘the theory of surplus-value’) that
the atomic theory of matter, true as it might be, can give no insight into the beauty
of a vase. Just so with the (logically) profligate notion of a ‘covering-law’.
But if, as its critics imply, the alternative is for the historian not to have any
‘covering-laws’, but to deal with each matter (event, circumstance, action)
separately, this is straightforwardly unrealistic – for as we have seen, even the
process of inference involved in establishing ‘the facts’, never mind explaining them,
can only function through assumptions about ‘how the world works’. Thus, if all
that is ultimately meant by ‘covering-laws’ is, at the minimum, having assumptions
about how the world works, then their very pervasiveness – from (e.g.) Marxism
to (e.g.) the assumption that people try to avoid pain, or like to help their friends
– renders the notion non-operational in any realistic or distinctive sense; i.e., it is
of no use, in practice, in identifying different features of the way past phenomena
can be explained.
‘Explaining’ things
Rather, let us adopt a third possible approach to the question of whether historians
do (or should) explain things in a particular way, by abandoning the above terms
of reference and, in better philosophical fashion, begin at the beginning. This
means starting with what it is that analytic philosophers are trying to explain – and
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in this case, it is the notion of ‘explanation’ itself! This should put one in a better
position to see what sense, if any, attaches to the notion of historical explanation.
From earlier discussion of ‘words’ and ‘reality’, we can say that one of the things
people have found worth singling out from ‘the world out there’ is the (mental)
activity denoted by the verb ‘to explain’. To see what it is ‘to explain something’
we need only consult the dictionary for a clarification of what is meant by the word,
(i.e., there is no paradigmatic ‘real thing’ called ‘to explain’ which we poor mortals
may or may not manage to apprehend; rather, it is a term used by us for us, better
to manage an aspect of our experience – in this case, our intellectual interests). The
list of meanings in the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary includes 1) ‘to make clear
the cause, origins, or reason of; to account for’, and 2) of the phrase ‘to explain
oneself’, ‘to make one’s meaning clear and intelligible . . . also, to give an account
of one’s intentions or motives’. A little reflection, I suggest, shows the common core
to these definitions, which is that ‘to explain’ something is to show how what is to
be explained ‘follows on’. For example, in (2), ‘to explain one’s conduct’ is to show
how it ‘follows’ from one’s intentions or motives – or, ‘to make one’s meaning clear
and intelligible’ is to show how what one has said does indeed ‘follow on’ from one
word to the next. Likewise with the first definition, (1), the notion of one thing
‘following on’ from another is at the core. For example, it follows that if 1+1 = 2,
then 2–1 = 1; that if one uses Newton’s laws of gravity, it follows that an
unrestrained object will fall downwards towards earth, and at a predictable rate of
acceleration; or, finally, that given the sequence of occurrences outlined in
(someone’s) history, it followed that war broke out in 1914. I have included this
last somewhat tendentious example to highlight the point that common to any
explanation is the notion of one thing ‘following on from’ another.
Now it is true that in the above examples things are construed as ‘following on’ for
different reasons (via logic, or scientific causality, or via conventional assumptions
about human conduct). But these are differences in the way things ‘follow on’, not
differences which imply that ‘explaining’ a thing sometimes involves the notion
of ‘following on’, but at other times does not involve this notion but some other
operative principle instead. The cardinal principle at work when we ‘explain’,
‘understand’, ‘reason about’, or ‘account for’ anything (terms often, and under-
standably, intermixed in dictionary definitions) is that propensity of the human
mind to think in terms of ‘one thing following on from another’. This is the way
the mind works, from the reason it ‘makes sense’ to the paranoic to kill his family,
to Einstein to claim E = MC squared, to the banker to charge interest, to me to take
an umbrella when it looks like rain. And what we do when we ‘explain’ something
is to demonstrate that it ‘follows on’.
Having said this, our concern, then, is that the concept of ‘historical explanation’
implies there is a class of things which ‘follow on’ historically, such that when we
‘explain’ them we are doing so ‘historically’ rather than in some other (alleged) way
– hence, ‘historical explanation’. But this is a chimera. Just as things do not fall
scientifically, biologically, mathematically, or historically, then in explaining why
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a thing falls we do not explain it scientifically, biologically, mathematically, or

historically. It is true that things may fall quickly, slowly, noisily, silently, but these
adverbial qualifiers denote merely contingent features of what is essentially
happening, and moreover have to be applicable to that kind of occurrence – i.e.,
they could not be applied to ‘loving’.
Thus with things ‘following on’. They may do so more nearly or distantly, or
more obviously than other things which also ‘follow’ – but not noisily, nor
historically. Just so, then, with the process of demonstrating that one thing follows
another – i.e., of explaining something. One may do it clearly or confusedly, lengthily
or succinctly, conventionally or originally – all contingent features of the same
essential phenomenon. But one cannot do it ‘historically’.
Historical accounts
Instead, the most which can be said is that distinct topics and activities often
generate their own terminology or frame of reference. For example, in explaining
why an engine has a flywheel one is to an extent captive to the topic of mechanics
– i.e., one shows how the need for a flywheel ‘follows’ from the way the laws of
mechanics are exploited in engine design. From this, there is nothing wrong in
referring to a ‘mechanical’ explanation so long as one does not mean there is a
‘mechanical’ way of explaining things. Similarly, in explaining the course of the
First World War one can give a military account of it, since any warfare is clearly
amenable to military terms of reference. Also, of course, one can give an historical
account of the First World War (albeit not a mechanical or biological account),
but what does this mean? Does it mean the war is somehow explained ‘historically’?
What we mean by ‘an historical account’ of (e.g.) a war is simply that, given it
was a sequence of events, we can demonstrate how those events ‘followed on’ from
each other. We may need on occasions to use military terms of reference, but also
economic and political ones. But overall, there will be no single special terms of
reference applicable to accounting for or ‘explaining’ what happened ‘in that war’.
Rather, what characterises the historian’s account or explanation is simply that it
consists of making an intelligible continuity from numerous and diverse events
and circumstances. In short, then, an explanation is ‘historical’ simply and solely
inasmuch as it deals with any occurrences by putting them into an intelligible
sequence, whereby one thing ‘follows from’ another, be it the outbreak of a
revolution, the invention of a medicine, or (in principle) my visit to the cinema
last week. As such, the term ‘historical’ is an unusually broad term denoting that a
thing is treated within the reference of ‘sequences of occurrences’, just as the term
‘scientific’ (unlike, e.g., ‘mechanical’, ‘biological’, or ‘geographical’), is an unusually
broad framework denoting a thing’s treatment within the reference of causal law-
determined phenomena, be it the composition of a planetary system, the strength
of a bridge, or the course of an illness. The crucial difference between ‘historical’
and ‘scientific’, however, is that these latter phenomena, despite their diversity, are
amenable to explanation exclusively as causally determined, whereas the things histo-
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rians explain are not. They are ‘simply’ construed as one event following from
another, and how this linking is construed takes us to what I have already suggested
is the distinctive character of history proper – i.e., narrative.
Narrative and ‘explanation’

We have already said something about the structure of narrative, but now need to
probe a little further into its characteristics, (whose fuller complexity, however, I
have explored elsewhere, and at greater length than we need indulge in here). We
should recall the seminal difference between a narrative (both factual and fictional)
and a chronicle, and above all the crucial operational force of the term ‘then’ in
the basic formula of narrative, ‘this happened and then that happened and then
that happened’ and so on. What lies behind this formula is the notion that what
happened next (or ‘then’) happened because of what had gone on before. In other
words, occurrences are put into a sequence where one occurrence ‘follows from’
another in terms of ‘prior’ and ‘subsequent’, or ‘this then that’. What this achieves
is that an occurrence (‘happening’, ‘action’, ‘event’) is ‘explained’ as following on
from a previous occurrence. For example, ‘Mr. Brown entered the room, and then
felt cold, and then turned on the fire’. In this elementary narrative, its very form as
narrative implies he felt cold because he entered the room, and he turned on the
fire because he felt cold. It is in this manner that ‘explanation’ is built into the very
structure of narrative – i.e., we do not have to interrupt the narrative to add some
separate (e.g., analytic or scientific) form of discourse to explain why he turned on
the fire. Rather, his action ‘makes sense’ given he felt cold.
If this is clear enough – (after all, to ‘explain’ things via narrative is so common
as to be ‘natural’ to us; ‘why did you come home so late last night?’, ‘why did Britain
go to war in 1939?’) – three points remain worth adding.
The logic of narrative sequences

First, in any narrative, however exhaustive in detail, not every occurrence is
included in the sequence articulated by the narrator. Not only would this be
impossible in practice, (although the ideal of science might be to say ‘a caused b,
which caused c, which caused d’, etc.) in narrative it is both unnecessary and
irrelevant. In short, narrative does not proceed from a, then b, then c, then d, and
so on. (Mr. Brown’s actions in turning on the light could in theory be spelt out in
terms of his moving towards the switch, raising his hand, extending his finger,
grasping the switch, and so on – and any one of those actions could in theory be
broken down again into a sequence). Rather, narrative at its starkest moves from
an initial occurrence a, ignores potential b’s and c’s, etc., until it reaches that point
(say k) which would not be understood to ‘follow’ from a (‘Mr. Brown came down
to breakfast and then braked his car violently to avoid a stray dog’). a then k would
not ‘make sense’. But a then j still makes sense (‘Mr. Brown came down to breakfast,
then got into his car to go to work’). So, of course, does j then k (Mr. Brown got
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into his car to go to work, and then braked violently’ etc . . . ). After this, point k
is treated like another point a. Thus, at its most basic, this is how the principle of
selection and omission of occurrences works in the narrative form: not a, b, c, etc.,
but a . . . j,k . . . s,t . . . y,z, etc. In this way, occurrences are put into a sequence
which makes each explicable at any point in the narrative/story, without requiring
a potential infinity of detail. (Within that essential structure all sorts of games can
of course be played, as they are in fiction to achieve various contingent effects such
as to convey information about a character, or build up tension. And the same can
be done in a factual narrative, but if so, it must always be to achieve more than
simply to ‘explain’ a sequence of events – but let us postpone examination of this
possibility until the next chapter, which includes the various purposes to which
factual/historical narrative are put).
Narrative and conventional understanding

Having witnessed narrative’s ability, embedded in its very form, to ‘make sense of’,
or ‘explain’, occurrences, the second point to add is, what kind of sense is involved
here? And the answer is that the ‘sense’ or ‘explanation’ implicit in narrative is
conventional to whatever the topic might be. By ‘conventional’ I mean our ‘ordinary’
understanding of how one occurrence or action leads to ‘the next’. We have seen
it would not make sense to say, for instance, that ‘the young Hitler sold one his
paintings in the streets of Vienna and then invaded Poland’. Too many intervening
‘nexts’ are omitted for the conventional way in which our minds link up actions
into an intelligible sequence. But to say that ‘Hitler had a long discussion with his
generals, and then invaded Poland’, or ‘Hitler saw all was lost and then committed
suicide’, are examples where the ‘next’ action can be understood to be conven-
tionally contiguous to the ‘previous’ action. These conventional understandings
on which narrative feeds range from psychology to economics, from military
matters to political insight, from the amorous life to family relations, and so on –
and this reinforces the point that no special kind of understanding need be at work
(although if the topic is inherently technical, the conventional understanding of
that topic’s special terminology may come into play, but only for that topic).
Rather, we are back to the reliance on conventional understandings of ‘how the
world works’, from Mr. Brown’s choice to turn on the fire when he felt cold, to
Hitler’s choice to commit suicide, having judged all was lost. Indeed, so ‘instinctive’
or ‘natural’ is it to not only explain things via a narrative, but also to employ
‘ordinary’ rather than ‘specialist’ assumptions in doing so, that we might rightly be
sceptical of an historian whose narrative sequences require us to share some
unconventional and/or special assumptions if we are to make sense of it – for
example, a particular theory of psychology when dealing with human motivations.
These ‘conventional’ assumptions about ‘how the world works’ may of course
change slowly over time, and may be suspect, if not indeed wrong. However, they
have the advantage that they are flexible and do not require justifying in each case
as one moves forward in a narrative.
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Indeterminacy in human conduct

Third, there is one more feature of narrative worth noticing. Narrative (insofar as
it deals with human conduct) does not offer a rigidly deterministic explanation of
occurrences and actions. Rather, if Mr. Brown felt cold and then turned on the fire,
this does not mean his action was ‘caused’ in the sense that it could have been no
other. He might have left the room instead, or put on a pullover, or put up with
feeling cold. We do not know. We do know, however, that he turned the fire on,
and we see this as his response to feeling cold. In short, narrative leaves room for
the notion of ‘free will’ or ‘choice’, despite the philosophical problems involved.
But here, narrative form simply reflects the conventional view, no worse for being
conventional, that human beings respond rather than react to situations (e.g., as
machines, or conglomerations of chemicals). In short, we arrive back at the point
that narrative discourse is different from scientific discourse – but can now
appreciate perhaps even further the peculiar appropriateness of narrative for the
discipline of history, given we mean human rather than ‘natural’ history, and given
that ‘the study of past events in the human world’ includes explaining, or accounting
for, their occurrence (as it surely should).
Summary
Having clarified and commented upon not only the manner in which narrative is
explanatory, but also what kind of sense or explanation it offers, let us conclude
these considerations by returning to what instigated them, i.e., the notion of
‘historical explanation’. What the historian is doing when he constructs a narrative
is to give an account of a sequence of events. In so doing he or she is accounting
for, or ‘explaining’, the occurrences involved. Thus historians know how to
‘explain’ their material, aware as anyone else that this involves demonstrating that
one thing follows from another. But they are wary of the notion that they are
explaining things ‘historically’ – or more to the point, that in relying on narrative
they are, according to many analysts, thereby failing to explain things ‘historically’.
Many analytic philosophers of history, and some historians, have been hostile to
narrative history precisely because they claim narrative (or ‘story-telling’) is either
non-explanatory per se, (a blatant error), or at most offers only ‘weak’, simplistic
explanations (as if narrative were inherently incapable of incorporating e.g.,
sociological insights into history!). Instead, for decades they have thus gone off in
search of some ‘ideal’ mode of understanding and/or discourse they call ‘historical
explanation’, a search which has dominated much analytic philosophy of history
– which is why, as your guide, I have devoted such space to the topic, if only to
reassure students of history who visit that literature that, if their instincts are likely
to rebel against it (as have many practising ‘historians’), not all theorists find it
illuminating either.
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‘Historical explanation’ restored? – ‘explication’

Having considered the notion of ‘historical explanation’ and found it wanting so
far, there is, however, an alternative sense in which the term may be awarded some
credence – but this derives from another meaning the dictionary gives for ‘explain’
(i.e., in addition to those we have used above), and also focuses on a further property
of narrative history in particular. One of the meanings of ‘to explain’ is ‘to make
[something] clear or intelligible with detailed information’. Used in this sense, the
term is interchangeable with a more technical term, namely, ‘to explicate’, meaning
‘to develop the notion of something’, or ‘to unfold’ or ‘make explicit the nature of
something’. Here the emphasis is not on explaining what caused a thing, or where
it came from, or some other sense of why something is as it is, but on ‘explaining’
(or ‘explicating’) what the thing is (or was). Now, if (as we have seen) one of
narrative’s properties is that it ‘explains’ why happenings occur – ‘this happened
then that happened’ etc.) – another of its properties is to ‘explain’ (or ‘explicate’)
the nature of those things I earlier called ‘narrative identities’ or ‘story-objects’; in
other words, those ‘things’ which comprise sequences of happenings.
For purposes of exposition, let us now use the term, ‘an event’ no longer as
interchangeable with an ‘occurrence’, ‘happening’, ‘incident’, or ‘action’, but as
meaning that which results from their connecting together (via narrative logic) into
an intelligible sequence of happenings. I have already proposed that in addition to
our apprehending different physical objects in ‘the world out there’, we also
apprehend or single out ‘occurrences’ and/or ‘actions’. And I have claimed that
when we use a word to denote an occurrence (e.g., he is ‘swimming’), then ‘to
swim’ is no more nor less ‘real’ a phenomenon than, e.g., ‘a chair’. Pursuing this logic
a little further, in the case of physical objects it is clear that many things posited
as single objects can in another light be seen as made up of a collection of other
objects. For example, we can talk of ‘a rose’, ‘a lawn’, or ‘a pond’ as separate,
individual objects. But we can also talk of ‘a garden’, which incorporates these
otherwise separate things. A ‘garden’ is no more nor less ‘real’ a thing than, e.g., a
‘lawn’. And in its turn a garden may be part of another single thing, namely, ‘an
estate’, just as (vice-versa) a lawn can be seen as a collection of otherwise separate
individual things (blades of grass, moss, soil). In short, there is an (almost?) infinite
dialectic between physical objects denoted as singular things and as breaking down
into other singular things, or as forming part of other (larger) single things – all of
which ‘things’ are as ‘real’ as any other, ranging ultimately from ‘the universe’ to
‘an atom’.
We noted the same logic applies to single occurrences and/or actions, in the
example of ‘switching on’ a light. This action can be broken down into other
‘contributory’ actions – e.g., extending an arm – or itself could be part of a ‘larger’
action of, e.g., ‘setting up’ a studio. Again, none of these actions is more nor less
‘real’ than any other. But we should also note that when an occurrence or action
is ‘broken down’ into its ‘parts’, what this actually entails is putting different actions
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into a sequence. And this is precisely what narrative does. It singles out a sequence
of otherwise individual occurrences and thereby ‘describes’ a phenomenon as ‘real’
as anything else – namely, an intelligible sequence of occurrences, for which we
can give the generic term ‘an event’, meaning anything which is conventionally
understood to be explicitly comprised of different occurrences (linked via the
narrative logic of ‘this happened then that happened’). Numerous ‘events’ are
uniquely their own ‘stories’ which thus require individual narration. However,
other ‘sequences of occurrences’ (‘events’) share sufficient common features as to
have been classified via different ‘event-nouns’ – for example, ‘a war’, ‘a revolution’,
‘an election’, ‘a love-affair’, ‘a slump’, ‘a cricket-match’, ‘a wedding’.
Thus we can now see more clearly the sense in which narrative ‘explains’ or
‘explicates’ the very nature of phenomena – phenomena, I repeat, no more nor less
‘real’ than physical objects, actions, qualities, and so on. In the case of narrative,
the phenomena whose nature it explains are ‘events’, i.e., intelligible sequences of
occurrences/actions. If we want to know in concrete terms, for example, ‘what the
First World War was’, we need to be told its ‘story’. The narrative of that war will
‘explain’ (‘make explicit, or unfold, the nature of’, or ‘develop the notion of’) that
war. Now, in relation to ‘objects’, when we put hundreds of them together and
perceive e.g., ‘an estate’, we may differ as to what to include in it, and where it
‘starts’ and ‘stops’ – but (unless we are to lose our senses) we do not therefore suggest
it does not ‘exist’, or is not a ‘real’ thing. Likewise with ‘events’. Because the First
World War was complex, because its ‘story’ can be told differently, this does not
mean ‘it’ did not happen, or was not ‘real’. It is true that the connecting of
occurrences can be misapprehended, even to the extent that ‘an event’ is proposed/
constructed which never actually happened. But this is rare in factual narrative,
apart from the lie. Rather, what is far more common is where ‘events’ which did take
place are denied, particularly by governments and others with vested interests who,
wishing to avoid embarrassment or exposure, have throughout history engaged in
‘cover-ups’. Attested (single) occurrences are often harder to deny – e.g., USA
bombs falling on Cambodia; individual killings in Bosnia. But a war?! An ethnic-
cleansing campaign?! ‘There was no such thing’, some insist in each case! Of this
syndrome, Holocaust denial is surely the most (in)famous example.
A crucial achievement of the narrative form, then, is that in addition to ‘explaining’

why this or that occurrence took place, in a different sense of the word it also
‘explains’ (‘explicates’) the nature of this or that ‘event’ (i.e., an identifiable or
meaningful sequence of occurrences singled out from the otherwise kaleidoscopic
anarchy of things ‘going on’). This latter achievement seems sufficiently distinctive,
and so much the natural territory of those we call ‘historians’, that it may warrant
being called ‘historical explanation’. But the reader should note that, given this
meaning, ‘historical explanation’ consists in giving an account of an intelligible
sequence of occurrences (i.e., an ‘event’) – but it does not account for it; i.e., it does
not ‘explain’ it in the sense of saying why it took place. Rather, it ‘explains’ it in
the sense of laying bare its nature. Put another way, an ‘event’, ‘story’, or ‘sequence
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of occurrences’ is something made up of change. But in itself it is not a thing which

changes. What the explicatory property of narrative does is to give an account of
a thing made up of change by explaining the process of change within it (‘this then
that’). But it does not account for the sequence as a whole. To expect that it could
is to enter unchartable territory, for by example of Mr Brown entering the room,
and then feeling cold, and then turning on the fire, it is like asking ‘why did Mr
Brown enter the room, and then feel cold, and then turn on the fire?’. This is a
question which goes beyond the form of narrative to answer – and, I suggest, beyond
any form of answer we could imagine as empirically based. Rather, it could be
argued that the quest for such an answer transports us to the realm of speculative
philosophy of history, which precisely tries to make sense not of this or that
occurrence, but of the grand sweep of huge ‘events’ – i.e., making them parts of a
quasi-narrative. Interesting efforts have ensued, as explored in Part I of this book.
But they are not examples of the discipline of history, and never claim to be. They
are ‘philosophy’. And yet it is just this expectation that sequences of occurrences,
already made intelligible by narrative, have themselves somehow to be explained
in terms of why they existed, which appears to have preoccupied some theorists’
search for what they call ‘historical explanation’. Not satisfied, or sometimes not
even aware of, the explanatory and explicatory power of narrative, they look
elsewhere for some ‘special way’ historians ‘explain’ (or should explain) the past as
part of their search for what distinguishes ‘history’. For our part it seems more
appropriate to praise what narrative historians do achieve – namely, meticulously
revealing the nature of past ‘events’ as well as ‘explaining’ the occurrences they
comprise in ways which everyone can understand – rather than bewail their ‘failure’
to explain the categorically inexplicable, (unless, that is, one confuses ‘history’
with speculative philosophy of history).
Historical topics
‘Anything goes?’
There is, finally, a further issue involved in pondering ‘what is history?’, and this is
whether history should study anything, or whether only certain things or ‘topics’
lend themselves to the historian’s scrutiny. By necessity our previous sections have
at least begun to answer this, insofar as we have already addressed the truism that
history deals with topics in the past, and the perhaps less certain truism (for some)
that ‘history’ deals with the human world to the exclusion of ‘natural history’ (the
domain of science).
In the abstract, these elementary parameters to what history studies may suffice
for some. On the one hand, why should we stick to the traditional topics of ‘history’,
(politics, warfare, economic development, revolutions – i.e., affairs of state)? In
recent decades ‘social’ history has achieved some prominence, whilst many of
today’s historians grapple with new topics such as womens’ history, media history,
black history, and the history of sport. And let us not forget intellectual history. The
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history of social and political thought, and the history of philosophy, have long
flourished, and have been joined more recently by the history of scientific thought.
Thus (one could say), not only should we welcome these topics into the purview
of ‘history’, we should hold the discipline open to explore any and every area where
human activity and endeavour have a past, from sex to cannibalism, from stamp-
collecting to space-travel.
Put more theoretically: what principles can be found, within the parameters of
the human past, for claiming that some aspects of that past cannot be studied, or
are at least less worthy of attention than others, and thus ought not to be studied?
Prima facie it seems difficult to conceive what these principles could be, such that
those bold spirits who claim that ‘anything goes’ as a topic of historical enquiry (so
long as it concerns the past world of human concerns) are vindicated in their
generous view.
Alternatively, it could be argued that it is indeed only in the abstract that ‘history’
has such generous parameters, and that such a vast area of study cries out for
refinement, which has been carried out in practice in any event. But where do we
start to conceive of what principles might underlie this refinement? This seems
difficult to do ab initio, such that the supporters of ‘anything goes for history’ may
have a point. Indeed, it seems incontrovertible if we include what I have called
‘descriptive’ and ‘analytic’ history, for on what grounds can we say something from
the human past is in principle either incapable or (at least) ‘unworthy’ of being
described or analysed? Philosophically speaking, none, since there is nothing in the
logic of description or analysis to limit their subject-matter – a position which
contributes to the notion that ‘history is anything, willy-nilly, which is said about
the past’.
Narrative parameters
The case is different, however, with narrative history. Here, the practice of that art
does generate limitations for what topics are studied, and for what is treated within
a topic or field of enquiry. Sufficient has already been said about the logic of
narrative to recognise one major constraint upon its subject-matter – namely, it
only treats of ‘events’, i.e., intelligible sequences of occurrences. This implies that
narrative history, in addition to being applicable only to occurrences, ‘happenings’,
or actions, is further restricted to only those which can be linked into genuinely
operational temporal relationships of ‘this then that’. By analogy, millions of physical
objects are located in the space occupied by a house, but only some are ‘noticed’ as
parts of the house – and even within that discrimination the spatial relations some
exhibit to each other are crucial in making up ‘a house’, (e.g., the walls and the
roof). Just so in any temporal space (i.e., a period of time) a myriad of occurrences
happen, but only some are relevant to a particular topic, and of these, only some bear
that special temporal relationship of ‘this then that’ which makes up an (intelligible)
sequence. This seemingly abstract point has practical import for the discipline of
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(narrative) history, for it dictates that even where the historian limits himself to
the (human) world of past happenings – (‘history is what happened’) – the ‘branch’
or ‘subject-area’ of his study must be one where genuine narrative sequences (or
‘events’) are sufficiently prevalent to allow a properly historical treatment. The
danger otherwise is that a random juxtapositioning (or worse, even a chronicle) of
different occurrences all related to a subject-area is presented as ‘history’. For
example, in any given period of time there was a myriad of occurrences specifically
relevant to women, or to an ethnic group, or to ‘society’. But their arbitrary
recounting would hardly constitute ‘women’s history’, ‘Black history’, or ‘social
history’. Such histories can only properly become such by their material being
amenable to the tracing of intelligible processes of change through time –
articulated, of course, via the narrative form. This is not to say, for example, that
‘womens’ history’ is not a viable undertaking. Such a view would be difficult to
defend on any a priori grounds. But it does mean that its practitioners can only be
convincing in defence of the ‘historicality’ of their topic to the extent that they
can extract genuine ‘events’ from the (sometimes alarming) breadth of otherwise
discrete aspects and occurrences they deal with. The alternative is a kind of ‘pseudo-
history’ which again threatens the ‘history is anything, willy-nilly, which is said
about the past’ syndrome (even where restricted to things that happened).
Highways and byways

As noted, then, none of the above suggests any a priori grounds for dismissing
topics, subject-areas, or ‘branches’ involving human activity from the purview of
(narrative) history. As such it remains a sufficiently generous set of ‘restrictions’
on what topics history ‘should’ deal with for enterprising spirits to continue to
innovate into unexplored parts of the past and even develop new branches of
history. But it does suggest some of the reasons why recognised areas of interest
become established amongst historians – namely, they are those areas where we are
most likely to ‘notice’ events (or ‘stories’) and thereby benefit from understanding
‘what happened’ in terms of meaningful sequences of occurrences. Here we return
to the observation that ‘events’ are no more nor less ‘real’ than other kinds of
‘things’ we apprehend – i.e., it is not their ‘reality’ which somehow imposes them
on our consciousness. Rather, it is their relevance and workability for us in our
experience of ‘the world out there’. And what this comes down to is the mundane
observation that ‘events’ in some areas of human activity are regarded as more
important than those in other areas – and, to an extent, these can vary over time
and culture. For example, religious history used to predominate (and still does) in
societies where religion was an important factor in peoples’ lives. Political history
has always been a major topic of historians’ work, although where political division
is less pointed this has inclined some to suggest that politics is far less influential
than many suppose – (e.g., compare Great Britain to Northern Ireland, or USA to
Israel) – and prompted them more towards economic history, or social history, or
even to develop new topics such as ‘media history’, or ‘the history of globalisation’.
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There are, of course, other factors at play in the emergence of established areas
of historical focus. We have already mentioned the possibility of a subject-area
being source-driven, and will in the following chapter consider the influence which
ideology and, indeed, ‘fashion’, can exert. But these are contingent factors, I suggest,
compared to the otherwise mundane factor of perceived ‘importance’ proposed
above. Not only this, however, the latter also helps explain why even within a given
topic or subject-area the historian’s focus narrows down to certain events rather
than others – i.e., it helps us probe further into what conspires to make ‘history’
restrain its field of scrutiny. This returns us to our analogy with the spatial
connections between things in a house, where we claimed that numerous of them
are pure chance, having nothing to do with the logic of the house. The other side
to this, however, is that some of those which are integral to the house are more
important than others. For example, the spatial relation between the foundations,
walls, and the roof, is more important in understanding or ‘explicating’ the house
than, for instance, that between the front and back door.
Likewise with the temporal relations between occurrences within a given subject-
area. Any given occurrence may form part of numerous different sequences or
‘stories’, many of which have no bearing on the subject-area. (We have all met
people who, in recounting an event we are interested in, get sidetracked by
intermixing other stories set off by one of the occurrences they have narrated as
part of that event.) Some of the sequences, however, are relevant to the topic, and
amongst these, some more so than others. The topic may be political or maritime
history, or the history of art – and what we are suggesting is that within that topic
attention focuses first upon those sequences of occurrences (‘events’) which are
conventionally regarded as relevant to it; but that then a further discrimination
generally operates, whereby the historian focuses upon those events which relate
more directly to what we might call the principal pillars of the topic’s architecture
– for example, the make-up of government, legislation, elections, revolutions,
organs of public opinion, in the subject-area of political history (earlier dominated
by the individual dynastic careers of monarchs). And this is because where
occurrences following on from each other involve the more important or formative
features of a topic, the more likely it is we will find the dynamic behind intelligible
change. We can remind ourselves of the platitude that, where nothing changes,
there is no history to be told. And thus we find historians within a certain subject-
area narrowing down their attention to those events or ‘story-objects’ which most
directly articulate how the overall ‘eventscape’ they are interested in changed over
time.
Summary comments
This chapter has incorporated four of the areas of debate which fall under analytic
philosophy of history, on the grounds that they each relate in their different ways
to one of the overall questions it addresses – namely, what is ‘history’ (as a
discipline). To summarise, these four areas are: what kind or type of discourse is
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history?; what kind of knowledge lies at its foundation? (i.e., history’s epistemological
status); what things does history explain, and how? (i.e., ‘historical explanation’);
and to what extent (and why) are the topics or subject-matter of ‘history’ limited
in character? (i.e., can history be about anything in the past?). Readers will not fail
to have noticed that, as your guide to these theoretical issues, in each case I have
prompted them towards narrative as offering the best direction to take in
considering them – and further, that because this prompting is common to all four
areas, it is suggestive of an overall coherence which might be achieved in reflecting
on ‘what is history?’. Readers will also have noticed that a more general
‘philosophical’ position, centred on the nature of ‘reality’ and the function of words,
underpins these suggestions. In short, as your guide I have found it neither fruitful,
nor hardly even possible, to give an exposition of these issues without suggesting
where they might be at least be clarified, if not resolved – i.e., it seems as futile to
analyse the discipline we call ‘history’ without central reference to the logic of
narrative, as it would be to attempt understanding the nature of what we call ‘travel’
without central reference to movement.
However, readers will of course make up their own minds as they further explore
the differing approaches of analytic philosophers of history, and hopefully this
chapter (either despite or because of the direction it prompts) at the least
demonstrates the relevance of these four issues and helps simplify the sometimes
complex and/or technical ways they are articulated in the genre of analytical
philosophy of history.
The following chapter explores the second of those general headings under
which I suggest the reflections contained in ‘analytic philosophy of history’ are
subsumed – namely, if the first is ‘what is history?’, the second is ‘what is history
for?’. Although intimately related to the first question, it generates sufficiently
different issues to warrant separate treatment.
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13
WHAT IS HISTO RY FOR ?
Introduction
In the previous chapter we explored the issues analytic philosophers of history raise
in relation to the question, ‘what is history?’. Properly, we treated this as a
philosophical question because there is no other ‘discipline’ which has ready answers,
and in the sense that the philosophical attitude is that of ‘astonishment’ at anything
– not only at the obscure, but also things otherwise taken for granted because so
familiar and thus apparently ‘obvious’.
It is in this light that analytic philosophers of history also pose the question,
‘what is history for?’ – i.e., what is the point of history? The same two-facedness
attaches to this question as to ‘what is history?’. This is that the philosophical
approach straddles between empirical observation of what the point of history ‘is’
as it appears to those who engage in it, and critical notions of what the point of
history ought to be for anyone. Now, this latter form of the question implies some
ideal motivation for the study of history, and may thus appear a curious, even
presumptive, question. What does it matter what motivates an individual to study
history, so long as he or she does it well enough? A possible reply, however, is that
the sting is in the tail of that complaint, since there is a case for claiming that, as
with many things we do, we do them well or badly depending on what motivates
us. In the extreme case, we may fail altogether in our effort to undertake an activity
because the expectations we have of it, which motivate us, distort how we go about
it. For example, if I play football simply to impress my girlfriend, this is likely to
make me play badly – maybe to the point where I am sent off for, as they say, ‘not
playing the game’! Applied to ‘what is the point of history?’, we shall amongst other
things explore whether, how far, and why one’s motivation in studying history may
distort the ‘history’ one does, possibly to the point that one is not ‘doing history’
at all, but something else – for example, political propaganda.
What this implies is that where the thing in question is a human activity, there
is a symbiosis between the nature of an activity, (as in ‘what is history?’), and its
purpose, (as in ‘what is the point of history?’). This may remind readers of Aristotle’s
notion that the definition of a thing should include its telos (or ‘end’ – see p. 35
above), except that (more realistically) here we are limiting the notion to human
activities, where intentionality is not a metaphysical supposition but clearly
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actually present. In short, if one does not know what the point of e.g., ‘washing up’
is, or of ‘history’, then how can one undertake these activities? So much is this the
case that we might almost argue that the question of the previous chapter, ‘what
is history?’, should have been approached by first asking, ‘what is history for?’ – in
other words, one could try to establish the nature of an activity by asking first and
foremost what people who engage in ‘it’ are trying to achieve, and why.
Persuasive as this might be, however, it does not allow us to escape the
philosophical dilemma of trying to straddle empirical and ideal notions. This is
because, in asking what people are trying to achieve by ‘doing history’, their answers
might differ to the point where we can find no significant common ground.
Consequently, ‘history’ is either indefinable or simply a catch-all term for different
things people do. The implication of this is that in asking what people are trying
to achieve by ‘doing history’, we first need at least some idea of what ‘history’ is –
i.e., we are brought full-circle, thereby emphasising the symbiosis between the
nature and the point of recognised human activities.
On a separate note, so far we have treated ‘history’ strictly in terms of the activity
undertaken by practising historians, and have had cause to comment that reading
history books (or ‘consuming’ lectures, and so on) is not ‘being an historian’ –
rather, it is ‘merely’ studying the product of ‘history’ as a discipline. This may dismay
many hard-working students who believe they are indeed undertaking the
discipline of history rather than merely studying its products! However, for
the purposes of examining ‘what is history?’ the distinction was essential. But now,
in addressing the question, ‘what is history for?’, it is proper to include the study of
‘history’ as communicated to us by practising historians – i.e., the reading of history
books and articles. Here, these latter are not ‘sources’ of historical knowledge (used
as evidence and/or proof of historical facts), but actual versions of historical
knowledge (referred to as ‘secondary sources’ to distinguish them from the former,
primary, sources). In practice, ‘the study of history’ of course more often refers to
this reading of, and thinking about, the knowledge produced and communicated
by historians, rather than the practising historians’ activity itself – and despite the
severe distinction it was necessary to draw between the two in the previous chapter,
no denigration of the latter meaning of ‘studying history’ is intended. This would
indeed be strange in a book written for ‘students of history’, by which I mean both
practitioners and readers of history.
But additionally, it is now appropriate to include both meanings of ‘doing
history’, because in asking ‘what is the point of history?’ we must note that, even
if the question was restricted only to the practise of working historians, part of their
work is to communicate their knowledge, and thus their expectations of how readers
might profit from it is integral to understanding at least part of the motivation
behind their activity – i.e., it is part of ‘what history is for’ for them. And as for
history readers, it would be strange if the point of reading history for them was
different from the reasons historians had for presenting them with the material to
read! However, not only can this be the case, it is possible to conceive of the
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W H A T I S H I S T O R Y FOR?
respective motivations of writer and reader even to be contrary – for example, an

author may write in order to make his readers think about a problem, whilst some
may read him in order to get the answer to it!
Such disconsonance between writer and reader over ‘what is the study of history
for?’ would be bizarre, and therefore reinforces the notion that in addressing this
question, the expectations of both parties should not only be incorporated, but
that a strong kinship ‘ought’ (ideally) to prevail in their motivation for ‘doing
history’.
In the following, then, we will explore the issue of the point of the discipline of
history both from the historian’s and the reader’s (or student’s) viewpoint.
However, as in the previous chapter, some ‘clearing of the ground’ is necessary.
Theoretical preliminaries
Because this aspect of analytical philosophy of history focuses on what the purpose
of historical study ‘is’ and/or ‘should be’, the general ground of this enquiry relates
to peoples’ motivations in what they do. As such, it might be objected that there
already exists a discipline which deals with this – namely, psychology. Also, it
might be objected that people’s motivations, even in practising or studying history,
could be so varied and individual that it is a fruitless line of enquiry for the purpose
of any useful generalisations. Both these objections are sound, but only insofar as
one is addressing individual motivations. Psychology studies what a person’s
motivation is, not what motivation is. We, on the other hand, are not here
concerned with the individual motivations at play when people do this or that
(e.g., play football or study history) – but not because of the potential blind alley
it invites us down. Rather, our focus is on the ground of motivation in general,
where a useful overall distinction can, and needs to, be made. The distinction is
that between doing something for its own sake, and doing something as a means
to an end. Because this distinction is central to the ensuing arguments over ‘what
is the point of (studying) history?’, it is worth clarifying in advance.
When we do something ‘for its own sake’, we undertake the action or activity
(comprising a number of related actions) for the sake of experiencing doing it. We
do it for the experience of it, rather than as a means to some (other) end. The doing
of the action is, thus, an end-in-itself. As such, it must be presumed we do it because
we enjoy it. Here, semantics can confuse matters, since the same point is sometimes
expressed in terms of doing something in order to enjoy it. But this is misleading,
because when we do something for its own sake we do not do it ‘in order to’
experience it. This suggests the doing of it and the experiencing of it are two
separate things, the former being a means to the latter end – whereas in reality the
doing of it is the experience of it. Where, then, one does something for the sake of
(the experience of) doing it, rather than as means to some (other) end, let us call
this a ‘final’ action.
The other ground to people’s motivation is where they do something not ‘for its
own sake’, but as a means to achieve some objective separate from, and beyond,
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the action itself. For example, I switch on the light so that I can see better. Actions
(or activities) so motivated, where they are engaged in to effect some separate end,
may be called ‘practical’ actions – and here the term ‘in order to’ has its proper place,
for in switching on the light in order to see better, or getting on the bus in order to
get to work, we are positing two separate situations, the first ordered to achieving
the second. Different actions are put in an order which (eventually, hopefully)
achieves the situation desired. Thus an entire chain of different actions may be
undertaken in the ‘practical’ spirit, all ordered to achieving a single objective.
Unlike ‘final’ actions, then, none of them are undertaken for the experience of
undertaking them – they are purely ‘practical’ actions.
Before drawing out the relevance of this distinction to ‘studying history’ (either as
practising historian or student), it is important to point out that, perhaps despite
appearances, in the abstract any action or activity can be undertaken either as
practically motivated, or for its own sake. In other words, no actions are either
‘practical’ or ‘final’ simply in virtue of what they involve. For example, I may engage
in housework either in order to achieve a clean and tidy house, or because I enjoy
that activity (i.e., I do housework ‘for its own sake’). One may engage in sexual
intercourse either in order to conceive a child, or to enjoy it. Indeed, this latter
example shows there are many occasions where both kinds of motivation are
simultaneously involved! It is true there are numerous actions which, simply in
virtue of what they involve, would appear to be merely ‘practical’, and probably are
in most cases. For example, it is difficult to conceive of tying one’s shoelaces as an
action which is not practically inspired (i.e., to secure one’s shoe) – however, in
theory we should leave room for the odd individual who really enjoys tying shoe-
laces. Vice-versa, it may be difficult to conceive of playing a game, not as a way of
‘enjoying oneself’, but as a means towards some (separate) objective. Nonetheless,
it could be the case (as with our show-off footballer). A few activities, indeed, seem
so obviously either ‘practical’ or ‘final’ that the language denoting them reflects this.
‘Making love’ is an example of the latter, whereas ‘mating’ exemplifies the former.
But far more often, the terms used to refer to actions and activities denote their
‘objective’ character, leaving the grounds of their motivation open. For example,
‘having a conversation’ refers to people talking with each other, but whether one
or more are doing it ‘for its own sake’ or, alternatively, in order to e.g., impress the
company, or in order to ingratiate themselves, is left an open question.
This seems to confirm that there is nothing in principle decreeing that this action
is, by its very nature, a ‘practical’ action, or that that action is, by its very nature,
a ‘final’ action. However, it is reasonable to suppose that, although most of the
objective characteristics of an activity remain the same irrespective of whether it
is undertaken practically or for its own sake, closer attention to the manner in
which it is performed often betrays which ground of motivation is in play. Tell-tale
signs relate to each, derived from the logic of their motivation. Because practically
motivated actions are dedicated to achieving some external objective, they are not
desired in themselves but are merely necessary labour. As such, the sole criterion
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of their performance is efficiency (incorporating e.g., speed, economy, and

minimum effort, and above all, effectiveness in achieving the desired outcome),
and in an ideal world one would pay someone else, or invent a machine, to do
them. (Largely gone are the days when the ‘wealthy person’s’ every practical need
was taken care of by a retinue of servants, down to tying their masters’ shoe-laces!).
On the other hand, where an activity is undertaken ‘for its own sake’, efficiency is
not a relevant criterion for its performance, since it is not undertaken to achieve
any extrinsic purpose. Rather, since what is at stake is the enjoyment of doing the
activity, we wish to perform it well. We, so to speak, indulge the activity so that we
can benefit from the experience it offers us. Another way of putting this is that when
we perform an activity for its own sake, we ‘do justice’ to the activity. It is not
practically motivated, so there is no pressure to cut corners, save time, substitute
a more efficient activity, or (least of all) get someone else to perform it for us. In
these respects, the signs of whether an action is undertaken as a means to an end
or for its own sake are not only different – they are antithetical.
Thus, as an example, I may see someone gardening. That she is gardening does
not in itself tell me whether she is doing it as a ‘final’ or a ‘practical’ activity. But
closer observation of the manner in which she gardens may reveal which. She is
hurried, neglects areas difficult to reach, and rushes indoors at the slightest sign of
rain. For her, it is simply a means to an end. What that end is for her may be one of
many – e.g., to keep fit, to keep up appearances with her neighbours’ gardens, or
even to put herself on display to attract the boy next door – and maybe still closer
observation will reveal one of these to be the case. Alternatively, the manner in
which she gardens may reveal that she is doing it ‘for its own sake’. She is
appropriately attired, she is thorough, spends much money on it, and is not unduly
hurried – indeed, she lingers longer than ‘necessary’ over certain tasks. And I have
noticed that she not only gardens frequently; she even does it when it does not
‘need’ doing. These signs suggest she is gardening because she enjoys it. Not
surprisingly, the product of her activity – her garden – is high quality, and part of
the reason for this is that, as a ‘final’ activity for her, she has ‘done it justice’.
I will add only one point before drawing out the relevance of this discussion for our
topic. The last remark might be taken to imply that, when something is undertaken
for its own sake, the result will be superior to when the same thing is undertaken
simply as a means to an (extrinsic) end. ‘Theory’ might indeed imply this, but the
real world often confounds it. Much as my neighbour may love gardening, she may
be a poor gardener – for instance, she may lack a true eye, plant at the wrong time
of year, and have no colour sense. Vice-versa, the gardener she employed to look
after her garden while she was away – a man who hated his job – may present her
with an excellent garden on her return, such is his skill. The moral is that whether
one does something for its own sake, or ‘merely’ as a means to an end (e.g., that
huge area of activity undertaken in order to earn money), does not necessarily mean
that, judged by their results, the former performance will be superior to the latter.
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Let us summarise: put simply, there are things we do because we like doing them,
and there are things we do because we have to in order to achieve an extrinsic
objective, (and sometimes we can combine both motivations). Although in
practice common-sense often suggests that certain actions are ‘by their nature’
simply means to an end, whilst others are done ‘for their own sake, in principle this
difference does not attach to the things themselves (i.e., actions/activities). Rather,
it can often be observed from the manner in which we do something, where either
efficiency in achieving the (separate) objective dictates how we do something, or
where ‘doing justice’ to an activity dictates how it is done. Although in principle it
is reasonable to expect a thing done ‘for its own sake’ to be done better than when
it is done merely as a means to an end, in practice this is somewhat dependent
upon individual aptitudes. Thus where an action or activity results in a tangible
product, (e.g., a garden, a meal, a book), that product need not necessarily display
in what spirit it was produced.
Thus, I can have a cup of coffee ‘for its own sake’, or in order to e.g., refresh
myself; I can play football ‘for its own sake’, or in order to e.g., keep fit; I can have
a drink with colleages ‘for its own sake’, or in order to e.g., clinch a deal; I can have
sexual intercourse ‘for its own sake’, or in order to e.g., reproduce.
The same applies to mental activities. Just as I can remember things ‘for their own
sake’ (i.e., indulge in nostalgia), or in order to, e.g., find my keys, so with
understanding. I can study e.g., politics ‘for its own sake’, or in order to e.g., win an
election. I can enquire into something ‘for its own sake’, or in order to e.g., solve a
pressing problem. In short, I can seek to understand something ‘for the sake of’
understanding, or in order to effect something via and extrinsic to understanding
it. It is precisely this difference which is at stake when we ask what the study of
history is for, (as applied now not only to the thinking of the practising historian
but also to the student’s reading of history books).
The other mental activity relevant to ‘what is the point of history?’ is that of
communicating. Here again, I can communicate my ideas (verbally or in writing)
‘for their own sake’, or in order to e.g., titillate the audience. Because, of course,
‘history’ has to be produced by historians, it is this difference which is at stake when
we ask what ‘is’ (or ‘should be’) the point of writing history.
This approach – i.e., what ‘are’ the motivational grounds for the study
and writing of history, and how do they affect the discipline as an activity? –
will give us a relevant and useful perspective from which to cover most of the
otherwise disparate issues analytical philosophers of history raise in discussing ‘what
is history for?’.
The practising historian

Here, our concern is with the practising historians’ study of the past. The
communication of the knowledge thereby acquired (i.e., historians’ writings) will be
treated in another section, as will the history students’ study of those writings (i.e.,
reading history).
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Following our introductory framework, it must be possible for the historian to

engage in the activity of uncovering ‘what happened’ in the past either ‘for its own
sake’, or in order to achieve some extrinsic purpose beyond ‘simply’ that of
discovering past events and explaining/ understanding their constituent parts. (We
are of course referring here to narrative history, but the same applies to ‘descriptive’
and ‘analytic’ history). Let us consider the latter case first.
Practically motivated historical work

Just as in our example of studying politics in order to e.g., learn how to win an
election, rather than ‘for its own sake’, so an historian can work at uncovering and
understanding some past event(s) in order to effect something via and beyond the
knowledge gained. In other words, the historian can be practically motivated, and
we need to explore the general implications of this, whatever the individual
motivation might be. Let us suppose, for example, the objective is to demonstrate
that women played an important role in the origins and development of the
(British) Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Here, we have to assume
the historian has already formed his view, but is seeking evidence to substantiate his
case. Because of this, there will be much about the history of the CND which will
not interest him because it is irrelevant to the role of women. His focus will be
restricted to important moments in the CND’s history, and to discovering and
assessing the role women played in them. Hopefully for him, he will find sufficient
evidence from which to make the reasonable inference that their role was
important, and he may even find proof in hitherto unknown contemporary docu-
ments attesting precisely to this. So far, so good. The problem is, what if he does
not find such evidence and proof of the case he wants to make? The danger is that,
to the extent he has already prejudged the case and is now concerned to
demonstrate it, he may thereby either deliberately or unconsciously – (often more
of a sliding scale than a clear difference) – neglect certain ‘inconvenient’ facts and
important episodes, and exaggerate others. In short, he may give a biased account.
Because the questions of ‘bias’, ‘objectivity’, and ‘truth’ are rightly regarded as
important factors in the study (and writing) of history, it is worth exploring the
above more closely. Let us suppose our historian did succumb to the dangers just
outlined. As said, this implies his understanding is ‘biased’. But what does this
mean? It does not necessarily mean that he has had to falsify ‘the facts’ – rather, it
means he has selected those which support his case, and ignored others. In two
senses of the term, then, he is being ‘partial’ in his work. First, because he is only
interested in the role of women, his account of the CND is ‘partial’, ignoring many
other features of its history. Second, in a related sense of the same term, because
he has a certain axe to grind he ‘angles’ his account (already ‘partial’ in the first
sense of the term) towards the conclusions which fulfil his objective. But he
does not have to give a ‘false’ account. Only if he was unconcerned to give his case
the authority of ‘history’ might he so distort his account to the point of actually
telling lies.
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To generalise from this, we see that where the historian engages in his work of
uncovering the past in order to achieve some (extrinsic) objective, he does less than
‘justice’ to that activity because of his ‘partiality’. This does not preclude him,
however, from ‘telling the truth’, for other historians with no axe to grind on the
matter might find his work and judgements perfectly sound. Nevertheless, as
suggested in our ‘theoretical preliminaries’, even in this case tell-tale signs of the
practical basis to our historian’s motivation should be apparent. The difference
(which may range from subtle to glaringly obvious manifestations) can be shown
by contrasting the above case, where the historian has an (external) objective
directing his work, to the case where an historian is asked the question, ‘how
important was the role of women in the history of the CND?’. It is true that, in
setting to work to respond to the question, the historian’s focus has been narrowed
to a particular aspect of the CND’s history and might therefore warrant being called
‘partial’ in our first sense of that term. But this is an illusion, since in that sense
answering any detailed questions asked about the past would imply a ‘partial’
account. Rather, the point is to assume our hypothetical historian is not practically
motivated in answering the question and therefore engages in a full examination
of what was important in the CND’s history before focusing on, and assessing, the
role of women in important episodes – all this without either a pre-formed view,
or by jumping to conclusions half-way through.
The moral of this discussion of practically motivated historical work is that, both
in the direction of its focus and (relatedly) in the ‘picture’ it develops, the thinking
behind it is ‘partial’ because directed towards demonstrating something about the
past (which may or may not have been true). The ‘facts’ it employs need not be
false, nor the ‘conclusions’ it proffers by the story it tells or by the scene it depicts.
But there will always be the uneasy feeling that an historical enquiry undertaken
for a practical motivation is thereby ‘tainted’, however excellent it might turn out
to be. This is because the suspicion is always justified, that a degree of ‘distortion’,
or ‘angling’ (conscious or otherwise), characterises such an historian’s thinking,
leading to the danger of his ‘misrepresenting’ the past.
Should we therefore say that, where practically motivated, the historian is
betraying his discipline – that ‘this is not what history is for?’ – that he or she is thus
not an historian, but merely adopting the guise of being an historian in order to lend
his or her accounts of the past the authority of ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’? The answer
to this surely depends on whether we think the discipline of history should bear the
hallmark of striving for ‘objective truth’ in what it says about the past. If we do think
this, then practically motivated ‘history’ is not ‘history as it ought to be’.
Alternatively, some theorists argue that objective truth is an impossibility, and
that to believe it does (or ‘should’) characterise the historian’s thinking (as do
many historians themselves) is to be deluded. If this were indeed the case, then our
practically motivated ‘historian’ is not betraying his discipline, since the threat of
‘bias’ or ‘partiality’ is somehow integral to it, making it pointless to complain, and
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meaning that those who do complain have simply misunderstood the nature of the
discipline.
Much, then, hangs on whether ‘impartial’, ‘objective’ thinking is a possible
undertaking, or whether all thinking is necessarily somehow ‘angled’ or ‘distorted’.
(We shall encounter in a later section the arguments of those who take the latter
view, where in particular we will explore the notion of ‘ideology’, its alleged
ubiquity, and how it impinges on the question of ‘what is history for?’). In turning
now to examine the case where the historian is not practically (neither
‘ideologically’) motivated in his work, but instead engages in the discipline ‘for its
own sake’, we will find this issue reappearing.
Historical work ‘for its own sake’

The notion of enquiring into the past ‘for the sake of it’ derives from our ‘theoretical
preliminaries’ where we argued that all actions and activities can be undertaken
either as means to an (external) end, or ‘for their own sake’ (sometimes combining
elements of both motivational grounds) – and that intellectual activities, the
discipline of history included, are no exception. But what exactly does it mean to
engage in historical work ‘for its own sake’, and how does this affect (if at all) how
the practising historian goes about his work? Most of the answers to these questions
can be found in the contrast between such activity and that of our practically
motivated ‘historian’.
First, we mean that it is possible to enquire into an aspect or episode of the past
for no other reason than that one enjoys the activity involved. As with anything
else done ‘for its own sake’, it is done for the experience of doing it – and as we have
seen, it would be curious if this did not imply that one enjoyed doing it. Thus, one
engages in the activity of finding out ‘what happened’ (or ‘what it was like’) and
why, not in order to achieve anything ‘external’ by the outcome of the activity –
such as demonstrating a political point, destroying a colleague’s academic
reputation, or writing a best-selling history book. The only sense in which
something might be achieved by the activity is the acquisition of knowledge and
understanding. But this is the intrinsic rationale of the activity, not some external
objective influencing how it is undertaken. (All actions and activities have an
intrinsic ‘objective’ simply in virtue of being sequences of ‘movements’, from
switching on a light to gardening, from uttering a sentence to solving a chess
problem). But even here, it follows that if one is ‘doing history’ for its own sake,
then whatever pleasure the historian might get from finding out about some aspect
of the past, the pleasure is in the activity of finding out, not in the knowledge
gained. If it were the latter, then one might as well pay someone to find out that
knowledge rather than bother oneself with the work.
Second, because of the absence of a practical motivation directing his focus, the
historian will (as we have put it) ‘do justice’ to the activity of enquiring into the
past. Although individuals may differ as to how competent they are at the activity,
in principle this means they will explore all avenues of their topic, none being
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‘irrelevant’ or ‘inconvenient’ because of some exterior objective – and will consider

all angles from which it might be understood. This, after all, is what it is to ‘enquire’
into and seek to ‘understand’ something solely for the sake of it. There are no
foregone conclusions to be reached, no ‘embarrassing’ facts to omit, no ‘angles’ to
be stressed. Rather, the thinking involved will be ‘objective’ or ‘impartial’.
However, in itself this does not guarantee that either the ‘facts’ the historian infers
or the conclusions he reaches will be true. Impartiality is not a sufficient condition
for saying things that are true. ‘Honest’ mistakes can be made – e.g., mis-
identifications, illogical reasoning, and simple lack of knowledge. Neither is
impartiality even a necessary condition of saying true things, for we have already
noted that the ‘facts’ a biased historian uncovers need not be false, nor the
conclusions he reaches. To this extent, then, impartiality and truth are separate
features of intellectual work, allowing the possibility that an historian may be
proposing false ‘facts’ and absurd conclusions, yet thinking with impeccable
impartiality.
Left at this, although impartiality is a necessary feature of the thinking involved
in studying the past ‘for its own sake’, it might appear a disappointing attribute in
terms of the difference it makes, since all it means is that the historian has not
concocted lies and has not skewed his account. The question of ‘truth’ remains.
There is, however, a third attribute to any study done ‘for its own sake’ (including
historical study), and here we can again refer to the notion of ‘doing justice’ to an
activity. When we think about something solely to understand it, it is difficult to
see how this does not equate with the urge to arrive at true ideas about it (i.e., to
reach the point where one is confident that what one thinks is the case, is the case,
‘truth’ being a property of statements, not of things themselves). Indeed, ‘truth’ is
so integral to ‘understanding’ that where something has been misunderstood we
mean it is not true – a false understanding is a misunderstanding. Put another way,
it is not conceivable that one should wish, in understanding something, that one
should construe false ideas. ‘Doing justice’ to the effort to understand something
thus involves the deliberate effort to ensure that the ideas one conceives are true.
For the historian this involves checking his ‘facts’ rather than assuming them, and
checking that whatever conclusions he may draw are logical. It also involves
checking that, even where logically correct, the chain of his reasoning has not been
influenced by any extrinsic objective, as in practically motivated thinking, which
may so distort his reasoning as to guide him towards unsound conclusions – e.g.,
exaggerations, misrepresentations of potential objections, and so on. Thus, for
example, however surprising, unconventional, ‘politically incorrect’, or unpopular
the understanding of a topic he conceives from his work, he should offer no
resistance to what he sees as true. Vice-versa, he should be open to change his
mind if new ‘facts’ or arguments conflict with his accounts.
What all this amounts to is that the historian, like anyone else studying something
‘for its own sake’, is ‘dis-interested’ in (i.e., impartial about) what he studies – and
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this involves thinking about his own thinking, not only to rid it of errors but also to
guard against its direction being ‘skewed’ by external motivation. It is in this sense
that, as suggested in Chapter 11, the historian who ‘does justice’ to the activity of
historical work because doing it ‘for its own sake’, is in that manner a ‘theorist’, since
the principal marks of ‘theoretical’ thinking are precisely that it has no axe to grind
and is reflexive – i.e., it reflects on itself to guard its adequacy.
Where, then, an historian enquires into some aspect of the past ‘for the sake of
it’, the search for objectivity and truth are integral to his work – and because of this,
some may assert that only where the discipline of history is undertaken in that
spirit is it ‘truly’ history. In short, historical work ‘is’ (‘ought to be’) objective and
true. Indeed, this position will commend itself to many, and there seems nothing
wrong with it so long as one is not implying that the discipline of history ‘really’
exists as some paradigm ‘above’ us which historians ‘ought’ to aspire and bow down
to. Rather, objectivity and truth are not god-given criteria for historical work – they
are simply what most people expect from it and mean by the term. And contrary
to those who claim that such ‘history’ is an impossible ideal precisely because
neither objectivity nor truth are possible – (e.g., because of the intrusion of
‘ideology’, a claim considered later) – we have seen that such historical work is
possible to the extent that it, like any other activity, can be done ‘for its own sake’,
the properties of objectivity and truth happening to be necessary offshoots rather
than some ‘extra’ demand added on in the name of an allegedly hopeless idealism.
The communication of history: the history ‘book’

The other aspect to the practising historian’s work is communicating its results. This
is mostly done in books and articles, but also in lectures and occasionally in
‘documentary’ films. Although these different media to a certain extent lend
themselves to different purposes (e.g., the introductory textbook, the detailed
article, the ‘blockbuster’ documentary series), for the purposes of argument let me
combine them under the generic term, ‘the book’. And the question is, what ‘are’
history books for? – i.e., what ‘should’ they be for? The historian has engaged in his
enquiry, (which the last section discussed); he now proposes to communicate its
results; what, as an historian, ‘should’ he or she be trying to achieve? What ‘is’ the
point of ‘the history book’?
The obvious answer is that it is to communicate knowledge about some aspect
of the past. However, this is simplistic, because communicating knowledge of the
past is intrinsic to history books. But it may not be the point behind writing them.
Thus our question might just as well be, ‘what is the point of communicating
knowledge about the past?’. And in this form it can be seen more clearly that the
question has two aspects: why communicate knowledge of the past?, and why
communicate knowledge of the past?
In exploring this, we take it for granted that ‘the book’ does not represent the
thinking of the historian, as if it were the facsimile or record of all the thinking he
did in the course of his enquiries. Rather, ‘the book’ is the product (carefully made)
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of that thinking, and as such can be viewed as evidence of what was going on in the
historian’s mind. And this allows us to adopt the same approach towards the writing
of history books as we did to the activity of historical enquiry – namely, to treat
the issue of the motivation of the historian in terms of the difference between having
a practical objective and doing it ‘for its own sake’.
Practically motivated historical writings

By ‘practically motivated’ historical writings I mean, then, those produced as a
means to some end. As explained before, it is not relevant (and hardly possible) to
explore the numerous diverse objectives individuals may have when they do things
as a means to an end – and this applies equally to the writing of history books.
What we can say, however, is that insofar as it involves communicating knowledge
of the past these different purposes can sensibly be related more closely to the
‘normal’ possibilities the activity offers. For example, servicing a car might be
undertaken for its own sake, but when done as a means to an end, we would
normally expect that end or purpose to relate more immediately to the obvious
possibilities the activity offers. In this case, the purposes would appear to be
markedly limited – namely, in order to make the car go faster, and/or more
economically, and/or more safely, and/or to maintain its market value, and/or to
prolong its working life. A more ‘distant’ purpose might be to avoid the wife indoors,
and many others can be imagined!
Applied to writing history books, however, although we might imagine such
vicarious objectives, the intrinsic nature of the activity (i.e., communicating
knowledge of the past) offers a wide enough range of possible objectives immediately
related to it. ‘History’ can be written in order to entertain the reader (e.g., to
fascinate, titillate, horrify, amuse). In Chapter 6 we saw Machiavelli complaining
that (even if a history was not written with that purpose in mind) this was what
many readers anticipated – and it is clear that ‘knowledge of the past’ is an area
offering ample opportunities for those who wish to write history for that purpose,
and has been so written. The ‘popular’ biography is often a case in point.
History can also be written in order to generate controversy through upsetting
peoples’ longstanding impressions of important past episodes or circumstances
(possibly as a means for an ambitious historian to ‘make his mark’). The obvious
genre is that of ‘revisionist’ historical writings, where it is important to judge
whether their alternative accounts are deliberately devised as such (i.e., are
practically motivated), or happen to be the way an impartial historian clinically
sees things.
Another way in which ‘history’ more obviously offers itself to be written as a
means to an end is that of political persuasion, where the historian devises his account
in such a manner as to invite the reader towards some political commitment – for
example, ‘official’ histories sanctioned, vetted, and financed by the state, in order
to foster a sense of national confidence or even triumph. But apart from these, there
are histories written in order to justify the aims of revolutionary and nationalist
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movements, by trying to show the justice of their historical grievances and, by

implication, the continuing resonance of their cause. As such, these histories (like
any written as a means to an end) are as much an engagement with the present as
with the past, and it would be naive to take them at face-value as ‘history’. Rather,
the information and judgements they contain are ‘suspect’ (albeit not necessarily
‘untrue’) for the reasons already outlined.
Such political objectives can be subsumed under a wider genre, namely, that of
writing history in order to convey a message which can broadly be called ‘moral’.
For example, a writer might wish to highlight social deprivation, racial
discrimination, or the position of women, as issues rooted in the past and, by
implication, still needful of being addressed. Women’s history, Black history,
minority ‘culture and heritage’ histories are examples where it is reasonable to ask
whether they are written to achieve a moral end or, as is perfectly possible, ‘for their
own sake’.
In all these examples, where communicating knowledge of the past can be allied
to an external objective which that activity more obviously invites (i.e., as distinct
from more ‘vicarious’ objectives), we have made these observations on the basis that
the writer is perfectly aware of his or her objective. However, this need not
necessarily be so, for many have made the case that historical writings can be
produced by those who believe they are writing them solely ‘for their own sake’ (an
eventuality explored below), but demonstrate a ‘bias’ (and thus imply a ‘moral’
message) of which the writer is unaware. (Some, indeed, insist that all historical
writings necessarily share this feature). Although this might be a possible feature of
any practical ‘motivation’ (namely, that the agent might be unaware of its practical
bent), our concern here is with what is usually referred to as ‘ideology’ and the
manner in which it can intrude into and affect the history ‘book’.
The nature and role of ‘ideology’ in communicating history

‘Ideology’ is a term which arose in the late eighteenth century (as we saw in Chapter
10, later to become in particular an integral part of Marx’s theories about history
and society) used to express the notion that many of peoples’ ideas can be
accounted for, not as the ‘free’ product of their thinking, but as stemming from the
position they occupy in society, particularly in terms of its associated material
interests. Although a source of much debate ever since, we can say that ‘an ideology’
is a more or less coherent set of ideas about the world which serves the function of
making that world intelligible for the purposes of action and/or commitment. In short,
when we act we do so on the basis of how we view or understand the relevant
features of our world (and no more so than when we act in the social field,
comprising our duties and obligations, our notions of justice, vice, and virtue, our
political activity and moral aims). That view or understanding needs to reflect or
‘make sense of’ our world in such a manner as to accommodate the pursuit of our
interests rather than conflict with them – for how else can we act in the world, as
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distinct from merely observing or contemplating it? (There is even the case where
action involves doing things otherwise disadvantageous to us, as when, for example,
the Christian acts contrary to his immediate interests – e.g., turning the other
cheek – because he believes in an ultimate justice ensured in resurrection.)
Further, the working assumption of those who employ the notion of ‘ideology’
is that because people occupy different positions in society, they will have
correspondingly different ‘understandings’ or views of social life which reflect the
interests associated with that position. As such, although an ideology may be
unique to an individual, the term is more usually meant to apply to recognisable
groups in society – e.g., different classes, different age groups, the genders, cultural,
‘racial’, and national minorities – who will share the same ‘world-view’ as others
in their group.
Thus, it is proposed, ‘women’ look at many aspects of the world differently from
men; the working class have different assumptions about e.g., work, family, and
politics from the middle class; poor Blacks see the world in perhaps radically
different ways from rich, professional Whites.
The further assumption is that these different ways of looking at the world
(which make sense of that world for the purposes of appropriate social and moral
action) can not only be consciously held and indeed deliberately propagandised in
order to promote the relevant group’s interests, but that they can also form sets of
unconscious assumptions which permeate peoples’ thinking. In short, individuals
may believe themselves to be viewing things ‘fairly’ and ‘objectively’, but in fact
may be biased because of unwitting assumptions they hold, constitutive of this or
that ‘ideology’. If this is the case, then their thinking is ‘ideological’ rather than
impartial – and because of this, when they communicate statements about the
world they are, without intending it, promoting a practical agenda, supportive of
the position and aims of the group to which they belong.
To the extent this is a realistic notion about what can be a feature of peoples’
consciousness, it presents a special, albeit potentially ubiquitous, case of what I
have called ‘practically grounded motivation’: special (indeed, almost paradoxical)
because the motivation is unintended, and potentially ubiquitous because everyone
occupies some position in society vis-a-vis others, linked to different ‘interests’.
The final point – and it is a worrying one responsible for much of the heated
controversy over the notions of ‘ideology’ and ‘ideological thinking’ – is the claim
by some that ideological thinking is not merely a feature which may attach to
peoples’ understandings of the (social) world, but that it is an inevitable feature
which we can never escape. In short, some claim that all thinking (at least related
to human affairs) is ‘ideological’, and is therefore, in something like the sense
explained regarding ‘practical’ thinking, somehow ‘skewed’ or ‘distorted’, such that
it is impossible to make ‘true’ statements about human affairs – or even, perhaps,
that this raises queries over the very nature of ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ themselves,
as conventionally applied to our hopes when we wish to ‘understand’ something.
This claim, which applies to a variety of disciplines, will be considered below,
but it should come as no surprise that one of the prime candidates for the
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‘accusation’ of being ‘ideological’ in content (either in particular cases or always

necessarily so) is the history ‘book’, since its intrinsic rationale is precisely to
communicate knowledge and understanding of (past) human affairs. Thus the
history ‘book’, in addition to offering ample opportunities as a means to some
extrinsic end, or as a vehicle conveying an explicitly held ‘ideological’ world-
view designed to persuade readers towards some moral, social, or political
committment, also particularly offers itself as a forum in which, far more
insiduously, distinctive but unconscious socio-political values infiltrate the
apparently impartial accounts historians give of past events and circumstances.
Where the latter occurs it is all the more threatening if the particular ideology
unconsciously held by the historian is also unconsciously shared by the readers,
since they will fail to notice it, assuming instead that they are reading history which
is ‘objectively true’. Where, on the other hand, the ideology permeating a history
book is different from that of the reader (or where, despite claims that it is
impossible, the reader does not think ‘ideologically’ at all), there is more chance
of the reader detecting its influence and thus being suitably cautious, even
‘suspicious’, about the ‘history’ he is reading.
Sufficient has been said to explain what people mean by ‘ideology’ and how, like
other species of practically motivated thinking, it impacts upon the forming and
communication of knowledge, to see that historians (as well as some other
disciplines) do need a grip on the concept if they are to be self-confident both as
practitioners and readers of history. Because of the potential complexity of the
notion, and the issues raised in the preceding treatment of more straightforward
types of the practically motivated history ‘book’, it is useful to conclude this section
by positing a simple analogy and drawing out the principal points. Let us suppose
a little child wants to understand what a razor-blade is. Her father tells her it is an
extremely sharp and dangerous kind of knife, for shaving his face. Now, what he
has said is true, but it is only a partial account of a razor-blade – ‘partial’ in those
two senses of the term pointed out earlier. First, it is partial because he has omitted
so much else that could be said about a razor-blade – e.g., its other uses, what it is
made of, why it has that shape, and so on. Yet the father has only mentioned one
or two things about the razor-blade, and it is not difficult to see that this is because
he wishes to protect his daughter from the danger it poses to her. This, then, is the
second sense in which the understanding he offers is ‘partial’ – i.e., it is ‘biased’ or
‘distorted’ towards achieving the objective of making his daughter wary of touching
razor-blades. In short, it is an example of practically motivated communication of
understanding. It is not an impartial account of a razor-blade. However, this does
not mean what he says is therefore not true. Rather, to use a legal expression, it is
not ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’.
Further, if he wished to enhance his warning about razor-blades, he could of
course invent some grim ‘fairy-tale’ to further persuade his impressionable daughter.
But in the case of writing history for a practical purpose, one would think such ‘myth-
making’ might undermine one’s purpose because of the danger of being caught in
a lie – not, however, that this has prevented practically motivated ‘historians’ from
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doing just this (particularly where they are using ‘history’ for explicitly ideological
political ends), nor from getting millions to believe them (if only for a time).
Returning to the caring father’s explanation of what a razor-blade is, it would be
extravagant to call this an example of ‘ideological’ thinking if the case begins and
ends there. Rather, it is simply one example of someone purporting to offer a ‘true’
and ‘objective’ account of something, but doing so as a means to an end, and thus
being ‘partial’ in what he says. He may be perfectly aware of this – and the only
relevant criterion of his performance is how efficient it is at achieving his objective
of protecting his child from playing with razor-blades. On the other hand, it is
possible that he is not aware of his ‘bias’, his account of razor-blades seeming
perfectly ‘natural’ and ‘obvious’ to him. But as observers of the interchange, we
should be able to see the tell-tale signs of his practical motivation, just as (in
principle) we should be able to in the case of ‘the history book’.
Let us now extend the analogy to incorporate the notion of ‘ideology’. Here we
would have to posit the case where what the father offers as the understanding of
a razor-blade forms but part of a larger set of ideas which make up a more or less
coherent ‘outlook’ which underpins many of his actions. In this case, let us posit
that they centre more immediately around his understanding of marriage, the
family, gender and age differences, and fatherly obligations, within which his duty
to care for his daughter fits consistently. As stated, he may be perfectly aware that
this set of ideas serves a prescriptive function rather than merely being descriptive,
and that other people situated differently have different understandings of that
aspect of life. On the other hand, as stated, he may believe he is simply ‘telling it
as it is’ when he explains what a razor-blade, a family, a father, and so on, are.
Also, we could add that his coherent set of ideas on these matters might
themselves be but part of an even larger ‘ideology’ which embraces more general
social and political views, or which derives from this or that religious outlook – and
it is indeed often this larger reference which those concerned about ‘ideology’ mean
by it. However, rather than extend the analogy further to encompass this, it is more
important to recognise that, if we know what ‘ideology’ an individual subscribes to,
we might almost predict the ideas he communicates, whether he is doing so in full
knowledge that he has a practical objective, or in the more complex case where he
is unaware that he is offering ideas which derive from his (or his group’s) interests.
Alternatively, although we might recognise an utterance is practically inspired
(as in ‘razor-blades are sharp and dangerous instruments’), if we do not know
whether this is part of an ‘ideology’ or a one-off statement, the more we hear of what
else the father says the clearer it should become, such that if he is speaking
‘ideologically’ we can see how his various ideas fit together to form a prescriptive
framework. In short, both in the case of straightforward practically inspired
communications of ideas, and in the related but subtler case of ‘ideology’, it is to
be hoped that careful reflection by a reader will recognise those various signs which
reveal whether the knowledge being communicated is offered ‘for its own sake’ or
in order to realise some objective in the author’s mind (including, possibly, his
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‘sub-conscious’) – and if the latter, the reader can adopt that cautionary stance
towards ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ appropriate to such writings.
Three questions
Before concluding this section on the practically motivated history ‘book’, three
questions need answering. First, is such ‘history’ useless as history? Clearly, when
written deliberately to serve a practical purpose, the author does not regard ‘the
book’ as useless. On the contrary, he hopes he will achieve his ends. But his ends,
whatever they are, are not the communication of historical knowledge. More to
the point is whether such ‘books’ are useless as history for the reader. On the one
hand it is tempting to say they are, because they do not meet the expectation that
‘history’ should be communicated impartially and truthfully. However, this could
be regarded as harsh, since we have seen that, although biased, the practically
inspired history ‘book’ at least does not need to tell lies. By analogy, the little girl
learned something true, and nothing false, from what her father told her about
razor-blades. Just so, a practically inspired ‘history book’ may contain much original
and fascinating material, all of which is ‘true’, and knowledge of which is useful to
any student of history. The extreme case is where, like our paid gardener, the
professional historian writes a book to make money or to court fame. However, even
here there must remain an unease over such books (and other forms of
communication), since the issue of ‘truth’ will not go away.
I have argued that ‘truth’ is a property of statements rather than of ‘things
themselves’. In this sense, the statement that a razor-blade is a sharp and dangerous
instrument is clearly ‘true’. But when we read history we are not being given a list
of individual statements. Rather, we are given ‘accounts’ of events and
circumstances – and to ask of an account of something (involving numerous
statements of fact) whether it is ‘true’, is to use the word ‘true’ in a slightly different,
albeit closely related sense, compared to when we apply it to single statements. In
the latter case it means, ‘is what is stated to be the case, the case?’. If so, the
statement is true. But when we ask if an account is true, we do not mean, ‘are all
the statements within it true?’, but is the account as a whole ‘true’? By ‘true’ here
we mean, does it give a ‘fair’ account which all can agree with from whatever ‘angle’
they may approach it, or does it omit things which are clearly relevant, include
things which are not, and exaggerate other things? If it does, we are wont to call
the account ‘untrue’ rather in the sense that an arrow, when not straight, is called
‘untrue’. Thus, although we have earlier rightly separated the criteria of ‘truth’ and
‘objectivity’, we see how, and in what sense, they re-combine when it comes to
considering ‘the history book’. Although its numerous statements are factually
true, the overall ‘impression’ it gives is not, just as when the father asks his son what
life is like as a student, the reply may well be ‘untrue’ despite no individual statements
involved being untrue! This even applies to our skilled professional historian who
writes history to serve some practical objective rather than as ‘a labour of love’. How
many corners have been cut? What questions have simply been left aside because
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difficult? How clearly have things been thought through? How scrupulously has
he/she checked their facts? (Some believe that, as in other academic disciplines,
professional pressures have led to there being far too many history ‘books’, many
being ‘pointless’ in the real advancement of historical knowledge. Perhaps the
fairest retort to this complaint is to remind ourselves that people can, within the
same activity, intermix practical motivation with performing it for its own sake,
such that within an individual ‘book’ there may be as much gold as there is dross,
or vice-versa).
But apart from the more straightforward case of practically motivated history
‘books’, what about the subtler case of their being ideologically driven, particularly
where the historian is ‘unconscious’ of it? Does this so distort his ‘book’ as to make
it useless as history? Here, the same judgements apply as those just offered above,
except in ‘ideological’ history the point about ‘truth’ applied to the account as a
whole particularly comes home to roost, for we would expect an ideological bias to
demonstrate itself consistently, and in different ways, throughout the diverse
material contained in an account. In short, it is particularly in history which is
unconsciously ‘ideological’ that we need to be alert to the overall ‘impression’ it
conveys. Not apparent to the historian himself, it may not be apparent to us as his
readers, since in all good faith the historian believes his ‘book’ represents a true and
objective account of something in the past.
The second question is: are practically motivated ‘history books’ reprehensible? Some
who care about history object to them on the grounds that such works betray the
discipline they love. The more obvious such ‘history’ (e.g., as in Holocaust denial
literature), the more some express their anger and contempt at it – albeit
misdirected when grounded in a motivation which is in fact as ‘ideological’ as that
which they are attacking, rather than in concern for ‘genuine’ history. However,
even where grounded in the latter, we have already shown that practically
motivated history (and its close relation, ideological history) are far from necessarily
‘useless’, and to that extent are not outright betrayals of the discipline.
But perhaps more to the point, we should remind ourselves that such ‘history
books’ are simply a species of communicating knowledge in order to achieve an
objective (i.e., with the exception of ‘unconscious’ ideological works), and it is
difficult to see why such activity is, in itself, reprehensible. If the father wishes to
warn his little girl of the danger of playing with razor-blades, what is ‘wrong’ about
that? If the ‘historian’ wishes to write a thoroughly entertaining account of something
in the past in order to profit from a best-seller, what is wrong with that? If the
‘historian’ wishes to influence people’s political or social views by writing about the
past in such a manner as to engage their sympathies for a cause, what is wrong with
that? Insofar as such history may not meet the criteria of objectivity and ‘truth’, it
may be a disservice to ‘history’ – but ‘history’ is not a sentient being which can suffer
from being shown lack of respect, or from exploitation, or some other form of
morally reprehensible treatment. Rather, the question is more sensibly put in terms
of whether, in writing such history, it harms the readers. And here the reply must
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surely be that where such history is a deliberate practice in deceit, because

purporting to be objective and ‘true’, its practitioners are indeed engaging in
reprehensible conduct, but only to the extent that the father knowingly ‘angles’
his description of a razor-blade to his suggestible little girl. But students of history
should not be naive, and thus there is an onus on them to adopt a critical attitude
to what they read, take from it what is valuable, and not moralise about ‘biased’
history. The alternative – of simply rejecting it out-of-hand in a fit of moral pique
– would mean ignoring what can be learnt from works as various as those written
in order to highlight the unequal position of women throughout history, to those
written in order to expose the endemic evils of capitalism, to those written in order
to demonstrate the superiority of the ‘Aryan race’ – all of which cases may be at
the least dubious and, at the most, absurd.
The third question turns the tables, and has been begging for a long while. We have
asked whether the practically motivated (and ‘ideological’) history ‘book’ is useless,
and whether it is reprehensible. However, we now have to ask whether it is
avoidable, because, as mentioned, there are those who insist that objectivity and
truth are impossible ideals, or indeed philosophical chimera, in relation to the
writing of history. Yet this exposition of the issues involved in ‘what is history for?’
began by distinguishing activity engaged in ‘for its own sake’ from that performed
as a means to an end – and our ensuing discussion has been premised on the notion
that this distinction applies as much to ‘doing history’, including the communicating
of history, as to anything else. The clear implication is that the practically
motivated (and ‘ideological’) history ‘book’ is avoidable, because history can be
produced ‘for its own sake’. But this needs to be established and further explored.
History written ‘for its own sake’

History ‘written for its own sake’ is a particular example of a more general category
– namely, that of communicating something for the sake of it. One can
communicate in numerous ways – facial expressions, ideographs, etc. – but in the
case of history we are limited to writing, speaking, and film-making, all of which I
have referred to generically as the history ‘book’, and is what I mean here by
‘written’ history – i.e., its communication in whichever of these forms.
To understand what history ‘written for its own sake’ involves, then, we first
need to examine the more general phenomenon of ‘communication for the sake of
it’ to see the basic principles involved. Following our framework, the latter is simply
an unexceptional example of doing something for the sake of it, where one does it
for the experience of doing it – i.e., one ‘enjoys oneself’ doing it.
This implies that it is possible to (e.g.) say or write something without having
any (extrinsic) practical motivation vis-a vis one’s audience. Now, it is true that
in saying things one wishes to be understood (except in some examples of practical
motivation – e.g., deliberate obfuscation in order to deceive the audience or in order
to conceal one’s ignorance), but it would be misleading to claim that we say things
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‘in order to’ be understood. Rather, ‘being understood’ is the intrinsic rationale of
communication, not some objective for which communication is a means.
We have already discussed communicating things as a means to an end in our
treatment of practically motivated history – as good an example of the principles
of practically motivated communication as any other. When, however, we
communicate something for the sake of communicating it, this is what I have called
a ‘final’ action, undertaken for the experience of doing it – and a little reflection
will show that saying (or writing) things ‘for the sake of it’ is a widespread
phenomenon, from the trivial remark, ‘what a lovely day it is!’, to the abstract
academic thesis on the mathematics of chaos theory, for all it means is that in
saying something one is sharing a thought (or set of ideas) with the audience,
without having any practical objective. For example, one might say ‘what a lovely
day it is!’ in order to break the ice with a stranger, or in order to change the topic of
conversation, or in order to persuade a friend to accompany one on a walk. These
are all examples of practically motivated communication. But alternatively, one
may simply say it for the sake of it, where, as a sharing of the thought, one intends
no more than that – i.e., communicating per se is not undertaken in order to share
thoughts; it is the sharing of thoughts, (i.e., it is the intrinsic rationale of
communication) and can be undertaken simply as such. Indeed, so prevalent is
this phenomenon that one might be puzzled at the ubiquity of literally ‘pointless’
conversation in human intercourse. However, on a positive note it can be seen as
one manifestation of the essentially social nature of human beings (even where the
effort to share thoughts ‘for the sake of it’ requires the apparently anti-social
conditions of solitude demanded by writers).
Now it is difficult not to see that expressing a thought for the sake of doing so is,
by that fact, to believe oneself to be saying something true. Argued in reverse, why
should anyone deliberately say something false simply for the sake of saying it?
Rather, one must have an objective in knowingly lying or misleading, which always
means such utterances are practically inspired. What is said, because false, must be
a means to achieve some (exterior) purpose. Arguing the same point directly, we
can remind ourselves that when someone does something for its own sake, there is
nothing prompting him to do less than justice to it – i.e., perform the action
according to the criteria demanded by it. Applied to saying things (i.e., of a
propositional nature rather than, e.g., issuing a command, or asking a question),
what else could this mean other than intending to say something true? The very
nature of statements is that they convey information, ideas, or observations, and
it would be strange indeed if our constant expectation of them is that they are
intended as untrue, on the grounds that falsity is an intrinsic feature of what it is
to state something. It is in this sense, then, that in equating saying something ‘for
the sake of it’ with ‘doing justice’ to saying things, the intention to say something
true is necessarily implied.
It also follows that, where one says (or writes) something for the sake of it, not
only is one intending to say something true, but that there is something in human
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beings which makes the sharing of ‘truth’ enjoyable in itself. What that ‘something’
is may be a mystery beyond the scope of this exposition, but it reinforces the
suggestion that ‘communication for the sake of it’ is powerful evidence of an innate
sociability in human-beings – i.e., it is an ubiquitous example of our doing things
for others, with no self-serving motive.
Having suggested these general principles underlying any communication ‘for the
sake of it’, let us relate them specifically to ‘the history book’ by first observing how
they affect the general kind of communicating under which ‘the history book’ falls.
As already observed, there are markedly different kinds and degrees of
(propositional) ‘communication’, ranging from the trite remark at the bus-stop to
the lengthy and complex mathematical dissertation, such that although ‘truth’
remains the criterion when things are ‘said’ for their own sake, the implications of
this vary depending on the kind of communication. ‘The history book’ falls under
the category of academic writing in general, and the principal points about such
communications are threefold. First, they issue from more or less careful thinking,
unlike the trite observation at the bus-stop. Second, as products they are carefully
constructed communications rather than spontaneous outbursts or ‘streams of
consciousness’ (the stuff of much that is said ‘for its own sake’). Third, because
they are written, they allow the communicator to revisit and reflect on what he has
produced, to ensure that ‘the book’ is as he wishes it to be. This involves two things.
First, ‘doing justice’ to what is an intrinsic feature of communication (irrespective
of its motivation); namely, to make clear what he means – and second, better to
ensure that ‘the book’ meets his motivation in producing it, i.e., whether intended
as communicating ideas ‘for their own sake’, or as a means to achieving some
external objective thereby, (hence the injunction that ‘nothing is ever well written,
only well re-written’).
When applied to the writing of history, these features mean that when the
historian produces a book ‘for the sake of it’, he is able to reflect on and revise what
he says, better to fulfil the criteria involved. Those criteria, as we have seen, revolve
around the special problems which ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ pose for historical work
in particular – problems which some regard as impossible to surmount. Yet it is
difficult to see why the historian who writes history ‘for its own sake’ is not precisely
engaged in overcoming these problems as he carefully constructs and revises his
work. He can double-check his facts to ensure the numerous statements he makes
are, to the best of his knowledge and diligence, true – and where in doubt, he can
say so, presenting them as provisional, (unlike in practically motivated history
writings, and particularly those consciously inspired by an ideology, where to cast
doubt on ‘facts’ especially important for one’s readers to accept, if one is to achieve
one’s objective, is self-defeating). Part of this may involve his revisiting the
assumptions he made in the process of inference, to check they were not
extravagant or relying on some unconventional ‘theory’ of ‘how the world works’.
In addition, he can constantly ask of what he has written, ‘why did I include
that?’, to remove passages which, despite himself, might have been practically
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motivated, if only as expressions of some of his ‘conceits’. Vice-versa, he can ask

why he excluded certain things, again to check that his process of selection and
omission did not stem from the extrinsic considerations imposed by some practical
objective. Also, and crucially, he can review not only the numerous individual
statements he makes but also ‘the account as a whole’, to ask whether the
‘impression’ it gives is impartially arrived at or has been influenced by some
‘ideological’ position. This is to say that historians are no less capable of thinking
about their thinking, and of thinking about what they have written, than anyone
else – and that, given their subject-matter, they are as aware of what ‘ideological
bias’ is, if not more so.
We have noted that the latter can be perfectly explicit and consciously held –
and here the only question is if the historian wishes his work to support this or that
ideology. If he does, then he is quite entitled to write in that manner – but because
he has that objective in mind, he cannot complain if his work is judged to be partial
and, for the reasons outlined, to fall short of being ‘true’ history. On the other hand,
we have noted that an ideological viewpoint may be ‘unconsciously’ at work in
peoples’ thinking and writing. But here, one of the explicit features of ‘thinking
about one’s thinking’ (which the activity of writing permits so well) is that, in
making one self-aware, it allows one to bring what might have been in ‘the
unconscious’ into consciousness. Values, assumptions, and prejudices which might
‘unconsciously’ have influenced what one writes, can on ‘reflexion’ be recognised
– and, if one has a mind to, one can remove the bias, distortion, or partiality they
have occasioned. Where, then, one is intending to write history ‘for the sake of it’,
one would precisely have a mind to do this, since one intends to say things impar-
tially and to give a ‘true’ account. To suggest, as some do, that this is difficult, is to
overstate the problem for the historian. It is true there are numerous contexts in
which saying things ‘for the sake of it’ can nonetheless fail to produce impartial and
true statements because of the influence of unconscious ‘ideology’, and to that
extent are self-delusory efforts. But in the context of academic work, and perhaps
the writing of history in particular, the kind of communicating is so carefully and
reflexively constructed that, if the historian wishes to avoid practical motivations
and/or ideology, it is difficult to see why he should not be able to. And as for those
who claim that impartiality and truth, rather than being difficult, are impossible –
and no more so than in the case of historians because, in particular, of ‘unconscious’
ideology – one can only puzzle why those so sure of their capacity to uncover
‘ideology’ in others, by implication deny it in themselves, for their view seems to
be that we can all recognise ideological influence in other peoples’ writings, but not
in those we produce ourselves. So curious is this view that one is tempted to suggest
the irony that it must itself stem from some ideological position, such that what it
purports to offer as an objective and true observation on the nature of historical
writings is anything but.
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Narrative history ‘for its own sake’

Having shown it is possible to avoid the practically motivated and/ or ideologically
inspired history ‘book’ by setting out the alternative principles involved in writing
history ‘for the sake of it’, it behoves us to give some indication of how this works
in actual practice. Here, given the previous chapter’s emphasis, it is appropriate to
restrict analysis to narrative history (leaving the reader to construe how those same
principles can also be applied to descriptive and analytic history).
As analysed in the previous chapter, narrative is the form of discourse intrinsic
to saying ‘what happened’ by linking occurrences into an intelligible sequence
governed, not by causality, but via the formula ‘this happened, then that happened’,
such that the ‘subsequent’ occurrence is conventionally understood to ‘follow from’
the ‘prior’ occurrence. In short, it is the form all stories take, although (like some
of them) a narrative need not have a distinct ending. However, where the narrative
explicates the nature of a particular ‘event’ (i.e., a parametered sequence of
happenings as in e.g., a war), it will share that feature of the typical ‘story’.
To see what an historical narrative ‘for its own sake’ involves we do not need to
extend the previous chapter’s analysis of how narrative works and what it achieves.
Rather, the answers are already implicit, and simply involve considering in what
way ‘narrative for its own sake’ differs from other narrative.
The first distinction is that between fictional and factual narrative. The
archetypal fictional narrative is that found in the novel, short story, or (screen)play
– and both common-sense and experience tell us that no one invents a (thereby)
fictional story simply for the sake of it. Rather, one must always have an objective
over and above that of simply making a sequence of happenings intelligible – i.e.,
the novelist exploits the narrative form always in order to achieve something by
recounting a story, rather than inventing the story ‘for the sake of it’. In short, the
fictional story-teller is always practically motivated in our sense of the term. What
his objectives may be – e.g., to excite, to highlight injustice – is a contingent matter,
but objectives there must be if we are to make sense of the activity of inventing
stories. (As for whether the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ contradicts this claim, this
falls outside our remit, being a matter for the philosophy of aesthetics.)
The fictional story-teller, then, conjures his narrative from invented happenings
– but this is not to say he can escape the basic logic of narrative, which at the
minimum must make the sequence of events follow each other intelligibly (even
if, as in the detective novel, only ‘at the end’). He is, then, involved in that process
of selection and omission of events necessitated by the narrative form, whereby he
will on occasions need to invent an occurrence merely to link together other
occurrences he particularly wishes to include in order to fulfil whatever objectives
he has in writing the story. But it is these other occurrences which are his real
concern, and however bizarre they might be, his ingenuity can steer the narrative
towards their inclusion. Indeed, one might say that the ability to make a narrative
flow, such that it is credible, is a fundamental skill of the fictional story-teller. But
more important is the observation that, although he can of course choose to invent
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any occurrences he likes, it is not that they are chosen/invented per se that matters
– it is that they are chosen in order to fulfil his practical motivation. In short, he is
constantly ‘angling’ his narrative to achieve his end – precisely the feature of all
activity undertaken as a means to an end rather than ‘for its own sake’.
Factual narrative, on the other hand, requires that the events recounted are ‘true’
or ‘real’, and this may suggest it is in principle different from fiction. But this is not
necessarily so. It is true that the need to avoid imaginary happenings constrains the
process of selection of ‘facts’, but this does not mean that the narrative cannot still
be ‘angled’ towards a distorted, even false, account which serves some (external)
objective. The historian can do this via the carefully devised (or possibly ‘uncon-
scious’) exploitation of the selection and omission process intrinsic to the form of
narrative. To use a legal analogy, is this woman in the dock so structuring her story
(the individual facts of which are true) in order to incriminate the defendant? More
directly, is this historian so selecting and omitting his facts, in e.g., his account of
the English Civil War, in order to present himself as a radical, or e.g., in order to
discredit a rival historian’s account, or e.g., in order to support the Marxist school
of historical interpretation? In each case the individual facts he selects are true, and
their ordering constructs a narrative which makes sense as such. But here we can
see even more clearly the difference between the ‘truth’ of individual statements,
and the slightly different sense of the ‘truth’ of an account as whole. The vengeful
woman in the dock has an objective beyond simply saying ‘what happened’, just
as does the historian in our examples. Their narratives or ‘stories’ are not told ‘for
their own sake’, but are ‘distorted’ by their practical motivation – and sooner or later
this should become apparent to the reader. This is because, of the numerous things
that could be selected as happening ‘next’ in any narrative, the practically motivated
historian can choose that which contributes towards the ‘message’ he wishes to
convey.
Thus, if all fictional narrative goes beyond the intrinsic rationale of the narrative
form, exploiting it because the narrator must have some practical (hence ‘extrinsic’)
objective in inventing ‘what happened’, so factual narrative (despite being
restricted to ‘true’ events) can likewise be exploited. But it does not have to be. It
can be engaged in ‘for its own sake’, and we see how this can be done by reverting
to our analysis of its intrinsic structure.
What we are positing is the situation where the historian (as narrator) has no
‘message’ to deliver, no practical purpose to achieve, by constructing his account
(or ‘story’). But what, then, determines what he chooses to select and omit as he
puts together his narrative?
Last chapter’s analysis showed that selection and omission of occurrences is a
necessary feature of narrative per se, and is thus as much a feature of narrative
written for its own sake as of narrative written to serve a practical purpose. This is
because, in the real world, any number of things can be said to happen ‘next’, and
it is neither necessary nor even possible to construct a literally exhaustive sequence
of ‘every’ thing that happened ‘next’. Instead, since the function of the narrative
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form is to make occurrences intelligible by sequencing them into ‘this happened

then that’, and (often) to make the sequence as a whole an intelligible phenomenon
(i.e., explicating the nature of an overall ‘event’), its intrinsic rationale is not
exhaustiveness of detail, but the achievement of an economy of intelligibility.
Thus (as we saw) narrative does not progress in the manner of a to b to c to d, etc.,
but omits those intervening occurrences until it reaches one which could not be
(conventionally) understood as ‘following’ from its starting point – e.g., point k. It
therefore inserts the point prior to k, such that the sequence would be ‘a happened,
then j happened, then k happened’. It is true that logic dictates that some other
point between a and k could be chosen instead, but a, j, k seems the most basic and
obvious manner in which narrative ‘for its own sake’ is structured, (point k being
succeeded by the same process of selection and omission).
This model shows two things. First, it shows how to construct a narrative without
any extrinsic practical purpose governing the selection and spacing of content.
And second, it shows that such narratives do not therefore have to include ‘every’
occurrence to avoid being practically ‘distorted’. In short, whereas the practically
motivated narrative will display itself as such by progressing, for example, a, c, o,
x, or whatever it chooses, so long as intelligibility is maintained (selecting things
it need not include, but which specifically steer towards the intended ‘message’, and
omitting things irrelevant to it or even counterproductive), narrative ‘for its own
sake’ offers an ‘objective’ account of ‘what happened’.
‘Relevant’ and ‘significant’ facts

Left at this, however, the model remains somewhat abstract, such that questions
remain as to the actual practice of constructing such ‘impartial’ narratives. Where
does one begin them? Can they go on forever (like the proverbial ‘soaps’)? Despite
the model, are not some events more ‘relevant’ than others, and some more
‘significant’? Such questions reflect the actual experience of ‘doing history’ (for its
own sake), where we know, for example, that the ‘origins’ of something stretch
back to earlier origins, and the ‘consequences’ of something stretch forward into
manifold future aftermaths.
Most of these problems are mitigated by recognising that the historian, like the
reporter, has a topic. He does not just dive into the mêlée of ‘happenings’ and begin
giving an account. Not even our abstract model (a, j, k) could accommodate such
arbitrariness. Rather, his topic configures the particular ‘events’ he is interested in
exploring – for example, a war, a political struggle for reform, the emergence of a
new art-form, a scientific discovery, and so on. Now, in giving an objective account
of such events, some of the individual happenings they incorporate can be taken
for granted and thus omitted. Others, however, are particular to that event and
require mentioning. By analogy, if one were to give an account of a journey, at a
minimum the reader wants to know who made the journey, when, for what reason,
from where, to where, and by what means. Beyond that, if everything went
smoothly according to conventional expectations regarding journeys, there is
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nothing more to be said about the event. In theory the same might be said of a war.
Having established who the contenders were, and what was at issue, if its outcome
was predictable there would be little else to say – ‘It was a typical war, that’s all’.
In reality, however, few events are so ‘paradigmatic’. Particular things occur
within them which, if not surprising, at least require explanation since their
occurrence is not obvious. It is these occurrences which resemble our point k. They
are ‘relevant’ to include in the narrative, because they are relevant to the particular
nature of this or that event, (and history feeds on ‘the particular’, if not indeed on
‘the unique’). For example, in addition to the particular aspects of a journey already
singled out, in the real world things often do not ‘go smoothly’. A flat tyre, a near
accident, an interesting hitch-hiker, a speeding ticket – all these things make this
journey particular.
What this shows, then, is that in giving an account of an event for its own sake,
the historian’s narrative is not only an ‘explication’ of the event, it is also in effect
a ‘description’ of it (akin to describing objects). This is because, when we describe
something, we do not say what is essential to it – that is to define something – but
what is particular about it. For example, in describing this house we will omit that
it has doors, windows, and rooms, and instead focus on what is inessential about it,
which make it this particular house. This constitutes a description undertaken ‘for
the sake of it’. Just so, in narrating an event ‘for the sake of it’, the historian does
not include everything that happened as part of it, nor the obviously essential.
Rather, his narrative focuses on those occurrences which, in not obviously following
‘next’, require to be included and made intelligible. In short, because narrating an
event for its own sake is analogous to describing an object for its own sake, then to
narrate an event in this manner is to nullify the problem of ‘relevance’, because all
that one includes will be ‘relevant’. (The reader can work out how a description
undertaken to serve some practical objective would differ in what it includes and omits
– i.e., have goal-orientated criteria for what is ‘relevant’.)
In addition to the need to include occurrences which are ‘relevant’, the other factor
which can play a part in the process of selection, even when writing history for its
own sake, is the inclusion of occurrences which are ‘significant’. Now it might be
argued that to regard an occurrence, or an entire event, as ‘significant’ is to engage
in a subjective judgement, and thus should play no part in the construction of
(impartial) history for its own sake. This can be true, but it is not necessarily the
case. This is because something which occurs in an account (or ‘story’) is
‘significant’ only in the light of some other event(s), where what occurs in the
former is a ‘relevant’ part of the latter. For example, an historian could give an
account (for its own sake) of a military campaign, incorporating what is relevant to
include in the manner outlined above. Much that happened would therefore be
omitted, amongst which we might suppose the conduct of this or that individual.
However, if our historian also happened to be interested in giving an account of
that individual’s subsequent career, and if a relevant moment in it was e.g.,
promotion because of his earlier conduct in the military campaign, then that
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conduct (otherwise ignored in the account of the campaign) becomes ‘significant’

in the light of those later events the historian also happens to be interested in.
Thus, numerous occurrences in one overall event (some included because
‘relevant’, and others excluded) can be ‘significant’ because relevant to some other
sequence of events. As such, whether an occurrence (or even an entire event) is
‘significant’ is an arbitrary matter, dependent upon what other ‘stories’ interest
one. But it is not a subjective matter. The individual’s earlier conduct either did or
did not make for his promotion, such that the singling out of an occurrence as
‘significant’ in one story because ‘relevant’ to another story, need not imply that
one makes that judgement out of bias or partiality. In short, the notion of an
occurrence being judged as significant need not conflict with (narrative) history
written for its own sake.
Summary
Many more questions relate to the actual practice of constructing historical
narrative ‘for its own sake’ – for instance, can the ‘blockbuster’ history of e.g., the
USA, come under this category? But their exploration would take us into the
narrower concerns of historical methodology. Rather, the rationale of this section
has been to argue that history can be written for its own sake; to explain the
principles involved; and to demonstrate how (at least in the most important
respects) these work out in the actual practice of constructing (narrative) history.
And it has been essential to argue this, rather than merely assert it, to substantiate
the larger point which looms when we ask what ‘history’ is for.
Empirically, we have seen that history can be written for many reasons, but that
the most fundamental distinction is that between history written to serve a purpose
(whatever that might be) and history written for its own sake. Just as examples of
the former abound, so do examples of the latter. The latter, in other words, is not
some misguided ideal conjured up by some philosophers (and most historians) who
suffer the ‘delusion’ that it is possible to write history which meets the criteria of
‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’. This is not to say history written in that frame of mind will
always succeed in those criteria, (just as the enthusiast who gardens for the sake of
it may produce a poor garden). In the real world, lapses of attention, lack of
adequate knowledge, ‘blind spots’ which escape reflexive self-awareness, pressures
of time, and the display of an author’s ‘conceits’ are all factors which may mar work
otherwise done for its own sake. But this does not mean such work is impossible;
rather, whatever defects it may have can soon enough be pointed out by like-
minded historians and others.
But the other dimension to the question of what history ‘is’ written for, is where
we really mean, ‘what should it be written for?’. We have seen it can serve many a
practical purpose (e.g., political persuasion), and have suggested there is no need
to ‘morally’ disapprove of such work. From the same perspective, then, there is no
‘moral’ superiority attached to writing history for the sake of it. Although it might
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be tempting to claim such history is ‘superior’, all we can reasonably mean by this
is that such history is more likely to offer true and impartial accounts. But this only
makes it ‘better’ history if we idealise the activity of writing ‘history’ such that, if
we do not write it in that way, we have failed to live up to some impersonal
paradigm of what it ‘is’. Rather, all that needs to be said is that such history is
different from that written to serve a practical end, and that if one ‘prefers’ one’s
understanding of the past to be derived from accounts whose rationale guards ‘truth’
and ‘impartiality’, one will in that sense regard such history as ‘better’. But to go
further than this, to argue that everyone ought to prefer such history, one would
have to make the case that truth and objectivity ought to be valued above all else
– not an easy case to argue and, more to the point, not one that needs arguing if, as
I have suggested, there is something in us which, in impelling us so frequently to
communicate ‘for the sake of it’, already implies a natural propensity to share
knowledge we take to be straight and true.
Why read history?

So far, we have restricted consideration of ‘what is history for?’ to the work of the
practising historian, both in the manner in which he pursues knowledge of the past
and how he communicates that knowledge. But, as argued in the Introduction, in
exploring what history is for we can validly include amongst those who ‘do history’,
those members of the public and students who read and study what historians write
– for although studying history as it is communicated to them does not make them
into practising historians, their intimate connection as ‘consumers’ of the practice
of history warrants their consideration when exploring what the point of the
discipline of history is. In addition, to the extent that readers of history can be
critical of what they read (e.g., by comparing different accounts of the same events
and reflecting on alternative ‘interpretations’), they can be more than ‘mere’
consumers, such that their expectations of what they read as ‘history’ may be
regarded as playing a role in debating what it is (and/or should be) ‘for’. Why do
(and/or should) people read history?
Here, we do not need to change the general approach already adopted regarding
what history is ‘for’. The broad distinction is between reading history ‘for its own
sake’ and reading it in order to achieve some (extrinsic) objective thereby. And
since the last sections were devoted to the notion of history for its own sake
(including writing it), let us continue that theme by first seeing how that notion
applies to reading history.
Reading history ‘for the sake of it’

Where we read history for the sake of reading it, we do not do so to achieve any
extrinsic objective, but solely to experience the intrinsic rationale of that activity
– i.e., as with any conduct undertaken for its own sake we must assume that, in
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seeking the experience, it is ‘enjoyed’ as such. Now, ‘the history book’ is the kind
of book which imparts information – in this case, about some aspect of the past. As
argued earlier, it would thus be misleading to say one reads such a book in order to
acquire information. Rather, the reading of the book is the receiving of information,
and this experience can be sought for its own sake, rather than one always wanting
to achieve some objective, for which the acquiring of the information is a means (as
we would normally expect when one reads, e.g., a car repair manual).
It is possible, then, to read a book whose rationale is the imparting of knowledge
‘for the sake of’ the information it contains (i.e., without wishing to do anything
with the information). Because it is reasonable to claim that one ‘enjoys’ the
information or knowledge, what is this but to suggest that the satisfying of curiosity
and/or the gaining of understanding is what is involved? For example, one can read
a geography book purely for the interest of the information it contains, rather than,
e.g., in order to prepare for travelling in a strange country. Likewise with a history
book, where one is simply interested to discover ‘what it was like’ (descriptive
history), or to understand the factors involved in how things were (analytic
history), or perhaps above all to discover ‘what happened and why’, (narrative
history). As with this Part’s emphasis, it is this last – narrative history – which is
the more interesting and complex case.
As claimed earlier, a narrative is essentially a story, even if (unlike the archetypal
story) it has no ending. I mention this because our proclivity to enjoy stories is
universal. Throughout history it seems people have been avid consumers of ‘stories’,
and the enjoyment they generate might thus be thought to stand as an exemplar
of receiving information ‘for the sake of it’. However, this is to overlook the
difference between factual (‘historical’) stories and fiction, and thus to neglect
some important distinctions. When we read a fictional story it is difficult to see why
the information the narrative feeds on should interest us in its own right, since it
is, after all, fiction. Facts, however, can be interesting in their own right precisely
because they are facts. In the case of history, ‘what happened’ is interesting (i.e., to
those who enjoy history for its own sake) partly because it actually happened. It
does not have to be particularly strange or dramatic (although it is well known
that truth is often stranger than fiction, because whereas fiction must exploit
conventional understandings of ‘what happened next’, factual events can defy
conventional expectations in most unusual and sometimes shocking ways, beyond
the temerity of any dramatist). On the other hand, as already suggested, fiction is
always designed by the writer to achieve some effect in the reader, through freely
inventing events to recount and merge into a story, also usually with a ‘satisfying’
ending. The desired effects may be emotional states of melancholy, expectation,
titillation, and the like – or perhaps in the loftier kind of fiction a presumed
heightened understanding of human nature through displaying its workings (albeit
via fiction). Plato, in his Republic, is famously controversial for thus voicing his
disapproval of fiction (‘poetry’) as exploitative, exaggerative, and careless of truth.
The historian, on the other hand, cannot invent the events he recounts,
although we have seen that where he, like the novelist, has a practical purpose in
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writing, he can to an extent choose which to mention and can, in part, direct the
course of his narrative. But we have denied such designed selectivity to the historian
who simply relates ‘what happened’ for the sake of it, claiming he can rely on the
inherent logic of the narrative form. In this case, we have to expect that the writer
anticipates readers who will simply find the narrative ‘interesting’ principally
because it actually happened – and vice-versa, this will be the expectation of many
a reader of history. They do not want to be preached at, converted to a political
stance, or be emotionally ‘entertained’. They find it sufficient to be informed of
‘what happened’ – but as argued earlier, this is far from a naive, simplistic absorbing
of information. On the contrary, an historical narrative not only conveys an
explanation of the various happenings within it, but also transmits an understanding
of large ‘events’ or ‘story-objects’ (such as wars, revolutions, cultural movements)
through its explicatory power, and it can do both these to varying degrees of
sophistication, depending on the quality of the writer.
Now it is true that some ‘exterior’ motivations might also accompany reading
(narrative) history for the sake of it, which may be viewed as bonus by-products
even where not deliberately concocted by the writer. Often, as with fiction, where
the events are dramatic the reader is gripped by the ‘story’ so that he becomes
intensely interested to find out what happened next. This is a form of ‘entertain-
ment’ which we should not complain about if historical material happens to
generate it! Another bonus is where a history (usually concerning recent times) is
regarded by the reader to offer an understanding of some aspect of the present, so
that he feels he can now better see where a certain situation has ‘come from’. Again,
this is a by-product not to be dismissed, although if the history is written with this
intention it is clearly an ‘angled’ narrative, constructed in order to serve as a means,
and this should be taken into account when assessing its ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’.
A third ‘bonus’ is where the reader feels he can extract relevant contemporary
lessons from the past – i.e., that history can teach us useful things such as the
the correctness of certain political stategies (e.g., to appease or not to appease), the
efficacy of certain social measures (e.g., regarding the treatment of crime), and
even ‘universal truths’ about human nature. Machiavelli, for example, read classical
history avidly, and although he ‘enjoyed’ it for its own sake he also extracted from
it what he took to be numerous lessons of practical relevance to the exercise of
statecraft. Moreover, he claimed it is for the latter reason that people should read
history – i.e., that this is what history is ‘for’, at least from the reader’s point of
view. However, (himself a writer of some histories), he does not say history should
be written to serve this practical end, and if it were we would have to repeat those
reservations voiced above about its status as objective and ‘true’.
In all these cases where the enjoyment inherent in reading history ‘for its own
sake’ can be enhanced by bonus ‘by-products’, we can offer no complaint but rather
rejoice where they occur. However, in enjoying history for its own sake they should
neither be sought for by the readers (because they might be disappointed), nor
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engineered by the writers (i.e., if they aspire to research into and write about the
past for the sake of it).
There might be little more to say about reading history ‘for the sake of it’ as one
answer to ‘why read history?’, except to remark that for many who teach history at
university level this is the answer – i.e., it is the ideal motivation they look for in
their students, despite a degree of pressure on the educational establishment to
ensure that university courses are in some sense ‘useful’ to society at large. Amidst
such pressure, reading history for its own sake sits uneasily, and the profession
variously responds by claiming such history can be seen as part of ‘civic training’,
or (relatedly) as integral to the ‘liberal arts’ which carry forward the high ideals of
culture and tolerance ensconsed in the old studia humanitatis beloved by figures
such as Erasmus, of whose ‘civilising’ effects he had such high hopes in his troubled
early sixteenth-century Europe. Others, where they can, point to the ‘relevance’
of history to ‘the community’, whilst less vaguely some point up the occupational
skills which history students acquire, such as the ability to understand complex
scenarios, arbitrate between alternative points of view, argue an interpretation,
comprehend what it is to be ‘objective’, and manifest a confident articulacy both
in writing and speaking. The hope is such claims can stave off any further scrutiny
by those who might ask the same we are asking in this chapter – namely, what is
history for? – but do so not out of academic interest but out of concern for the
public purse. In short, there are those who might recognise that history can be read
for its own sake, and even that this may be the ‘best’ motivation – but claim that
if this is the case, why should public finance be involved in an activity undertaken
for the enjoyment of it? The most the honest historian can do, perhaps, is either
to hope the above range of arguments are convincing enough to maintain a still
widespread desire that history be studied, or that any such scrutiny be engulfed in
the wider issue of ‘education for its own sake’ as distinct from ‘education for life’ or
education for vocational or other practical benefits. The alternative, it would seem,
is to keep quiet about reading history for its own sake – or at least not to elevate
that as the ‘best’ motivation – and instead to look at the other answers to ‘why read
history?’, all of which can be subsumed under the notion of reading history in order
to achieve some extrinsic objective, and to which we now turn.
Reading history as a means to an end

To bear in mind that people can often combine doing something for its own sake
with also doing it as a means to an end makes the first example of this more palatable
– namely, where in the context of school and university education students read
history in order to gain academic qualifications, themselves sought for career
purposes. Fortunately they are not forced to study history, and thus we can assume
an element of ‘enjoying’ it accompanies their practical motivation – and perhaps
more so in the case of history because, with the obvious exception of becoming a
history teacher, it appears a subject peculiarly divorced from occupational needs
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compared to others (even in the humanities/arts). However, we have already noted

the ‘skills bonus’ associated with studying history (i.e., for the reader), and they are
rightly recounted by many an admissions tutor to reassure attracted but hesitant
students as they make their subject-choices. If we also recognise that most
professions nowadays put their graduates through their own training programmes,
the apparent irrelevance of history becomes that much less important compared
to the sound springboard its disciplined reading provides for just such training (e.g.,
high standards of literacy, perspicacity, objectivity, articulation, and the capacity
to make sense of complex events and arguments).
A second example of a practical motivation for reading history again relates to
occupation, but in this case more directly to one in particular – namely, the
profession of politics. Ever since the days of the classical Athenian polis, the crucial
role played by rhetoric in political activity has been recognised – i.e., the ability to
acquire authority, to get people to follow you, by the persuasive power of speech
alone. A knowledge and appreciation of history has always been an essential
component of political rhetoric, and in many a persons’ mind surpasses the study
of ‘political science’ or ‘political theory’ as a preparation for engaging in politics,
including government itself. The ability to put a problem into historical
perspective, to explain to sometimes confused and worried fellow-citizens why a
certain situation has emerged, to cite previous such situations and say whether
they were dealt with well or badly – such abilities can raise an individual in the eyes
of many an audience to the point where they will accede to his political proposals
on the grounds that he ‘knows what he’s talking about’. The only problem with this
powerful tool provided by the reading of history is that, for the art of rhetoric, it
matters not whether the ‘history’ appealed to is ‘true’ or not – the point is, can
historical knowledge be used persuasively? Because of this, many would doubtless
balk at someone who only read history in order to use it as a rhetorical resource for
a political career, and regard this as an exploitative manipulation of their discipline.
Fortunately, however, these same individuals who read history for its own sake
have the opportunity, despite themselves, to put their knowledge to practical use
– namely, to expose errors, misinformation, bias, and contorted interpretations
appearing in the history politicians expound as part of their rhetoric (unless, of
course, they support the political aims, in which case they may choose to keep
quiet, entitled as they are to place their own politics above their love of history).
A third example of reading history as a means to an end is worth revisiting to
distinguish it from using history as a rhetorical tool – namely, where one only reads
it in order to search for the supposed lessons it can teach. Some argue this will
always be a flawed exercise because in human affairs every situation is unique –
paradoxically, itself a lesson history does teach, and a salutary one at that! Others,
however, believe that even if history never repeats itself in every detail, its study
shows that situations can be sufficiently similar to warrant drawing lessons from.
Machiavelli used a simple philosophical idea to support this notion – namely, that
human nature never changes, and thus similar contexts will generate the same
human responses with outcomes sufficiently predictable to permit (a degree of)
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controlled manipulation by intelligent legislation and governance. Others look to

history with similar hopes, but without any philosophical underpinning. Rather,
they read it with a view to discovering instructive parallels between past and present
events. Such a motivation can best be seen as the urge to learn by experience,
although because more elaborate a case than where we commonly do so in our
personal affairs, it is that much more ambitious and uncertain an enterprise.
I take the above to be the more usual reasons people have for reading history from
a practical motivation. There are others, such as reading history to confirms one’s
political ideology (in which case the ‘history’ needs to be carefully chosen!), or to
bolster one’s sense of identity (i.e., by concentrating on ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’
histories) – but it would be remiss of us, lastly, not to mention one in particular;
namely that special case where individuals read history in order to discover some
overall pattern and/or meaning in it – i.e., read it in order to construe a speculative
philosophy of history. Here, the audacity of the motivation is apparent in those who
have actually gone on to write such books (of which we have given important
examples in Part I), and is only matched by the scepticism afforded such efforts from
analytic philosophers of history. Variously disapproving, or diffident, as the latter
might be towards some of the reasons we have identified for reading history –
including (as we will see in the last chapter) reading history for its own sake – we
have to assume that they would all condemn this particular motivation, since they
appear unanimous in rejecting speculative philosophy of history altogether.
This may seem an ungenerous, even inconsistent, stance from a group of thinkers
who are, after all, ‘philosophers’ themselves, but it is symptomatic of that ‘turn’
taken by Anglo-American philosophy towards the end of the nineteenth century,
away from philosophy as the grand speculative project of total explanation towards
linguistic and analytic investigation into the meaning of statements. This tended
to make ‘philosophy’ esoteric, and less accessible to the intelligent layman.
Additionally, as the twentieth century progressed and Europe underwent vast
political and military struggles involving ideologies which explicitly appealed to
their own theories of history (e.g., Nazism and Marxism-Leninism), the idea of
speculative philosophy of history per se became increasingly regarded as ‘politically
incorrect’ among the liberal intelligentsia. And if we add to these two factors the
growing secularism, indeed atheism, of the later twentieth century, to which any
notion of an overall meaning or direction to history seemed to imply a mindful
agent behind it, simply beggaring belief, it is reasonable to suppose that few today
read history as a means to finding ‘the meaning of life’.
To the extent this latter supposition is correct, some might find it regrettable,
because although there may be good reasons for suggesting history ‘should’ be
studied for its own sake rather than in order to achieve some (exterior) objective,
nevertheless the urge to read history in order to discover some overall meaning,
although an example of the latter kind of motivation, is surely a noble motivation
in a class of its own, reflective of that same kind of ambition which, before
people had much ‘history’ at all to survey, prompted them instead to look out
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at the stars, not ‘for the sake of it’, but to divine some overall meaning to the scheme
of things.
Conclusion
The theme of this chapter has been to ask ‘what is history for?, and the answers
(whether about researching into and writing history, or about ‘merely’ reading
history) have throughout been organised into two overall categories of human
motivation – doing something ‘for its own sake’, and doing something in order to
achieve some (external) objective. We have explored what the former means and
involves when applied to ‘doing history’, and also the latter, suggesting a variety
of the more usual practical motives individuals may have. Although I have indicated
where qualitative distinctions are wont be made – e.g., the purist’s adherence to
‘doing history’ for its own sake, or perhaps the ‘superiority’ of one practical
motivation as distinct from another – we should probably leave the question of
‘what is the point of studying history?’ open. After all, it is just one more human
activity – and although whether people do it for its own sake or in order to achieve
some (outside) objective do make differences to that activity, it is difficult to see
how anyone has the right to decree what the point of studying history ‘should’ be.
But in any event, if we are to believe some current strands of thought, the question
does not matter, since from two different angles they posit that ‘history’ is finished
anyway! From one angle it is argued that the discipline we know as ‘history’ simply
falls apart when its claims are scrutinised, whereas from another angle altogether
it is argued that, viable as the discipline is, ‘history’ itself (i.e., ‘history’ as the march
of change over the ages) has come to an end. The former argument comes from
analytic philosophy of history, the latter from speculative philosophy of history, and
it is fitting that in devoting our final part to these interesting claims we shall be
visiting both these branches of philosophy of history, so far kept in separate Parts
of this book.
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Part III
THE END OF HISTO RY?

14
The postmodernist challenge
Introduction
It is appropriate that this ‘guide’ should conclude by exploring the cutting edges of
present debates within ‘philosophy of history’, both as speculative and analytic. But
it also means concluding on a note of supreme irony. It so happens that in both
manifestations we are confronted with something like the notion that ‘history’ has
come to an end – i.e., from the speculative approach, ‘history’ as the huge story of
changing eras, and from the analytic approach, ‘history’ as a viable discipline able
to deliver concrete knowledge of the past. I say ‘it so happens’ because the two
viewpoints are not obviously connected. On the contrary, we shall see how it could
be argued that, coming from markedly different perspectives, they are in flat
contradiction to each other. But, despite this, we shall also see how it may be no
coincidence that both announcements of ‘the end of history’ appeared roughly
contemporaneously – i.e., in the last two decades.
The exploration of these two versions involves markedly different exercises, not
only because one comes from analytic, the other from speculative, philosophy of
history, but because the former stems from an entire ‘movement’ in latter day
twentieth-century theory – namely, postmodernism – thereby requiring its
distillation for purposes of exposition, whilst the latter stems from the speculative
thoughts of one individual, Francis Fukuyama.
This Part is thus divided into two chapters, and because the preceding Part
focused on analytic philosophy of history, we will continue that momentum by
beginning with the postmodernist challenge to history as a discipline.
The nature of postmodernist theory
The basic postmodernist perspective

For those unfamiliar with ‘postmodernism’, let us first characterise its principal
thrust. Essentially, those who subscribe to ‘postmodernism’ do not believe that
language faithfully ‘represents’ reality – and that not only is it unlikely that anything
else can ‘represent’ it, but that the very concept of ‘reality’, understood as given,
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objective, is fallacious. This means there can be no (single) truth about the world,
but that our knowledge of ‘reality’ is always a construct, mediated by the multi-
farious contexts we inhabit (race, gender, economy, culture, and so on). ‘Truth’ –
e.g., about justice, beauty, morality, progress, events – is therefore radically relative,
there being no ‘essential’ meaning to things which the subject can, godlike,
apprehend as ‘object’ of his knowledge. Rather, the very notion of ‘the subject’ as
the detached understander of ‘the object’ has no meaning, just as the notion of ‘the
subject’ as an autonomous agent in a world of known and manipulable objects has
no meaning. Instead, both in our knowing and in our doing we are differing
manifestations of an immense complex of ultimately groundless ‘positions’ occupied
and lived out by diverse millions of individuals and groupings. There is no ultimate
or fixed ‘reality’, there are no transcendental truths, there is no authoritative
projection into the future, nor an ‘objective’ history from which to derive it.
Whereas modern philosophy and science, from the seventeenth century onwards,
spawned the Enlightenment belief in the rational instrumentality of mankind
to increasingly understand and master its world so as to fulfil ‘the nature of man’,
the game is up – the myth is exposed. Man’s own reflective insight into his
consciousness (itself an Enlightenment project) has revealed the fallacy of a world
which can be ‘represented’ in objective, universalist terms.
Also, this ‘crisis in representation’ is not merely a theoretical perspective on
‘reality’. Since at least the 1970s ‘reality’ itself has increasingly reflected its inherent
relativity, both in the output of the Western intellectual avant-garde (literature,
film, fine art, architecture) and in the groundless culture of mass consumer society
where values and life-styles are radically eclectic. This is linked to the twin
phenomena of decolonisation and global capitalism, creating a world where
‘differences’ are unamenable to homogenisation by any universalistic ideals, and
where economic production is ‘post-industrial’, increasingly devoted to information
technology, and focused precisely on the commodification of ‘differences’ via its
reproduction and marketing of any and every ‘life-style’ as exemplified in their
various status-signs.
Before proceeding, two points are worth making. First, it should already be apparent
that, from this ‘anti-representationalist’ postmodernist perspective, the discipline
of history is going to be in trouble! And as we shall see, this is indeed an implication
which postmodernists draw, even to the extent that it implodes as a viable
‘discipline’ and becomes just one more kind of ‘discourse’ sharing the same ultimate
groundlessness as any other.
Second, it is proper to forestall the error of representing postmodernist
theorists as forming one united ‘school of thought’ who draw the same political,
philosophical, and moral implications. On the contrary, diverse positions emerge
amongst them. For example, politically some draw left-wing implications, others
liberal, others even conservative – whilst others again draw none and retreat into
either pessimism or irony. This eclecticism regarding the implications of post-
modernism is not, however, to be seen as emblematic of the postmodernist
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THE END OF HISTORY? THE POSTMODERN CHALLENGE
perspective, nicely logical as that might be. Rather, it is a feature of all those
cultural/ intellectual phenomena which, in lacking the cohesiveness and purpose
of a school of thought (e.g., Marxism), are better called ‘movements’1 – and it is in
this light that we can best develop our account of postmodernism to the point
where it impinges on the status of history in particular.
Postmodernism as a ‘movement’
By treating postmodernism as a ‘movement’ I mean it is best understood as
originating as a few key ideas, which were however of such a nature that, when
combined with ‘the times’ they were proposed in, influenced many other areas of
thought. Here, the example of Renaissance humanism2 is an instructive parallel.
That movement began, it seems, in the field of the literary arts, where many were
influenced by the new sensibilities which Petrarch introduced into his poetry and
literary criticism. Just so, it seems, postmodernism began (in the 1950s) ‘primarily
as a response to artistic innovation’,3 first in poetry and fiction. Just as the
Renaissance humanists’ inspiration flowed from rejecting their preceding
intellectual heritage (medieval scholasticism), so were the first ‘postmodernists’
inspired by a rejection of the principles underlying what they took to be their
preceding cultural heritage, ‘modernism’. They identified ‘modernism’ (in the arts)
with the intellectualism of the ‘rationalistic liberal humanism’ characterising
Western culture since the Renaissance (itself harking back to Classical culture) and
which dominated the scene since the 1789 French Revolution. Underlying this
Western ‘modernism’ is the fundamental supposition of the individual as a thinking
‘subject’ which confronts Nature as a world of ‘objects’, a world that can be
understood from the distance of ‘rationality’, and increasingly rearranged to meet
recognised universal humanistic goals (freedom, justice, beauty, social consensus,
economic efficiency). Again, just as we saw the Renaissance humanists did have
predecessors for aspects of their ideas, so can many ‘postmodernist’ ideas be traced
back as developments from philosophies integral to modernism – for example, the
ideas of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘language games’, and the existen-
tialist school of thought. (This merely exemplifies how difficult it is, particularly
in the case of historical ‘movements’, to locate authentic origins.)
To pursue our parallel, just as the literary origins of Renaissance humanism
spread out to influence painting, sculpture, and architecture, so the literary origins
of postmodernism developed into painting, dance, architecture, and other areas of
the arts, as well as deepening its impact upon literary criticism itself. It is just this
‘spreading’ effect which typifies the emergence of ‘a movement’, and one would be
tempted to use the analogy of dropping a stone into a pond and witnessing the
ripples spreading out to affect much else further out in the water, were it not that
ripples weaken as they get further from their source, whereas historical ‘movements’
gain in momentum, incorporating increasingly distant areas. The latter was the
case with Renaissance humanism, which spread its influence beyond the arts to
philosophy, political thought, religion, social attitudes, and economic activity. In
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short, the influence of Renaissance humanism, as a cultural/intellectual movement,

can be construed as an integral factor in forming those wider features which
characterise the period of the Renaissance itself, although many would say this is
to claim too much instrumentality to what was, after all, ‘only’ a cultural move-
ment. Be this as it may (and the truth about the dialectic between Renaissance
culture and Renaissance society probably lies in the middle), a similar outspreading
of postmodernist influence occurred, such that by the 1980s it impacted upon
(some) contemporary philosophy, political theory, and sociology. Again, the
parallel between Renaissance humanism and postmodernism as ‘movements’
prevails (albeit necessarily provisionally, since the latter has only begun so
recently), because ‘postmodernism’ has extended into so many facets of
contemporary society that it becomes difficult to maintain a separation between it
as ‘influencer’ and the (allegedly) ‘postmodern’ society we inhabit.
Another (related) parallel between our ‘movements’ is that although Renaissance
humanism originated amongst high intellectuals, its general ethos became
fashionable, both in the literal sense of affecting modes of dress and styles of
consumer consumption, and in being regarded as valuable for practical purposes
of employment and ‘getting on’ in the world as an up-to-date person. A similar
phenomenon has accompanied postmodernism. It began amongst the avant-garde
literary circles, but spread not only to other arts and disciplines but also into popular
culture, including dress and music, patterns of consumption, life-styles, and
employment (the latter becoming increasingly ‘post-industrial’, eclectically
and happily short-term contractual, and broadly focused around information
technology). However, disagreement exists amongst postmodernists as to whether
‘the masses’ display genuine ‘postmodern’ sensibilities, or whether this is limited
to the new ‘bourgeoisie’ of Western societies, the former merely being mute captives
of consumer culture.
But such a disagreement is only one amongst many in the postmodernist
movement, and this is yet another parallel with Renaissance humanism, for the
latter encompassed a variety of often conflicting views on e.g., philosophy and
politics. The same characterises postmodern theorists, such that no singular
philosophy, political message, nor social prescription can be identified with them.
In short, if Renaissance humanists were agreed on the attraction of the indivi-
dualistic, secular culture of classical Antiquity, but developed diverse views from
that starting point, so postmodernists agree on their ‘anti-representationalist’
alternative suppositions to the liberal-universalist grounding of ‘modernism’, yet
develop divergent political and social views therefrom.
The final parallel is that, with any ‘movement’, numerous people remain
unaffected by it for generations. It neither affects their thinking nor their life-styles,
and this can be because they are simply ignorant of it, or because they reject it
as simply ‘wrong-headed’, or because, given their circumstances (location,
occupation), it simply does not impinge on them. This was the case with
Renaissance humanism, where millions in early-modern Europe continued their
rural, medieval ways of life and thinking for at least two centuries, and where even
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the intellectual elites by no means unanimously adopted its ethos in, for example,
education and secular values. The same applies to postmodernism. Seen either as
a new intellectual outlook, or as referring to the actual outlines of a new kind of
society – a new period in history – it passes numerous people by. But it has not
passed the field of historical criticism by, occupying a niche whose potentially
destructive influence may yet turn to good, or prove to be a merely passing threat.
Some key postmodernist ideas
Derrida
There is an abundance of literature manifesting and exploring the diverse
contributions of postmodernists. Our task now, preparatory to addressing their
specific implications for history, is to extract from that abundance some of its key
underlying ideas. (In addition, I will indicate some of the differing political
perspectives advanced by postmodernist theorists, since these also offer intimations
relevant to speculative philosophy of history.)
From the 1960s onwards the Algerian-French thinker, Jacques Derrida, has been
one those ‘deconstructionists’ concerned to show that language is not neutral, but
is inextricably bound up with the culture in which it is used. In itself, this is hardly
a novel proposition. But Derrida and others take their analyses far beyond the point
where anyone can recognise language as ‘value-laden’ or ‘ideological’. Rather,
Derrida can be understood as claiming that insofar as language is expressive of
consciousness, and consciousness is that of specific human beings’ experience
within a definite spatial/temporal context, then language is not denotive of ‘reality’
as some ‘objective’ phenomenon. And yet the very function of language, on the
surface, is to translate our experience of ‘reality’ into consciousness – i.e., to make
it known. But language is itself part of that reality, and thus one is caught in an
infinite regression where the medium via which we are supposed to understand
reality needs itself to be understood – and how is this to be done other than through
the same medium, language? Thus, the apparent project of consciousness – to know
reality – is self-contradictory. The apparent simplicity of language, as the fixed
signifier of a signified reality, is shown to be an illusion. When it is ‘deconstructed’
we find it feeds on suppositions derived from Western logic, and expressed in
the structure of grammar, which have no ultimate or ‘true’ grounding (e.g., the
metaphysical distinction between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, the notion that a thing
either is or is not).
Such ‘deconstructionism’ has been seen either as a continuation of modern
philosophy, or as part of postmodernism. Whichever, it has contributed significantly
to that basic attack upon what postmodernists take to be the grand illusion
underlying the Western metaphysical framework of thought – namely, that reality
can be faithfully ‘represented’ through language (and other media of ‘signification’
such as photography, fine art, and drama).
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Foucault
Another seminal influence on postmodernism is the French thinker, Foucault
(1926–1984). Although proposing similar ideas to Derrida’s about language,
Foucault’s focus was initially more on the historical contextuality of thought. He
tried to show that the manner in which we order the world in our consciousness,
including our own identities, emerges from that ‘being in the world’ rather than
from any prior logic which our experience has to be fitted into. Language, however,
can give the impression via its meanings and rules that just such a pre-set structur-
ing does characterise experience, lending it some fixed, metaphysical grounding,
and thus fostering the illusion that there is some essential meaning to things,
including the identities we attach to ourselves as ‘subjects’ and ‘agents’. Yet for
Foucault it would seem that all we can talk about are the different modes of
practices from and within which the meanings and rules of language emerge, such
that at its most radical he has been understood as saying that ‘all we have are
material effects and material acts; there is no essential meaning to things – no
essential subject behind action’. Further, and of special interest to us, it follows
that ‘there is no essential order to history’,4 since (whether we realise it or not) not
only is history always written from the point of view of the present, both in the
mundane sense that historians choose topics of interest to them now (often
involving their rewriting history because applying their contemporary meanings to
things), but also in the more radical sense that the discipline of history can lapse
into the illusion that some causal efficacy and continuity must always underlie the
past, thus giving it an order. But, as above, this is merely a feature (usually) of
historical discourse, which (like any discourse) has no prior grounding or ultimate
veracity behind it.
Much of the above arose from Foucault’s (1961) study of the historicity of the
concepts of ‘reason’ and ‘madness’, and of the changing institutions and practices
adopted respecting the latter. Later (in the 1970s) Foucault developed this to argue
that the ‘knowledge’ which is expressed in various discourses is a form of power.
Institutionalised power (e.g., the treatment of crime and punishment) is not the
application of some a-historical rationality, but is co-extensive with the manner
in which it construes that which it deals with. The ‘knowledge’ contained in a
mode of discourse and its referents has an authoritative instrumentality, and thus
the workings of power can be understood through studying the social practices
which have given rise to particular forms of discourse. Thus in itself ‘power’ has no
grounded, independent source, and Foucault claimed that nowadays in particular
it is located in numerous parts of society, not only in official institutions and large
organisations. Wherever a recognisable mode of living develops its own linguistic
discourse, this becomes a form of ‘knowledge’ which empowers those groups who
practise that mode. For this reason, Foucault can approve of the positive effects such
empowerment can have for groups otherwise excluded from consideration in the
social field. The idea that ‘knowledge’ is never objective, but an intrinsic part of
particular social practices and relations, and the idea that ‘knowledge’ is ‘power’,
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means that ‘power’ is never objectively grounded or defensible in universalistic

terms, and is potentially dispersable throughout society – and these notions became
an important feature of postmodernist political and social thought, as well as having
obvious implications (if true) for the subject of history.
Lyotard
If these ideas of Foucault and Derrida might be seen as avant-garde examples of
modern philosophy, their further extension underlies the theoretical writings
of the postmodernist movement, one of whose leading figures is the Frenchman
Jean-François Lyotard (born in 1924), influential amongst USA intellectuals from
the 1980s onwards. Emerging from a Marxist background in the 1960s, Lyotard
came to reject Marxism because he saw it as just another version of the attempt to
impose a universalistic set of ideas and values upon the world. Lyotard called such
attempts ‘metanarratives’, and the essence of his ‘postmodernism’ revolves around
exposing and challenging them. By a ‘metanarrative’ he is referring to the
suppositions he sees as interwoven in entire ways of thinking. The latter are
articulated via their own kinds of discourse, and manifested in corresponding
practices and institutions. For example, Marxism proposes that societies are
fundamentally orientated around the productive process, are divided into different
classes, are therefore unjust, and that progress demands the restructuring of the
economic base in order not only to redress injustice but also to achieve universal
rationality and fulfilment for people. This set of ideas, replete with its key words,
assumptions about the nature of ‘society’, and values, served to legitimate a
particular outlook which pervaded the approach to life shared by millions. Another
‘metanarrative’ is the liberal-rational-humanist perspective endemic to modern
Western culture, whereby it is assumed that the basis for the progress of societies
is the accumulation of ‘scientific’ knowledge, not only for the sake of ‘enlighten-
ment’ regarding ‘truth’ but also for its application to efficient economic production,
‘just’ government and administration, and harmonious social engineering.5
These are examples – religions are others – of great overriding ‘stories’ or (for
Lyotard) ‘narratives’ which are so embedded in a culture’s consciousness (via its
institutions and its language – i.e., its ‘discourse of representations’) that they
insidiously justify norms and practices to the point where they are regarded as
universally ‘true’ because ‘natural’ and ‘obvious’. However, part of the point of
calling them ‘metanarratives’ is that they are ‘stories’ which have no external
grounding in fact. Moreover, ‘narratives’ are always constructed and handed down
through the telling. Just so, ‘metanarratives’ underlie the supposed coherence of a
society – although they are not told explicitly, but are implicit in the very mode(s)
of articulation employed by the society. Lyotard draws from this the notion that
‘knowledge’ is indistinguishable from the form it takes, and is, if not the
determinant of a society, extremely influential on its characteristics. Yet it does not
objectively ‘represent’ reality. Such a ‘knowledge’ or ‘representation’ is impossible,
since it can only be legitimised by some other alleged ‘knowledge’ or form of
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discourse, equally groundless. Neither is ‘science’ exempt, since it can only validate
the ‘truth’ of the knowledge it produces either by reference to some grand
metanarrative outside its own terms of reference, or by accepting that the ‘truths’
it uncovers are only expressions within the ‘language game’ which constitutes the
‘rules’ of scientific discourse.
Indeed, Lyotard uses the example of science to typify what he means by the
postmodern condition in general. If there is still a ‘modern’ science confident of the
objectivity and universality of the propositions it produces concerning the world,
there is also now a postmodern science which feeds on uncovering the chaotic,
unpredictable, and undecidable in the world, and which rejects the modern notion
of ‘science’ as instrumental knowledge for ordering the world. This state of affairs is
mirrored throughout postmodern society at large, however, for now we are
confronted by a multiplicity of different contexts and identities, each sustained
through their own terms of reference or ‘language games’, and whose legitimation
cannot be subsumed under some (old) ‘metanarrative’. Now we have to recognise
that differences (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, work styles, family structures,
ethnic practices and values) ‘legitimate’ themselves through the ‘regimes of
discourse’ in which they are respectively expressed. The ‘knowledges’ which such
diverse contexts represent cannot and should not be reconciled under some
overarching, universal notion of the ‘proper’ norms for living. Rather, they are
expressive of the plurality of ways of living, none of which can be privileged as
‘better’ or more ‘right’ than others. Dissensus, rather than consensus, characterises
the postmodern world, and this is something Lyotard (followed by many ‘mere’
liberals) applauds. It is true that this generates conflicting ideas, and sometimes the
gulf between them is such that no common ground can be found (e.g., on what is
just, beautiful, worthwhile). Lyotard refers to this as the emergence of a ‘differend’,
and insists that its unknowability must be respected rather than some consensus
being forced upon the parties, or one or other party being silenced. Indeed,
exploration of a ‘differend’ may generate yet new insights into as yet unknowable
modes of experiencing the world – in particular, perhaps, opening up the more
‘sublime’ aspects of life which have been repressed by the universalising,
instrumentality-orientated ‘knowledge’ of modernity.
However, this latter possibility assumes our ability to choose for ourselves (albeit
in a radically existentialist manner) which ‘language games’ to immerse ourselves
in. Latterly, Lyotard appears to move from the potentially emancipatory
implication of a pluralistic, relativistic world to a more sinister one where we are
not self-determining subjects, but simply manifestations of (different) praxes
exemplified in what he now called the ‘regimes of discourses’ which sustain them.
As with Foucault, the subject (understood as a thinking and acting agent
confronting and managing an exterior, objectively knowable world) ceases to have
any real meaning. Rather, the ‘subject-object’ dichotomy is itelf but part of the
many metanarratives characteristic of (especially Western) experience, expressive
of the multiplicity of identities and praxes into and out of which we toss, as corks
in a vast ocean.
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Baudrillard
If Lyotard’s thought centres on the impossibility of ‘representing’ reality, so does
that of the French thinker, Jean Baudrillard, born in 1929 – but from a different
perspective. Like a latterday Rousseau, Baudrillard is a man radically at odds with
his times. Rightly, he sees himself living in a world increasingly dominated by an
economy geared towards consumerism – but his analysis of this fact has generated
considerable controversy. For Baudrillard we have reached a new stage in history
– (in fact, a kind of ‘end of history’ in terms of its ability to generate any future real
meaning) – because societies are no longer based on the production of objects to
satisfy ‘objective’ economic needs and desires (if they ever were). Rather, what the
postmodern capitalist system produces are objects as ‘signs’ of particular life-styles.
Here, advertising, information technology, marketing, the media, and computer-
simulation play a crucial role in creating a world where what we consume is related
to status and (alleged) identity. We do not so much buy a suit, a drink, or a car
for the ‘real’ needs these ‘real’ objects satisfy, as buy into this or that life-style and
the values which these objects signify. Because these ‘signs’ are ‘simulations’ of
some allegedly ‘real’ object, they can not only be ceaselessly reproduced by modern
technology, but their variety is also virtually infinite. Postmodern capitalism is
thus devoted to the eclectic reproduction of ‘sign-objects’ representing whatever
life-style, values, or identities will sell – the latter being in the control of the media
rather than determined by any objectively grounded utilitarian needs and rational
aspirations. The world in which we increasingly live out our social lives is a complex
of simulated contexts which have no real meaning in terms of being our experience
of ‘being in the world’, for the ‘real’ world is superseded by a world of ‘simulations’
which we inhabit and subscribe to as its consumers.
But this is not only the changed character of society in terms of its productive
system and the logic of work, consumption, and social life which attends this. It is
also the changed character of society in terms of what Marxists call its
‘superstructure’, particularly the state, politics, and their ideological underpinnings.
For Baudrillard these spheres are equally ‘simulations’ which have lost any reference
to grounded reality. The combined ability of communication technology and the
media to reproduce and manipulate ‘simulations’ and flood the masses with
‘information’ means that ‘power’ can sustain itself through incessant self-
referencing devoid of any objective grounding. For example, much media coverage
of ‘the news’ functions through polling, just as elections are themselves giant polls.
But these exercises establish no real information because devised through the
‘question-and-answer’ form, which in addition to depending on what questions
are asked, is an empty tautology because a self-answering system of ‘information’ –
a product of its own ‘rules’ of ordering and evaluating facts, ideas, and responses.
‘The public’ is not real; ‘public affairs’ are not real. Dialogue, criticism, opposition,
are not real. They may be concocted, or even recognised for what they are, but only
if they can be reincorporated into the self-sustaining logic of the simulation of
‘reality’ generated in the media.
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The upshot of this is that, for Baudrillard, we no longer live in a real world where
we produce to meet our needs and fulfil our desires, guided by values rationally
generated by our confrontation with the restraints and possibilities the objective
world of nature provides, and struggling to organise better social structures through
the management of real political processes. Rather, in most respects we live in
‘hyperreality’, a world of groundless, endlessly reproducible ‘significations’, which
reproduce an ‘unreal’ world. For Baudrillard, the USA is archetypal. In actuality,
the USA is not ‘real’ but ‘hyperreal’, and the function of Disneyland (as an explicitly
simulated world of fantasy) is to make Americans believe that their world is ‘real’,
because they can contrast it with Disneyland. Yet, for Baudrillard, Disneyland
is the ‘reality’ of the USA, because it reveals the self-referencing simulation
which the USA has actually become; i.e., the USA as simulacrum generates the
simulacrum, Disneyland, precisely to sustain its groundless identity. At a more
sinister level Baudrillard suggests that the self-referencing logic of the hyperreal
world leads to collusion between different simulations within it. If, at one level, the
USA needs Disneyland, at another level all societies in the postmodern, hyperreral
world need to self-reference themselves as, and through, ‘simulations’, whereby
(for example) an act of cruelty in a hostile society can be welcomed in its opposing
society because it is used to confirm the latter’s values, just as the retaliation it
provokes against the hostile society (bombing, economic sanctions) can be
welcomed by the latter in turn, because fostering patriotic support from its own
citizens. This does not mean that such events as massacres and retaliatory bombings
are not ‘real’ enough for those involved – but it does mean that the ‘reality’ of
events referred to as ‘wars’, or, indeed, ‘peace-processes’, is brought into question.
For Baudrillard there is a sense in which many of these ‘events’ are ‘unreal’ – not
so much because they are constructs of ‘spin’, but in the sense that they are
manifestations of a ‘hyperreality’ which functions through the logic of simulacra
rather than what we take to be the logic of the real world. The (ostensible), ‘war
against terrorism’ since the events of 11 September, 2001 in New York and
Washington may offer a rich example for those who regard Baudrillard’s perspective
as profound. Others, however, have argued that his analysis is trite because he is
in fact merely dressing up the well-recognised machinations of ‘realpolitik’, where
the participants deliberately practise collusion and media-spin. Baudrillard’s point,
however, (rightly or wrongly) is that the participants are not engaged in ‘realpolitik’
but are simply unwitting agents of the postmodern world – i.e., are prisoners of
hyperreality.
Finally, as for how it might be possible to escape this vacuous world of simulations
and return to one ordered according to some grasp of ‘the real’, Baudrillard suggests
a catastrophic strategy whereby the consumerist masses take the system to its logical
extremes in an orgy of eclectic ‘buying into’ any and everything that’s going, such
that the hyperreal may implode under the weight of its own meaninglessness –
akin to going along with a plan one knows to be absurd, in order for it to reveal
itself as such in practice.
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Jameson
Partly influenced by Baudrillard, the US theorist Fredric Jameson is also a well-
known figure in the postmodernist movement, although as much a critical
exponent of postmodernism as a practitioner of its perspectives. Once again, his
thinking emanates from the claim that we live in a ‘postmodern’ world whose
principal feature is the loss of ‘representation’ in its culture. Although his writings
include analyses of art, architecture, philosophy, and politics, we can more easily
grasp Jameson’s approach by his analysis of consumer society and its TV and film
culture. Like many, Jameson claims that at some (disputed) time after the Second
World War, Western capitalism entered a new stage where it became multi-
national, post-industrial, and consumerist, this having profound effects upon social
life and culture. Coupled with the new electronic technology, TV and the media
generally have become the dominant form in which knowledge, information, or
‘culture’ in general have been disseminated to the consumerist populace. But the
electronic image (e.g., TV) is not just the form of communication – as in McLuhan’s
famous dictum that ‘the medium is the message’, it profoundly influences the
content. For Jameson, electronically reproduced images, adverts, and texts
ceaselessly bombard the populace, but are devoid of any depth of content. Rather,
under the relentless pressure of consumerist capitalism, TV programmes must be
produced 24 hours around-the-clock, the press (both popular and high-brow) has
to churn out something every day, and advertising needs to find novel, attention-
catching images and slogans to replace their short shelf-life. The effect on peoples’
consciousness, Jameson suggests, is that we lose our bearings amidst this mêlée of
‘representations’ which in fact ‘represent’ nothing but themselves – i.e., the
technology of electronic reproduction. The culture it produces does not centre on
representing reality – rather, it centres on the uninterrupted flow of simulated
images, whose effect is to distort even our sense of time and place, since both these
otherwise fundamental bases to our lives are constantly simulated by the media
bombarding us with eclectic, quasi-‘historical’ references, and architecture,
products, and life-styles which bear no intrinsic relation to the place where they
happen to appear. The danger, for Jameson, is that in this post-industrial, global
capitalist world – as ‘unreal’ in a sense as Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreality’ – we are unable
to distance ourselves from the groundless ‘reality’ spawned by its culture, and our
sense of identity is swallowed up, such that we lose the capacity to ‘represent’ the
world to ourselves as independent, responding, challenging subjects.
Here again, then, we encounter the notion that ‘the subject’ is fast disappearing,
and thus with it the possibility of ‘understanding’ the world around us – for that
world offers us no depth of grounding in reality from which to perceive and
challenge it. And, for Jameson, it seems it will not be challenged in its overall
fundamentals until (or unless) it generates some class akin to the disaffected
proletariat of classical industrial capitalism, whose very position and consciousness
confronts the totality of the system from the viewpoint of a genuine alienation.
Meanwhile, only temporary, local social struggles take place in the sphere of
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micro-politics (e.g., feminism, sexual orientation, Green issues) – relatively easily

absorbed by today’s economy and culture.
Postmodernism and the discipline of history
The issues
Hopefully the above selection of postmodern critiques has sufficiently conveyed
something of their force and range. Although much of this may have struck some
readers as bizarre, rather than offer critical remarks, what is important for us now is
to extract the principal points which impinge on analytic philosophy of history (i.e.,
those issues discussed in the previous two chapters) – after which we will examine
two examples of such postmodern thinking on the discipline of history.
The principal general points relevant to the discipline of history are clear
enough. They derive from postmodernists’ central notion of what Bertens has called
‘the end of’, or at least the ‘crisis of’ representation,6 particularly in the humanities.
And narrowed to history, the same applies. As Munslow puts it: overriding the
various methodological problems involved in uncovering and interpreting
evidence, ‘the issue is the nature of representation, not the empirical research
process as such’. This is because ‘the past is not discovered or found. It is created
and represented by the historian as a text’,7 and for Munslow and others this means
that the overall anti-representational thrust of postmodernist theory comes home
to roost emphatically in the historian’s terrain. If we have lost our ability to
‘represent’ reality – or more to the point, that ability never existed, but has only now
been fully exposed as an illusion – then inasmuch as the discipline of history is
traditionally understood as the endeavour to represent past reality for what it
actually was and what actually happened, its day is over. For those, then, who
subscribe to this traditional view, it is the end of history, or at least, of their history
– for if we accept the postmodernist perspective, a number of issues conspire to
consign it to the dustbin of history.
First, if we cannot objectively ‘represent’ (know, understand) ‘reality’ which is
present to us, presumably those same epistemological barriers apply to ‘reality’
which is past (and may even be compounded by its pastness). In short, how can we
objectively (faithfully, truthfully) represent the past? Again, if the traditional
dichotomy between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ (whereby the subject, as a kind of trans-
cendental intellect, is distanced from the thus knowable object) is unsustainable,
then how can the historian assume the role of detached subject confronting the past
as ‘object’? Rather, it raises the issue of what ‘language game’ or ‘genre of discourse’
(invariably subjective and relativistic) characterises history – and, to the extent
that it is central to history, narrative in particular. Is the form of narrative no more
than an imposition upon an essentially unstructurable past, constructing/inventing
intelligibility where it has never in fact existed? Relatedly, is the discipline
of history, however practised at different times, always simply some kind of
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‘simulation’ which, far from being disengaged from the present, is inevitably part
of the multifarious contexts of meanings which constitute present ‘reality’, none of
which can claim privilege over others? In other words, is historical knowledge not
real knowledge of the past, but simply one of the (necessarily ungrounded)
experiences in present ‘hyperreality’? If this is so (as the postmodernists confirm),
then not only does ‘history’ lose the respect and authority it had, it loses its
associated socio-political role of anchoring peoples’ sense of identity in terms of
where they have come from, what their achievements have been, and what values
are worth holding on to. Whether this is what history is/should be for has been
discussed in the previous chapter, but to the extent this role evaporates altogether
under the postmodernist onslaught, it raises the question of what the socio-political
function of ‘history’ might be instead? But the answer to this depends not only on
what postmodernists think ‘history’ is, but whether they think anything at least
resembling it is worthwhile pursuing, and what that might be. In short, (and
brought full-circle), does postmodernism imply not only the end of history as
traditionally conceived, but the end of history in any meaningful sense? Or do the
two come to the same thing?
Postmodern history: two contemporary examples

We have just asked whether the postmodernist perspective means the end of history
per se. Views vary. Some ‘traditional’ historians say it does indeed imply this, and
is deeply and deplorably erroneous. Other traditionalists take the view that the
discipline always has changed over time, and accept that their present notion of
history will, quite properly, also change in the future. In other words, they leave
room for some other kind of defensible ‘history’ to emerge, such that the demise of
history as presently grounded does not mean the end of history per se. However, they
may take the view that the postmodernist assumptions (revolving around ‘anti-
representationalism’) are of such a radical nature that they cannot conceive of any
kind of history informed by that perspective. As for postmodernists themselves,
doubtless some think history is dead. But not all. Just as literature and architecture,
for example, did not cease because of postmodern critiques, but instead became
(some of it) ‘postmodern’, so the same possibility exists for history according to
some. To see what they say it is instructive to take two examples, the first more
measured in tone than the second.
Munslow – the problem with ‘mainstream’ history

One of the most active and knowledgeable exponents of the postmodernist
perspective on the discipline of history is the contemporary British historical
theorist, Alun Munslow. In his book, Deconstructing History,8 Munslow gives a
thorough survey of what he calls ‘deconstructionism’ in contemporary history
(which equates with ‘postmodernism’ as applied to history), and the extensive
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variety of references to recent and contemporary writers he cites should be enough

to convince readers of the vitality of the phenomenon, amongst which it is clear
he includes himself. Indeed, he begins by insisting that:
in our contemporary or postmodern world, history conceived of as an

empirical research method based upon the belief in some reasonably
accurate correspondence between the past, its interpretation and its
narrative representation, is no longer a tenable conception of the task of
the historian. Instead of beginning with the past we should start with its
representation, because it is only by doing this that we can challenge the
belief that there is a discoverable and accurately representable truthfulness
in the reality of the past.9
Munslow organises his reasons for this under four general arguments, of which the
most important is the familiar postmodernist rejection of ‘empiricism’ as the way
of acquiring ‘true’ and/or ‘objective’ knowledge of the world (past or present). For
Munslow, the traditional or ‘mainstream’ (i.e., non postmodernist) historian ‘is an
empiricist who believes in a knowable historical reality independent of the mind
of the historian – subject and object are separated just as mind and knowledge are
presumed to be’.10 This belief, however, is mistaken, since it ignores the fact that
all knowledge is mediated, not only through the various ideological assumptions
of the knower whose ideas cannot but stem from his present culture, but also by
the very terminology and linguistic forms in which it is expressed.
In the case of history in particular, the former sort of mediation arises where
historians use (different) models or explanatory frameworks to organise their ‘facts’
into historical accounts (e.g., a Marxist approach, or the use of some ‘covering
law’). Whether they know it or not, they are thereby imposing some ‘theory’ of
history on to the facts – and although some ‘theories’ may be better than others,
they are all ultimately groundless. This ‘impositionalism’ goes deeper, however,
since the establishment of ‘the facts’ themselves is equally mediated via the process
of selecting and construing ‘sources’ as ‘evidence’, followed by the process of
‘inference’ (from that ‘evidence’) of what it means, what it tells us, and how
significant it is. In short, ‘“facts” are never innocent because only when used by the
historian is factual evidence invested with meaning as it is . . . placed within a
context’, and it is in just this process of ‘contextualisng’ ‘where the historian’s own
views and cultural situation usually emerge’, making it ‘impossible to divorce the
historian from the constitution of meaning through the creation of a context, even
though this is seemingly and innocently derived from the facts’.11
Indeed, so much is this the case for Munslow that he expresses with approval
Foucault’s notion that ‘evidence, rather than being the point of departure, is
history’s point of arrival. Metaphor is the point of departure’.12
This mention of ‘metaphor’ brings us to that deeper form whereby all historical
knowledge is mediated – namely, the very terminology and linguistic forms in
which it is expressed. In general this refers to those who accept something like
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Derrida’s overall position on language – namely, that language is not denotive of

‘reality’ as some ‘objective’ phenomenon but is suffused, both in its vocabulary and
its structure, with the intermixedness of the language user and his/her experience
of the world – i.e., it can (if ‘deconstructed’) only ever signify the cultural
contextuality of the knower, rather than ‘representing’ the known ‘real’ world.
Munslow accepts this, but is particularly interested in exploring its implications for
narrative. This is because he believes that ‘history’s primary cognitive device . . .
resides in its power of narration’.13 What this means is that the historian has to
‘emplot’ the past with a story or narrative structure, and Munslow recognises that
this is to employ ‘a highly complex form of explanation of historical change’.
However, precisely because narrative is an emplotment of the past, ‘it is not history
as it actually happened’.14 Rather, narrative as a literary form must, it seems for
Munslow, always be a figurative expression of the past rather than a direct
representation of it, and he therefore draws attention to the ideas of the historical
theorist Hayden White (as they appeared through the 1970s and 1980s). For White
also, ‘to understand what the past was about we must impose a narrative upon it’,
and this implies that therefore ‘our knowledge of the past is through a poetic act.
This is the element of fiction in all historical accounts’.15 This notion prompted
White to expore the different styles or modes which characterise all narratives
(‘fact’ or fiction), and resulted in his formal and complex model which, at its
simplest, claims that any narrative must be ‘emplotted’ as either romantic, tragic,
comic, or satiric, and that each of these styles involves different kinds of
interpretation and nuances of historical explanation. Although White did not
intend his model to be rigidly deterministic, it is sufficiently detailed and suggestive
for Munslow to recommend that scholars should take it seriously when they read
what other historians have written, and themselves bear it in mind ‘self-reflexively’
when they write their own historical accounts.16
In addition, as the medium for expressing historical knowledge, this (allegedly)
figurative nature of narrative, with its corresponding fictional elements, cuts even
deeper for Munslow, for it prompts him to ask whether ‘in reality’ the past is a
narrative (or collection of narratives) at all. In other words, if (because of narrative’s
literary character) we are always introducing some kind of metaphorical
interpretation of the past when we ‘emplot’ it narratively, then, even aside from
this, is narrative per se (irrespective of its literary nuances) the form in which
the past occurs? Munslow seems hesitant about this, unlike White who claims
that ‘No one lives a story’, and who may therefore be saying that there is no
correspondence in reality between a narrative (as form) and the actual ‘content’
of people’s (past) experience – a notably radical position. Rather, Munslow argues
that even though (narrative) history is emphatically a literary endeavour, this does
not necessarily mean that people living in the past did not indeed ‘explain their
lives to themselves as narratives’, and that therefore ‘there may be some kind of
narrative correspondence possible between past events as lived and their history as
emplotted later by historians’. But even if this is the case, Munslow asks us to
consider whether such lived narratives were themselves ‘emplotted’ by their
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experiencers according to some dominant cultural metaphor (which must therefore

be taken into account by the historian if he uses their stories as evidence) – and
further (and most speculatively, but also most interestingly), whether their
changing literary modes have therefore played any determining role in ‘the
fundamental cultural transitions in Western society since the Renaissance’.17
These, then, are Munslow’s principal reasons for complaining that mainstream
historians ‘refuse to slip the anchor of empiricism’,18 and that ‘the real poverty of
empiricism resides in its strenuous refusal to acknowledge the power of figuration
in the narrativisation of the past . . .’.19 Thus, ‘Empiricism necessarily sells history
short’.20 It does this, not so much because mainstream historians fail to recognise
that history is always open to different interpretations – (on the contrary, Munslow
rightly points out that ‘mainstreamers’ of course recognise this) – but because at
base it is still premised on the notion that there is an objective reality which can
be known, instead of accepting the postmodernists’ ‘insistence that objectivity is
impossible to achieve’.21
Munslow’s alternative ‘history’

But this does not mean the end of history for Munslow. On the contrary, he asserts
‘that history, while it can no more depend on undisputed notions of truth,
objectivity and factualism, can speak to new and even more challenging questions
about how we gain knowledge of the past’.22 What does this mean in practice?
Here, when trying to explain what history should be instead, Munslow is less specific
than when attacking its ‘mainstream’ version. The key to it seems to revolve around
‘self-reflexivity’, as will appear from the following cull of passages where Munslow
attempts to explain the alternative kind of ‘history’ championed by postmodernists:
. . . good history . . . is that which is self-reflexive enough to acknowledge
its limits, especially aware that the writing of history is far more precarious
and speculative than empiricists usually admit23 . . . we may grasp more
of the richness of historical analysis by incorporating into the study of the
past the intertextual nature of history as a discourse24 . . . the decon-
structionist [i.e., postmodern] consciousness accepts history as what it
might have been rather than what it actually was. . . . None of this
precludes the deconstructively aware historian from believing that a past
once existed. What it does mean is that he/she will write about a past
within a self-conscious framework. It means accepting . . . the historian’s
dialogue with sources that do not necessarily correspond to the past and
acknowledge that they are not projections of what actually happened
because they are non-referential.25
And here, in line with his regret at many historians’ ‘wilful disregard of Foucault’s
work’, Munslow approvingly summarises what he takes to be that writer’s view –
namely, that history should be ‘self-reflexively engaged with its own philosophy’,
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since ‘the past construed as history is an endless process of interpretation by the

historian as an act of imagination, and our categories of analysis, assumptions,
models and figurative style all themselves become a part of the history we are trying
to unravel’.26 Again, ‘while mainstream historians study evidence in order to wring
out its true meaning, to deconstruct means to seek out its multiple messages and
through the exercise of our imagination create possible ranges of meanings about
referents’.27 And finally (now following the other thinker Munslow believes
mainstream historians wrongly disregard, Hayden White) ‘[t]he input of the
historian . . . is his/her ability to develop the figurative or metaphorical nature of
the narrative as a form of explanation – to expand the nature of his/her historical
imagination’.28
If, as seems from above, the postmodern alternative history does not aspire to
know the past ‘as it actually happened’, Munslow nevertheless insists: ‘This is not
anti-history, but is a conception of history as what it palpably is: a self-conscious
narrative composition written in the here and now that recognises its literary form
as its essential cognitive medium, and not merely its mode of report’.29 Because of
this, there is a sense in which for Munslow and others the past is not the same as
history – indeed, he cites the historian Elizabeth Tonks’ preferred use of
‘representations of pastness’ rather than ‘history’ – because ‘the deconstructive
consciousness makes us . . . aware that the way in which we metaphorically
prefigure, organise, emplot, explain, and make moral judgements about the past is
our only access to it’.30
In sum, then, for Munslow ‘the overarching implication is that history can be
no more, nor less, than a representation of pastness’, and the key to writing
acceptable (i.e., postmodern) history is the exercise of a deep self-reflexivity on the
part of the historian (preferably informed, if not guided, by the ideas of Foucault,
White, and such-like), such that ‘by exploring how we represent the relationship
between ourselves and the past we may see ourselves not as detached observers of
the past but . . . [as] participants in its creation’.31
Critique
Although I will offer a general critique of the overall postmodern perspective later,
some specific points about Munslow’s ideas in particular are worth making. First,
apart from his clear acceptance of the intimate relationship between history and
narrative, and its derivation from evidence, Munslow’s appeal to self-awareness or
‘self-reflexivity’ rings through these attempts to substantiate what ‘kind’ of history
should dislodge its mainstream character, but little else. Yet hopefully historians
are self-aware in any event, and to the extent they are it influences their preparatory
ideas and their self-editing of what they initially wrote. But it is difficult to see how
Munslow’s ‘self-reflexivity’ adds so much to this that it requires ‘history must be
reassessed at its most basic level’.32 Second, it would appear that under the
postmodern dispensation much of the discipline of history would resolve into
talking about historians’ writings rather than producing them – a concern expressed
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by practising historians,33 and unlikely to be allayed by Munslow’s urging that

‘history is the study not of change over time per se, but the study of the information
produced by historians as they go about their task’.34
However, this criticism may be unfair, or at least premature, on two counts. On
the one hand, few have been more energetic than Munslow himself, as editor of
the journal Rethinking History, in encouraging and publishing examples of the kind
of ‘history’ he is recommending – bolstered by his USA co-editor, Robert
Rosenstone, who, for instance, cites a number of other examples in his article
‘Experiments in Narrative’.35 On the other hand, it could be argued that, because
they reject their immediate past, many ‘movements’ begin more on a negative note
than on a positive alternative, and thus that as postmodernism spreads to the
subject of history its initial impact will concentrate on criticising ‘traditional’
history rather than on producing mature examples of its proposed alternative. (For
example, the Renaissance humanist movement scorned its preceding culture, but
unlike postmodern historians had the advantage of a ready-made positive
alternative in the world of Classical Antiquity.)
Third, however, (and more damagingly) is the question of ‘narrative’, which
Munslow rightly raises as central to any discussion of the logic of historical
discourse. Although seeming hesitant to go as far as saying that ‘stories’ (i.e.,
narratives) are never ‘real’, but are always imposed upon past events, the broad
thrust of his outlook points to that position. From our viewpoint the only way to
partly salvage him from a fundamental mistake is to suggest a distinction (alluded
to in our Chapter 12) between what we might call ‘blockbuster’ or ‘mega’ histories,
and those that simply purport to discover ‘what happened’ in more obviously
manageable contexts. In the former case (which might happily coincide with the
postmodern notion of ‘meta-narrative’), where one attempts to uncover such vast
and amorphous ‘stories’ as ‘the history of the USA’, ‘the history of Western
philosophy’, or ‘the history of European art’, Munslow’s claim that such narratives
are constructs (or literary artefacts) will usually be true. This is because it is highly
unlikely that such topics can be treated in such a manner that any genuine narrative
continuity can be sustained. If, then, such ‘histories’ are nevertheless presented as
narratives, the principles underlying the breathtaking selectivity necessarily
involved cannot emerge from the diverse events themselves, but will indeed be the
result of some kind of imaginative ‘emplotment’ carried out by the historian, (at
its most obvious in TV blockbuster documentaries, where music and visual effects
accompany the dialogue). To this extent Munslow is right, and it is reasonable to
thus pursue the kind of explorations about ‘emplotment’ urged, for example, by
Hayden White.
However, not all history is ‘mega’ (or ‘meta’) history, and as we descend from
those dizzy ‘heights’ we can reach planes where the narrative form is not imposed
upon history as if from without, but where the material is, of itself, narratively
structured, and thus requires narrative logic for its apprehension, and the form of
narrative for its communication. At its simplest, this directs us to an individual’s
actions, where he/she does ‘this then that’, the logic of which we examined in
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Chapters 12 and 13. Although it is true that we must always leave room for
discontinuity in an individual’s behaviour (whereby he stops doing one thing and
starts doing another), nevertheless where a genuine sequentiality of actions can be
found, such that one thing ‘follows from’ another in the manner we earlier
explained, we are confronted by what I have called a ‘story-object’ or ‘narrative
identity’. These range in complexity, from ‘following’ an individual’s conduct to
‘following’ (or ‘perceiving’) an event, a term worth distinguishing from an indi-
vidual’s actions because I mean it to encompass the interplay between different
individuals as they respond to each other. Clearly, ‘events’ themselves vary in ‘size’
and complexity, from a motor-car accident to a war (and I have tried elsewhere to
distinguish different classes of ‘story-objects’ – in this case, within the history of
thought – from the simplest to the most complex and threateningly amorphous36)
– but in each case we are hoping to find real sequences, where ‘this happened
because of that happening’, rather than invent continuities where they do not exist.
In short, actions and events are narratively structured. We perceive ‘events’,
and (as argued earlier) ‘events’ and ‘happenings’ are as ‘real’ or ‘objective’ as the
physical objects we perceive, (hence my term, ‘story-objects’). But as also argued,
whether objects and events in some further sense ‘truly’ exist is a non-question,
spawned from the fallacy of the metaphysical enquirer. The general point is, does
their apprehension and identification (via the meaning of words – e.g., a ‘dog’, a
‘war’) work in practice? But the particular point is that events are as ‘real’ as physical
objects, emotions, relationships, colours, and other phenomena we abstract from
the world around us. We do not invent them, and the discourse in which we
communicate them (narrative) therefore does not have to be figurative. It can be
factual.
This returns us to the distinction between fact and fiction in narrative, and here it
could be argued that where Munslow (who is not alone in this) follows White’s
insistence that any narrative must be ‘emplotted’ in such a manner as to convey
romance, comedy, tragedy, or satire (and is therefore a literary artefact rather than
an objective account), he has got the matter upside-down.
First, we should recall that, whereas factual narrative can be employed in order
to achieve some extrinsic objective (i.e., rather than simply explicating what
happened), fictional narrative must be so employed, since it is inconceivable that
anyone would invent a story merely ‘for the sake of it’. It is only because of this that
fictional narrative must indeed be explored for what it is trying to achieve by
constructing a story – e.g., dramatic or comic effects, or many others. But to claim
that all factual narrative must also be figuratively slanted along the same lines is to
beg the question, for it precludes the possibility of narrative told for its own sake.
In short, it implies that all narrative, whether fictional or factual, is as if it were
fiction, whereas we have shown that factual narrative can be simply that, bearing
none of fiction’s necessary hallmarks.
Second, there can indeed be occasions where factual narrative written ‘for the
sake of it’ nevertheless produces a ‘story’ which is indeed e.g., tragic, or ironic. But
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this does not have to be because the historian has imaginatively made it so (as must
be the case in fiction). This again begs the question, for it assumes that, for example,
‘the dramatic’ is some invention imposed upon events from ‘outside’. It may be, but
it does not have to be. Some events are ‘by their nature’ dramatic, comic, and so
on, which is why we have the terms ‘dramatic’, ‘comic’ and so forth. These terms
have been construed by human beings to denote relevant aspects of their
experience of the world, including the nature of the events within it. Thus it is that,
without any figurative or literary invention, the story which the historian uncovers
‘for its own sake’ may be, for example, ‘dramatic’. It does not mean the narrative is
therefore necessarily not objective, or in some other sense ‘untrue’. It simply means
some dramas are ‘real’. (For example, it is in this sense I choose to interpret the
claim that the destruction of the World Trade Center towers was ‘a work of art’ –
i.e., as an apt inversion of that faulty logic which claims that artistic/ aesthetic
criteria are always imposed upon reality rather than being derived from real
responses to real situations.)
Indeed, this insistence on the (allegedly inevitable) figurative, metaphoric nature
of historical discourse may prompt one to speculate that postmodern historical
theorists have been grievously flawed from the outset. The origins of the
postmodern movement, we should recall, were in the field of literary criticism and
the fine arts, areas which Plato famously distinguished from the world of fact. For
him, the application of aesthetic criteria to factual reality (especially concerning
human affairs) runs the risk of distortion, exaggeration, and dramatisation, trans-
forming them into fiction, since the very purpose of art is to engage the emotions.
Now, given the artistic origins of postmodernism we might say it never was
concerned with factual reality, and quite properly so – such that those who
nevertheless employ its insights to analyse discourse about factual reality have,
from the outset, and in a profound manner, detached themselves from a sense of
reality. In short, postmodernism never was about factual reality, and this runs like
a corrupting core throughout postmodernist theorising about the discipline of
history, however seductive it might otherwise be.
Jenkins on ‘own-sakism’
Although sharing much of Munslow’s perspective, it is instructive to look at the
writings of another contemporary British theorist, Keith Jenkins, particularly his
(1995) On ‘What is History?’, as a second example of the attempt to apply post-
modernist ideas to the discipline of history. More strident in tone, Jenkins makes
some aspects of postmodern ‘history’ clearer in places where Munslow is hesitant
or merely indicative. What does Jenkins add? Essentially, he explicitly politicises
both the postmodern critique of ‘traditional’ history and its putative replacement.
In his critique of mainstream history, like Munslow and others Jenkins
approves of the ‘anti-essentialist, anti-teleological, anti-foundationalist, anti-
representationalist and anti-realist implications’ of the postmodern perspective for
history.37 Accordingly, he makes it clear in particular that:
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today we know of no such things as neutral/objective ‘interpretations’, as

‘innocent surveys’, as ‘unpositioned positions’. Rather, we should all know
by now that the best we can do is to alert . . . ‘readers’ to the position we
are interpreting from, rather than imagining . . . that some interpretations
are not interpretive at all but ‘the truth’.38
The logic of these unequivocal assertions rules out the possibility (urged in our
preceding two chapters) of engaging in historical narrative ‘for its own sake’ – and
Jenkins does just that. First, he tells us that, living in our postmodern times, it is
no longer credible to subscribe to any overarching ‘ideology’ or philosophy of
history which purports to give meaning to history, and in this connection he singles
out the ‘meta-historical’ frameworks employed by ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’
modernist history – i.e., history as construed along Marxist or ‘liberal-democratic’
lines. This is ‘upper-case History’ (akin, we might note, to speculative philosophy
of history, if only implicitly), and because the respective hopes behind History
with a capital H (either of a consummated class-war or of a liberal utopia of rational
optimism) have been dashed by the uncertainties of the postmodern world, ‘nobody
really believes in that particular fantasy any more’. Instead, according to Jenkins,
as more of the bourgeoisie ‘made it’ in society, their conservative elements
developed an approach to history which, in not being threatening, served the
function of sustaining their position – namely, the abandonment of any
‘metanarrative claims’ to history and its replacement by the study of the past ‘for
its own sake’. This kind of history – ‘lower-case’ history, denoted dismissively by
Jenkins as ‘own-sakism’ – has come to dominate the universities and is regarded as
‘almost natural’. It purports to study the past ‘objectively’ and ‘disinterestedly’, and
yet, for Jenkins, it is ‘just as ideological as any upper case history ever was’, because
‘the idea that the proper study of history is actually “own-sakism” is recognised as
just the mystifying way in which a bourgeoisie conveniently articulates its own
interests as if they belonged to the past itself’.39
In further explanation, Jenkins singles out the ideas of Geoffrey Elton, whom he
identifies as a ‘conservative (Tory) historian’, because in his influential book, The
Practice of History, Elton, following the nineteenth-century historian Ranke, argued
in effect ‘that, once upon a time and especially in Europe, earlier fumbling attempts
to understand the past had been made, but that only in the nineteenth century was
the bulk of previous mystical, religious, and metaphysical approaches sloughed-
off, allowing proper history to emerge’. What was this ‘proper history’? Jenkins
quotes Elton directly: ‘the principles of respectable historiography [can] be reduced
to one main precept: to study history for its own sake’. This account, according to
Jenkins, is in fact ‘Whiggish’, even ‘Hegelian’, in seeing the ‘Rankean-type . . .
lower case (bourgeois) . . . professional own-sakist “academic” study’ of the past as
the culmination of the progress of historiography. But for Jenkins, this is to fail ‘to
see lower case history in “real” historical terms ( i.e., in terms to do with power, with
class and ethnic and gender location, with material exigencies and ideological
positions and so on)’.
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Jenkins is clear, then. History which emerges as the effort to study the past ‘for its
own sake’ is not impartial and objective (and to that extent aspiring to ‘truth’), but
is ‘bourgeois’ because serving conservative-liberal interests. What is not so clear,
however, is whether its ‘bourgeois’ character is an historical accident, such that
‘own-sakism’ could be associated with some other ideological position. Be this as it
may, it seems that, given Jenkins’ denial of the possibility of ‘neutral’ positions,
‘own-sakism’ must for him always reflect the very feature which it aspires to avoid
– namely, bias, partiality, ‘ideology’. For Jenkins, then, those who see themselves
as understanding something solely for the sake of understanding it are under an
illusion, since such activity is impossible. Quite why it is impossible is not made
clear, however. We, on the other hand, have striven not only to demonstrate that
it is possible, but also to analyse its implications by distinguishing it from
(intellectual) activities undertaken to serve some practical objective – and it is
hardly necessary to elaborate here upon how those arguments serve to refute
Jenkins’ attack upon ‘own-sakism’.
What is worth noting, however, is that when Jenkins claims to identify the
‘bourgeois’ and ‘Whiggish’ character of ‘own-sakism’ he offers us an historical
account of its emergence – presumably as a ‘true’ account? If so, then, does his
understanding of its historical roots emerge from his trying to understand what
happened (in historiography) ‘for its own sake’, thereby laying claim to being ‘true’
because done in the objective spirit? Presumably not, since he has denied the
validity of such understanding. In which case, what he says about the origins and
nature of ‘own-sakism’ is not objective, but is deliberately ‘biased’, and its ‘truth’
is to that extent suspect – in short, why should we ‘believe’ what he says? But
Jenkins clearly does want us to believe what he says. Yet nevertheless, and tellingly,
he evidences his own uneasiness at his position because, when complaining of
Elton’s (allegedly) naive belief in objectivity, he says that Elton did not understand
‘lower case history in “real” historical terms’, putting the word ‘real’ in inverted
commas.40 Whether this device is expressive of embarassement on Jenkins’ part,
or an example of ‘ironic self-reflexivity’, it is certainly disingenuous in trying to have
matters both ways round – a syndrome found quite commonly in postmodernist
theorising, where they justify their critique of ‘modernism’ by placing it within an
historical perspective which they present as ‘true’.
This, in fact, merely highlights a paradox faced by postmodernists (and anyone
else) who share Jenkins’ notion that ‘neutral’, ‘objective’ knowledge is impossible;
namely, is the statement that ‘all knowledge is ideological’ itself an ‘ideological’
statement, and therefore (possibly) untrue? In other words, is not such a statement
logically impossible, as in the old conundrum, ‘Everything I say is a lie’? One way
out of this conundrum is to amend the statement to the following: ‘With the
exception of what I am saying now, everything I say is a lie’. And such, it seems, is
the only way to make sense of Jenkins et al. when they, for example, give an
historical account of ‘modernism’ and its (alleged) demise, or advance theoretical/
philosophical arguments in support of their viewpoint. An unkind critic might say
that their position amounts to the following: that anything anyone else might say
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is ideologically distorted, and that even what they themselves say is ideologically
distorted, except when they make precisely this proposition – in other words, the
only ‘truth’ to be found in discourse is that where postmodernists explain and
defend themselves! But the gaping question must be, ‘why?’ – i.e., returning to the
conundrum, ‘if everything I say is a lie except what I am saying now’, on what
grounds is this exception made? No explanation is forthcoming.
Kinder critics, however, will recognise that many postmodernists are aware of
this threatening conundrum, and commend (where apparent) their attempts to
confront it. Jenkins is amongst these when he defends the North American
postmodern theorist, Richard Rorty, against accusations that his pragmatic stance
on ‘truth’ is so relativistic that its very possibility evaporates, everything proposed
inevitably coming from some ‘position’ or other. Rorty has been interpreted as
claiming that ‘truth’ should therefore be seen as those statements which it is good
to believe in (for Rorty, the use of ‘language-games’ which, for example, entail respect
for and tolerance of others’ opinions, the avoidance of force in disputes, and, from
an ironic perspective, accommodate the liberal life-styles and systems of bourgeois
North-Atlantic societies). Jenkins (clearly aware that such a position on ‘truth’ is
indeed weak, if not foolish) urges readers that this is to misrepresent Rorty, since
Rorty’s notion of ‘truth’ is not solely dependent on what it is good to believe in.
Rather, Jenkins quotes Rorty as saying ‘that truth is “the name of whatever proves
itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons”’.
What are these reasons? They are, according to Jenkins, ‘the usual sorts of definite,
assignable reasons generally available’, which are to be found in the ‘thousands of
words’ Rorty has written explaining his views.41 Readers must pursue for themselves
how convincing is this attempt to confront the conundrum of truth as it appears
for Jenkins and other postmodernists. But since ‘truth’ does not present itself as a
conundrum for those who accept the possibility and distinctness of understanding
something for the sake of understanding it, and its linkage to ‘truth’, we may move
on from the critical thrust of Jenkins’s ideas (especially against ‘own-sakism’ in
historical study) to the constructive side of his thought – namely, if mainstream
history is no longer valid, then what should replace it?
Jenkins on the postmodern alternative ‘history’

Whereas I have suggested that Munslow’s Deconstructing History remains vague
about this, Jenkins is somewhat clearer due to his more explicitly political approach
to historiography. Having identified ‘own-sakism’ (which he equates with
professional, mainstream, academic history) as ‘bourgeois’, then its abandonment
(along with claims that the past can be objectively ‘represented’ by historians)
‘usher[s] in new possibilities; new opportunities’.42 It does this because, once it is
recognised that the structure and intelligibility which conventional history imposes
upon the past is a fallacy, the way is cleared to accept the ‘openness and
meaninglessness’ of the past. Whereas the authoritative narratives of conventional
history served as ‘ideological closures’ on the meaning and significance of past
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events, restricting visions for the future, Jenkins approvingly quotes White’s notion
that it is precisely only the recognition of history’s meaninglessness ‘that can “alone
goad living human beings to make their lives different for themselves and their
children”’. Indeed, Jenkins tells us that White has even queried whether historical
narrative per se is not ‘a general ideological instrument of anti-utopian closure’, such
that historians might move forward ‘by refusing to attempt a narrativist mode for
the representation of . . . “truth”’. Instead, history based on the recognition of
rupture and discontinuity within the past would be a discourse far better able to
accommodate the needs, viewpoints, and aspirations of ‘subordinate, emergent, or
resisting social groups’.43 Although Jenkins claims that White ‘has not gone on to
explain how . . . his history of discontinuity would actually work in practice’,44 it
is clear that whatever approach to history it might imply (e.g., descriptive vignettes,
the dramatisation of alternative reminiscences, and other such forms found in the
journal Rethinking History), for Jenkins and others it should be ‘a study of the past
that fully recognises the openness and uncontrollable nature of it in order to
encourage an open and different emancipatory future’.45
In short, it seems that for those of Jenkins’ mind, since no history can escape
being politically ideological, then let it be openly such, and be directed towards the
objective of ‘emancipation’ – and of whom? The answer (echoing Foucault) lies in
the equation of information with power. Mainstream ‘metanarrative’ and ‘own-
sakist’ history legitimises the dominant social orders, political structures, and
economic systems, ignoring the disadvantaged positions of ‘the other’, and in its
‘rationality’ turns attention away from the ever-present possibility, throughout
history, of reaching for something ‘sublime’, outside the mentality of those
comfortably entrenched in the instrumental routines of society. Thus it is
that Jenkins approvingly quotes the postmodern historian, Brenda Marshall’s,
description of postmodern history: ‘“It asks: Whose history gets told? In whose
name? For what purpose? Postmodernism is about histories not told, retold, untold.
History as it never was. Histories forgotten, hidden, invisible, considered
unimportant, changed, eradicated”. . .’.46 In thus giving a voice to ‘the other’, the
postmodern study of history can empower and help emancipate not only ‘the other’
but all of us.
Critique
Such, then, is the approach to ‘history’ Jenkins and some other postmodernists
think should replace its current nature as a discipline – although others draw
different, and often less robust, political implications. For example, in Deconstructing
History Munslow also claims that historians should ‘seek out’ that which
mainstream history texts omit; namely, ‘the other’, meaning the repressed and
marginalised, of which (in 1997) he gives the following examples – ‘Jews, Serbs,
Croats, women, the poor, lesbians, immigrants, aboriginals, gays’47 – but he does
not highlight an explicitly emancipatory objective for the discipline of history.
Jenkins does, and although in doing so he can claim the virtue of consistency – (i.e.,
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if history is invariably ideological, then let us not pretend to be otherwise in our

own prescriptions for how the discipline should be ‘rethought’) – many will see the
openly ideological nature of his approach, if adopted, as one amongst other factors
indeed harbingering ‘the end of history’; that is, ‘history’ understood as the
endeavour to establish what pertained, what happened, and why, in the human past
– an activity whose validity and importance is otherwise accepted without question.
This judgement on Jenkins’ position, let it be clear, does not derive from any
political considerations, and particularly not from any bias against ‘the other’. On
that issue, although much mischief surrounds the concept such that it positively
invites ‘ideological’ discriminations within it – (e.g., note the above mention of
Jews, but not of Palestinians) – the reason ‘the other’s’ history has been less explored
is that although it is of legitimate interest to those groups who fall under this rubric,
they may not have played any significant role in the dominant themes which
historians and others (economists, political scientists, sociological theorists)
perceive as having shaped the changing nature of societies and the international
scene. Earlier (Chapter 12) we argued, by analogy, that just as the architect will
focus on the principal features of a building in order to understand/explain it, so
do (most) historians’ instincts lead them to study the principal events associated
with the changing nature of societies – and where a grouping we might call part of
‘the other’ has played a role, then its history is likely to be explored – otherwise not.
This has long been a feature of historical practice, from the study of medieval
heretical sects which, coming out of obscurity, impacted their surrounding society
(e.g., the Cathars), to the Diggers’ and True Levellers’ influence in the English
Civil War; and in contemporary times the influence of ‘the gay community’ upon
social change and legislation.
Rather, Jenkins’ explicitly ideological approach can be seen as harbingering ‘the
end of history’ simply because, whatever the ideology, it means that the past is not
studied ‘for its own sake’ but quite consciously as a practical activity – in this case,
to reiterate Jenkins, ‘in order to encourage an open and different emancipatory
future’. From our viewpoint it does not matter what practical (extrinsic) objective
might motivate the study of the past. The problem is when any external motivation
is in play, thereby threatening the impartiality, all-roundedness, objectivity, and
‘truthfulness’ of historical accounts – particularly where its practical purpose is not,
for example, to gain a professional qualification or write a lucrative book, but to
persuade readers to a political end. Insofar as we have earlier laboured to distinguish
between things done ‘for their own sake’ and things done in order to achieve some
extrinsic objective, and drawn out the implications both in general and specifically
for the activity of history, we can leave to readers’ deliberations how far this aspect
of Jenkins’ approach implies ‘the end of history’.
There is, however, a second respect in which those who endorse Jenkins’
postmodernist approach may be accused, despite their protestations, of signalling
‘the end of history’. This returns us to the unease we expressed over the apparent
implication in Munslow that postmodern history is more ‘the study of the
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information produced by historians’ than ‘the study of . . . change over time per se’.48
Characteristically, Jenkins is bolder on this crucial issue, but arguably to the point
of recklessness. He concludes What is History? by telling us that ‘history is . . . a
narrative prose discourse of which . . . the content is as much invented as found’,
and that ‘understood . . . as a rhetorical, metaphorical, textual practice, . . . the
cogency of historical work can be admitted without the past per se ever entering
into it – except rhetorically’.49 In other words, and at face-value, the discipline of
history either does and/or (?) should proceed without the reality of past events
constituting its foundation!
So extraordinary is this claim that it is worth exploring whether this is what
Jenkins means – but other parts of his text suggest he indeed does. Earlier he claims
that conventional history has been revealed as ‘an ideological-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’.50
However, to forestall readers’ potential alarm that the past has somehow
disappeared, Jenkins later makes it clear that ‘it is no part of any postmodernist
argument . . . to deny the material existence of the past . . . [T]here is indeed an
actual world “out there” . . . which has a past’. However, the postmodernist ‘strong
insistence’ is ‘that that once actual past is . . . only accessible to us through texts
and thus as a “reading”’.51 (Whether he means ‘texts’ as history books, i.e.,
secondary source material, or as primary source-material such as archives, letters,
and State papers – or as both – is not clear.) Because of this, then although
postmodernists do not deny the objective existence of things in the past, the fact
that they existed/ happened ‘does not in the slightest way tell you how to go about
making the historical representation of [them] true and/or objective’. Rather,
because ‘objectivity and truth are not derived in any way from the mere existence
of an object of enquiry’, these features of knowledge can only derive from ‘the
internal mechanisms and coherences of methods of explanation that are applied
to it’. Thus, to achieve objective and true statements about (i.e., ‘representations
of’) the past, what is needed is ‘an epistemology and a method’.52
Correct as this is, many historians and theorists, however, think we already have
them. The postmodernists, on the other hand, deny the viability of mainstream
historical method and epistemology for the reasons we have expounded – or do
they? It is more accurate to say they deny the claims to truth and objectivity made for
mainstream history. It is far from clear they deny its method, based on finding
evidence, inferring from it, and (if the case) constructing narrative accounts
premised on the notion that ‘truth’ is that property of discourse where what one
proposes to be the case is indeed the case – for what other approach do they propose?
Rather, they seem to have none, but are stuck with one which according to them
cannot achieve objective knowledge of the actual past. Rather than look for a real
alternative, there is no point in their doing so since, for them, no form of discourse
can ever faithfully ‘represent’ reality (past or present) anyway.
384
In short, we return to that corrosive core, not of postmodernism itself as an

approach to aesthetics, but of postmodernism when applied to the world of factual
reality. For Jenkins et al. ‘the past’ was real, actual, objective, but precisely these
features cannot be recaptured either in today’s mainstream historical discourse or
any other.
Thus we may indeed interpret Jenkins at face value as saying that history already
is, and also should be, a discourse or discipline ‘without the past per se entering into
it’. The difference, however, is that the postmodern awareness of this should not
only, as in Munslow, stimulate a greater ‘self-reflexivity’ on historians’ part. Also
(since ‘history’ is for postmodernists virtually a species of fiction anyway) it should
give them a license to use ‘history’ as an instrument for promoting the ‘emancipa-
tion’ of ‘the other’; (indeed, the two might amount to the same thing, since
Munslow’s ‘self-reflexivity’ is, arguably, but a surreptitious ideology of ‘the other’).
To the extent that all the above is a fair rendering of Jenkins principal points and,
as importantly, a fair drawing out of their implications, the reader may appreciate
just why many historians and theorists regard the postmodern analytic philosophy
of history (at least, when expounded so robustly as in Jenkins) as representing ‘the
end of history’ were it to become the cornerstone of the discipline. The past per se
does not enter into it; it is impossible to make either objective or ‘true’ statements
about the past – ‘history’ cannot be studied ‘for its own sake’; ‘history’ should settle
for being a (now self-conscious) exercise in ideological persuasion. As mentioned
initially, some postmodernists do accept the logic that this indeed means ‘the end
of history’, and presumably have no more to do with it – a perfectly respectable
and consistent (if flawed) position. Curiously, however, others not only see this as
not ‘the end of history’, but as its beginning, at last stripped of previous errors and
illusions – to many, a dawn as strange as it is false.
Conclusion: the foundations of postmodernism revisited

Despite differences of emphasis and political viewpoint amongst them, the fact
that postmodernist history theorists are deeply embedded in the fundamental
premises of postmodern thought make it worth revisiting the latter before leaving
this version of (arguably) ‘the end of history’.
Essentially, postmodernism is a movement based on challenging the current
foundations of epistemology – i.e., the manner in which we think we achieve
knowledge of reality. This, in its turn, centres on the forms in which we purport to
‘represent’ reality – e.g., film, painting – but particularly language as a ‘representer’
of reality. Postmodernist theorists insist on the inability of language to correspond
to reality, such that although some (e.g., Munslow and Jenkins) accept that there
is such a thing as an ‘objective’, ‘true’ reality ‘out there’ but deny its accessibility
via linguistic representation, others discard the notion of ‘reality’ altogether.
We have suggested that, since postmodernism began as a critique of art and
literature, it was already at one remove from ‘reality’, such that its application to
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the world of ‘fact’ (the distinctive, but not unique, domain of history) was bound
to be problematic. This observation, I suggest, can stand, and is borne out in the
two writers we have examined. More precisely, however, in their case it is
the notion that suppositions are embedded in language, and underlie the way we
use language, which informs their perspective on how far, if at all, anything true or
objective can be advanced in historical discourse. Most explicitly in Jenkins’ case
(but at the base of most postmodernist theory) these suppositions are presented as
‘ideological’, meaning ‘political’, bias in the broad sense of moral, political, social,
and economic ‘positionings’. This is not to neglect that for postmodernists (and
others) such bias also operates in the very choice of what one talks about – e.g., the
editing process of choosing ‘the news’, historians’ choices of topics. But it is
the notion that ‘discourse’ itself (i.e., the use of language) is inherently ‘ideological’,
such that ‘reality’ is inaccessible via language as a medium of knowledge, which is
the more philosophical point, and invites scrutiny.
‘Ideology’: shallow and deep

The correspondence (or lack of it) between language and ‘reality’ in our efforts to
‘know’ the latter is not a new problematic. Indeed, earlier in this book we
encountered examples of thinkers who grappled with this aspect of epistemology
– Hobbes in the seventeenth century, Vico in the eighteenth, and Marx in the
nineteenth; and the ‘linguistic turn’ taken by much twentieth-century philosophy
is well-known. In this respect, then, the postmodernists’ focus is hardly novel.
What, however, particularly characterises their approach is their emphasis upon the
role of ‘ideology’ (in the broad sense just denoted), and it is thus to this topic that
our critical attention should be restricted, rather than wander far and wide over
centuries of different contributions to the problem of ‘language and reality’.
Here, I suggest a distinction between what might be called ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’
ideology. By the former I mean those instances where language is overtly ideological;
that is, where both the vocabulary employed (e.g., various derogatory terms
denoting different races/ethnicities), and the import of statements constructed in
the use of language (e.g., ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’) are manifest
expressions of value-assumptions, whether those who utter them realise this or not.
It is true that there are degrees of overtness in such discourse, such that on occasions
its ‘ideological’ nature needs revealing through analysis. However, I suggest these
are degrees within a general level of ‘ideological’ influence that either hits us straight
in the face or is at least recognisable after a little thought – and we have already
analysed the manner in which such discourse, in reflecting partiality and bias,
imparts ‘false’ knowledge (or at least not ‘the whole truth’) of what it addresses.
Likewise, however, we have also claimed that, precisely because such ‘shallow’
ideology is recognisable, then reflective writers can expunge it from their own
writings – that is, if it is there, and if they wish to. Indeed, from the other side of
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the same coin we have argued that it is both a necessary and a possible feature of any
discourse which purports to convey knowledge ‘for its own sake’ that its author
avoids being ‘ideological’.
Our postmodernist historians, however, appear to subscribe to the general
postmodernist fallacy that any discourse must be ‘ideological’ at this ‘shallow’ level,
simply dismissing the notion that it is possible to avoid being so. Whatever they
mean by ‘self-reflexivity’, it does not mean the ability to reflect on one’s thinking
and writing to flush out any overt ideological ‘positioning’. But it does mean this
for those historians and fellow-intellectuals who are concerned to uncover and
communicate ‘true’, ‘objective’ knowledge about reality. In doing so, they use
language. But far from this automatically making knowledge of reality inaccessible,
we might instead point to the spectacular success of language in ‘representing’
reality, particularly in the numerous disciplines which emerged as part of that
‘modern’ history which postmodernists castigate.
We can conclude from this that whilst postmodern historical theorists’ critique of
‘mainline’ history (largely) centres on its (alleged) overtly ideological character,
that critique is unsustainable as a philosophical premise – for although it is true that
there are examples of overtly ‘ideological’ history (long ago analysed by, e.g., Tudor,
who called it ‘political myth’ rather than ‘history’),53 it is far from true that this must,
and therefore does, characterise all historical discourse.
However, I suggest there is another level of ‘ideology’, namely, ‘deep’ ideology
– and where other postmodernists appear occasionally to touch on this, they might
have a point, albeit one different to that advanced by postmodernist historical
theorists.
By ‘deep’ ideology I mean to point not to where language is overtly value-laden
or politically biased, but to what is, indeed, a genuinely inherent restriction on the
capacity of language to denote reality. Here, I revert to my brief discussion in
Chapter 12 on the meaning of words, where I argued: that words are contrived by
human-beings to denote or ‘single out’ something in ‘the world out there’ worth
noticing and distinguishing from other things; that the reason we have for noticing
things is that they are relevant to us; that things are relevant to us in terms of the
myriad of our ‘interests’ (material, aesthetic, sexual, etc.); that other beings with
different bodies and/or different mentalities would ‘single out’ and denote different
‘things’ to those we identify; that when we therefore single out something and call
it ‘a tree’, the meaning of the word derives from the reason we have for noticing it;
that whether there are ‘truly’ such things as, e.g., ‘trees’, ‘holidays’, or ‘teenagers’
is a non-question since none of these ‘things’ pre-exist us as already objectively
meaningful ‘trees’ etc.; that instead, the point is not, are ‘trees’ etc., ‘true’ or ‘real’?,
but does the use of the term, given what we mean by it, work in practice? Is it
relevant, workable, and reliable to use that word when understanding ‘the world
out there’?
This approach to language and its relation to ‘reality’ extends beyond the
meaning of words, to how they are put together in grammatical constructs – e.g.,
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‘this is a tree’, ‘he ran down the street and then went in the house’, ‘why did she
leave?’. Here the same may apply; namely, that the manner in which reality is
apprehended through the logic of linguistic constructions (including narrative)
does not accord with some prior, pre-existent logical objective in ‘the world out
there’, but that they are simply ways which human beings have found to make
relevant, workable, and reliable sense of that world for them.
Along these lines, then, we could indeed concede that any discourse is
‘ideological’, including that specifically devoted to saying ‘true’ things about reality
for the sake of it (unlike ‘shallow’ ideology). This is because we cannot but
experience, ‘perceive’, or ‘know’ reality as human beings rather than as disembodied
‘spirits’ or as differently embodied (e.g., as ants). At this level, for example, we
could ask why we commonly identify people via gender pronouns – ‘he went for a
walk’, ‘she left the room’. Here, following the above analysis, it could be argued we
are not being ‘objective’, but instead being partial because singling out a specific
feature of individuals. (Trans-sexuals have indeed complained of this ‘ideological’
feature of language). Likewise, it could be argued that where language is structured
around the use of transitive verbs – ‘he posts the letter’ – this assumes the fact of
human agency/will; or that when we narrate a sequence (such as, above, ‘he ran
down the street and then went in the house’), it assumes the ‘reality’ of ‘stories’. In
each case – gender pronouns, transitive verbs, narrative, (and we could add, for
example, the different tenses) – the question is not whether such terminology and
linguistic constructs correlate with ‘objective reality’, thereby making language
afford ‘true’ knowledge (or ‘representations’) of reality, but do they work, and
if so, why?
Such an exploratory approach to the ‘logos’ of our consciousness or ideas –
(hence ‘ideo-logy’) – seems eminently worthwhile, and could even apply to what
(if any) linguistic forms are essential to historical discourse. Yet such forays into
‘deep’ ideology are qualitatively different from that perspective on the relation
between language and reality which suffuses postmodernist critiques. They – and
no more so than when applied to the discipline of history – revolve around ‘shallow’
ideology; that is, the manner in which value-presuppositions about ‘reality’ affect
our knowledge of it, whereas ‘deep’ ideology concerns the way we see reality in the
first place. Whereas the former can be avoided – and ‘should’ be when we try to
understand things for the sake of it – the latter seems inescapably linked to our
fundamental human condition, irrespective of the temporary situations people find
themselves in and which generate different ‘positionings’.
The upshot of this is, then, that our knowledge of reality is always limited by
being human knowledge, (if ‘limit’ is the appropriate term) – but need not be further
limited because it stems from this or that human being, placed in such and such a
position. Knowledge of the past (‘history’) is no exception. It cannot exceed the
boundaries of originating in human beings, escaping from there into some
metaphysical fairy-land of ultimate, transcendental ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’. But
within its boundaries it can, like other ‘discourses’, discover and communicate
knowledge ‘for the sake of it’, unimpaired by ‘shallow’ ideology. This, after all, is
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all we can sensibly mean by the words ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’, and I suggest they
have served us well over the ages as, indeed, themselves workable, relevant, and
reliable distinctions worth singling out amongst the otherwise random torrent of
human conversation. If, in some confused sense, we failed to recognise the
difference between ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ ideology, we would fall into the trap which
appears to have been set by postmodern history theorists – namely, of affording the
former the same status as ‘deep’ ideology, thereby signalling not only ‘the end of
history’ as a viable discipline, but (following postmodern philosophers) ‘the end
of knowledge’ per se, (i.e., understood as the ability of language to ‘represent reality’
rather than distort it).
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15
Fukuyama’s speculative philosophy of history
Introduction
‘The times we live in’

In the previous chapter we saw the emergence of a contemporary school of analytic
philosophy of history interpreted by many – particularly irate historians – as
heralding ‘the end of history’ as a viable discipline, were it to be taken seriously.
Deriving from the postmodernist movement in general, its proponents relate their
perceptions to the times we live in. The troubled twentieth century, combined
with novel features of contemporary capitalism, convinces them of the need to
rethink the very basis upon which we approach ‘knowing’ reality.
Such efforts, of course, are not new in the history of thought, and it is tempting
to suggest they always correlate with what their proponents perceived as particularly
‘troubled’, or at least ‘interesting’, times. For example, battling to defend
Christianity at a crucial period under the Roman Empire, Augustine urged people
to stop relying on the power of reason, and instead ground their understanding on
an act of faith – ‘believe in order to understand’. Or, as we saw, Renaissance
humanists proposed a fresh start to how people understood the world and them-
selves, whilst we noted Hegel’s awe at seeing Napoleon in Jena. Or, finally, moving
to what he regarded as revolutionary times, we might cite the epistemological
radicalism behind Marx’s ‘historical materialism’.
But counter-examples cast doubt on the necessity behind such correlations. For
instance, it would be difficult to claim that originators of ‘the Scientific Revolution’
(e.g., Galileo, Bacon) or of modern philosophy (e.g., Descartes, Spinoza) were
responding to any feelings they might have harboured about the special
propitiousness of their times. Perhaps above all, this applies to Vico (in the early
eighteenth century), whose passion to revolutionise the basis of knowledge
prompted his proclamation that ‘we must reckon as if there were no books in the
world’ which have been any use up to now – and yet nothing suggests he regarded
his own times as exceptional.
Attempts to ‘rethink’ how we approach understanding the world are, then, neither
uncommon nor necessarily related (in their proponents’ minds) to ‘exceptional’
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FUKUYAMA’S SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
times. However, we have seen that postmodernists do draw such a correlation

(when expounding their epistemological notion of a ‘crisis in representation’). The
same, although for markedly different reasons, applies with Francis Fukuyama’s
philosophy of history.
Essentially, we will find Fukuyama arguing that ‘History, . . . understood as a single,

coherent, evolutionary process,’1 has reached its end-goal, such that we can expect
no new developments in the basic structure already characterising the majority of
the world’s states – namely, the combination of free-market (i.e., capitalist)
economies and liberal-democratic political constitutions. Countries presently
lacking these features will sooner or later catch up, thereby completing the demise
of ‘the historical world’ and the full arrival of ‘the post-historical world’.2
Fukuyama thus presents a thesis stemming from speculative philosophy of history
– and he is suggesting there is something distinctive about our times which should
prompt us to rethink modern assumptions underlying our approach to knowledge
of history in particular.
For Fukuyama, writing in the early 1990s, and having worked in the US State
Department’s Policy Planning Staff (although now a professional academic), what
is special about today’s world is that, having undergone a century of ‘troubled
times’ including two world wars, the Holocaust, the Cold War, and barbarous
experiments in government from both Communist and fascist regimes, the ideals
of liberal democracy have not only survived but have palpably triumphed, such that
the prospect of a ‘world-wide liberal revolution’ is now evident. Apart from the
defeat of Nazism, many right-wing authoritarian regimes around the world have
since become democracies, whilst communism has collapsed in Russia and Eastern
Europe.
Although there is much to elaborate upon here, sufficient has been said to
explain why Fukuyama believes our times are indeed special. But even if we accept
that we are on the brink of a world-wide liberal revolution (backed up by the
globalisation of capitalism), why should this prompt us to rethink the very manner
in which we approach understanding history?
The revival of speculative philosophy of history

The answer is as simple as it is bold. Fukuyama believes there should be a revival
of speculative philosophy of history. This would help inform our historical
understanding (and, it would seem, future policy both domestically and inter-
nationally). He suggests that discussion of whether there is some overall meaning
to human history was ‘more or less abandoned’3 in the twentieth century because
events increasingly made people into ‘deep historical pessimists’; ‘our deepest
thinkers have concluded that there is no such thing as History – i.e., a meaningful
order to the broad sweep of human events’.4
Previously, various attempts had been made to construct overall theories of
history, and Fukuyama includes examples omitted from our Part I, such as Kant’s
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sketchy ideas (in the 1780s) and the dubious notions of Spengler and Toynbee in
the early twentieth century. (Surprisingly, he neglects to mention Vico.) But he
principally centres on Hegel and Marx, whose writings constitute ‘the most serious
efforts at writing Universal Histories’,5 continuing the legacy of those earlier
thinkers who ‘saw the central issue in history as the development of Freedom’,
believing that ‘History was not a blind concatenation of events, but a meaningful
whole in which human ideas concerning the nature of a just political and social
order developed and played themselves out’.6 But, apart from minor exceptions,
Fukuyama correctly implies that after Marx great speculative philosophy of history
disappeared.
Yet he believes this rejection of speculative philosophy of history is misguided.

Rather, he believes we should rethink – not, however, rethink the actual content
of history, but our approach to that history. Later, he urges that ‘“history” is not
a given, nor merely a catalogue of everything that happened in the past, but a
deliberate effort of abstraction in which we separate out important from
unimportant events’ – and that ‘this is all the more true of a Universal History,
which raises the level of abstraction to an even higher degree’. In short, he implies
the discipline of history could benefit from a shift in focus regarding those factors
deemed to be ‘important’ in understanding the past, by affording consideration to
the speculative framework of the ‘Universal History’ he is to unfold.
This is worth noting, if only to mark the clear distinction between his thinking
and that of the postmodernists. Both he and they relate their ideas to ‘the times
we live in’, but there the similarity ends. The postmodernists interpret our
times as generating the need for a revolution (however ill-defined) in the very
methodology and suppositions brought to the discipline of history, whereas the
implications of Fukuyama’s ideas for analytic philosophy of history are that, apart
from the question of focus, the discipline as presently practised is perfectly valid.
Indeed, the difference goes further. The postmodernists could be seen as a radical
example of that pessimism about the twentieth century which Fukuyama thinks is
misguided, for they have abandoned all hope whatsoever in the ability to say
anything objective or true about the past, let alone construct some overall meaning
to it. Such a project would strike postmodernists as an absurd and exaggerated
example of ‘metanarrative’.
Fukuyama, however, insists that it is just this ‘reference to a standard that exists
somewhere “outside” of history (and, incidentally, outside of the sphere of
competence of professional historians qua historians)’ that always does operate in
the choices historians make between what is ‘important and unimportant’.7 Hence
the need to accept this openly, and allow the reappearance of speculative
philosophy of history into our understanding of the past, particularly since the
events of the twentieth century can indeed be shown to validate the notion of an
overall logic to historical development.
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The logic of historical development
The ‘Mechanism’ of modern natural science

Having outlined Fukuyama’s overall thesis (including his reasoning in reviving
speculative philosophy of history), let us now explore its arguments. He begins by
asking: ‘Is history directional, and is there reason to think that there will be a
universal evolution in the direction of liberal democracy?’ His answer to the first
part is that history is not repetitive, but is indeed directional. Thus, ‘a constant and
uniform Mechanism or set of historical first causes . . . dictates evolution in a single
direction’,8 and he identifies just such a mechanism – namely, within ‘the entire
range of human social endeavour, the only one that is by common consensus
unequivocally cumulative’ is scientific knowledge. Although its effect on societies’
historical development may be difficult to perceive in earlier history, it was always
present – but ‘a qualitative change occurred in the relationship of scientific
knowledge to the historical process with the rise of modern natural science’.9
Initially its effects were felt in military competition. Not only did lesser scientifically
developed countries have to catch up with the latest military technology emerging
from the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution, this also involved modernising
their societies by unifying their countries, centralising taxation, and improving
education. Fukuyama gives many historical examples, from the emergence of the
early-modern state in Europe (e.g., Spain, France), the Ottoman Empire after
Napoleon’s invasion, the Japanese in the mid-nineteenth century, and suggests
the most recent example ‘was the initial phase of Mikhail Gorbachev’s own
perestroika’.10 The message is clear, though Fukuyama spares making it. Once the
scientific knowledge behind nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction
(biological, chemical) is uncovered, there is no going back, just as the rifle rendered
the spear forever outdated.
The second irreversible impact of modern scientific knowledge on societies’

historical evolution is, for Fukuyama, even more important, for it concerns nothing
less than how it directs ‘the progressive conquest of nature for the purpose of
satisfying human desires’. Understood in that broad sense, he is content to refer to
it as ‘economic development’. Here, Fukuyama points not only to the spectacular
successes of industrialisation in vastly increasing per capita income, but also to ‘the
bringing to bear of human reason to the problem of social organisation and
the creation of a rational division of labour’.11 Just as military competition involved
certain common ‘modernising’ processes, so ‘economic growth produced certain
uniform social transformations in all societies, regardless of their prior social
structure’,12 and he cites among other examples the extreme case of the necessary
breakdown of apartheid in South Africa as a precondition of the ‘rational
bureaucratic organisation’ that economic development nowadays requires.
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THE END OF HISTORY?
The effect of scientific knowledge, particularly modern science, thus provides a

mechanism which impacts cumulatively upon the evolution of societies through
military competition and economic development. But is it irreversible? His answer
is yes. Aware that ‘the deliberate rejection of technology and a rationalised society
has been suggested by any number of groups in modern times’13 – e.g., the hippies,
Islamic fundamentalism, and the environmentalists – he finds their origins in the
‘back to nature’ ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But for Fukuyama it is simply
unrealistic to expect people, ‘once they have experienced the consumerism of a
technological society’, to turn back the clock of economic development. It would
mean becoming ‘reacquainted with the life of a poor peasant tied to the land in an
unending cycle of back-breaking labour’.14
Alternatively, some nuclear holocaust might push many countries ‘back to
nature’ against their will. But, whatever the effects on the world as a whole,
Fukuyama does not believe that ‘modern natural science . . . can ever be forgotten
or “un-invented”’, short of ‘the physical annihilation of the human race’.15
Thus, the ‘Mechanism’ provided by scientific knowledge produces an irreversible

directionality to human history – and Fukuyama’s next point is that economically
this leads to, and culminates in, modern capitalism (i.e., the principles of economic
liberalism). Here again the twentieth century has been a testing-bed for competing
economic systems, and it is clear to Fukuyama that the free-market economy has
emerged victorious. The centralised, state-planned economies of the communist
bloc ultimately failed to keep up with the productive power of Western capitalist
economies once the latter moved from the age of heavy manufacture into the
‘information age’. Today’s ‘post-industrial’ world thrives on innovation, which
requires freedom of thought and individual initiative. Also, ‘the complexity of
modern economies proved to be simply beyond the capacities of centralised
bureaucracies to manage’,16 whilst control over prices and the allocation of goods
prohibited communist economies ‘from participating in the international division
of labour’.17 Finally, central planning undermined people’s incentive to work.
Taken together, Fukuyama suggests that ‘it was in the highly complex and
dynamic “post-industrial” economic world that Marxism-Leninism as an economic
system met its Waterloo’,18 and he observes that ‘by the end of the 1980s . . . China,
the Soviet Union, and the countries of Eastern Europe can be seen as having
succumbed to the economic logic of advanced industrialisation’.19
He argues the same applies to Third World countries. Although, ever since
Lenin’s thesis about imperialism (1916), there have been theorists claiming that
‘the global capitalist economic order’ kept undeveloped countries in ‘a state of
perpetual dependent development’, such that many regarded socialism as a more
promising economic strategy for Third World countries, this theory ‘has by now
been exploded . . . by one large phenomenon it cannot possibly explain: that is, the
economic development of East Asia in the postwar period’.20 Countries such as
South Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia ‘demonstrated that late modernisers were
actually advantaged relative to more established industrial powers’, and where
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regions such as Latin-America have not grown so fast, this is because of complex
cultural factors (including the nature of the work-ethic), combined with the fact
that ‘capitalism has never worked in Latin America and other parts of the Third
World because it has never been seriously tried’.21
Fukuyama admits that ‘the logic of a progressive modern natural science
predisposes human societies towards capitalism only to the extent that men can see
their own economic self-interest clearly’, but he claims that the empirical
experience of regions such as Asia and Eastern Europe should contribute towards
‘a very strong predisposition for all human societies’ to participate in the economic
liberalism of globalisation.22 Cultures which appear less favourable to this
development can change.
But not only is the ‘mechanism’ of modern science irreversible in its economic
effects, progressively bringing countries towards a capitalist economic system. For
Fukuyuma it also culminates in capitalism. Conceding that ‘the Mechanism is . . .
a kind of Marxist interpretation of history’ because based on ‘the desire of “man the
species-being” to produce and consume’ – ‘a highly elastic desire’ not limited to so-
called ‘natural needs’, but ‘whose own horizon of possibilities is constantly being
pushed back’ – nevertheless ‘the kind of society that permits people to produce
and consume the largest quantity of products on the most equal basis is not a
communist one, but a capitalist society’.23 And it would appear that Fukuyama,
having rejected the historical alternatives to capitalism, cannot conceive of any
other economic system which could better fulfil man’s economic drives. As such,
then, capitalism is the end-story of the irreversible directionality which the progress
of science produces in terms of economic systems.
The ‘Mechanism’ behind liberal democracy

Fukuyama then asks whether this same ‘mechanism’ also determines that, politically,
societies should culminate as liberal democracies. His answer is no. Although many
have argued a necessary correlation between liberal democracy and the high degree
of economic development afforded by capitalism, he disputes this. Whilst agreeing
that there are many empirical examples of such correlations both today and from
history, he does not find the generalities derived from these cases convincing – for
example, that ‘only democracy is capable of mediating the complex web of
conflicting interests that are created by a modern economy’;24 or that dictatorial
regimes (of either the right or left) ‘naturally’ evolve into democracies because
unable to hold in check the struggles between the elite groups they spawn; or that
‘successful industrialisation produces middle-class societies, and that middle-class
societies demand political participation and equality of rights’.25
None of these arguments explain ‘why there should be a universal evolution
in the direction of liberal democracy’,26 and look even more unconvincing
when one recognises that ‘there is considerable evidence to indicate that market-
oriented authoritarian modernisers do better economically than their democratic
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THE END OF HISTORY?
counterparts’27 – e.g., Meiji Japan, Chile under Pinochet, and particularly the newly
industrialised economies in Asia (e.g., Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand). These
typically conservative, authoritarian regimes are, according to Fukuyama, ‘on
principle better able to follow truly liberal economic policies undistorted by
redistributive goals that constrain growth’, whereas not only do democratic states
attempt the latter, they are also reluctant to restrain competition. Yet, ‘state
intervention in the market, competently executed and remaining within the broad
parameters of a competitive market, has quite evidently been fully compatible with
very high levels of growth’.
For these reasons Fukuyama concludes that ‘the Mechanism underlying our
directional history’, although leading to capitalist economies, does not necessarily
lead to political democracy, but ‘leads equally well to a bureaucratic-authoritarian
future as to a liberal one’.28 Thus he asks, what has driven the evolution to
democracy if it has not been the product of capitalism, itself the product of the
‘Mechanism’ of modern natural science? His answer brings us to the philosophical
heart of Fukuyama’s thesis.
We have just seen Fukuyama rejecting any necessary connection between capitalist
economics and liberal-democratic politics. He goes further, saying that in historical
development ‘there are other aspects of human motivation that have nothing to
do with economics’, and that ‘democracy is almost never chosen for economic
reasons’.29 Not only this, but even if the ‘mechanism’ of modern natural science
and its necessary link to capitalism were proposed as the sole motor of historical
change, this would only apply since the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution.
Also, there have been ‘discontinuities’ apparently contradicting, or at least
interrupting, the meaningful flow of history (he cites the Holocaust in that light)
which any satisfactory universal theory of history should also be able to
accommodate.
Fukuyama thus declares the need to find a second and deeper ‘Mechanism’ on
which to ground a truly Universal History, and claims to find it in Hegel. ‘For
Hegel, the primary motor of human history is not modern natural science or the
ever expanding horizon of desire that powers it, but rather a totally non-economic
drive, the struggle for recognition’.30 This ‘motor’ not only allows us to account for
the apparent ‘discontinuities’ in history occasioned by wars of e.g., religion and
nationalism, but its Hegelian derivation also encourages us to view historical
development as emerging from contradictions which are resolved by successively
higher socio-political structures – i.e., what both Hegel and Marx called ‘dialectics’.
This is important for Fukuyama, since if history reaches a point where there are no
longer any fundamental ‘contradictions’, then History is ended. In this light,
Fukuyama asks, ‘Are there any “contradictions” in our contemporary liberal
democratic social order that would lead us to expect that the historical process will
continue, and produce a new, higher order?’.31 His answer is going to be ‘no’.
396
Some preparatory reservations

In explaining why not, Fukuyama cites his enormous respect for the ideas of the
mid-twentieth-century French-Russian philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, who built
upon Hegel’s ideas about ‘the struggle for recognition’, and concluded that ‘the
modern liberal democratic world . . . is free of contradictions’, and that therefore
‘we have reached the end of history because life in the universal and homogenous
state is completely satisfying to its citizens’.32 From this, it is fair to say that
Fukuyama’s book is both an update and an elaboration of Kojève’s thesis, itself
derived from the latter’s reading of Hegel.
To further complicate the provenance of Fukuyama’s central philosophical
theme, he also claims to find the same essential idea about ‘the struggle for
recognition’ in Plato’s characterisation of that ‘spirited’ part of the soul, different
from both its reasoning and its desiring part, which he termed ‘thymos’ – the feature
Plato thought should dominate the Guardian class of his Republic, since their
function was to employ their public-spiritedness in fighting for the honour of
the state.
In another context this somewhat complex sourcing of Fukuyama’s key
philosophical idea could occasion sustained critical comment, for it is by no means
certain he has understood Hegel correctly, and his appeal to Plato could be seen
as a forced argument. But because we should deal with Fukuyama’s arguments as
they stand (their origins strictly speaking being irrelevant to his thesis), let us
straight away suggest where he might have misinterpreted and/or misused both
Hegel and Plato, and then leave the matter at that.
Fukuyama makes much of Hegel’s analysis of ‘the bloody battle for recognition’
by which the first men distinguished themselves from animals (see below). For
Fukuyama this is quintessentially an example of ‘spirit’ in operation, and as
Gourevitch rightly notes in a critical essay, Fukuyama simply treats Hegel’s notion
of ‘Spirit’ or ‘Geist’ as ‘collective human consciousness’, thereby appearing ‘fully to
accept Kojève’s utterly anthropologised Hegel’ by neglecting any transcendental
(or ‘metaphysical’) dimension to the latter’s philosophy. This is so tendentious
as to be seriously misleading to those unfamiliar with Hegel, and thus needs
pointing out. We might add that in the same context it is curious that Fukuyama,
having extracted what Hegel says about ‘the struggle for recognition’ from his
Phenomenology of Mind, virtually ignores those two later works where Hegel himself
directly addresses philosophy of history – namely, The Philosophy of Right and The
Philosophy of History!
Similar concerns apply to Fukuyama’s appeal to Plato’s notion of thymos or
‘spiritedness’. Gourevitch notes Fukuyama’s ‘apparent dismissal of the decisive
difference between Socrates-Plato’s “spiritedness” and Hegel-Kojève’s “recogni-
tion”’.33 To this serious complaint we might add that, whatever Plato meant by
‘thymos’, it never occurred to him that it was the key to understanding the motor
of historical change! (A like complaint can be made of Fukuyama’s reading of
Hobbes’s notion of ‘glory’, which with similar tendentiousness he again equates
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THE END OF HISTORY?
with a non-materialistic desire for ‘recognition’,34 despite Hobbes’ theory that men
seek power for security, and that ‘reputation’ is merely one kind of ‘power’ amongst
others.)
This said, we should acknowledge that Fukuyama himself recognises that the
Hegel he takes from Kojève’s interpretation might not be ‘really Hegel as he
understood himself’, and has the candour to confess that in his appeal to Hegel (to
which he could have added e.g., Plato and Hobbes) ‘we will be more interested in
the ideas themselves than in the philosophers who originally articulated them’.35
Still somewhat disingenuous – (for did they articulate them?) – we should proceed
by accepting the spirit of Fukuyama’s remarks and focus on the idea of ‘recognition’
which he intuits.
‘Spirit’, thymos, the desire for recognition

After this necessary interlude, let us briefly re-locate our exposition. Because the
‘mechanism’ of modern science, although explaining capitalism, cannot explain
liberal democracy, some other factor has been in play throughout history. Fukuyama
claims to find this in that permanent, ‘trans-historical’, feature of human nature
which he calls the desire for recognition.
To explain what he means he first refers to what he takes to be Hegel’s account
of ‘the state of nature’, where, from the beginning, man not only desired the
physical objects necessary for survival and comfort, ‘but also objects that are totally
non-material’. Of the latter, and ‘above all, he desires the desire of other men, that
is, to be wanted by others or to be recognised’.36 This is the very condition of man
being self-conscious – i.e., that he is recognised by others, such that ‘his own sense
of self-worth and identity is intimately connected with the value that other people
place on him’.
But this impulse goes deeper, for man is (allegedly) different from animals not
only in seeking recognition from others, but this recognition must revolve around
what makes him human – and what makes man human is his preparedness to risk
his life in defence of his sense of worth. ‘In the beginning’ there thus ensues a
‘bloody battle’ between men where ‘each contestant seeks to make the other
“recognise” him by risking his own life’. Either both die, one dies, or ‘the battle can
terminate in the relationship of lordship and bondage, in which one of the contes-
tants decides to submit to a life of slavery rather than face the risk of violent
death’.37 The master has thus achieved recognition of his willingness to risk his life
‘for pure prestige’, and this struggle of ‘self-creation’ is ‘the first authentically human
act’. But, says Fukuyama, ‘it is far from the last’, for it clearly ‘leaves us still a very
long way from modern liberal democracy’. Rather, ‘the problem of human history
can be seen . . . as the search for a way to satisfy the desire of both masters and slaves
for recognition on a mutual and equal basis; history ends with the victory of a social
order that accomplishes this goal’.38
398
Fukuyama thus puts an enormous weight upon ‘the desire for recognition’ as a
motor behind the socio-political evolution of human history – and partly because
he is aware that, as a foundation for political order, this feature is alien to the
thinking behind the Western liberal-democratic tradition as it emerged from
the ‘social contract’ theories of, particularly, Hobbes and Locke, he devotes an
interesting chapter to explaining the difference. Uncontroversially, Fukuyama
points out that the ‘social contract’ theory centres on a one-dimensional view of
man which sees him as a rational being pursuing his own self-interest – the latter,
in addition, being construed (narrowly) in terms of self-preservation and material
welfare. But for Fukuyama this results in liberal society’s ‘most typical product’,
the bourgeois individual, who does ‘not need to be public-spirited, patriotic, or
concerned for the welfare of those around him’,39 and he asks whether there is ‘not
something deeply contemptible about a man who cannot raise his sights’ to the
‘noble passions of patriotism, courage, generosity, and public-spiritedness?’. There
is, then, something higher in human nature – namely, that moral dimension
whereby throughout history man has repeatedly shown himself capable of risking
his life ‘for an objective or principle that lies beyond the body’. Hegel called it
‘Freedom’, Fukuyama derives it from ‘the desire for recognition’, and he repeats
that ‘it is this moral dimension, and the struggle to have it recognised, that is the
motor driving the dialectical process of history’.40
Given its importance, Fukuyama elaborates further upon this aspect of human
nature, claiming it is a notion ‘as old as Western political philosophy itself’, Plato
having first analysed it as thymos.41 In Plato’s tripartite division of the soul, to
appetite and reason is added the sense of self-esteem, which, when trampled upon,
generates anger. As Fukuyama sees it, in explaining the powerful relationship
between self-esteem, the sense of indignation, and the self-disregarding anger which
follows, ‘thymos is something like an innate human sense of justice’, the desire that
we should be recognised ‘according to our own estimate of our worth’. As such,
‘Plato’s thymos is therefore nothing other than the psychological seat of Hegel’s
desire for recognition’,42 and Fukuyama goes on to give what (for him) is a telling
example of it at work in recent times. Under the communist regimes of Eastern
Europe people were daily faced with having to make moral compromises – e.g.,
saying things they did not believe in, remaining silent while colleagues were
persecuted – in order to carry on their lives. This affront to the ‘thymotic’ part of
their nature caused them a sense of humiliation and indignation, and it was this,
according to Havel, who became president of Czechoslovakia in 1989, which was
the chief factor in the failure of communism to satisfy its citizens: not a failure to
satisfy ‘economic’ man, but the failure to satisfy man’s moral longing for justice
and esteem. Thus, for Fukuyama, ‘the desire for recognition has . . . played a critical
role in bringing about the anti-communist earthquake in the Soviet Union, Eastern
Europe, and China’.43
Pursuing this, Fukuyama not only attacks communist states for suppressing
thymos in their citizens, but claims this defect ‘pervades many aspects of day-to-day
life that we commonly think of as economic’, including in liberal democratic states.
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THE END OF HISTORY?
Again criticising the (utilitarian) ‘social contract’ theory, he says that ‘the good
political order needs to be something more than a mutual non-aggression pact’.
Rather, ‘it must also satisfy man’s just desire for recognition of his dignity and
worth’,44 and thus provide outlets for the nobler virtues of courage, moral integrity,
and public-spiritedness. Indeed, so accustomed have we become to overlooking
these human instincts derived from thymos, and instead concentrating on the
combination of desire and reason which delineate economic man, we risk neglecting
the immense role the former plays in history. For example, wage struggles are not
only about material wealth, but also about status; revolutions are not so much
caused by poverty but by the rising expectations generated as people compare their
already developing societies with wealthy countries, ‘and grow angry as a result’.
Fukuyama applies this to the 1789 French Revolution, and observes that ‘in the
contemporary world, only the poorest and richest countries tend to be stable’.45
Likewise, the American Civil War cannot be interpreted on economic grounds.
The goals of the opposing sides concerned their respective senses of identity, partly
related to the slavery issue and their respective ways of life. In the same vein
Fukuyama points to many issues of contemporary American politics – e.g., abortion,
racism, civil rights in general – which have little real economic content, instead
being ‘thymotic contests over recognition of competing understandings of justice
and human dignity’.46
For Fukuyama, all such scenarios demonstrate a crucial feature of thymos –
namely, that it can extend from individuals seeking recognition for their own worth
to seeking recognition for other peoples’ worth, often of one’s own grouping (e.g.,
ethnicity), but also of those to which one does not belong (e.g., the international
anti-apartheid movement). Indeed, we should recognise the complex psychology
by which the essentially self-assertive character of thymos leads to the struggle to
indeed impose one’s own moral values on others, and not confuse such situations
with the simple pursuit of self-interest.
The graphically archetypal exemplar of all these aspects of thymos are
represented, for Fukuyama, by the pictures of the lone man confronting a tank in
Tiananmen Square during the 1989 student protests in Beijing. Since then,
however, others might point more ominously to the relentless series of suicide
bombings by Palestinians on Israeli ‘targets’ or, of course, the suicide plane attacks
on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, as confirmation of the
notion that in their ‘struggle for recognition’ some are prepared not only to risk their
lives, but to give them.
Megalothymia
If the last remarks point to an alarming aspect to thymos, (unless one construed such
acts as its perversion), Fukuyama himself now introduces a qualification to his
concept of thymos which is to play a crucial role in his philosophy of history. Having
so far presented thymos ‘as the source of . . . noble virtues’, he urges that ‘there is a
dark side to the desire for recognition as well, . . . that has led many philosophers
400
to believe that thymos is the fundamental source of human evil’.47 This is the desire
in some people not to be regarded as equal to others, but as superior. This passion
(for it can become such) exhibits itself as much ‘in the concert pianist who wants
to be recognised as the foremost interpreter of Beethoven’ as it does ‘in the tyrant
who invades and enslaves a neighbouring people so that they will recognise his
authority’,48 and Fukuyama terms it ‘megalothymia’. (He thus finds a new term for
the benign form of thymos, where one simply demands equal respect – namely,
‘isothymia’). But it is indeed in political life ‘that megalothymia is a highly problematic
passion’, for it has spawned ‘the tyrannical ambition of a Caesar or a Stalin’, and
Fukuyama interprets much Western political thought as trying to address the
dangers it poses to societies (e.g., concerns about imperialism in the Middle Ages,
Machiavelli’s concept of ‘glory’, and early-modern liberal thinkers who saw in the
development of commercial societies a way of curbing the warlike passion of princes
and the aristocratic class).49
As the desire for greatness, megalothymia has thus played a crucial role in
historical political life. Indeed, Fukuyama goes so far as to claim that if we paid
proper attention to the twin sides of ‘the desire for recognition’, megalothymia and
isothymia, it would suggest ‘a very different way of reading the historical process, not
as the story of the unfolding of modern natural science or of the logic of economic
development, but rather as the emergence, growth, and eventual decline of
megalothymia’.50
But, for Fukuyama, regrettably we do not pay attention to it. Why not? Precisely
because ‘in terms of what we say about ourselves, [megalothymia] has been ethically
vanquished in the modern world’. He suggests two reasons for this. First, he refers
to the ‘thorough-going economisation of life’, through which the desiring part of the
soul has ousted megalothymia in our materialist, consumer cultures. Second, it has
been eclipsed in modern times by the other side to thymos, namely, isothymia. If the
language of glory and superiority has become politically incorrect, ‘words like
“dignity”, “respect”, “self-respect”, and “self-esteem” . . . permeate our political life
and are indispensable to an understanding of the democratic transformation that
has occurred around the world in the late twentieth century’.
Isothymia
Fukuyuma suggests that this contemporary dominance of isothymia might, in fact,
be seen as representing a failure on behalf of ‘the founders of the Anglo-Saxon
tradition of modern liberalism’, because they had ‘sought to banish thymos from
political life’ altogether. But this would be to equate that utilitarian ‘social contract’
basis to liberalism with more contemporary liberalism. The latter, according to
Fukuyama, does not suppress thymos altogether, but ‘tries to preserve the thymotic
side of the human personality rather than exiling it from the realm of politics’.51 It
does this by fulfilling isothymia, and this achievement offers us a higher under-
standing of the nature of modern liberal democracy – i.e., the ‘universal and
homogenous state’ with its universal citizenship and equality of rights.
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THE END OF HISTORY?
The exploration of this logic reverts Fukuyama to Hegel. If, ‘in the beginning’,
the ‘bloody battle for recognition’ led to lordship and bondage, that situation could
not hold. In winning the prestige battle, the master is recognised by the slave. But
the slave failed to achieve his own humanity ‘due to his having given in to his
natural fear of death’, and thus ‘the master’s worth is therefore recognised by
someone not quite human’.52 The master’s desire for recognition as human is to that
extent unsatisfied, although in pre-modern history he often tried to satisfy it by
warring with other masters.
However, Fukuyama is more interested in the slave’s mentality. The slave is also
unsatisfied, but in his case this leads to ‘creative and enriching change’. The reasons
for this centre on what the slave does – namely, work. Although forced to work,
his motive eventually changes from one of fear of punishment to one of ‘a sense of
duty and self-discipline’ – i.e., a work-ethic. This involves suppressing his animal
desires, and is thus a humanising factor in his experience. The latter develops as
the slave realises he can transform the materials of nature into ‘something else
based on a pre-existing idea or concept’,53 and it is this freedom to create, outside
the constraints of natural need, which confirms man’s human nature. Thus, the
slave conceives of the idea of freedom from, and mastery over, nature, and its
connection with what it is to be human.
Not yet actually free from his master, however, the slave is thus limited to
‘philosophising’ about freedom and being truly human, this resulting in various
slave ideologies such as Stoicism and Scepticism – but the most important of
them was Christianity, because it ‘was the first to establish the principle of the
universal equality of all men in the sight of God, on the basis of their faculty for
moral choice’. As Fukuyama puts it, ‘the thymotic sense of self-worth . . . has
something in common with the inner dignity and freedom of the Christian
believer’, whilst ‘the Kingdom of Heaven . . . presents the prospect of a world in
which the isothymia of every man – though not the megalothymia of the vainglorious
– will be satisfied’. As in Hegel, then, for Fukuyama, Christianity’s contribution to
the development of history was immense because of its humanising effect on
people’s consciousness – particularly, of course, the lower orders’ longing for equal
recognition.
But the other side to Christianity, as a ‘slave’ ideology, is to reconcile ‘real-world
slaves to their lack of freedom by telling them not to expect liberation in this life’.54
What Christianity proffered as a hope it took away in reality, and what was required
was the final recognition that God was man’s creation, and that man was merely
subjecting himself to a new form of slavery insofar as he bowed down in self-
abnegation before ‘God’. Extraordinarily, Fukuyama offers the latter ideas as
Hegel’s, whereas most commentators would identify them as distinctive to Hegel’s
severe critic, Feuerbach, who argued that man’s idea of God was in fact man’s idea
of the potential of his own species (an idea taken up by the young Marx). Be this
as it may, what was required for the ‘completion of the historical process’ whereby
‘the free and autonomous individual . . . is recognised universally and reciprocally
by all men’, was ‘a secularisation of Christianity, that is, a translation of the
402
Christian idea of freedom into the here-and-now’. But this fulfilment (as Marx
would have pointed out) could not come about simply by a revolution in thought
(that is, although Fukuyama does not expressly say so, by the abandoning of the
Christian religion), but also ‘required one more bloody battle, the battle in which
the slave liberates himself from the master’.55 And, as in Hegel, for Fukuyama this
was the significance of the 1789 French Revolution, which, if it did not complete
the process all at once, heralded its fulfilment.
The point for Fukuyama of the above analysis of thymos and its two constituents,
megalothymia and isothymia, is fourfold. First, he has identified a second ‘mechanism’
in addition to the irreversible progress of modern natural science. The latter
culminates economically in capitalist societies, and he concedes it only really applies
to roughly the last four hundred years, whereas the motor of thymos applies to
history from the earliest times. Second, the latter drives the political development
of societies, thus explaining factors and ‘discontinuities’ in history which cannot
be explained on a purely utilitarian or economic basis. Third, it provides ‘the
missing link between liberal economics and liberal politics’, such that we can better
understand why the two have (eventually) come to operate in tandem in the
modern world. And fourth, analysis of the logic underlying thymos vindicates
the notion that, if capitalism is the final form of economic evolution, so liberal
democracy is the final form of its political evolution, thus completing his ‘end of
history’ thesis.
Fukuyama, however, recognises this last assertion as particularly controversial,
and thus proceeds to defend it. Rightly, the issue for him is not so much whether,
empirically, liberal democracies abound and are still gaining ground in today’s world,
but whether on philosophical grounds their form, ‘the universal and homogenous
state’, is indeed ‘the last stage in human history because it [is] completely satisfying
to man’,56 thereby not only resolving earlier ‘contradictions’ but ensuring no new
ones emerge to change history further. This leads him to elaborate on the (thymotic)
logic behind liberal democracy, and to explore ‘both the prospects and limitations
of the current worldwide liberal revolution’57 to see whether that logic is indeed
working in practice.
Because his exploration of this involves him in a sustained analysis of the current
world and, indeed, its future prospects, we might almost say that the remainder of
his book is more devoted to contemporary political philosophy, his speculative
philosophy of history having been completed by this point. This is partly true, but
because his exploration is so intimately informed by his preceding philosophy (in
fact, constituting his vindication of it) then, in shedding further light on it, it is
worthwhile following the principal points he makes.
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THE END OF HISTORY?
The contemporary world
Thymos and liberal democracy

First, Fukuyama defends his equation of liberal democracy with what he has called
‘the universal and homogenous state’. Whereas ‘Hobbesian or Lockean liberalism
can be interpreted as the pursuit of rational self-interest’, contemporary liberalism
(following Hegel) ‘can be seen as the pursuit of rational recognition, that is,
recognition on a universal basis in which the dignity of each person as a free and
autonomous person is recognised by all’.58 The properly liberal state does just this.
It is universal because it ‘grant[s] recognition to all its citizens because they are
human beings, and not because they are members of some particular national,
ethnic, or racial group’. And it is homogenous because ‘it creates a classless society
based on the abolition of the distinction between master and slaves’. Lastly it is
rational insofar as ‘the authority of the state does not arise out of age-old tradition
or from the murky depths of religious faith’, but from citizens’ explicit agreement
on the terms by which they live together.59 These key features of liberal democracy
are exemplified in the equal rights such societies attribute to citizens, amongst which
Fukuyama cites the right to life, property, freedom of expression, and political
participation (voting, standing for office, etc.) although it is perhaps significant that
he does not refer to that clarion call represented by The Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948), nor the European Convention on Human Rights (1950),
possibly because the former is a United Nations document (and he has his doubts
about the UN) and the latter, similarly sourced, also contains extra ‘rights’ which
some argue cannot be truly ‘universal’.60
Second, however, Fukuyama recognises that liberal democracy has not yet become
universal around the world despite his claim that, apart from the Islamic world,
there is ‘a general consensus’ on the superiority of liberal democratic ideology.
Moreover, even where states are liberal-democratic, they are not always stable as
such. The reason for these obstacles ‘lies ultimately in the incomplete
correspondence between peoples and states’.61 ‘Peoples’ are cultural phenomena,
with their own distinctive customs, religions, family structures, and the like – and,
as such, they are ‘sub-political’, whilst ‘states impose themselves on top of peoples’
and ‘in many cases sit in uneasy tension’ with them.
In short, however ‘rational’ the liberal-democratic state is, it ‘requires a degree
of conformity’ between its ideals and the pre-existing cultural and moral
characteristics of its people.62 The latter are features coming from the thymotic part
of human nature, and Fukuyama thus suggests existing liberal democracies should
take care to inculcate in their citizens ‘a certain irrational thymotic pride in their
political system and way of life’,63 rather than relying for stability on their capacity
to deliver economic prosperity and equal rights. As for countries not yet
democratic, cultural factors such as highly developed nationalism, illiberal
religions, or long-standing severe class hierarchies, constitute sources of resistance
404
to their full democratisation. However, Fukuyama disagrees with the view that
liberal democracy depends necessarily on certain cultural prerequisites, for a people’s
culture can change over time – and in any event he believes it can in fact be
advantageous to preserve facets of ‘sub-political’ culture within liberal democracies
as a way of enriching the thymotic basis to their otherwise somewhat coldly liberal-
rationalistic states.
Thymos and economics

If the influence of the thymotic phenomenon of ‘culture’ is crucial in assessing the
stability and future prospects of liberal democracy, so it is in considering capitalism’s
stability as an economic system, and its prospects for world-wide adoption. This is
important because not only is capitalism the effect of one of Fukuyama’s two
‘mechanisms’ of historical development – i.e., modern natural science. Also, ‘the
strong correlation between advanced industrialisation and democracy’ suggests
that if capitalism is not stable then liberal democracy is also at risk.
Here, Fukuyama’s prime concern is again to challenge the purely utilitarian-based
understanding of societies – but in this case applied to their economies. Centred
on work as the source of production and consumption, the economic world can be
construed solely in terms of ‘reason satisfying desire’ – and granted the universal
desire for wealth, it might seem that differing government policies are therefore the
sole factor determining economic development. But for Fukuyama this would be
to ignore the crucial role thymos plays in economic life.
He observes that ‘most successful modern economies may be capitalist’, but ‘not
all capitalist economies are successful – or, at any rate, as successful as others’.64 The
reason for this implicates thymos, for he argues that ‘culture affects economic
behaviour in certain critical ways just as it affects the ability of a people to sustain
liberal democracy’, citing such examples as ‘the superior economic performance
. . . of the Jews in Europe, the Chinese on Southeast Asia’, and, in the USA, the
contrast between ‘the descendants of blacks who voluntarily immigrated from
the West Indies, and those who were brought directly to the country from Africa
as slaves’.65 These differences are not explicable via simple economic motivation,
but ‘are determined by culture and custom, and are therefore related in some way
to thymos’.66
One such way is the relation between different religions and their respective
‘work-ethics’. For instance, the ‘Protestant work-ethic’, whereby work was seen as
‘a “calling” which the believer hoped would reflect his status as either saved or
damned’, can be contrasted with the discouraging ethos of the Hindu religion’s
sanctification of poverty for the lower castes, which Fukuyama suggests ‘induces
. . . a certain kind of “this-wordly” torpor and inertia which is in many respects the
opposite of the spirit of capitalism’.67 Interestingly, he speculates whether, as
countries such as USA and Japan become increasingly secularised, and thus
divorced from their respective cultural roots, their work-ethics might be
undermined by the ‘consumer society’, leading to ‘an undermining of capitalism
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THE END OF HISTORY?
itself’.68 On the other hand, thymotic motives other than religious belief, such as
working for the good of one’s family, or (as in many parts of Asia) in the interests
of group loyalty, may counteract this potential threat to economic stability in
capitalist economies, and Fukuyama concludes the theme by suggesting the most
obvious fact is the comparative failure of many Third World countries to make
capitalism work. Correct policies would help, but ‘ “irrational” forms of thymos –
religion, nationalism, the ability . . . to maintain standards and pride in work
– continue to influence economic behaviour in countless ways that contribute
to the wealth or poverty of nations’.69 Because of this, he claims substantial
international differences between countries’ economic performance will remain a
feature in the world-scene – but no longer because of ideological differences (the
ideology of capitalism having triumphed): rather, because of cultural factors relating
to thymos.
Now, Fukuyama argues, because the differing cultures of countries affect their
economic performance, this impinges upon that crucial link between capitalism
and liberal democracy which underpins his notion of ‘the end of history’. Where
economic progress towards capitalism is impeded by cultural factors, so therefore
are the prospects of a country’s becoming liberal-democratic in its politics. Instead,
‘some new authoritarian alternatives, perhaps never before seen in history, may
assert themselves in the future’. He claims this has already happened in the case of
the revival of Islamic fundamentalism in countries such as Iran, where ‘illiberal
doctrines’ have emerged ‘out of economic failure’. He interprets this in thymotic
terms, viewing it ‘as a response to the failure of Muslim societies generally to
maintain their dignity vis-a-vis the non-Muslim West’,70 (although he claims that
the ideological ‘revival’ is more an invention of some alleged past rather than a
reassertion of authentic ‘traditional’ Muslim values).
But, he adds, the same lack of correspondence between capitalism and liberal
democracy (involving cultural factors) can occur because of economic success rather
than failure – e.g., those many Asian countries whose retention of aspects of their
non-democratic political culture worked to their advantage as they embarked on
economic modernisation and capitalism. Their ‘tremendous economic success’
stemmed from their combining ‘liberal economics with a kind of paternalistic
authoritarianism’,71 and Fukuyama warns that a number of factors, especially the
manner in which the West treats Asian societies attitudinally, may conspire to
encourage ‘a systematic illiberal and non-democratic alternative combining
technical economic rationalism with paternalistic authoritarianism . . . in the
Far East’.72
Overall, from these analyses of the linkages between capitalism, liberal-democracy,

and the thymotic phenomenon of ‘culture’, Fukuyama concludes that, in principle,
‘important differences between states will remain’ because, although the current
world has witnessed ‘the victory of the universal and homogenous state’, leaving
behind earlier politico-economic forms, in practice ‘the possible interpretations of
the surviving forms, capitalism and liberal democracy, continue to be varied’.73 In
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short, although ‘the end of history’ may point in theory to the eventual literal
emergence of a one-world ‘universal and homogenous’ state, Fukuyama recognises
that the present reality of a world comprising numerous different states will
continue into the future.
Because of this, the realm of international relations will continue into ‘the end of
history’, and Fukuyama is thus rightly prompted into considering whether their
prognosis could indeed contradict his thesis by provoking some new stage of
historical development (either of a higher order, or some kind of reverse of history,
as in cyclical theories). I say ‘rightly prompted’ because, although historians rarely
think in the manner and scope of Fukuyama – i.e., speculative philosophy of history
– nevertheless, of the few ‘general rules’ most would admit to accepting is this: that
war is the greatest harbinger of historical change. This lends extra urgency to how
successfully Fukuyama incorporates the problem of international relations into
‘the end of history’.
International relations and war

He begins by saying that, if history is indeed uni-directional, then what ‘the
universal and homogenous state’ means for individuals within states – equal
recognition and the abolition of lordship and bondage – should apply to
relationships between states; namely, the end of imperialism and the wars associated
with it. (Fukuyama often uses ‘imperialism’ to encompass any warlike activities.)
However, he is aware of the many realpolitik theories about international relations
which claim ‘that insecurity is a universal and permanent feature of the
international order, due to the latter’s abidingly anarchic character’.74 Such ‘realist’
assumptions dictate the necessity of states’ preparedness for war, as well as strategies
to avoid it – including alliances and the maintenance of a ‘balance of power’,
exemplified in the Cold War. Such is the grip of ‘realpolitik’ upon international
strategists that Fukuyama ruefully observes that, even after the circumstances
provoking the Cold War were over (with the collapse of the Soviet Union), many
regretted the disappearance of bipolar Europe and feared a period of great
instability.
Fukuyama rejects this perspective on international relations because, for him,
it is based on the unrealistic and simplistic notion that neither human nature nor
societies’ motivations ever change. In a (contentious) interpretation of Hobbes’
‘state of nature’, he suggests instead that ‘in an anarchic international order’ there
is ‘absolutely no reason to assume that any state should feel threatened by another
state’,75 unless one were to believe that people, and states, are inherently aggressive.
According to Fukuyama, they are not. Rather, what provokes war within societies,
and between them, is not the instinct for self-preservation but more the desire for
recognition taking the form of wishing to impose one’s, or a society’s, views upon
another – i.e., megaloythmia. In history, he claims, war has been such a prevalent
feature because some states have been ‘like giant thymotic individuals’ who ‘seek
acknowledgement of their value or dignity on dynastic, religious, nationalist, or
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ideological grounds, and in the process force other states either to fight or to submit’.
This, then, ‘is the original source of imperialism’ and ‘the ultimate ground of war
among states . . ., [i.e.] thymos rather than self-preservation’.76
But not all states behave in such ways. Although it might be true that all states
seek ‘power’ (to achieve their national objectives), this is to employ a notion of
‘power’ so elastic – incorporating economic expansion, colonisation and
decolonisation, prestige – as to rob it of any analytic value. What is clear, rather,
is that the maximising of their ‘power’, particularly in its military form, is by no means
a universal feature of states’ behaviour – and Fukuyama cites contemporary Canada,
Spain, Holland, and Mexico as examples.
Thus, rather than interpret international relations and the history of war as
simply an endemic ‘power-game’, Fukuyama points instead to the influence of the
concept of legitimacy and its connection to thymos. The notion of ‘self-respect’ and
the desire to be esteemed by others has always played a crucial role in states’
behaviour – either, as in some modern examples of decolonisation, to reduce
aggression and domination, or, as in earlier times, to legitimate imperialistic
ventures whose logic extends to the achievement of a world-empire. In the latter
case, ‘the striving of princes for universal but unequal recognition was widely
regarded as legitimate’, and for Fukuyama exemplifies the megalothymia which
characterised aristocracy-based societies which dominated history for so long. The
wars that ensued were not only, nor solely, about territorial conquest. Some were
about imposing religious beliefs, e.g., as late as in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries in Europe. In their case, they were finally ended, as were the attitudes
legitimising them, by ‘the bourgeois revolution’ which,
sought to morally elevate the slave’s fear of death over the aristocratic
virtue of the master, and thereby to sublimate irrational manifestations
of thymos like princely ambition and religious fanaticism into the
unlimited accumulation of property.77
In short, the civil peace which accompanied the eventual emergence of liberal,
commercial societies ‘should logically have its counterpart in relations between
states’, because ‘imperialism and war were historically the product of aristocratic
societies’,78 and Fukuyama notes ‘the fundamentally un-warlike character of liberal
societies . . . evident in the extraordinarily peaceful relations they maintain among
one another’, citing studies which claim ‘few, if any, instances of one liberal
democracy going to war with another’. This, he suggests, is because ‘in such states
megalothymia has found other outlets besides war, or else has atrophied’.79 Indeed,
such is the ‘thoroughly bourgeois character of life in present-day Europe’ that it is
unthinkable that its states will return to ‘the competitive great power behaviour
of the nineteenth century’.
This, however, does not rule out liberal democracies fighting wars against non-
liberal regimes, and this of course occurred precisely in the twentieth century,
which showed that ‘history’s most destructive wars have in fact occurred since the
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bourgeois revolution’. One explanation is that, at least earlier in the century,

despite the liberal-bourgeois revolution which Europe had mainly achieved, its
ruling classes were still drawn from the aristocracy, ‘for whom concepts of national
greatness and glory had not been displaced by commerce’. But Fukuyama suggests
a deeper reason ‘drawn directly from the history of thymos’; namely, that ‘between
the older forms of recognition represented by dynastic and religious ambition, and
the fully modern resolution it finds in the universal and homogenous state, thymos
can take the form of nationalism’.80 The latter not only ‘had much to do with the
wars’ of the twentieth century but, writing in the early 1990s, Fukuyama claims that
nationalism’s resurgence continues to threaten the peace of post-communist
Europe. This powerful force thus needs to be understood. In particular, the above
implication that it is only a transitional phenomenon which will eventually
disappear at ‘the end of history’ is one he sets about considering.
Nationalism
Fukuyama begins by claiming that nationalism ‘is a specifically modern
phenomenon’ because within a country it involves ‘mutual and equal recognition’
between citizens. Yet nationalism is not fully ‘rational’ because ‘the dignity
nationalists seeks to have recognised is not universal human dignity, but dignity
for their group’.81 Thus, it remains a source of war because representing the
incomplete sublimation of ‘the master’s megalothymia’. Although he had said earlier
that ‘megalothymia – the desire to be recognised as superior – has been ethically
vanquished in the modern world’,82 it would appear that this is not entirely the case.
Some states still act ‘like giant thymotic individuals’, and they do so under the
influence of nationalism.
But this need not continue as some ineradicable feature of human nature and
international relations. Rather, nationalism is a specifically historical phenomenon
related to those circumstances in modern history when a society, ‘having gone
through the first phases of economic modernisation, is denied both national
identity and political freedom’83 – and just as, in Fukuyama’s judgement, the
‘combination of liberalism and economic self-interest . . . vanquished religion in
Europe’, such that religion has been ousted from politics and instead ‘relegated to
the sphere of private life’, so the same combination can ‘defang’ and ‘modernise’
nationalism. In short, political nationalism can become cultural nationalism, where
‘national groups can retain their separate languages and senses of identity’,84 but
express no political intolerance whatever towards other nationalities and countries.
Again, the very historicity (and thus transitoriness) of nationalism is demonstrated
by the circumstances in which it resurfaced to disturb the peace in the 1990s in
Eastern Europe, where ‘national and ethnic groups long denied a voice express[ed]
themselves in favour of sovereignty and independent existence’, and Fukuyama
concedes that ‘the breakup of long-standing multi-ethnic states promises to be a
violent and bloody affair’,85 just as was the ‘almost virtually triumphant’ rise of
Third World nationalism which drove the French ‘out of Vietnam and Algeria, the
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USA out of Vietnam, the Soviets out of Afghanistan, the Libyans out of Chad, the
Vietnamese out of Cambodia, and so forth’.
Fukuyama recognises the understandable intensity of nationalism in such
contexts, but again complains of the shortsightedness of those who thus believe it
will continue as a permanent feature in world affairs. Rather, those same forces
which originally fostered it – democratisation breaking down class barriers and
economic modernisation creating ‘centralised, linguistically homogenous’ societies
– are leaving nationalism behind them in many parts of the world, as they now
encourage ‘the creation of a single, integrated world market’, such that sooner or
later history will see ‘the final political neutralisation of nationalism’ altogether.86
In the meantime, however, where industrialisation and nationalism are late
arrivals – principally the Third World – nationalism will still provoke wars. Indeed,
Fukuyama suggests that in these regions there will not only be nationalist conflicts,
but also religious and ideological ones. And this prompts him to introduce a bold
vocabulary, albeit one perfectly in line with his overall thesis – namely, the notion
that at present the world is divided into a post-historical part and an historical part,
the latter being ‘still stuck in history’.87 The post-historical world (of liberal-
democratic states with capitalist economies) will still be divided into nation-states,
but they will remain at peace because nationalism’s political fangs have been drawn.
Indeed, such is the difference between the post-historical and historical worlds
that, although ‘the boundary line . . . is changing rapidly and is therefore hard to
draw’,88 Fukuyama suggests they will have comparatively little to do with each
other – except, that is, where they collide. And this is likely to happen over oil,
immigration, and ‘world-order’ issues such as the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction and environmental threats. To the extent such collisions involve the
historical world using the ‘realist’ strategy of power-politics, the post-historical
world must be prepared to use the same methods in defence. However, Fukuyama
is quite clear that the latter should not go on the military offensive in order to spread
itself further around the planet. Rather, he urges that peace is best procured by the
post-historical states relying on the principles of democratic legitimacy and the
manner in which they ‘satisfy the human longing for recognition’.89 Writing in
the early 1990s it is interesting to note his assertion: ‘No one, of course, would
advocate a policy of military challenge to non-democratic states armed with
powerful weapons, especially nuclear ones’;90 and his urging that human rights
issues should not be shelved to ‘accommodate’ states in the historical world, nor if
having to engage militarily with them.
Rather, liberal-democratic states should keep banging the ideological drum, by
which means they can better hope both to keep international peace and promote
liberal democracy elsewhere – a mutually enhancing strategy.
The end of history?

The preceding section has explored Fukuyama’s estimation of how far a factual
analysis of the present world vindicates his theory of history. But just as it has not
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been strictly to our purpose to follow exhaustively all the examples his impressive
survey embraces, neither has it been to challenge his judgements. Rather, the
section has been germane because it has revealed further insights into his overall
philosophy of history. First, his survey involved him in many historical examples of
his concrete application, in particular, of thymos to actual societies, bringing this
otherwise ‘philosophical’ concept to life. But also he has quite properly raised and
considered many possible objections to his theory which that survey might suggest.
For example, he concedes that ‘cultural’ factors can interfere with the link that
otherwise operates between economic modernisation and liberal democracy, such
that new authoritarian types of regime might emerge – and, for example, his view
that political nationalism is by no means a spent force. To that extent he is prepared
to be self-critical about his notion of ‘the end of history’, reserving that status at
present to the ‘post-historical’ world. However, this self-criticism does not extend
to his having to concede that the ‘historical’ world is not subject to the same
irreversible ‘mechanisms’ of development in the long run. On the contrary, he uses
his notion of ‘thymos’ precisely to explain why certain states lag behind in that
recalcitrant world – but also why the vast majority of the world will indeed arrive
at liberal democracy and free-market capitalism.
What doubts Fukuyama expresses, then, are not about the efficacy of his two
‘mechanisms’. Rather, they concern his claim that the (presently dominant) ‘post-
historical’ world will remain for evermore essentially unchanged. It is this aspect of
his overall theory which has attracted most controversy, particularly since
Fukuyama has been simplistically portrayed as promoting its unassailable truth.
But this is a misrepresentation. The matter is less than certain in his mind. There
are strong elements in his theory to sustain that thesis, but in his view these same
elements could also point to its being a fallacy. In short, he thinks he has got the
mechanisms of history right, but is it ‘the end of history’?
Fukuyama devotes the last part of his book to considering this in terms of two
interrelated questions. Is liberal democracy desirable in itself as fully satisfying? And,
are there ‘contradictions’ still inherent in liberal democracy which would leave
history unfinished?
The challenge from the Left

He first reminds us of that other ‘mechanism’ driving history in addition to thymos,
– namely, modern science fulfilling economic desire, and asks whether these two
mechanisms may not collide rather than collude. The Left, he maintains, can be
interpreted as implying they do, because the economic inequalities endemic to
capitalism leave ‘the promise of universal, reciprocal recognition . . . essentially
unfulfilled in liberal societies’. Fukuyama concedes that problems of inequality are
indeed ‘in a certain sense, unresolvable within the context of liberalism’,91 but he
does not regard them as sufficiently serious as to constitute the kind of fundamental
‘contradiction’ liable to foster historical change. He argues that some inequalities
are the result of ‘convention’ – e.g., legal barriers such as apartheid, and cultural
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barriers such as racism. Difficult in particular as are the latter kind, nevertheless ‘all
truly liberal societies are in principle dedicated to the elimination of conventional
sources of inequality’,92 and he cites the extent to which racism, sexism, and
homophobia are now high profile issues being addressed – so much so, indeed, that
the passion shown in ‘democratic America’ to completely eliminate ‘any vestiges
of inequality’ are in fact a tribute to ‘the smallness of its actual remaining
inequalities’.93
The other source of inequality is nature itself – i.e., ‘the unequal distribution of
natural abilities and attributes’. Some of these are simply ineradicable, such as
differences in artistic ability, whilst others are exploited by the rational division of
labour demanded by capitalist economics, which cannot function ‘without creating
winners and losers’ because capital must be free to shift its location. Fukuyama
views this as simply a necessity of capitalism – and in any event, he insists that
capitalist societies are in fact ‘far more egalitarian in their social effects than the
agricultural societies they replaced’.94
These factors, then, mitigate the inequalities in liberal democratic, capitalist

societies. However, says Fukuyama, there is one kind of inequality which cannot
be mitigated, and remains serious – namely, that deriving from the occupational
division of labour. The inequality of wealth associated with different jobs under
capitalism ‘will continue to fail to satisfy the human desire for equal recognition,
or isothymia’. But for Fukuyama this is not so much a matter of income as of dignity.
Basic social welfare provisions feature in all liberal societies, even the USA, such
that ‘the problem of poverty has been transformed from one of natural need, into
one of recognition. The real injury . . . done to poor or homeless people is less to
their physical well-being than to their dignity’, as is also the case with the differing
degrees of respect accorded to, e.g., garbage men and brain surgeons. Because of this,
Fukuyama concludes that ‘major social inequalities will remain even in the most
perfect of liberal societies’, such that ‘there will be a continuing tension between
the twin principles of liberty and equality’.
He believes we should accept this as simply ‘necessary and inevitable’,95 but is
aware that others do not. Rather than encourage such dissenters, however,
Fukuyama identifies them as exemplifying what he sees as the Left-wing urge to get
rid of all inequality – and he warns this is a threat to liberal democracy itself.
His argument centres on the notion of ‘equal rights’, concerning which he
bemoans ‘the incoherence in our current discourse’. Echoing debates about the
concept of universal human rights, Fukuyama complains of the ‘massive
proliferation of new “rights”’, which extend far beyond their traditional compass
of the right to life, liberty, and property, into such areas as privacy, abortion, and
travel, where they become ‘ambiguous in their social content and mutually
contradictory’.96 In pushing for such proliferation, the Left is in danger of obscuring
that which vindicates human rights, namely, their function in protecting what it
is to be human. For Fukuyama, this is man’s dignity, inseparable from his capacity
to make moral choices. But not only, according to him, is this fundamental
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perception or ‘philosophy’ neglected by most people, there is no current consensus

on what makes man human. The danger is that not only is it claimed there are not,
or should not be, any differences between human beings, neither should there be
between human beings and animals, for whence comes human superiority? The
animal rights movement, for example, argues cases where they believe animals
have as much right to exist and prosper as human beings have, because they too
can suffer pain. But, as Fukuyama puts it, why stop the argument there? In perfectly
respectable philosophical fashion, he pushes the point ad absurdum to reveal its
weakness. Perhaps the HIV virus can suffer, and should therefore be accorded ‘equal
rights’ to human beings? In short, unless we can say why man has ‘more dignity than
any [other] part of the natural world’, then ‘the liberal concept of an equal and
universal humanity with a specifically human dignity’97 will in effect be under
attack – the implication being, who knows what kind of society would then replace
liberal democracy?
The challenge from the Right

Although the Left may be correct in complaining of ‘the more intractable forms of
inequality’98 in liberal society (whereby, Fukuyama’s concedes, isothymia remains
unfulfilled because it still affords the unequal recognition of equal people), the
obfuscation introduced by the Left’s confusedly extravagant proliferation of alleged
‘equal rights’ suggests to him that the threat it poses to liberal democracy need not
be taken too seriously. Rather, he argues, ‘the greater and ultimately more serious
threat comes from the Right’. This is because there is another side to the isothymia
coin in liberal-democratic societies – namely, their ‘tendency to grant equal
recognition to unequal people’.99
Here, Fukuyama turns to the ideas of the Prussian philosopher, Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844–1900), who influenced many by claiming that ‘God is dead’, and
that the Christian values of humility and kindness led to a mediocrity which needed
to be overcome by the courage of the ‘overman’ to instil new values based on
affirming the creativity of the will, the true ‘life-force’. Because of this, Nietzsche
voiced his contempt for ‘bourgeois’ society and its rationalistic liberal-democratic
ideals, and this prompts Fukuyama to interpret him as, in effect, raising the
question: ‘Is recognition that can be universalised worth having in the first
place?’. Going back to Hegel’s ‘bloody battle for recognition’, initially won by
the master, history has evolved to where the slave is now victorious, the ideology
of equality forming the heart of ‘the slave ideology’. But from Nietzsche’s perspec-
tive, ‘is not the quality of recognition far more important than its universality?
And does not the goal of universalising recognition inevitably trivialise and de-
value it?’.100
Fukuyama recognises the resonance of this viewpoint for today, complaining
that the dominance of isothymia has gone so far as to become corrupted into the
empty belief that everyone should be equally esteemed, whatever they do. In short,
we live in a radically relativist (‘postmodern’?) morality which refuses to make
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qualitative judgements where they should, in fact, be made. For Fukuyama, ‘to truly
esteem oneself means that one must be capable of feeling shame or self-disgust
when one does not live up to a certain standard’, and the same preparedness to face
up to moral decisions applies when esteeming others. For example, ‘in the end, the
mother will know if she has neglected her child, the father will know if he has gone
back to drinking’. Relatedly, if the dominant ethic of isothymia involves the urge
to be recognised as equal to everyone else by everyone else, then is such purely
formal recognition worth having? Rather, it matters who is esteeming one, because
‘the satisfaction one derives from recognition depend[s], in large measure, on the
quality of the person doing the esteeming’. 101 But in liberal democracy, one is
esteemed simply in virtue of one’s citizenship rather than for particular, concrete
qualities which proffer the opportunity for meaningful moral evaluation. In short,
it is to a degree a phony ‘recognition’ of being human, (exactly the point made by
Marx, albeit seemingly unbeknownst to Fukuyama, in his critique of ‘the universal
rights of man and citizen’, where he criticised the liberal state for its phony, because
entirely abstract, universality).102
Instead, (glossing Nietzsche), the more authentic fulfilment of man’s basic thymos
is in fact secured though the desire to be recognised as superior to others –
megaloythmia – and this is best satisfied in aristocratic rather than democratic
societies. Here, the free reign given to megalothymia encourages the creative
freedom of individuals to excel, for the desire to be superior to others requires
that one desires to surpass oneself – that is, to overcome the fear of physical
discomfort or, if the case, to disdain material security, and strive towards great
achievements in the higher aspects of life (art, science, politics). The problem
with democratic societies, Fukuyama suggests, is that, being based on the equality
of all, they are dedicated to the principle of toleration, ‘unable to affirm that
any particular way of life is superior to another’. Hence the only value they can
focus around is the lowest common denominator, material welfare. Thus, claims
Fukuyama, ‘it is not an accident that people in democratic societies are preoc-
cupied with material gain’103 and do not want to be tormented by moral questions.
Indeed, he goes further by suggesting that the torpor and mediocrity of ambition
that characterises modern materialistic man is exacerbated by the manner in
which modern education consciously instils the historical awareness that ‘all
horizons and value systems are relative to their time and place’, and none are more
nor less inherently valuable than others. Modern, aware, man thus has an ironic
sense of relativism, for he ‘knows better than to risk his life for a cause’.104 But for
the same reason he can feel alienated because lacking firm beliefs and attachments.
Rather than satiated by ‘the victory of the slave over the master’, he does not
feel ‘like his own master at all, but weak and impotent in the face of events he
cannot control’.105
Fukuyama recognises that the overall gist of these defects in liberal democracy
has been agreed by many since Nietzsche, and he himself shares their concern that
this ‘last man’, (at the end of history because he has achieved both recognition of
his humanity and the material welfare secured through science), will cease to exist
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as ‘ “Man properly so-called” . . . because he will have ceased to work and struggle’.
No longer needing to fight wars of recognition or combat injustice, and materially
secure, ‘the last men’ will return to ‘become animals again, as they were before the
bloody battle that began history’.106 ‘Happy’ they might be, but would they be
satisfied?, Fukuyama asks. If not, would these ‘last men’ be ‘hence ready to drag the
world back into history with all its wars, injustices, and revolution?’. And of obvious
importance to Fukuyama, for whom these ‘last men’ are not hypothetical future
beings but already populate the ‘post-historical’ world, is this flaw in liberal
democracy – i.e., the threat of the reassertion of megolythmia – sufficient of a
‘contradiction’ to render null and void that part of his philosophy which claims we
are at ‘the end of history’?
Thymos and the future: Fukuyama’s doubts

Fukuyama takes this potentially fatal flaw to his theory seriously because, even
if we should reject Nietzsche’s openly intolerant, aristocratic, and cruel morality,
‘we can readily accept many of Nietzsche’s acute psychological observations’.
Above all, if megalothymia is altogether purged from life, ‘human beings will rebel’,
because, apart from anything else, they will become bored. ‘They will want to have
ideals by which to live and die’; they will want to risk their lives in war despite
the universal peace promised by the world-wide triumph of liberal democracy.
And for Fukuyama, ‘This is the “contradiction” that liberal democracy has not
yet solved’.107 In short, although ‘the end of history’ is conceivably threatened by
an excess of isothymia (from the Left), this is most unlikely. Rather, Fukuyama
‘intuits’ it is far more at risk from an excess of megaloythmia, precisely because of
liberal democracy’s tendency to wish to suppress it. It follows that unless liberal
democracy can achieve a balance satisfying both aspects of thymos (i.e., isothymia
and megalothymia), it will disappear under the strain – and with it, ‘the end of
history’ as an intelligible theory. Thus, Fukuyama urges that ‘liberal democracy
needs megalothymia and will never survive on the basis of universal and equal
recognition alone’.108
Fortunately many outlets for megalothymia already exist (although Fukuyama is
also being prescriptive here). Most important is the scope in a capitalist economy
for entrepreneurship, where those truly driven by megalothymia ‘stake their fortunes,
status, and reputations for the sake of a certain kind of glory’.109 Not only does their
innovativeness and energy create wealth, it keeps them out of politics and the
military, where such megalothymotic qualities could create severe problems. This is
not to say that politics itself is not a useful outlet, but given the restrictions put upon
the role of individuals in domestic affairs, ‘it is primarily in the realm of foreign
policy that democratic politicians can still achieve a degree of recognition
unavailable in virtually any other walk of life’,110 so weighty are the decisions
involved. A third outlet is provided by sporting activities, and (relatedly) in an
interesting reference to California as ‘the most post-historical part of the United
States’, he notes Californians’ ‘obsession’ with ‘high-risk leisure activities’ which
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‘shake’ them ‘out of the comfort of a bourgeois existence’. In addition to these

notable outlets, there are numerous others – e.g., academic and scientific
achievement (and, we might add, nowadays it is difficult not to think of media
celebrity status). So varied are they that Fukuyama reckons ‘virtually the only forms
of megalothymia . . . not permitted in contemporary democracies are those leading
to political tyranny’, despite the fact that they ‘exist in a certain tension with the
publicly stated ideals of society’ – i.e., equality.111
Somewhat as an exception, there is one further outlet Fukuyama identifies –

different, because less dramatic than full-blown megalothymia, and also because,
according to Fukuyama, it is diminishing in liberal societies. This is the recognition
one can gain by involvement in the community. In practice, given the sheer size of
most modern states, active citizenship ‘is best exercised through so-called
“mediating institutions” ’ such as school boards, trade unions, interest groups, and
local associations. Here, ‘one can take daily pride’ in being a member of an actual
little community which has concrete aims and values, and by which one can be
esteemed for specifically relevant qualities (rather than for the abstract universality
of simply being a person like any other, as the state ‘esteems’ one). Even the family
is such a ‘community’, and Fukuyama cites it as an example of a general tendency
in liberal democracies towards the weakening of community ties. The family is
now nuclear rather than extended; and, like other forms of communal affiliation,
it is not only undermined by the increased social mobility within capitalist
economies but also by the principle of equality. (Indeed, in 1999 Fukuyama
published The Great Disruption112 in which he pursued the theme of the
disintegration of ‘the family’, particularly under threat from women’s control over
their fertility and their access to the workplace.)
As Fukuyama puts it, ‘the strongest communities are bound together by certain
moral laws that define wrong and right for its members’,113 thereby excluding those
who do not share these loyalties. But rather than tolerate such different standards,
the tendency in modern democracy is to assert ‘their essential equality . . . and
therefore oppose the kind of exclusivity engendered by strong and cohesive
communities’.114 Here, again, Fukuyama notes the stronger sense of community
found in Asian countries, derived not from mere self-interest (as in liberal theory)
but from religion or some other ‘irrational’ (thymotic) cultural feature. And such is
the importance he attaches to community involvement as an outlet for the
megalothymotic instincts of man, he goes so far as to suggest that individuals in
modern liberal societies should be prepared to ‘give back certain of their rights to
communities, and accept the return of certain historical forms of intolerance’,
otherwise ‘no fundamental strengthening of community life will be possible’.115
But if the diminution of community involvement is a tendency, we should recall

Fukuyama’s claim that war between liberal democracies is virtually outlawed – and
yet war is the clearest context in which human beings can demonstrate (for good
or evil) those sterling qualities of honour and self-sacrifice called forth by their
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thymotic natures. Bolder spirits than Fukuyama have thus glorified war as providing
‘the ultimate crucible of citizenship’ in which people are prepared to risk their very
lives to assert the values of their society, and he clearly has some (theoretical)
sympathy with this view. Indeed, he interprets Hegel as suggesting that ‘a liberal
democracy that could fight a short and decisive war every generation or so to defend
its own liberty and independence would be far healthier and more satisfied than
one that experienced nothing but continuous peace’.116
Leaving aside the tempting observation that this is precisely what does seem to
have happened in certain ‘liberal democracies’ since the Cold War, and seems
likely to continue to – and also leaving aside Fukuyama’s own earlier implication that
many opportunities remain for (‘post-historical’) liberal democracies to go to war
so long as the ‘historical’ world still exists – his focus here is on that hypothetical
‘end of history’ prefigured by his theory. Here, ‘the world has become “filled up”
. . . with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression
worthy of the name against which to struggle’. And in such a context Fukuyama
claims that ‘if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause . . ., they will struggle
for the sake of struggle’, and this would mean ‘they will struggle against [the] peace
and prosperity, and . . . democracy’ of the ‘post-historical’ world. They will do so
‘out of a certain boredom’, and he claims that ‘experience suggests’ this has
happened before, citing it as an ‘intangible but crucial factor’ leading to the First
World War, when ‘many European publics simply wanted war because they were
fed up with the dullness and lack of community in civilian life’117 – hence the war-
euphoria of 1914.
But what of the relativism that characterises our tolerant liberal societies today?
Has not Fukuyama earlier said that we ‘know’ too much to value one culture above
another, and thus fight for it? He had, after all, offered this notion in support of his
projected ‘end of history’. But now he reveals the other side to relativism, for he
warns that it ‘is not a weapon that can be aimed selectively at the enemies one
chooses’, but ‘fires indiscriminately’, such that that very tolerance apparently
wedded to it becomes itself regarded as a purely ‘relativistic’ value. Then, ‘cherished
principles like human equality have to go by the wayside as well’,118 threatening
instead the kind of war-like nihilistic psychology lauded by Nietzsche, and practised
by Nazism.
Fukuyama’s doubts resolved?

Such, then, are the many objections that Fukuyama, in good academic fashion, has
raised against his own theory that history is in the process of ‘ending’. Above all,
his concern is that to the extent liberal democracies rely entirely on the rational
principle of universal recognition afforded by the homogenous state, then their
ability ‘to establish and sustain themselves on a rational basis over the long term
is open to some doubt’. And, in casting doubt on his notion of ‘the end of history’,
this brings to his mind those various cyclical theories of history which see it as an
endless repetition of different phases, even going back to the ‘bestial first’ men.
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But it is this very reflection which persuades Fukuyama of the likely success
of ‘the end of history’. Precisely because the twentieth century ‘has taught us
the horrendous consequences of the effort to resurrect unbridled megalothymia’,
and because, worse, we now ‘have nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction,
which will allow millions to be killed instantly and anonymously’, the presumption
must be that ‘we who live in the old age of mankind’ would not countenance
turning back the clock as a way of satisfying megalothymia. Also ‘standing as
a bulwark against the revival of history and the return of the first man is the
imposing Mechanism of modern natural science’. Its economic benefits are so great,
and war so disruptive, that although some countries may (as in the past) sacrifice
economic security in pursuit of other aims, ‘it is questionable whether the world as
a whole can make such a rupture for any extended length of time’.119 That human
feature of ‘unlimited desire guided by reason’, which drives science, will not
disappear.
For these reasons, Fukuyama suggests that his theory of ‘the end of history’ is
indeed plausible. Although he does not believe that the ‘host of problems such as
unemployment, pollution, drugs, crime’,120 which ‘plague’ liberal democracies are
so fundamental as to destroy them, yet like any form of society, liberal democracy
has to grapple with the absolutely elemental force of thymos in human nature which
has previously driven historical change. In this, it might not succeed perfectly, but
in practice it does achieve a sufficient balance between isothymia and megalothymia,
and between them and economic progress, to make ‘liberal democracy in reality
[constitute] the best possible solution to the human problem’. And in a parting
shot (which, incidentally, could be perfectly aimed at ‘post-modernism’ – a target
he singled out, however, in a later defence of his theory121) he concludes that ‘the
chief threat to democracy [is] our own confusion about what is really at stake’. This
arises from the failure of ‘relativists’ both ‘to come to a consensus on what
constitutes man and his specific dignity, and consequently [on] the rights of man’,
as well as to recognise ‘that history is being driven in a coherent direction’.122
However, even this obstacle might, logically, be expected to disappear, because
that which provoked relativism – twentieth-century Europe’s confrontation with
different cultures – should cease to be a factor as the politics and economics of the
world as a whole become increasingly homogenised.
Fukuyama concludes by likening the historical process to a wagon train whose
wagons are stretched out along the journey, some getting stuck for while, others
temporarily losing direction, but where the great majority will eventually arrive ‘in
town’ – i.e., in that ‘post-historical’ world heralded by ‘the recent worldwide liberal
revolution’. If enough do so arrive, then ‘any reasonable person . . . would be forced
to agree that there had been only one journey and one destination’, and for all the
reasons he has given this is clearly what Fukuyama believes will be the case.
However, as befits any theory, until the evidence is clear it ‘must remain
provisionally inconclusive’, and he therefore (somewhat perfunctorily) concedes
that ‘it is doubtful if we are at that point’ where sufficient have arrived – nor, even
if we do get to that point, whether our ‘last men’, ‘having looked around a bit at
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their new surroundings, will not find them inadequate and set their eyes on a new
and more distant journey’.123
Critique
The above survey of Fukuyama’s estimation of the present world’s propensity for
becoming fully ‘the end of the history’ concludes our exposition of his overall
speculative philosophy of history, during which I have mostly refrained from
criticism. This task now beckons, but because Fukuyama’s book has occasioned
critical interest from so many angles, I will restrict attention to those points relating
more specifically to the grand theme of speculative philosophy of history, and how
Fukuyama has approached it.
There are three perspectives from which to comment on his philosophy – the
strictly academic, his empirical judgements, and his philosophical basis – and
although it is the last which should principally concern us, the former two invite
some brief comments.
On strictly academic grounds we have already queried the provenance of some of

Fukuyama’s appeals to previous philosophers’ ideas, and our exposition has revealed
further respects in which his book can be criticised for involving both misreadings
and non-readings of previous thinkers who had much to say, often of an alternative
if not contrary nature, on the very themes he deals with. Yet two things can be said
in his defence. First, as urged earlier, what is ultimately important are the ideas he
advances rather than their academic backing. That they might be improved, or
changed, by such backing is open to question – yet that they deserve respect as they
stand is amply evidenced by the interest they have generated. And second, it is clear
that Fukuyama’s thinking has not stood still since The End of History and the Last
Man. On the contrary, in his Our Post-human Future,124 he has turned his attention
to the implications of bio-engineering for ‘human nature’, in which he speculates
upon its potential for producing a ‘recommencement of history’. So recent is this
book that your ‘guide’ cannot incorporate it here, but it will clearly be interesting
to see whether it evidences changes in Fukuyama’s fundamental ‘end of history’
theory.
Empirical judgements
As for the numerous practical judgements embracing perceptions both on the
histories of different countries and on their present circumstances, Fukuyama
incorporates a refreshingly multi-disciplinary mixture of political, economic,
sociological, and ‘cultural’ observations. Such matters are of course integral to his
thesis because any philosophy of history which did not appeal to the ‘empirical
facts’ (albeit necessarily selectively) would be a grotesquely pointless exercise. Not
surprisingly, however, many of his perceptions and/or judgements have been
challenged – and no more so than when he surveys the present as presaging ‘the end
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of history’. Put simply, even were his theory of what drives history correct – and,
from that, also his logical extrapolation of an ‘end of history’ – the notion that the
present correlates with that impending ‘end’ strikes many as bizarre.
These, then, are matters of empirical judgement, not philosophy. For example,
one critic summarises a widespread disagreement with Fukuyama’s perception of
today’s Asian world by claiming that, ‘In the foreseeable future, establishing liberal
democracy in the Eurasian space is a utopian dream’. The same critic, echoing a
view widely held (and passionately so by Western ‘anti-capitalist’ protest
movements), claims that globalisation overwhelms people and makes them feel
powerless, tearing them from the traditions of their communities and endangering
the environment, to the extent that far from the present heralding Fukuyama’s
harmonious ‘end of history’, we should ‘ready our minds for a New History’.125
Alternatively, we might recall Paul Kennedy’s thinly veiled prophecy (in 1988)
about China’s potential to become the new world power – namely, ‘It is only a
matter of time’.126
Some readers may be surprised by other judgements Fukuyama makes – for
example (and despite his own reservations) the capacity for liberal democracies to
command a loyalty from their citizens sufficient to sustain indefinitely a political
system (‘democracy’) flawed by apathy and the power of money. We noted his
reference to Hegel’s idea that fighting a war every generation is helpful – (a recent
survey discovered that many of the older UK generation today relate ‘what it means
to be British’ to the Second World War) – and this is reminiscent of Machiavelli’s
notion that to maintain the public-spiritedness on which republics depend, a purge
might be necessary every ten years or so. Fukuyama himself suggests that liberal
democracy needs some ‘irrational’ (thymotic) source of enthusiasm,127 but fails to
say convincingly (other than war and/or the need to accept more intolerance
between ‘communities’) where this might come from and how it may be maintained.
In short, he is somewhat hoisted on his own petard, for having set out the case for
the crucial role thymos plays in historical change, one suspects he himself senses
he perceives today’s ‘democracies’ through somewhat rose-tinted spectacles.
The Islamic world

It is in pursuit of this theme that we might suggest where Fukuyama’s practical
judgements are most challenging – namely, his assessment of the Islamic world.
This, of course, is just one of those world-historical religio-cultural groups, all of
which are supposed by his theory to eventually succumb to ‘the worldwide liberal
revolution’. But not only did the Islamic world appear to pose a problem for
Fukuyama when he wrote his book (1992), its relevance has been heightened by
the ramifications of the attack of 11 September 2001 on the USA, such that it is
worth looking more closely at how he perceives it.
One reason the Islamic world poses a problem for Fukuyama is his claim that,
unlike other great religions, it shares with Christianity an ideology which ‘is
potentially universal, reaching out to all men as men, and not just to members of
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a particular ethnic or national group’. It is ‘a systematic and coherent ideology

. . . with its own code of morality and doctrine of political and social justice’, and
incorporates ‘one-fifth of the world’s population’.128 And yet, despite its universalist
principles, it is the exception to what Fukuyama claims is otherwise a world-wide
‘general consensus that accepts liberal democracy’s claims to be the most rational
form of government’.129 (It is important to note, here, that Fukuyama is not
referring to Islamic fundamentalism, which he sees as a temporary phenomenon
responding to economic failure and a sense of indignity towards the West.)
Although it may accommodate some form of ‘democracy’ because it does believe
in ‘universal human equality’, it is nonetheless ‘very hard to reconcile with
liberalism and the recognition of universal rights, particularly freedom of
conscience or religion’.130 In short, although previous systems have either been
consigned to history or are on their way there (ultimately because of their failure
to recognise human equality), the Islamic world is different in that it could, theoret-
ically, contradict Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ theory, either by persisting
indefinitely, or indeed by offering an alternative ‘ending’.
Fukuyama’s judgement on this (in 1990) was that despite its power, ‘it remains
the case that this religion has virtually no appeal outside those areas that were
culturally Islamic to begin with. The days of Islam’s cultural conquests, it would
seem, are over: it can win back lapsed adherents, but has no resonance for young
people in Berlin, Tokyo, or Moscow’.131 An empirical observation on his part, this
estimation of Islam’s potential future impact (or lack of it) on world history has
no theoretical backing in Fukuyama’s philosophy of historical evolution – and it
may even be suspect as an observation, since a case could be made for claiming
that ‘Western’ youth can see an attraction in Islam because of some of those
same drawbacks to ‘liberal’ culture which Fukuyama himself concedes, e.g., the
aimlessness of ‘relativism’, decline of community, the urge towards ‘a cause’ to
live for.
At present, however, the waters have been too muddied by ‘Sept. 11, ’01’ and
its aftermath to pursue such considerations, since a regrettable confusion exists in
some peoples’ minds between mainstream Islam and its extremist fundamentalist
offshoots – the latter clearly unattractive to Western women in particular. The
same events have also reinforced the doubts of those already sceptical of Fukuyama’s
‘end of history’ thesis. Rather, they wonder whether a growing scenario of cross-
global confrontation between Islam and Western culture might not assume such
proportions, with such unforeseen consequences, as to constitute nothing less than
a new phase to history, (i.e., rather than merely involve a temporary series of ‘anti-
terrorist’ campaigns and minor wars). Such an eventuality would indeed render
untenable at least the ‘end of history’ part of Fukuyama’s philosophy.
Aware of this, however, Fukuyama responded within a month after the
September 11 attack with an article for the Wall Street Journal132 in which he
reiterated his view – now some twelve years on – that ‘modernity is a very powerful
freight train that will not be derailed by recent events, however painful. Democracy
and free markets will continue to expand as the dominant organising principles for
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much of the world’. He notes that ‘there does seem to be something about Islam,
or at least the fundamentalist versions . . . , that makes Muslim societies particularly
resistant to modernity’, and wonders whether ‘this rejection is somehow inherent
in Islam, or indeed no more than “a lunatic fringe” ’. Somewhat undecided on this
(given the breadth and depth of anti-Americanism the event revealed), he perhaps
unwittingly altered his earlier notion that Islam has no appeal to other cultures by
now saying ‘Radical Islam has virtually no appeal in the contemporary world apart
from those who are culturally Islamic to begin with’133, and that ‘for Muslims
themselves’, in practice, ‘political Islam [e.g., the Taliban regime] has proved much
more appealing in the abstract than in reality’. This shift of emphasis towards now
talking of ‘radical’ Islam, however, can surely be seen as Fukuyama evading the
issue of Islam ‘proper’. Nonetheless, from this he concludes that ‘We remain at
the end of history because there is only one system that will continue to dominate
world politics, that of the liberal-democratic west’. The latter does confront ‘a
series of rearguard actions from societies whose traditional existence is . . .
threatened by modernisation’ – but his very terminology puts them firmly back in
that old ‘historical’ world whose days are numbered, and during which wars might
need to be fought, but in no sense challenges the now heralded ‘end of history’.
Philosophy and ideology

The final and, for us, most important perspective for critical assessment of
Fukuyama’s philosophy of history comes from ‘philosophy’ itself – and by way of a
conclusion to this ‘guide’ it is fitting to take the opportunity to pursue this task
within the broader context of themes our book has encountered and considered.
We may start with an overview of Fukuyama’s theory. For him, history is
meaningful; it is progressive; it is cumulative; it is irreversible; it culminates; and its
motor is imminent, rather than the product of any transcendental ‘force’, ‘God’,
‘Spirit’, or ‘Intelligence’ – i.e., his philosophy is entirely secular.
As such, then, Fukuyama’s book not only falls squarely within that corpus
of works we have referred to as ‘speculative philosophy of history’, it represents
a revival of it – and, it would seem, a resounding one insofar as it ‘has apparently
struck a nerve’.134 (That it is also distinctly political simply confirms what our
study of earlier speculative philosophies of history revealed – namely, that as we
approach modern times they become increasingly politically orientated. Indeed,
some have dismissed Fukuyama’s book as being pure ideology, a matter we will
shortly address.)
We noted the demise of speculative philosophy of history as a ‘respectable’
intellectual endeavour as, turning into the twentieth century, huge historical
theories became academically out of fashion, whilst crude, bastardised versions were
employed by warring twentieth-century ideologies (fascism and communism),
inviting further opprobrium from alarmed liberal circles. In short, the project of
trying to make sense of, and find meaning in, the scope of human history threatened
to become entirely obsolete – and correspondingly (amongst other things) a
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piece-meal approach to the discipline of history grew apace with its increasing
professionalisation. In this light alone, Fukuyama’s book is an unusual occurrence;
but also, I suggest, a welcome one because, in reintroducing ideas into the study of
history, it reintroduces historians and others to ideas of what history is about. One
could be forgiven for thinking that all we can say about ‘history’ is that it is ‘about
the past’, and probably add ‘the human past’, but that beyond that we have been
left uncharted and overwhelmingly at sea. The project of speculative philosophy
of history (however executed) challenges this by daring, at the least, to pose the
question of whether history is about anything in particular, and if so, what? Here,
historians who might otherwise see themselves as at loggerheads with their
postmodernist critics could nevertheless be accused of colluding with them on this
issue. This is because for postmodernists the vaguest whiff of the notion that history
is ‘about’ anything is anathema, for how can history be about anything if ‘history’
itself is a ‘discourse’ which, in imagining it can ‘represent’ past reality, is futile to
begin with? Although most historians disagree with the latter, there is a sense in
which their practice – stubbornly resistant to ‘theorising’ about the past – accords
perfectly with the nihilistic urgings of their postmodernist critics. If Fukuyama, or
anyone else prepared to engage in speculative philosophy of history, can bounce
historians (and, in that sense, ‘history’) out of this torpor, this alone might be
reason for praising his book.
As for the philosophical content of his book, we have noted it has been attacked as
blatantly ‘ideological’. For us, the potential seriousness of this criticism extends
beyond what many mean by it – i.e., they merely disagree with the political
implications and prescriptions within it. In short, (since it is evident enough),
Fukuyama clearly supports the values and ideals embraced by ‘liberal-democratic’
ideology, sees them as superior to other systems and cultures, and looks forward to
their world-wide and enduring triumph – i.e., to when ‘the West has won’, as put
crudely in the headline The Guardian used in its reproduction of Fukuyama’s Wall
Street Journal article mentioned above. If this were to mean his book was no more
than ideology dressed up as philosophy, we might be as suspicious of it as proper
speculative philosophy of history as we were concerning Augustine’s City of God,135
seeing it instead as resting on unexamined assumptions and partial ‘facts’ in order
to persuade readers towards a political commitment.
Although such a judgement can only properly emerge from the close scrutiny
historians of thought bring to such texts, at face value this would nonetheless seem
an inaccurate description of Fukuyama’s book. Not only does he make amply clear
the conceptual framework he employs rather than rely on unexamined
assumptions, he also raises potential objections to many of his ideas – and not as a
mere rhetorical device, but with sufficient seriousness that he retains (and openly
conveys) a degree of scepticism about some of his conclusions. This is no more
evident than when he explains his concept of ‘the last men’, for as the
consummation of the historical process he is by no means sure their situation
equates with some kind of millennialist bliss.
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For these reasons I suggest his book supersedes ‘mere political ideology’ and
should be seen as the product of genuinely philosophical reflection – i.e., from the
attempt, first and foremost, to reach an impartial understanding of its topic. But
this is not to say that such books must not contain a ‘message’, political or otherwise.
Were that the case, one would be hard-pressed to find, for example, a work of
political or moral philosophy in the entire history of thought, since they all contain
prescriptive implications. Are we, for example, to therefore deny Aristotle was a
philosopher, and approach his writings as we should Hitler’s Mein Kampf, i.e., as
‘ideology’?
Thus, we can concede that Fukuyama’s book does contain a prescriptive
‘message’ – but I suggest it is not that ‘liberal democracy’ is a good, or the best,
thing. This is to diminish his attempt to philosophise about the meaning of history.
Rather, his real message stems from, and should be assessed within, the context of
previous speculative philosophy of history. In this light, it would appear to be the
following: that (apart from natural catastrophes which might alter its evolution
from ‘outside’) history can best be understood as a self-sustaining developmental
process which continues cumulatively and irreversibly towards a consummation.
Thus, history is not cyclical or reversible. Also, its development is unremittingly
progressive, such that its consummation is not the final doom of a humanity whose
history has represented the progressive deterioration of man from some Rousseau-
istic pristine nature. On the contrary, the logic of Fukuyama’s analysis points to a
world in which human-beings have fashioned the best economic and political
system to satisfy their unlimited capacity for material ‘desire’ as well as their deepest
human urgings for ‘recognition’ – a world which will persist indefinitely because
neither the politico-economic system (both domestically and internationally) nor
the satisfactions it awards contain any negative or ‘contradictory’ factors of
sufficient import to cause either a new phase of history or some kind of cyclical
reverse. Such is the logic of history for Fukuyama. Yet his remarks on ‘the last men’
evince his own hesitations, and it is here, I suggest, that his real message can be
found – a message, moreover, reminiscent of Vico (of whose ideas we have
suggested Fukuyama was unaware when he wrote his book).
Fukuyama’s message?
We may briefly recall Vico’s graphic summary of the trajectory of man’s
development:
Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort: still
later [they] amuse themselves with pleasure, then grow dissolute in luxury,
and finally go mad and waste their substance.
Amongst other symptoms of decline ‘at the end’, there is a corresponding intellectual
decline into scepticism whereby there ‘arose a false eloquence, ready to uphold either
of the opposed sides of a case indifferently’, which, if unchecked, leads men ‘into
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beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had
been made by the barbarism of sense’.136 Vico, in short, feared that the cyclical
element he had found in history would not stop at ‘the last men’, but begin some
kind of re-enactment – and I urged that the most likely explanation for his
extraordinary dedication in repeatedly reworking his New Science was that he
wished to instruct people on how to prevent such a (human-made) catastrophe.
If, then, Vico’s message was ‘stop the cycle!’, so, it could be argued, is Fukuyama’s.
Although he does not describe the ‘last men’ as in danger of ‘going mad and wasting
their substance’, he does suggest the dangerous enervating effects of effortless
material prosperity and security, including warnings about ‘relativism’ (=
‘scepticism’ = postmodernism?). Frequently he shows a wistful respect, if not
admiration, for various cultural features of non-Western societies in the ‘historical’
world, and is aware (by proxy) that the kind of criticisms Vico makes about ‘the
last men’ are precisely those made by Islam (and other cultures) against the
‘decadent’ West. Hence those many express and implicit prescriptions we find
littered throughout Fukuyama’s book, in effect warning of the less than certain ‘end
of history’ if certain trends are ‘left unchecked’ – for instance, the decline of
communities, the need for a restoration of some intolerance, the confused rush
into ‘equal rights’ for everyone and everything. If we are correct in claiming that
this is Fukuyama’s real ‘message’, then its dimensions supersede mere shallow
political ideology because originating from genuine speculative philosophy of
history.
Thymos revisited
This said in defence of Fukuyama, however, it does not mean his philosophy is
unproblematic in its foundations. But here I will restrict comment to two points –
one specific, and one of a general nature which may permit me to complete this
guide by bringing together certain points in the manner of a conclusion.
The specific problem relates to Fukuyama’s concept of thymos and his use of it.
The concept (‘the desire for recognition’) is completely fundamental to his
philosophy of history. It is clear enough what he means by it, and many might find
it both novel and persuasive. Yet complications emerge when he divides it into
isothymia and megalothymia, not because each is difficult to comprehend (they are
not), but because of their common root despite their differences – differences which
are substantial in practice, yet sometimes glossed over by Fukuyama’s resorting to
the general terms ‘thymos’ and ‘thymotic’ when trying to explain something, (for
example, the need for a certain ‘irrational thymotic pride’ in liberal democracy).
And this, I suggest, is symptomatic of a deeper problem with ‘thymos’ – namely, that
too much is put upon it as an explanatory factor. Fukuyama himself tells us that it
‘allows us to reinterpret [such phenomena] as culture, religion, work, nationalism,
and war’.137 It also provides the link between capitalism and democracy, as well as
helping explain imperialism, revolutions, liberalism, and forms of tyranny. It is
true that dividing it into two strands sometimes helps give it operative force, but
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overall can we not say of thymos what Fukuyama himself said about the vulnerability
of the concept of ‘power’ for explaining things? The concept of ‘power’ can be used
so broadly that it encompasses markedly different things which would otherwise
require their own specific explanations. Thus, although on a broad interpretation
of it, ‘the quest for power . . . is indeed universal, . . . its meaning becomes trivial’.138
The same, ultimately, could be said for the concept which lies at the foundation
of Fukuyama’s philosophy – namely, thymos. In explaining so much, perhaps it
really explains very little?
Concluding reflections
On a more general note we can perhaps best get an overall philosophical
perspective on Fukuyama’s theory by, initially, comparing his thinking on ‘the
meaning of history’ with those ideas of the young Marx (i.e., before his ‘historical
materialist’ conversion). Somewhat akin to Fukuyama, Marx put forward the
notion that human history is driven, progressively and imminently by human
activity, towards a consummation which is such because it finally satisfies ‘human
nature’. Man’s work in the world throughout history has been to ‘humanise’ nature
and to ‘naturalise’ man, such that he is released (as far as possible) from natural
need, and from being ‘alienated’ from his true (free) nature. In both respects he
becomes ‘free’, and ‘pre-history’ (cf. Fukuyama’s ‘historical world’) ends, heralding
the beginning of ‘human’ history’ (cf. Fukuyama’s ‘post-historical world’). We know
that, unlike in Fukuyama, Marx’s ‘human’ history would be based on the money-
less communal ownership and control of economic resources, combined with an
unspecified stateless radical ‘democracy’ – but beyond that not much more, partly
because the whole point of ‘human’ history for Marx is that people, at last free from
economic and political constraints, would be able to ‘make’ their own history – i.e.,
as social individuals, free to explore and fulfil their diverse potential. What human
beings would do with their freedom is thus (with some logic) left open, and thus
exactly what that ‘human nature’ is, which awaits to be realised, remains a problem
(at least in reading the early Marx). In short, he does not tell us what ‘the meaning
of life’ is – rather, he tells us the precondition of being able to realise it, namely,
‘freedom’.
For Fukuyama also, history reaches a consummation where it at last satisfies
‘human nature’. As Fukuyama argued in his text, it is therefore crucial to know what
that essential ‘human nature’ is, or, put another way, what ‘the meaning of life’ is.
He derives his answer to this from his reading of Plato, who (he suggests) divided
the human ‘soul’ into three parts, each of which needs to be satisfied to fulfil human
nature: desire, reason, and thymos. For Fukuyama ‘desire’ principally means man’s
economic needs, ‘reason’ means the capacity to understand and manipulate the
environment (natural and social) to achieve one’s ends, and thymos means the urge
for respect both from oneself and from others as a human being rather than an
animal. And the ‘end of history’ equates with the satisfaction of these three
components of human nature.
426
Now, it could be argued that this neo-Platonic triad offers a clearer picture than
does Marx of what that human nature is which history eventually fulfils – and in
that sense, what the ‘meaning of life’ is (or should be) under the ideal circumstances
of the ‘post-historical world’. In short, it implies ‘what we should be doing with our
lives’, or, put another way, what kind of world we should aspire to build or (if we
think we have already built it) to maintain.
Such, then, is the grand stature of speculative philosophy of history, Fukuyama’s
book included. As claimed in our Introduction, it invites reflection on the loftiest
themes, whose very intractability demands (if we are so-minded) that we resort to
‘philosophy’ to approach them.
But philosophy is open-ended, and thus I would like to conclude this guide by
suggesting an alternative understanding of that ‘human nature’ which lies at the
foundation of Fukuyama’s philosophy of history. In his triad – desire, reason, respect
– arguably this otherwise suggestive framework is diminished by the apparently
purely utilitarian significance Fukuyama attaches to ‘reason’ (which for operative
purposes he virtually equates with modern natural science). Some other
philosophers (e.g., Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel) see matters differently, for whilst
they recognise the instrumental utility of ‘reason’ in helping us achieve objectives
(i.e., its practical side), they also recognise the capacity to ‘reason’ about things
solely to understand them. (Readers may recognise this from my earlier reference
to its ‘theoretical’ side.) This is not to say that Fukuyama does not recognise this
aspect of ‘reason’. Yet (as he also does with the arts) he appears to treat intellectual
activity ‘for its own sake’ not as self-sufficient but as emanating from thymos – i.e.,
as expressions of the desire to be esteemed, or even, as in megalothymia, the desire
to excel.
The contrast I have in mind with Fukuyama’s perspective can best be exemplified
by a dictum penned by the sixteenth-century French thinker, Bodin, who wrote:
‘those things least in order of dignity come first in order of necessity’. He went on
to explain that (somewhat akin to Fukuyama) there are three aspects to life. First,
we must secure our material well-being – i.e., the economic life. This accords with
Fukuyama’s ‘desire’. But, said Bodin, the economic life is ‘ordained to’ the moral
life, by which he meant there is a higher dimension to life than the merely economic
(whose role is to enable and support it) – namely, that entire forum focused on
human relations (e.g., family, politics, the administration of justice). This, I suggest,
is fairly akin to Fukuyama’s thymotic dimension to life. But then Bodin went on to
say that the ‘moral’ life is in its turn ‘ordained to’ the ‘intellectual’ life, i.e., ‘the
contemplation of the noblest subjects . . . human, natural, and divine’ – by which
he meant that there is a higher dimension than the moral (thymotic?) life, namely,
intellectual, ‘contemplative’, activity – what I have called ‘understanding for the
sake of it’. And the moral life is subservient to it, its role being to provide
the conditions under which ‘the intellective and contemplative virtues’ can be
exercised.
427
THE END OF HISTORY?
Perhaps characteristically for a philosopher, (and for true academics generally)

Bodin claimed that this third dimension to life is the highest – the most in ‘dignity’!
But the point for us is that Bodin is far from alone in singling out that aspect of
‘reason’ – the effort to understand ‘for the sake of it’ rather than in order to achieve
some practical objective – as a human quality so distinctive and separate from other
aspects of ‘human nature’ that it cannot be subsumed under them, nor be confused
with them, but should stand proud as the ultimate telos or ‘final end’ of human
society.139
As I have claimed, Fukuyama does not award such significance to ‘the
intellectual life’, whereas others might prefer Bodin’s version of what human life
is ultimately about. But if so, then apart from the fact that history would clearly not
have ‘ended’, how or even if such a philosophy might affect an attempt to ‘make
sense of’ history is another story.
428
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1 B. Mazlish, The Riddle of History, New York and London, Harper & Row, 1966, p. i.
2 R. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, London, Heinemann, 1980, p. 327.
3 p. 328, ibid.
4 Mazlish, op. cit., p. 1.
1 SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

1 B. Mazlish, The Riddle of History, New York and London, Harper & Row, 1966, see
pp. 59–69.
2 P. Gardiner, The Philosophy of History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 2.
3 cf. p. 30, Mazlish, op. cit. for an example of such a use of the term.
4 See below, Chapter 13.
2 PRE-CLASSICAL IDEAS ON ‘HISTORY’

1 M. C. Lemon, The Discipline of History and the History of Thought, London, Routledge,
1995, cf. pp. 245–50.
2 H. Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968, p. 12.
3 R. A. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, London, Heinemann, 1980, p. 14.
4 p. 24, Frankfort, op. cit.
5 cf. pp. 37–41, Lemon, op. cit.
6 S. L. Jaki, Science and Creation – From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe,
Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1974, p. 99.
7 p. 80. ibid.
8 See Chapter 14, below.
3 CLASSICAL GREEK AND ROMAN SPECULATIONS ON HISTORY

1 e.g., R. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, London, Heinemann, 1980, e.g., p. 33.
2 H. Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968, p. 251.
3 e.g., Frankfort (op. cit.); E. Cassirer, Essay on Man, New Haven, Yale University Press,
1945.
4 See p. 250, Frankfort, op. cit.
5 p. 238, ibid.
6 pp. 248–249, ibid.
7 i.e., R. Nisbet, in his Social Change and History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.
8 As quoted by G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought
429
NOTES
– From Antiquity to the Reformation, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of

California Press, 1979, p. 11.
9 As quoted by S. L. Jaki, Science and Creation, Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press,
1974, p. 109.
10 As quoted by Jaki, p. 114, ibid.
11 cf. p. 112, ibid.
12 pp. 16–17, Nisbet, Social Change and History, (op. cit.).
13 quoted by Nisbet, p. 25, ibid.
14 p. 104, Jaki, op. cit.
15 p. 69 and p. 104, Trompf, op. cit.
16 Nisbet quoting Hesiod, p. 14, History of the Idea of Progress, (op. cit.).
17 pp. 15–17, ibid.
18 i.e., in his Social Change and History, op. cit.
19 p. 32, Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, (op. cit.).
20 p. 34, ibid.
22 p. 112, ibid.
23 p. 130, ibid.
24 p. 357, ibid.
25 p. 351, Nisbet, op. cit.
26 p. 357, ibid.
4 THE CHRISTIAN CHALLENGE TO GRAECO-ROMAN HISTORICAL

PERSPECTIVES
1 G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought – From Antiquity to
the Reformation, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press, 1979,
see p.186.
2 P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, London, Fontana Press, 1989, p. 591.
3 F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, London, Penguin, 1992.
4 p. 188, Trompf, op. cit.
5 p. 189, ibid.
6 p. 191, ibid.
7 Trompf quoting Ammianus, p. 192, ibid.
8 p. 202, ibid.
9 N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, London, Mercury Books, 1962, pp. 2–3.
10 p. 4, ibid.
11 p. 5, ibid.
12 p. 8, ibid., quoting Revelations.
13 See pp. 8–13, ibid.
14 R. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, London, Heinemann, 1980, p. 60.
15 S. Jaki, Science and Creation, Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1974, p. 177.
16 See p. 181, ibid.
17 See note 2 on p. 117 Trompf, op. cit., for a list (to which we can add Jaki).
18 p. 117, ibid.
19 p. 179, ibid.
20 p. 185, ibid.
21 p. 206, ibid.
22 p. 313, ibid.
23 ibid.
24 p. 315, ibid.
25 See note 17 above.
430
NOTES
27 p. 34, ibid.
28 p. 47, ibid.
29 p. 68, ibid.
30 p. 354, ibid.
31 p. 352, ibid.
32 p. 141, ibid.
33 p. 357, ibid.
34 p. 313, Trompf, op cit.
35 p. 120, D. R. Bultmann, History and Eschatology, Edinburgh, 1975.
37 p. 202, ibid. – see also p. 208.
39 H. A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine, Columbia University Press,
1963, p. viii.
40 p. 317, ibid.
41 p. 223, Trompf, op. cit.
42 p. 238, ibid.
43 p. 71, Deane, op. cit.
44 E. L. Fortin, ‘Augustine’s City of God and the Modern Historical Consciousness’, The
Review of Politics, Vol., 41, No. 3, July, 1979, p. 328.
45 p. 336, ibid.
46 p. 339, ibid.
47 p. 343, ibid.
49 p. 178, ibid.
50 p. 183, ibid. – (my italics).
51 ibid.
53 p. 61, ibid.
54 p. 67, ibid.
55 p. 75, ibid.
56 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in Vol.1, The Chief Works of Benedict de
Spinoza, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, New York, Dover Publications, 1955, p. 86.
57 See p. 246, Trompf, op. cit., for discussion and references.
58 G. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 3rd. edition, London, Harrap & Co., 1963, see
p. 191 and note 13.
1995, pp. 184–225
60 V. J. Bourke’s ‘Introduction’ to his edition of Augustine’s City of God, New York,
Image Books, 1958, p. 8.
61 Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Preface), trans. T. Knox, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962,
p. 12.
5 A CHANGING CONSCIOUSNESS OF HISTORY

1 P. Heather, ‘Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval West’, in Companion to
Historiography, ed. M. Bentley, London, Routledge, 1997, p. 74.
2 See Chapter 4, R. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies, Oxford, Blackwell,
1970.
3 J.M. Smith, ‘Regarding Medievalists’ in Companion to Historiography, op. cit., p. 106.
4 Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, in Aquinas, Selected Political Writings, ed. A. P.
D’Entrèves, Oxford, Blackwell, 1965, p. 79.
5 p. 60, Southern, op. cit.
431
NOTES
6 P. Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, California, Stanford Univer-

sity Press, 1964, p. 4.
7 E. Rice and A. Grafton, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460–1559, New
York, W. W. Norton, 1994, p. 81.
8 e.g., see C. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, Cambridge
University Press, 1995, pp. 30–3.
9 Pace Nauert’s complaint against Burkhardt, p. 2, ibid.
10 e.g., German Ideology, in Vol. 5, Karl Marx: Frederick Engels, Collected Works, London,
Lawrence & Wishart, 1976, pp. 63–74.
11 p. 214, Nauert, op. cit.
12 ibid.
13 p. 7 Rice and Grafton, op. cit.
14 p. 10, ibid.
15 ibid.
16 Julia Smith, ‘Regarding Medievalists’, in Companion to Historiography, op. cit., p. 107.
17 ibid.
1995, pp. 250–59.
19 e.g., see the section, ‘Denials’, The Renaissance Debate, ed. D. Hay, New York, Holt,
Rinehart, & Winston, 1965, pp. 77–91.
20 e.g., Henri Saint-Simon.
21 p. 91, The Renaissance Debate, op. cit.
22 More, Utopia, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965, p. 76.
23 P. Kropotkin, in The Essential Kropotkin, (eds) E. Capouya and K. Thompkins,
London, Macmillan, 1976, p. 109.
24 p. 63, More, op. cit.
25 Command and Conquer, Virgin Interactive Entertainment, 1996.
26 L. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1969,
p. 9.
27 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Everyman edition of The Social Contract
and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole, London, 1966, p. 59.
28 Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell – my references (below) are to the Picador
edition, London, 1992.
29 See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. and ed. by T. M. Knox, Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1962, paragraphs 137–40.
30 cf. pp. 295–96 De Grazia, op. cit.; also p. 252 Trompf, G.W., The Idea of Historical
Recurrence in Western Thought – From Antiquity to the Reformation, Berkeley, Los
Angeles, London, University of California Press, 1979.
31 p. 85, de Grazia, op. cit.
32 N. Machiavelli, The Discourses, in The Prince and the Discourses, ed. E. Vincent, New
York, The Modern Library, 1950, p. 101.
33 p. 103, ibid.
34 p. 104, ibid.
35 ibid.
36 p. 105, ibid.
37 ibid.
38 pp. 117–18, ibid.
39 p. 208, ibid.
40 p. 474, ibid.
41 p. 182, ibid.
42 p. 66, The Prince, ibid.
43 ibid.
44 p. 272, Discourses, ibid.
432
NOTES
45 p. 273, ibid.
46 p. 539, ibid.
47 p. 146, ibid.
48 p. 146, ibid.
49 p. 151, ibid.
50 p. 285, ibid.
51 e.g., see p. 101ff, de Grazia, op. cit.
52 p. 94, The Prince, op. cit.
53 p. 91, ibid.
54 Jaki, S. L. Science and Creation, Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1974, p. 256.
55 Nisbet, R. A. History of the Idea of Progress, London, Heinemann, 1980, p. 106.
56 p. 101, ibid.
57 Trompf, G. W. The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, Berkeley, London,
University of California Press, 1979, p. 249.
58 p. 258, ibid.
60 p. 201, ibid.
61 p .202, ibid.
62 p. 91, The Prince, op. cit.
63 ibid.
65 e.g., cf. D. Earl, The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome, London, Thames & Hudson,
1967, pp. 74–83.
6 AN INNOVATIVE INTERLUDE: FROM MACHIAVELLI TO VICO

1 See Chapter 4.
2 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, revised translation of the Third Edition
(1744) by T.G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch, New York, Cornell University Press, 1968,
paragraph 330.
3 See B. Cohen, ‘The Eighteenth-century Origins of the Concept of Scientific
Revolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 37, No. 2, 1976.
4 H. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, New York, 1952, p. viii, as cited in The
Western Intellectual Tradition, J. Bronowski and B. Mazlish, London, Hutchinson,1960,
p.107.
5 Quoted by L. Olschki, ‘Galileo’s Philosophy of Science’ in Intellectual Movements in
Modern European History, ed. F. L. Bauer, London, Macmillan, 1969, p. 51.
6 p. 47, ibid.
7 p. 195, Bronowski and Mazlish, op. cit.
8 p. 77, Hobbes, T. Leviathan, ed. J. Plamenatz, London, Fontana, 1962.
9 p. 111, ibid.
10 Spinoza, B., Introduction to Part 3, The Ethics, in The Chief Works of Benedict de
Spinoza, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, New York, Dover Publications, 1955, Vol. 2, p. 129.
11 Spinoza, B., On the Improvement of the Understanding, in The Chief Works of Benedict de
Spinoza, Vol. 2, op.cit., p. 7.
12 p. 111, Hobbes, op.cit.
13 p. 90, ibid.
14 e.g., cf. R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1993, (especially Chapter 2).
15 p. 143, Hobbes, op. cit.
16 see J. H. Franklyn, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-century Revolution in the Methodology of
Law and History, New York and London, Columbia University Press, 1966.
17 G. E. Aylmer, ‘Introductory Survey: From the Renaissance to the Eighteenth
433
NOTES
Century’, in Companion to Historiography, ed. M. Bentley, London, Routledge, 1997,

pp. 249–50.
18 B. Willey, ‘The Touch of Cold Philosophy’, in Intellectual Movements in Modern
European History, op.cit., p. 60.
19 Hobbes, Thomas White’s ‘De Mundo’ Examined, trans. H. W. Jones, London, Bradford
University Press, 1976, p. 434.
20 p. 74, Spinoza, Appendix, Ethics, op. cit.
21 p. 61, Spinoza, Note to Proof to Prop. XVII, ibid.
22 see p.112–13, Hobbes, Leviathan, op. cit.
23 paragraph 330, Vico, op.cit.
24 paragraph 331, ibid.
25 paragraph 330, ibid.
7 VICO’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

1 P. Burke, Vico, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 12.
2 See e.g., J. M. Levine, ‘Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns’, in Journal of
the History of Ideas, Vol. LII, No. 1, 1991.
3 p. 58 ibid.
4 Vico, On the Heroic Mind, trans. E. Sewell and A. Sirignano, in Social Research,
No. 43, 1976, p. 901.
5 Vico, Universal Right, trans. and ed. G. Pinton and M. Diehl, Amsterdam Atlanta,
Rodopi, 2000.
6 See e.g., J. C. Morrison, ‘Vico’s Principle of Verum is Factum and the Problem of
Historicism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 39, Issue 2, 1978.
7 See above, Chapter 6.
8 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, revised translation of the Third Edition
(1744) by T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch, New York, Cornell University Press, 1968,
paragraph 164 – all subsequent references to this text are given by paragraph number
only in this chapter.
9 119
10 120
11 125
12 127
13 349
14 138
15 359
16 140
17 139
18 137
19 138
20 331
21 349
22 140
23 163
24 349 (also 393)
25 1096
26 ibid.
27 211–212
28 215–216
29 240
30 298
31 369
434
NOTES
32 374
33 377
34 380
35 379
36 504
37 504–505
38 12–13
39 333
40 564
41 944
42 372
43 553
44 179
45 338
46 555
47 18
48 555
49 556
50 926
51 555 (my emphasis)
52 582
53 926
54 923
55 916
56 553
57 816
58 708
59 401
60 228–229–230
61 814
62 221
63 814
64 221
65 918
66 935
67 460
68 32
69 29
70 925
71 926
72 559
73 20
74 927
75 1038
76 326–327
77 1040
79 1008
80 951
81 29
82 951
84 951
435
NOTES
85 1008
86 918
87 1102
88 1101
89 1102
90 241
91 242
92 1105
93 1102
94 1106
95 1047
96 1103
97 1102
98 1105
99 1106
100 1108
101 1108
102 348
103 349
104 1046
105 1056
106 1008
107 1084
108 1104
109 1104 – See also 1008.
110 243–244
111 1108
112 1008
114 1047
115 1048
116 e.g., see L. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, University of Chicago Press,
1988.
117 13
118 372
119 9
120 167
121 313
122 9
123 329
124 9
125 54
126 165
127 125
128 68
129 396
130 365
131 948
132 1092
134 95
135 40
136 1094
436
NOTES
137 136
138 141
139 381
140 365
141 132–133
142 1108
143 343
144 344
145 324
146 349
147 345
148 136
149 313
150 329
152 310
153 See Chapter 5.
154 1109
155 334
156 1110
157 1106
158 1093
159 674
160 670
161 672
162 Vico, On the Heroic Mind, op. cit., p. 888.
163 p. 901 ibid.
164 p. 902 ibid.
166 J. C. Morrison, op. cit., p. 589.
167 ibid.
8 SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY DURING

THE ENLIGHTENMENT
1 Rousseau, The Confessions, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1965, p. 328.
2 Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, trans. G. D. H. Cole, London, Everyman,
Dent, 1966, p. 140.
3 p. 121 ibid.
4 p. 122 ibid.
5 p. 138 ibid.
6 p. 122 ibid.
7 p. 136 ibid.
8 p. 131 ibid.
9 p.140 ibid.
10 p. 120 ibid.
11 p. 121 ibid.
12 p. 123 ibid.
13 p. 129 ibid.
14 p. 124 ibid.
15 pp. 124–8 ibid.
16 p. 124 ibid.
17 p. 122 ibid.
437
NOTES
18 p. 123 ibid.
19 p. 362, The Confessions, op. cit.
20 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, trans. G. D. H. Cole, London,
Everyman, Dent, 1966 p. 161.
21 p. 162 ibid.
22 p. 169 ibid.
23 p. 170 ibid.
24 p. 185 ibid.
25 p. 167 ibid.
26 p. 190 ibid.
27 pp. 192 and 193 ibid.
28 pp. 194–6 ibid.
29 p. 197 ibid.
30 p. 198 ibid.
31 p. 199 Rousseau, op. cit
32 p. 202 ibid.
33 p. 205 ibid.
34 p. 192 ibid.
35 p. 207 ibid.
36 pp. 214–15
37 p. 219 ibid.
38 p. 220 ibid.
39 p. 228–9 ibid.
40 Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. G. D. H. Cole, London, Everyman, London,
1966, p. 6.
41 p. 8 ibid.
42 p. 12 ibid.
43 p. 16 ibid.
44 ibid.
45 p. 32 ibid.
46 p. 219, Discourse on Inequality, op. cit.
47 p. 17–18, Social Contract, op. cit.
48 B. Mazlish, The Riddle of History, New York and London, Harper & Row, 1966, p. 75.
49 F. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris, New York, Harper and Row, 1965, p. 61.
50 p. 15 ibid.
51 p. 13 ibid.
52 See note 49 above.
53 p. 36 ibid.
54 p. 18 ibid.
55 p. 32 ibid. (my emphasis).
56 p. 38 ibid.
57 p. 40 ibid.
58 p. 44 ibid.
59 p. 14 ibid.
60 p. 73, Mazlish, op. cit.
61 Quoted by Mazlish, p. 80, ibid.
62 p. 70, Manuel, op. cit.
63 pp. 77–78, Mazlish, op. cit.
64 Quoted by Mazlish, p. 86 ibid.
65 pp. 89 and 99 ibid.
438
NOTES
69 p. 100 ibid.
70 p. 87ff, Manuel, op. cit.
71 pp. 93–5, Mazlish, op. cit.
74 p. 91, Mazlish, op. cit
75 pp. 72–3, Manuel, op. cit.
76 Quoted by Conor Cruise O’Brien on p. 35 of his ‘Introduction’ to the Pelican edition
of Reflections on the Revolution in France, which he edited. Harmondsworth, Penguin
Books, 1969 – all subsequent quotations are from this edition.
77 For a recent and celebrated account of this ‘conservative disposition’, see
M. Oakeshott’s essay, ‘On Being Conservative’, in his Rationalism in Politics, London,
Methuen, 1962.
78 p. 194, Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, op. cit.
79 Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Oxford, Blackwell,
1967, p. 126.
80 p. 152, Burke, op. cit.
81 p. 153 ibid.
82 p. 118 ibid.
83 p. 153 ibid.
84 G. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, (third edition), London, Harrap, 1963,
pp. 618–19.
85 p. 105, Burke, op. cit.
9 HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

1 This is the title as translated by J. B. Baillie in his edition first published in London by
Allen & Unwin, and in New York by Humanities Press, in 1910. The title was
differently translated by A. V. Miller, in the Oxford University Press edition of 1977,
as Phenomenology of Spirit.
2 For the Rankean historical school, see M. Bentley, ‘Approaches to Modernity’, in
Companion to Historiography, (ed.) M. Bentley, London, Routledge, 1997,
pp. 420–23.
3 P. H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism, Berkley, University
of California Press, 1975.
4 pp. 2–4, ibid.
5 Philosophers will recognise here something like Spinoza’s distinction between Natura
naturata and Natura naturans.
6 K. Leidecker, Preface to W. Orynski, Hegel – Highlights: an annotated selection, New
York, Philosophical Library, 1960, p. vii.
7 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 25, see note 26.
8 pp. 30–3 ibid.
9 e.g., Hegel, (Preface) Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1962, p. 10.
10 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, op. cit., p. 305 (translator’s notes).
11 Hegel, p. 21 ibid.
12 See Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A. Miller, Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1971, pp. 158–68 (i.e., sections from the Encyclopaedia).
13 pp. 20–3, Hegel, Philosophy of Right, op. cit.
14 p. 57 ibid.
15 p. 67 ibid.
16 p. 73 ibid.
17 See pp. 256–58 ibid.
439
NOTES
18 p. 92 ibid.
19 p. 105 ibid.
20 p. 110 ibid. (my emphasis)
21 p. 118 ibid.
22 pp. 130–31 ibid.
23 p. 154 ibid.
24 p. 155 ibid.
25 p. 156 ibid.
26 p. 160 ibid.
27 Subsequent editions and translations appeared. All references below are to the 1840
edition, translated by J. Sibree, Hegel G., The Philosophy of History, New York, Dover
Publications, 1956.
28 p. 17 ibid.
29 p. 19 ibid.
30 p. 17 ibid.
31 Philosophy of Right, op. cit., p. 227.
32 Philosophy of History, op. cit., p. iv.
33 pp. 17–18 ibid.
34 pp. 19–20 ibid.
35 p. 63 ibid.
36 p. 9 ibid.
37 p. 10 ibid.
38 pp. 64–5 ibid.
39 p. 38 ibid.
40 p. 46 ibid.
41 p. 49 ibid.
42 p. 63 ibid.
43 pp. 61–2 ibid.
44 p. 80 ibid.
45 pp. 52–3
46 Philosophy of Right, op. cit., pp. 218–19.
47 See Philosophy of History, op. cit., pp. 80–1.
48 pp. 84–7 ibid.
49 pp. 91–6 ibid.
50 pp. 98–9 ibid.
51 p. 99 ibid.
52 p. 104 ibid.
53 pp. 104–5 ibid.
54 p. 222 ibid.
55 p. 106 ibid.
56 p. 223 ibid.
57 pp. 105–6 ibid.
58 Philosophy of Right, op. cit. p. 288.
59 p. 221 ibid.
60 Philosophy of History, op. cit., p. 223.
61 p. 107 ibid.
62 p. 279 ibid.
63 p.108 ibid.
64 p. 284 ibid.
440
NOTES
69 p. 109 ibid.
70 p. 344 ibid.
71 p. 109 ibid.
72 p. 344 ibid.
73 pp. 408–11 ibid.
74 pp. 412–15 ibid.
75 pp. 416–17 ibid.
76 pp. 109–10 ibid.
77 p. 419 ibid.
78 pp. 424–27 ibid.
79 pp. 439–40 ibid.
80 pp. 442–43 ibid.
81 p. 449 ibid.
82 p. 452 ibid.
83 p. 449 ibid.
84 But see p. 376, note by Knox (translator) to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, op. cit., for a
contrary view.
86 Philosophy of Right, op. cit., p. 278: see also pp. 148–50 ibid.
87 Philosophy of History, op. cit, p. 452.
88 p. 449, 453 ibid.
89 pp. 454–55 ibid.
90 pp. 108–9 ibid.
91 pp. 86–7 ibid.
92 pp. 456–57 ibid.
94 Philosophers may recognise here something akin to Spinoza’s notion that Thought
and Extension are but attributes of (the same) Substance.
95 Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, (trans. J. B. Baillie), London, Allen & Unwin, 1966,
p. 276.
10 MARX ON HISTORY
1 F. Engels, Schelling and Revelation (written late 1841, early 1842), in Vol. 2, Karl Marx/
Frederick Engels, Collected Works, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1975, pp. 239–40.
2 ibid.
3 Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, in Vol. 3, Collected
Works, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1976, p. 77.
4 Marx, On the Jewish Question, in Vol. 3, Collected Works, op. cit., p. 153.
5 p. 167, ibid.
6 p. 166 ibid.
7 Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, op. cit., pp. 30–1.
8 p. 50 ibid.
9 p. 162–3, ibid.
10 p. 168, ibid.
11 Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law – Introduction, Vol. 3,
Collected Works, op. cit., p. 179.
12 pp. 184, 185, 186, ibid.
13 p. 182 ibid.
14 pp. 186, 187 ibid.
15 pp. 176, 181 ibid.
16 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Vol. 3, Collected Works, op. cit.,
pp. 271–2.
441
NOTES
17 ibid.
18 p. 274 ibid.
19 p. 276 ibid.
20 pp. 302–4, ibid.
21 p. 277 ibid.
22 pp. 296–7 ibid.
23 p. 297 ibid.
24 L. Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1966,
p. 51.
25 p. 24 ibid.
26 p. 9 ibid.
27 p. 48 ibid.
28 pp. 30–1 ibid.
29 p. 73 ibid.
30 p. 67 ibid.
31 p. 71 ibid.
32 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in Vol. 3, Collected Works, op. cit., p. 334.
33 p. 337 ibid.
34 p. 341 ibid.
35 Interestingly, it is to these very concerns that F. Fukuyama (see Chapter 15) has
recently turned his attention.
36 pp. 275–6 ibid.
37 pp. 299–302 ibid.
38 ‘Forming’, from the German ‘Bildung’, meaning ‘education’ in the broadest sense.
39 pp. 301–2 ibid.
40 p. 302 ibid.
41 p. 337 ibid.
42 p. 279 ibid.
43 Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, Vol. 5, Collected Works, op. cit., p. 3.
44 pp. 4–5 ibid.
45 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, (trans. T. Knox), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962, pp. 11–12.
46 e.g., see Marx, ‘Communism and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung’ in Vol. 1,
Collected Works, op. cit., p. 220.
47 Marx, The German Ideology, Vol. 5, Collected Works, op. cit., p. 41.
48 pp. 41–2 ibid.
49 p. 31 ibid.
50 p. 42 ibid.
51 p. 31 ibid.
52 pp. 42–4 ibid.
53 p. 45 ibid.
54 p. 46 ibid.
55 p. 32 ibid.
56 p. 46 ibid.
57 p. 32 ibid.
58 p. 47 ibid.
59 p. 90 ibid.
60 Engels, pp. 46–7 ibid.
61 Marx, pp. 50–1 ibid.
62 pp. 53–4 ibid.
63 p. 37 ibid.
64 p. 60 ibid.
65 pp. 61–2 ibid.
66 p. 82 ibid.
442
NOTES
67 p. 74 ibid.
68 p. 82 ibid.
69 p. 74 ibid.
70 p. 33 ibid.
71 pp. 34–5 ibid.
72 pp. 66 to 9 ibid.
73 p. 72 ibid.
74 p. 72 ibid.
75 pp. 72–3 ibid.
76 p. 78 ibid.
77 p. 49 ibid.
78 pp. 51–2 ibid.
79 Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 29, Collected Works,
op. cit., p. 264.
80 Marx, The German Ideology, op. cit., p. 77.
81 p. 79 ibid.
82 pp. 87–8 ibid.
83 p. 52 ibid.
84 See Vol. 28 of Karl Marx/Frederick Engels, Collected Works, op. cit. – also known as
Grundrisse, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1973.
85 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Vol. 6, Collected Works, op. cit.,
p. 482.
86 Marx, The German Ideology, op. cit., p. 74.
87 pp. 52–3 ibid.
88 ibid.
89 e.g., see G. Lichtheim, Marxism – An Historical and Critical Study, London, Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1964, pp. 244–8.
90 Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, op. cit., pp. 264–5.
91 Pace Fukuyama, see Chapter 15.
92 Marx, The German Ideology, op. cit., pp. 48–9.
93 ibid., p. 37: ‘real, positive science’ translated from the original German, ‘wirkliche,
positive Wissenschaft’, Deutsche Ideologie, Vol.3, Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels: Werke,
Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1969, p. 27.
94 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, op. cit., p. 498.
95 Its original German title was Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur
Wissenschaft, and its French title was Socialisme Utopique et Socialisme Scientifique, see
Vol. 19, op. cit., pp. 177, 179.
96 In German, ‘Wissenschaft’.
97 Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, Vol.5, Collected Works, op. cit., p. 3
11 ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

1 The above quotes and account are taken from J. Franklyn’s indispensable Jean Bodin
and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History, New York
and London, Columbia University Press, 1966, pp. 152–4.
12 THE ‘WHAT IS HISTORY?’ DEBATE

1 See my The Discipline of History and the History of Thought, London, Routledge, 1995.
443
NOTES
14 THE END OF HISTORY

1 cf. pp. 250–59, M. C. Lemon, The Discipline of History and the History of Thought,
London, Routledge, 1995.
2 Described in Chapter 5.
3 H. Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern – a History, London and New York, Routledge,
1995, p. 35.
4 J. Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers – From Structuralism to Postmodernity,
London and New York, Routledge, 1994, p. 111.
5 cf. Condorcet, see Chapter 8 above.
6 pp. 239 and 240, Bertens, op. cit.
7 A. Munslow, Deconstructing History, London and New York, Routledge, 1997, p. 178.
8 Munslow, op. cit.
9 ibid. pp. 1–3
10 ibid. p.165
11 ibid. pp. 6 and 7
12 ibid. p. 127
13 ibid. pp. 5 and 164
14 ibid. p. 174
15 ibid. p. 143
16 ibid., p. 154
17 ibid. p. 144
18 ibid. p. 35
19 ibid. p. 162
20 ibid. p. 176
21 ibid. p. 177
22 ibid. p. 18
23 ibid. p. 70
24 ibid. p. 74
25 ibid. pp. 117–18
26 ibid. p. 138, p. 121
27 ibid. p. 130
28 ibid. p. 146
29 ibid. pp. 163–4
30 ibid. p. 166
31 ibid. p. 178
32 ibid. p. 1
33 e.g., Eric Evans, ‘The Theory Man’, in History Today, Vol. 47, June 1997.
34 Munslow, op. cit. p. 2.
35 See pp. 411–16, Rethinking History, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2001.
36 cf. pp. 225–59, M. C. Lemon, op. cit.
37 K. Jenkins, On ‘What is History?’, London and New York, Routledge, 1995, p. 63.
38 p. 13 ibid.
39 pp. 8 and 9 ibid.
40 pp. 69–70 ibid.
41 p. 125 ibid.
42 p. 63 ibid.
43 pp. 142–3 ibid.
44 p. 145 ibid.
45 p. 138 ibid. (my italics)
46 p. 38 ibid.
47 p. 102, Munslow, op. cit.
48 p. 2 ibid.
444
NOTES
49 p. 178–9, Jenkins, op. cit.

50 p. 9 ibid.
51 p. 29 ibid. (cf. also Munslow, p. 149 op. cit.).
52 p. 79 ibid.
53 H. Tudor, Political Myth, London, Pall Mall Press, 1972, see pp. 123–5.
15 THE END OF HISTORY? FUKUYAMA’S SPECULATIVE

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, London, Penguin Books,
1992 edition, p. xii.
2 e.g., see p. 276 ibid. for these terms.
3 p. xiv ibid.
4 p. 3 ibid.
5 p. 57 ibid.
6 p. 51 ibid.
7 p. 138 and 139 ibid.
8 p. 71 ibid.
9 p. 72 ibid.
10 p. 75 ibid.
11 p. 76 ibid.
12 p. 77 ibid.
13 p. 83 ibid.
14 p. 85 ibid.
15 p. 88 ibid.
16 p. 93 ibid.
17 p. 94 ibid.
18 p. 93 ibid.
19 p. 96 ibid.
20 p. 100 ibid.
21 p. 103 ibid.
22 p. 108 ibid.
23 p. 131 ibid.
24 p. 112 ibid.
25 p. 115–16 ibid.
26 p. 121 ibid.
28 p. 125 ibid.
29 p. 133–4 ibid.
30 p. 135 ibid.
31 p.136 ibid.
32 p. 139 ibid.
33 V. Gourevitch, ‘The End of History?’ in After History? Francis Fukuyama and His
Critics, ed. T. Burns, Maryland, Towman & Littlefield, 1994, p. 129.
34 p. 154, Fukuyama, op. cit.
35 p. 144 ibid.
36 p. 146 ibid.
37 p. 147 ibid.
38 p. 152 ibid.
39 p. 160 ibid.
40 p. 161 ibid.
41 p. 162 ibid.
42 p. 165 ibid.
445
NOTES
43 p. 177 ibid.
44 p. 170 ibid.
45 p. 175 ibid.
46 p. 176 ibid.
47 p. 181 ibid.
48 p. 182 ibid.
49 cf. A. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, New Jersey, Princeton University
Press, 1997.
51 p. 190–1 ibid.
52 p. 193 ibid.
53 p. 194 ibid.
54 p. 196–7 ibid.
55 p. 198 ibid.
56 p. 206 ibid.
57 p. 208 ibid.
58 p. 200 ibid.
59 p. 202 ibid.
60 e.g., see M. Cranston, ‘Human Rights, Real and Supposed’, in Political Theory and the
Rights of Man, ed. D. Raphael, London, Macmillan, 1967, pp. 43–53.
62 p. 213 ibid.
63 p. 215 ibid.
64 p. 223 ibid.
65 p. 224 ibid.
66 p. 225 ibid.
67 p. 228 ibid.
68 p. 230 ibid.
69 p. 234 ibid.
70 p. 235–6 ibid.
71 p. 238 ibid.
72 p. 243 ibid.
73 p. 244 ibid.
74 p. 247 ibid.
75 p. 254 ibid.
76 p. 255–6 ibid.
77 p. 259 ibid.
78 p. 260 ibid.
79 p. 262–3 ibid.
80 p. 265 ibid.
81 p. 266 ibid.
82 p. 190 ibid.
83 p. 270 ibid.
84 p. 271 ibid.
85 p. 272 ibid.
86 p. 275 ibid.
87 p. 276 ibid.
88 p. 277 ibid.
89 p. 279 ibid.
90 p. 280 ibid.
91 p. 289 ibid.
92 p. 290 ibid.
93 p. 295 ibid.
446
NOTES
94 p. 290 ibid.
95 p. 292 ibid.
96 p. 296 ibid.
97 p. 298 ibid.
98 p. 293 ibid.
99 p. 299 (my emphasis)
100 p. 301 ibid.
101 p. 303 ibid.
102 See our Chapter 10.
103 p. 305 ibid.
104 p. 307 ibid.
105 p. 309 ibid.
106 pp. 310–11 ibid.
107 pp. 313–14 ibid.
109 p. 316 ibid.
110 p. 318 ibid.
111 pp. 319–21 ibid.
112 F. Fukuyama, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social
Order, Profile Books, 1999.
113 F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, op. cit., p. 323.
114 p. 324 ibid.
115 p. 326 ibid.
116 p. 329 ibid.
117 pp. 330–1 ibid.
118 p. 332 ibid.
119 pp. 335–6 ibid.
120 p. 288 ibid.
121 F. Fukuyama, ‘Reflections on The End of History – Five Years Later’, in After History?
Francis Fukuyama and His Critics, ed. T. Burns, Maryland, Littlefield Adams, 1994,
see pp. 247–50.
122 F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, op. cit., pp. 337–8.
123 p. 339 ibid.
124 F. Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Bio-technology Revolution,
Profile Books, 2002.
125 T. Von Laue, ‘From Fukuyama to Reality: A Critical Essay’, in After History? Francis
Fukuyama and His Critics, op. cit., pp. 32 and 37.
126 See note 2 to our Chapter 4.
127 F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, op. cit., pp. xix, xx and 222.
128 p. 45 and 46 ibid.
129 p. 211 ibid.
130 p. 217 ibid.
131 p. 46 ibid.
132 reprinted in The Guardian (UK), p. 21, 11 October, 2001.
133 My emphasis.
134 G. B. Smith, ‘The “End of History” or a Portal to the Future: Does Anything
Lie Beyond Late Modernity?’, in After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics,
op. cit., p. 1.
135 See our Chapter 4.
136 See the section, ‘The potential demise of “the age of men”’, in our Chapter 7.
137 p. xix, Fukuyama, op. cit.
138 p. 257 ibid.
139 J. Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed. M. J. Tooley, Oxford, Blackwell, 1967,
pp. 3–5.
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451
INDEX
Abraham 53 Aphrodite 19, 26

Academy of Dijon 172, 174 apocalyptics 52–4, 58–9, 65–6
Achilles 140–1 Aquinas (St Thomas) 75–8, 157
Adam 153, 155 Arabs 190, 195
Advancement of Learning, The (Bacon) 110 archaeology 294
Afghanistan 410 Arians 151
Africa 83–4, 86, 149, 219–21, 405 Aristotle 28, 32, 35–6, 39–40, 43, 76–9,
‘age of giants’, the (in Vico) 136–40, 142, 91, 100, 108–9, 112, 154, 190, 291, 323,
144 424, 427
‘age of gods’, the (in Vico) 136–40, 144, ‘Aryan’ race 341
148–9, 152 Assyrian Empire 46, 49
‘age of heroes’, the (in Vico) 140–4, 147–9 Athens 31, 36, 145, 173, 222, 354
‘age of men’, the (in Vico) 142–50, 160–4 Aufklärung, the 202, 229
Age of Reason, the 171 Augustine (St) 15, 33, 41, 54–5, 57, 61–9,
‘ages of man’, the 41, 51, 57 71–6, 107, 152, 390, 423
Alexander the Great 208 Augustus (Roman Emperor)–(see also
Algeria 363, 409 Octavian) 45, 50, 79, 145–6, 150
alienation 82, 205, 244–6, 248–50, 252–3, Australia 219–220, 270
255, 259, 266, 277, 369, 414, 426 Austria 230
Allah 60 autobiographies 306
Ambrose (St) 68 Autobiography (Vico) 107, 127
American Civil War, the 400 Aztecs 86
‘American Empire’ 48
American Indians 148, 175, 219 Babylon 46
American Revolution, the (1776) 168, Bacon, Francis 110, 133–4, 164, 169, 172,
190, 196, 241 390
American War of Independence 169 Baudrillard, J. 26, 367–9
Ammianus 50 Bayle, Pierre 158
analytic history 295–8, 319, 329, 345, 351 Before Philosophy (Frankfort et al.) 17
analytic philosophy of history 1–3, 8, Behemoth (Hobbes) 123
281–5, 288–91, 293–4, 297, 300, 306–8, Beijing 400
310, 315, 321–3, 325, 355–6, 359, 370, Belgium 239
385, 390, 392 Bentham, Jeremy 169, 192, 197
Anaximander 28, 30 Berlin 201, 238, 421
Anaximenes 28 Bernstein, Edward 310
Anti-Dühring (Engels) 274 Bertens, H. 370
antiquarianism 1, 294 Bible, The 57, 75, 83–4, 92, 108, 118–24,
apartheid 393, 411 137, 189, 214, 228
452
INDEX
‘Big Feet’ (Pufendorf) 140 China 7, 48, 51, 84, 221, 394, 399, 405,
biography 334 420
biological analogy (in history) 35–9, 40–3, Christianity 15, 23–4, 29, 35, 44–5, 47–51,
49, 52, 222–5, 234 54–78, 91, 93–5, 99, 103–4, 108, 120–3,
Black history 318, 320, 335 149, 151–4, 157, 158–9, 186, 189, 203,
‘block-buster’ histories 333, 349, 376 225, 227–8, 231, 309, 336, 390, 402–3,
Bodin, Jean 116–17, 119, 124, 284, 427–8 413, 420
‘body–state’ analogy, the 18, 49–50, 116 chronicles 15, 20, 300–1, 313, 320
Bonn 238 Cicero 79, 158
Book of Daniel, The 46, 53 City of God, The (Augustine) 54, 61, 63,
Book of Ezra, The 53 65–9, 423
Book of Revelation, The 54 class-conflict 49, 145, 160, 242–3, 249,
Book of Wisdom, The 55 253, 258, 261, 267–70, 274, 277, 309,
Bosnia 317 379, 404
bourgeoisie 81, 242, 265, 362, 379–81, Cohn, N. 53
399, 408–9, 413, 416 Cold War, the 236, 391, 407, 417
Boyle, R. 110 Cologne 238–9
Britain 168–9, 196, 202, 270, 320, 371, Columbus (Christopher) 83
378, 420 Commodianus 54
British Empire 48 communism 237–8, 246, 249–50, 255,
Brussels 238 266–70, 272–3, 391, 394–5, 399, 422
Buddhism (Therevada, Mahayana) 71–2 comparative history 47, 119, 284, 296
Bultman, D. R. 59 Comte, Auguste 18
Burke, Edmund 195–200, 213 Condillac, E. B. de (1715–80) 184
Burkhardt, J. 82, 88 Condorcet, Marquis de (1743–94) 171,
Bury, J. B. 42 184, 187–95, 236
Byzantium (and Byzantine Empire) 45, 83, Constantine (Roman Emperor) 45, 47
85, 190 Constantinople 45, 85, 90, 173, 174
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
California 270, 415 Philosophy of Law (Marx) 240, 242
Caligula (Roman Emperor) 151 Copernicus, Nicolaus (1743–1543) 108–9
Cambodia 317, 410 Cortes, H. (1485–1547) 83
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament covering laws (in history) 309–10, 372
(CND) 329–30 Crimean War, the 13
Canada 408 ‘critical’ philosophy of history 2
Cape of Good Hope 83, 175 Croats 382
capitalism 26, 37, 82–3, 86, 91, 116, 194, Cromwell, Oliver 299
239, 244–6, 264–5, 269–73, 297, 341, Crusades, the 72, 190, 195
360, 367, 369, 390–1, 394–6, 398, 403, cycles: cosmological 16, 23–4, 26, 31, 33,
405–6, 410–12, 415–16, 420, 425 35, 46–7, 50, 52, 55–7, 60, 69, 72;
Carribean, the 83 historical 9, 12, 22, 32–4, 38–9, 42–7,
Cartesianism (see Descartes) 49–50, 52, 55, 57–9, 61–2, 64, 69–70,
Carthaginians 31 102, 130, 148, 150–2, 155, 159, 164,
Cathars 383 180, 199, 271, 309, 407, 417, 424–5;
Catholicism 67, 80, 86, 99, 109–10, 116, political 39–41, 102–3
120, 127, 151–3, 157, 159, 219, 227–8, Cyclops, the 139
230, 232 Czechoslovakia 399
causality in history 22, 293
Chad 410 Dallas 302
Charlemagne 66, 225–6 ‘Dark Ages’, the 9, 149, 154, 173, 225, 226
Charles 1 (England) 198 Darwin, Charles 152, 199
childhood 18, 31, 50 Day of Judgement, the 53
Chile 396 Deane, H. A. 63
453
INDEX
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the 134–5, 165, 168–9, 190–1, 201, 229,
Citizen 230 291, 372, 374
Deconstructing History (Munslow) 371, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
381–2 (Hegel) 209
deconstructionists 363, 373–375 Encyclopédie 170
De Grazia, S. 93–4, 103–4 Encyclopédists (French) 170–1
democracy 25, 39–40, 145, 232, 241–3, End of History and the Last Man, The
250, 268–70, 396, 401, 420–1, 425–6 (Fukuyama) 48, 419
Democritus 29, 112, 238 Engels, F. 238, 240, 255, 258–9, 270–1,
Denmark 150 274
Derrida, J. 363–5, 373 England 109–10, 112, 119, 152, 196, 198,
Descartes (and Cartesianism) 111–14, 121, 230, 232, 245, 263–4, 297
128, 131, 169, 172, 190, 229, 390 English Civil War 123, 346, 383
descriptive history 294–5, 297–8, 301, 319, English revolutions (1640, 1688) 265
329, 345, 351 Enlightenment, the 46, 86, 88–9, 168–73,
determinism (in history) 9, 12, 25, 35, 160, 181, 184, 186–7, 190, 194–5, 198, 200,
271–2, 276, 315 202, 229, 250, 360
dialectical materialism 270 Epicurus 29, 33, 112, 158, 238
dialectics 181, 195, 205–10, 215, 222–3, epistemology 112, 114–15, 123–4, 132–4,
228, 231, 249, 267, 271, 396 166, 253, 260, 290, 301, 304, 306, 308,
Dialogue on the Two Principal World Systems 322, 384–6, 390–1
(Galileo) 109 Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Kepler)
Dias, B. (1450?–1500) 83 109
Diderot, Denis 170–1 Erasmus (Desiderius) 80, 85–6, 91, 119,
Diggers, the 383 353
Dionysius 46 eschatology 54, 61
Discourse on Method (Descartes) 113 Esquisse, the (Condorcet) 187, 194–5
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(Rousseau) 46, 171–4, 184 (Locke) 112
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy’s Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of
History of Rome (Machiavelli) 93, 95, Nations (Voltaire) 7
97, 102–3 Ethics (Spinoza) 114, 122
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Euclid 113, 217, 235
(Rousseau) 174–81, 183–4 Euphrates, the 30
Disneyland 368 European Convention on Human Rights 404
Domitian (Roman Emperor) 151 European Union (political) 161
Donation of Constantine, the 79 events (concept of) 298, 316–21, 339,
Dublin 196 345–9, 351–2, 368, 377
evidence (concept of) 130, 282, 302–5,
East India Company, the 196 324, 334, 370, 372, 375, 384
‘East Indies’, the 83, 264 existentialism 105–6, 175, 361, 366
Eclaircissement, the 229, 231 ‘explicatory’ (function of narrative)
economic history 320 317–18, 321, 347–8, 352
Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58 (Marx)
269 fables 16
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts fact (concept of) 303–5, 307, 310, 313–14,
of 1844 (Marx) 243–53, 256, 266, 317, 332, 339, 343, 345–6, 351, 365,
268 367, 372–4, 377–8, 385–6, 423;
Egypt 16, 19–20, 23–4, 30, 153, 173, ‘relevant’ fact 347–9; ‘significant’ fact
221–2 347–9
Einstein, Albert 311 fascism 179, 391, 422
Elton, G. 379–80 fate 9, 12, 33–4, 42–3, 46, 50, 52, 58, 155
empiricism 86, 110–15, 118, 123–4, 127, Fenians 303
454
INDEX
feudalism 149, 189–90, 226–7, 229, 241, Great Disruption, The (Fukuyama) 416
262–4, 268, 270 Great Year, the 20
Feuerbach, Ludwig 247–9, 253–5, 275–6, Greece 16, 24, 27–39, 41–3, 46, 49, 53, 56,
402 58–9, 80, 91, 98, 111, 113, 128, 130,
Fichte, J. G. (1762–1814) 202 136–7, 139–43, 151, 154, 157, 166, 173,
fiction (the logic of) 165–6, 299, 313–14, 185, 190, 206, 222–3, 227, 231, 262, 309
325–8, 345–6, 373, 377–8, 385 Guardian, The 423
‘final’ activity (concept of) 325–8, 340–2, Gutenberg, Johann 84
346, 356
First World War 302, 311–12, 317, 391, Hadrian (Roman Emperor) 50
417 Ham 137
Flanders 263 Hammurabi 23
Flood, the 26, 137, 153 Hannibal 93
Florentine Histories, The (Machiavelli) 94, Havel, V. 399
102 Hebrews, the 137, 153–4, 157, 159
Florus 50 Hegel, G. W. F. 13–14, 37, 48, 72, 93, 171,
Fortin, E. L. 63 181, 184, 195, 200–50, 252–3, 255,
fortune 33–4, 41–2, 51–2, 100–3, 155 259–60, 266, 268–71, 275–6, 309, 379,
Foucault, M. 364–6, 372, 374, 382 390, 392, 396–9, 402–4, 413, 417, 420,
Four World-Monarchies (myth of) 45–8, 427
53 Hegel, Karl 213
Fragment on Government, A (Bentham) Heidelberg 201
169, 192 Henry VIII 91
France 7, 78, 84, 110, 112–13, 116, 119, Heraclitus 28–9, 33
127–8, 149, 158, 168, 187, 196, 201–2, Herodotus 31, 34
229–30, 232, 239, 242–3, 263, 269, 284, Hesiod 28–30, 38
363–5, 367, 393, 397, 409, 427 Hinduism 23, 405
Frankfort, H. 21, 28, 30 Hippo 68
Frederick the Great 229 hippy movement 394
French Academy of Sciences 110, 187 Hiroshima 93
French Revolution, the (1789) 88, 168–9, ‘histodicy’ 11
187, 190, 194–6, 202, 229–31, 241–2, ‘historical explanation’ 281, 290, 308–11,
265, 361, 400, 403 315–18, 322
Fukuyama, F. 37, 48, 359, 390–428 historical materialism 145, 239, 250, 253,
255, 265–8, 270–7, 309, 390, 426
Galileo 109, 111, 114, 121, 390 historical methodology 281–5, 307, 349
‘general will’, the (Rousseau) 182–3 historicism 125
Geneva, Republic of 171 historiography 307, 379–80
German Ideology, The (Marx and Engels) Histories (Polybius) 31, 41
255, 258–62, 266, 268–70, 274, 276 History (Herodotus) 31
‘German world, the’ (in Hegel) 224–8, history of ideas (see history of thought)
231, 234 History of the Idea of Progress (Nisbet) 42
Germany 84, 93, 201–2, 229–30, 238–9, History of the Peloponnesian War
243, 259, 262, 268 (Thucydides) 31
globalisation 273, 320, 360, 369, 391, 395, History of Political Theory, A (Sabine) 200
420 History of Rome (Livy) 95
gods, the 16–22, 28–30, 33–4, 47, 53, 153 history of thought 8, 67, 191, 259–60, 266,
golden age 21, 37–8, 42, 177, 181, 199 290, 318–19, 377, 423–4
Gorbachev, M. 393 Hitler, Adolf 35, 49, 314, 424
Gospels, the 63 Hobbes, Thomas 105, 113–15, 117–18,
Goths, the 45, 68, 81 120–3, 140, 158, 178, 275, 386, 397–9,
Gourevitch, V. 397 404, 407
Grafton, A. 79 Holland 84, 229, 408
455
INDEX
Holocaust, the 317, 340, 391, 396 Italy 77, 81, 84, 89, 98–9, 109, 119, 142,
Holy Roman Empire 66 263
Homer 128–30, 136–7, 139–43
Hooke, R. 110 Jacobins, the 187
Horace 186 Jacobsen, T. 30
Hottentots, the 175 Jaki, S. 36, 43–4, 53, 60, 64–5, 102
humanism 106, 128, 250, 266 (see also Jameson, F. 369
‘Renaissance humanism’) Japan 393, 396, 405
humanities, the (see also studia humanitatis) Japheth 137
13, 77, 127, 354, 370 Jena 201, 203, 390
human nature 9, 12, 26, 40, 42, 92, 97–8, Jenkins, K. 378–86
105, 118, 124, 143, 146–7, 160, 163, Jerusalem 53
174, 185, 250–2, 256, 285, 352, 354, Jesuits, the 187
360, 398–9, 402, 404, 407, 409, 412–13, Jesus (of Nazareth) 54, 121, 154, 225
418–19, 426–8 Jews 52–4, 56–7, 69, 70, 114, 222, 238,
382–3, 405
Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Johnson, Dr S. 50
Thought, The (Trompf) 41, 56 Jove 138, 140–1
idealism (philosophical) 25, 29, 92, 202, Judaism 58, 123
237, 240, 243, 247–8, 253, 255, 275, Judaeo-Christian tradition, the 15, 52–6,
291, 292 59–60, 65, 157, 159, 160
Idea of Progress (Bury) 42 Julius Caesar 45, 50, 208, 401
ideology 1, 56, 65, 67, 83, 105, 107,
126, 184, 189–90, 195, 237, 257, Kant, E. 202, 229, 391
259–61, 265, 267, 271, 276–7, 281, Kapital, Das (Marx) 25, 239, 269–70, 272,
286, 306, 321, 331, 333, 335–8, 340, 276
343–5, 363, 367, 372, 379–81, 383–6, Kennedy, J. F. (President) 293, 302, 306
402, 404, 406, 408, 410, 413, 420–1; Kennedy, P. 48, 420
‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ ideology 386–9, Kepler, Johannes 109, 216–17, 235
422–5 Kojève, A. 397–8
Iliad, the (Homer) 128 Koran,The 60
imperialism 272, 394, 401, 407–8, 425 Kristeller, P. 78
Incas 86 Kropotkin, M. 91
India 7, 83, 196, 218, 221
Industrial Revolution, the 88–9 Lactantius 54
inference (concept of) 130, 303–6, 310, Last Judgement, the 54
343, 372, 384 Latin America 395
Inquisition, the 109, 127, 152, 228 Law of the Twelve Tables, the 140, 142
intellectual history (see history of thought) Lenin, V. 170, 272, 394
International Working Men’s Association Leonardo da Vinci 82
(First International) 239 Leviathan (Hobbes) 113, 117
Internet, the 85–6, 143 liberal arts, the 76–7, 112, 353
Investigators, the 127 liberal-democracy 37, 237, 379, 391, 393,
Ionian school (of philosophy) 28 395–9, 401, 403–6, 408, 410–18, 420–5
Iran 406 liberalism 197, 230, 232, 401, 404, 411–12,
Ireland 196, 299, 303 421, 425
Irenaeus 54 Libya 410
Islam 60, 394, 404, 406, 420–2, 425 linear history 22, 42–4, 49, 55–62, 64, 66,
Isles of the Blest 38 69–71, 103, 152, 160, 180, 271, 309, 407
isothymia 401–3, 412–15, 418, 425 Livy 95, 96
Israel 320, 400 Locke, John 112, 117–18, 169, 178, 184,
Israelites 53 190, 399, 404
Istanbul 45 London 196, 239, 294
456
INDEX
Louis XIV (France) 7 millennium, the (and millennialism)

Lucretius 29, 33, 112 48–9, 54, 58, 64–5, 92, 115, 160, 199,
Luke (the Gospels) 57 309, 423
Luther, (Martin) 80, 119, 227 modernism 361, 380
Lyotard, J-F. 365–7 Mohammedans 154
Montanus 54
Maccabaeans 53 More (St Thomas) 72, 90–2, 95, 264
Macedonian Empire 46, 49 Moscow 421
Machiavelli, N. 15, 41, 80, 93–108, 115, Moses 153
117, 125, 141, 146, 158, 227, 334, 352, ‘movements’ (in history) 88–90, 359,
354, 401, 420 361–2, 376
McLuhan, M. 369 Muhammad 60
Magellan, F. (1480?–1521) 83 Munslow, A. 370–8, 381–3, 385
Mainz 84 Muslim (see also Islam) 64, 190, 406, 422
Malaysia 394 myth, and mythopoeic mentality 9, 14,
Mani (and Manichaeism) 68 17–18, 20, 23, 28–31, 34, 52–3, 55, 70,
Manifesto of the Communist Party, The 112, 129–30, 136–7, 139, 141–3, 337
(Marx and Engels) 49, 239, 269, 274
Manuel, F. 184, 186–7, 192, 195 Nagasaki 93
Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor) 33 Naples 107, 127, 152
Marshall, B. 382 Napoleon (Bonaparte) 88, 169, 201, 203,
Marx, Karl 25, 48–9, 72, 82–3, 145, 163, 208, 230, 234, 390, 393
171, 184, 237, 238–77, 309, 335, 386, Napoleonic Wars 293
390, 392, 396, 402–3, 414, 426–7 narrative (and narrative history) 15, 16,
Marxism 58, 145, 163, 181, 239, 270–2, 21–2, 26, 50, 88–9, 100, 281, 291,
274, 309–10, 346, 361, 365, 367, 372, 298–301, 313–20, 322, 329, 345–7, 349,
379, 395 351–2, 365, 370, 372–3, 375–9, 382,
Marxism-Leninism 239, 355, 394 384, 388
materialism (philosophical) 25, 29, 33, 92, nationalism 334, 396, 404, 407, 409–11,
112, 117, 192, 204, 253, 275 425
Mazlish, B. 189, 191 ‘natural history’ 293–4, 309, 315, 318
media history 282, 318, 320 Nazism 237, 306, 355, 391, 417
Median Empire 46, 49 Nero (Roman Emperor) 151
medieval (see ‘Middle Ages’) Netherlands, the 113–14, 119
megalothymia 400–3, 407–9, 414–16, 418, New Jerusalem 54
425, 427 Newton (Isaac) 109–10, 120, 147, 172,
Meiji Japan 396 311
Mein Kampf (Hitler) 424 New Science, The (Vico) 108, 120, 124,
Mercator, G. (1512–94) 83 126, 129–32, 134–6, 141, 147, 151–3,
Mesopotamia 19, 23, 30, 137 158–9, 163–4, 168, 425
Messiah, the 53–4 New Testament, the 229
‘metanarrative’ 365–6, 376, 382, 392 ‘New World’, the 83–4, 86, 220, 234
Method for the Easy Comprehension of New York 368, 400
Histories (Bodin) 284 Nietzsche, Frederick 361, 413–15, 417
Mexico 83, 86, 408 Nile, the 30, 220
Mexico City 84 Nisbet, R. A. 35, 38, 42–4, 54, 58–9, 65,
Michelet, J. (1798–1874) 78, 86 102
Middle Ages, the 62, 66, 74–9, 81–6, Noah 137
88, 96, 112, 115, 149, 151, 154, 157, ‘noble savage, the’ 175, 177, 180, 182
173, 190, 225–7, 262–5, 361–2, North Africa 49, 68, 83
383, 401 Northern Ireland 320
Middle East, the 16, 31, 46, 49 Novum Organum (Bacon) 110
Milan 68 Nüremburg 201
457
INDEX
objectivity 67, 281, 284–5, 290, 304, 307, 322–4, 355, 360, 363, 386, 390, 396,
329–33, 336–43, 347, 349–50, 352–4, 403, 411, 422–4, 427–8
360, 364–5, 367, 370, 372–4, 377–81, Philosophy of History, The (Hegel) 14, 201,
383–9, 392 207, 209, 214–15, 217, 221, 228, 397
Octavian (‘Augustus’ – Roman Emperor) Philosophy of Right, The (Hegel) 201,
45 209–13, 215, 217–18, 221–2, 229–31,
Odyssey, the (Homer) 128 234, 397
official histories 334 Phoenicians 222
Oldenberg, H. 112 Pinochet (General) 396
Old Hegelians, the 238 Pizarro, F (1476–1541) 83
Old Testament, the 53, 229 Plato 28–9, 32, 34, 36, 39, 72, 79, 91–2,
Olympics, the 306 154, 158, 192, 291, 351, 378, 397–9,
On the Heroic Mind (Vico) 162 426–7
On the Improvement of the Understanding Poland 150, 314
(Spinoza) 114 polis, the 36, 354
On the Jewish Question (Marx) 241 Politics, The (Aristotle) 39
On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians politiques, les 116
(Vico) 128, 131 Polybius 31, 34, 37, 40–1, 93, 102–3, 158
On the Origin of Species (Darwin) 152 Pompey 53
On the Study Methods of our Time (Vico) Portugal 83
128 ‘post-historical’ world, the 391, 410–11,
On What Is History? (Jenkins) 378 415, 417–18, 426–7
Origen 54 post-industrial era 272, 360, 362, 369, 394
Osiris 26 post-modernism (and history) 2, 85, 285,
Ottoman (Turks) 45, 85, 393 289, 359–92, 413, 418, 423, 425
Our Post-human Future (Fukuyama) 419 ‘practical’ activity (concept of) 286,
Owen, Robert 242 325–9, 336, 340, 346, 383
‘own-sakism’ (in Jenkins) 378–82 practical study/thinking 282–4, 286,
330–2, 337, 350–1, 353–5, 380, 428
Palatine Academy, the 127 practical writing 67–9, 334–5, 338,
Palestine 53, 383, 400 339–50, 352, 377
pantheism 203 Practice of History, The (Elton) 379
Paris 171–2, 187, 238–9 pre-historic people 16
Paris Commune (1871) 270 ‘primitives’ 16–18, 31, 34
Parmenides 29 Prince, The (Machiavelli) 93, 97, 100, 104
Pascal, B. (1632–62) 188 Principia (Newton) 109
Pax Romana 55 printing 84–5, 90, 172, 190, 227
perestroika 393 progress 7, 9–12, 16, 18, 22–4, 26, 36, 38,
Persia 31, 46, 49, 68, 221 42–4, 52, 58–60, 64–7, 69–71, 75, 105,
Peru 83, 86 168, 170–1, 180, 184–95, 200, 203, 271,
Petition of Right, the 198 365, 422, 424, 426
Petrarch 77, 361 proletariat, the 243–6, 249, 262, 265,
Phenomenology of Mind, The (Hegel) 201, 268–71, 277, 369, 379
213, 235, 397 proof (concept of) 282, 304–6, 324
Philip of Macedon 94 Prophets of Paris, The (Manuel) 184
Philippines, the 84 Protestantism 67, 80, 85–6, 111, 116, 120,
philosophes, the 184, 186–7, 189 196, 219, 225, 228–32, 405
Philosophical Essays (Descartes) 113 providence 9, 12, 48, 96, 103, 121, 153,
philosophy 8–9, 14–15, 28–31, 68, 72, 87, 155–61, 163, 167, 180, 185, 188, 192
91–2, 94, 107, 111, 113–15, 124–5, 128, Prussia 201, 203, 229–30, 238, 240, 413
133–5, 143, 145, 156, 188–90, 193, 203, Ptolemy 83, 108–9, 112
208, 216, 234, 247, 253–7, 260, 266, Pufendorf , Samuel von 140
268, 270, 274–5, 283, 285, 289, 291, Pythagoras 154
458
INDEX
‘Quarrel, the’ (between the Ancients and St Bartholomew Massacre 116

Moderns), the 127–8 Savanorola, G. (1452–98) 98
scepticism 86, 158, 402, 424–5
Rankean school (of history) 202, 379 Schelling, F. W. J. (1775–1854) 201–2,
rationalism 112–15, 117, 121–4, 127, 204
134–5, 158, 165, 168–9, 190, 229 scholasticism 76–78, 111–12, 190, 361
‘realpolitik’ 368, 407 Science and Creation (Jaki) 43, 60
Reflections on the Revolution in France Science of Logic, The (Hegel) 201
(Burke) 195–6 science (and technology) 9, 16–17, 19,
Reformation, the 57, 80, 85–6, 88, 106–8, 23–6, 28, 35–6, 43, 60, 110–11, 133,
115, 119–20, 123, 226–9, 231–2 163, 168, 185–6, 188–93, 229, 245, 264,
Reform Bill (1832) 232 271, 274–5, 293–4, 308–9, 311–12, 315,
Renaissance, the 13, 15, 37, 45, 57, 318, 360, 365–6, 393–6, 398, 401, 403,
74–106, 107–8, 110–12, 115, 119–20, 405, 411, 418, 427
122, 125, 127, 129, 190, 225–8, 263, Scientific Revolution, the 86, 105, 108,
361–2, 374, 376, 390 (see also 110–11, 115, 119–20, 123–4, 128, 190,
‘Renaissance humanism’) 229, 249, 271, 390, 393, 396
Renaissance humanism 77–87, 91, 96, 110, ‘scientific socialism’ 239
112, 115, 119, 125, 127, 129, 227, Scotland 168
361–2, 376, 390 Second Coming, the 54, 309
Republic, The (Plato) 351, 397 Second World War 93, 369, 391, 420
Resurrection, the 62, 336 Seleucids 53
Rethinking History (journal) 376, 382 Seneca 33, 50–1
Rhineland, the 84, 238 September 11 2001 (terrorist attack) 368,
Rice, E. 79 378, 400, 420–1
Riefenstahl, L. 306 Serbs 382
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, The Seven Years War, the 229
(Kennedy) 48 ‘sexual revolution’, the 87, 139
Robespierre, Maximilien (1758–94) 194, Shem 137
230 Sibree, J. 214
Rome 24, 27, 31, 34, 40, 45, 47, 53, 56, 63, Silver Age, the 33
68–9, 85, 109, 119, 128, 130, 140–2, Sinai 153
145–6,150, 151, 157–8, 166, 173, 190, Singapore 394
223–7, 231, 233, 262 Six Books of the Commonwealth (Bodin)
Roman Empire, the 45–7, 51–2, 54–5, 66, 116
74–5, 77, 79, 98, 147, 149–51, 154, 166, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress
225–6, 262, 390 of the Human Mind (Condorcet) 184, 187
Roman Republic, the 41, 45, 98–9, 105, Smith, Adam (1723– 90) 169, 237, 257
145, 147, 262 Smith, J. 88
Romulus 50 ‘social contract’ (political) theory 117–18,
Romulus Augustus (Roman Emperor) 45 124, 178, 197, 213, 399–401
Rorty, R. 381 Social Contract, The (Rousseau) 181–4
Rosenstone, R. 376 Social-Democratic Party of Germany 239
Rousseau, J-J. 18, 46, 93, 171–84, 189, 194, social history 282, 318, 320
209, 250, 367, 394, 424 socialism 82, 91, 238, 242, 255, 274, 394
Royal Academy of Naples 162 Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (Engels)
Royal Academy of Sciences, the (see 274
French Academy of Sciences) social science 166–7, 186–7, 191, 194
Royal Society, the 110, 112 Socrates 30, 145, 173, 206, 397
Russia 391, 397 Solomon 53
sources (historical): film 282, 302, 305–7;
Sabine, G. 200 oral 282, 302, 305–6; written 302,
Sahara, the 220 305–7, 324, 372
459
INDEX
South Africa 393 Third Reich, the 49

South America 83, 219, 221 Thirty Years War, the 229
Southern, R. 74 Thorndike, L. 89
South Korea 394, 396 Thucydides 31, 123
Soviet Empire 48 thymos 397–401, 403–6, 408–9, 411, 414,
Soviet Union (see USSR) 416–18, 420, 425–7
Spain 83, 119, 127, 152, 219, 229–30, 393, Tiananmen Square 400
408 Tigris, the 30
Spanish Empire 47 time (attitudes to) 19–21, 56, 59–61, 69,
Sparta 31, 173, 222 87, 369
speculative philosophy of history 1–3, Tokyo 421
8–13, 14–15, 18, 31, 41–2, 44, 56, Tonks, E. 375
59–63, 65–75, 77–9, 90, 93, 104, 106–7, totalitarianism 179, 213
118, 123, 125, 134, 136, 161, 164, 171, Toynbee, A. J. 392
195, 235, 237, 272–4, 276, 281, 309–10, Tractatus Politicus (Spinoza) 118
318, 355–6, 359, 363, 379, 390–3, 403, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Spinoza)
407, 419, 422–5, 427 122–3
Spengler, O. 392 Trajan (Roman Emperor) 50
Spinoza, B. 66, 72, 114, 118, 122–4, 158, Trier 238
202–3, 390, 427 Trinity College (Dublin) 196
sport history 282, 318 Trojan War, the 38
Stalin, Joseph 401 Trompf G. W. 41, 49–51, 56–9, 62, 102–3
‘state of nature’ (in political theory) True Levellers, the 383
117–18, 124, 174–5, 178, 189, 221, 398, truth 67–9, 72, 91–2, 113, 122, 125,
407 131, 133–5, 153, 169, 189, 254, 281,
statistics 166, 282 285, 287–8, 292, 299–301, 304, 307,
Stoics 32, 34, 40, 46, 52, 71, 402 329–30, 332–3, 335–44, 349–50,
stories ( and ‘story-objects’) 16, 21–2, 352, 354, 360, 366, 370, 372, 374,
96, 165–6, 299–301, 314–17, 320–1, 378–89, 392
345–6, 349, 351–2, 365, 373, 376–7, Tübingen 201–2
388 Tudor, H. 387
studia humanitatis 77–8, 353 Turgot, Baron de l’Aulne (1727–81)
Stuttgart 201 184–7, 188–9, 192, 194
‘substantive’ philosophy of history 8 Turks, the 45, 85, 173
Summa Theologica (Aquinas) 76 Two Treatises on Civil Government (Locke)
Sweden 150 117
Syria 221
UK 420
Taiwan 396 unilinear history (see ‘linear history’)
Taliban, the 422 United Nations 404
teaching (of history) 353–5 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 404
teleology 35–7, 180, 192–3, 215, 231, 323, universal history 1, 9, 14, 215–16, 392, 396
428 Universal Right (Vico) 130, 168
Tertullian 54 USA 219–20, 233–4, 270, 317, 320, 349,
Thailand 396 365, 368–9, 376, 391, 405, 410, 412,
Thales 28, 30 415, 420
theodicy 11, 153, 195 USSR 51, 394, 399, 410
Theogony (Hesiod) 29 utilitarianism 117, 192–3, 197, 400–1
‘theoretical’ study/thinking 282–8, 331–4, Utopia (More) 72, 90–2, 95, 264
350–1, 353–6, 378, 383, 385, 427–8 ‘utopians’, French 242, 255
theoretical writing 67–8, 335, 338,
341–50, 352–3, 377, 379, 387–8 Valla (Lorenzo) 78
Theses on Feuerbach (Marx) 253, 255 Vasco da Gama 83
460
INDEX
Venice 84 West Indies 405

Vico, Giambattista 17, 68, 106–8, 110, Wheel of Fortune, the (Great) 34, 46, 102
115, 118, 120, 122, 125–68, 174, 177, White, H. 373, 375–7, 382
179, 183, 187, 189, 207, 270, 386, 390, Wilson, J. A. 30
392, 424–5 Wittgenstein, L. 361
Vienna 314 women’s history 282, 318, 320, 335, 341
Vietnam 409–10 Works and Days (Hesiod) 30, 38
Virgil 186 World Trade Centre 378
Voltaire, F. M. A. (1694–1778) 7, 8,
169–70 Yahweh 53
Young Hegelians, the 238, 240, 243
Wall Street Journal 421
Washington 368, 400 Zeno 158
Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) 169, 257 Zion 53
461

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1

ISBN 0-203-38023-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-38640-X (Adobe eReader Format)

1 Speculative philosophy of history: what is it and why study it? 7

2 Pre-classical ideas on ‘history’ 14

3 Classical Greek and Roman speculations on history 28

4 The Christian challenge to Graeco-Roman historical perspectives 45

5 A changing consciousness of history: the Renaissance

Effects on historical consciousness 78; The humanists and

Broader Renaissance secularism 81

Continuing relevance of ‘the Renaissance’ 87; ‘Movements’ 88

Thomas More’s Utopia 90

Machiavelli’s reputation 93; Machiavelli on history 94;

Summary comments 104

6 An innovative interlude: from Machiavelli to Vico 107

7 Vico’s philosophy of history 127

8 Speculative philosophy of history during the Enlightenment 168

9 Hegel’s philosophy of history 201

10 Marx on history 238

Marx’s ‘immature’ philosophy of history 245

11 Analytic philosophy of history: what is it and why study it? 281

Historical methodology – an important distinction 281; The difference

12 The ‘what is history?’ debate 290

Theoretical preliminaries 290

‘Actual’ and ‘ideal’ history 290; Words and ‘reality’ 291;

‘Types’ of history 294

Descriptive history 294; Analytic history 295; Narrative history 298

The epistemological status of ‘history’ 301

13 What is history for? 323

Theoretical preliminaries 325

The practising historian 328

Practically motivated historical work 329; Historical work ‘for its

The communication of history: the history ‘book’ 333

Practically motivated historical writings 334; The nature and role

Why read history? 350

14 The end of history? The postmodernist challenge 359

15 The End of History? Fukuyama’s speculative philosophy of

Thymos and liberal democracy 404; Thymos and economics 405;

In some chapters I have leaned heavily on the enviable knowledge displayed in

Part I begins by distinguishing between ‘speculative’ and ‘analytic’ philosophy of

Introduction: the two branches of philosophy of history:

Speculative philosophy of history

The relevance of speculative philosophy of history

To complete our analogy, a third reason why speculative philosophy of history is

Is speculative philosophy of history worthwhile?

Introduction: principles of selection

A mythical consciousness of the past?

‘I’ and ‘Thou’

A bizarre, or ‘workable’, mentality?

Ancient ideas of ‘history’

The passing of time

The archetypal past

‘Story-telling’ and ‘historical causality’

to circumstances. As a form of ‘explanation’ it does not appeal to abstract ‘factors’

[t]he promising creativity of Hammurabi’s age was not followed up in later

As for the ancient Egyptians in particular,

[m]uch of their intellectual history had been a long stagnation in the

The earthly life

circumstances, through affecting peoples’ mentalities, to play a much larger role in