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Philosophy of History is an area of philosophy concerning the eventual significance, if any, of human history, and speculation as to a possible teleological end to its development, that is that there is a design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in the processes of human history. The philosopher of history asks at least three basic questions:

  • Are there any broad patterns that we can discern through the study of the human past? Are there, for example, patterns of progress? Or cycles? Or are there no patterns or cycles, and is human history therefore random and devoid of any meaning — in the words of William Shakespeare's character MacBeth, "life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?"

  • If history can indeed be said to progress, what is its ultimate direction? Is it a positive or negative, decadent direction? And what (if any) is the driving force of that progress?

Philosophy of History should not be confused with the History of Philosophy, which is the study of the development of philosophical ideas through time. However, philosophy of history necessarily enquires about history of philosophy, since it is the history of its own thought. Issues more specifically related to history of philosophy might include (but are not limited to): How can changes in philosophy be accounted for historically? What drives the development of thought in its historical context? To what degree can philosophical texts from prior historical eras even be understood today? These questions are, of course, related to history of sciences, epistemology and history of art (which had to be invented first, as it was in no way evident that art had a "history").

Unit of study

In the Poetics, Aristotle had argued that poetry is superior to history, because poetry speaks of what must or should be true, rather than merely what is true. Accordingly, classical historians felt a duty to ennoble the world. Herodotus, whom can be considered as the first historian, and, later, Plutarch freely invented speeches for their historical figures and chose their historical subjects with an eye toward morally improving the reader. History was supposed to teach you good examples to follow. From the Classical period through to the Renaissance, historians alternated between focusing on subjects designed to improve mankind and on a devotion to fact. History was composed mainly of hagiographies of monarchs or epic poetry describing heroic gestures such as the Song of Roland about the Battle of Roncevaux Pass, during Charlemagne's first campaign to conquer the Iberian peninsula.

By the 18th century, historians had turned toward a more positivist approach focusing on fact as much as possible, but still with an eye on telling histories that could instruct and improve. Starting with Fustel de Coullanges and Theodor Mommsen, historical studies would take their modern scientifical form. In the Victorian era, the debate in historiography thus was not so much whether history was intended to improve the reader, but what causes turned history and how historical change could be understood.

Cyclical and linear history

The mythical conception of time is not linear but cyclical. Examples are the ancient doctrine of eternal return, which existed in Ancient Egypt, the Dharmic religions, or the Greek Pythagoreans' and the Stoics' conceptions. In The Works and Days, Hesiod described five Ages of Man: the Gold Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age and the Iron Age, which began with the Dorian invasion. Plato also wrote about the myth of the Golden Age. The Greeks believed in a cyclical conception of forms of govrenment, in which each regime necessarily fell into its corrupted form (aristocracy, democracy and monarchy were the healthy regimes; oligarchy and tyranny were corrupted regimes).

In the East cyclical theories of history were developed in China (as a theory of Dynastic cycle) and in the Islamic world by Ibn Khaldun.

Judaism and Christianism substituted the myth of the Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden to it, which would give the basis for theodicies, which attempts to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with the existence of God creating a global explanation of history with the belief in a Messianic Age. Theodicies claimed that history had a progressive direction leading to an eschatological end, such as the Apocalypse, given by a superior power. Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas or Bossuet in his Discourse On Universal History (1679)formulated such theodicies, but Leibniz, who coined the term, was the most famous philosopher whom created a theodicy. Leibniz based its explanation on the principle of sufficient reason, which states that anything that happens, does happens for a specific reason. Thus, what man saw as evil, such as wars, epidemia and natural disasters, was in fact only an effect of his perception; if one adopted God's view, this evil event in fact only took place in the larger divine plan. Hence, theodicies explained the necessity of evil as a relative element which forms part of a larger plan of history. Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason was not, however, a gesture of fatalism. Confronted to the Antique problem of the future contingents, Leibniz invented the theory of "compossible worlds", distinguish two types of necessity, to cope with the problem of determinism.

During the Renaissance, cyclical conceptions of history would become common, illustrated by the decline of the Roman Empire. Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy (1513-1517) are an example. The notion of Empire contained in itself its ascendance and its decadence, as in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), which was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Cyclical conceptions would be maintained in the 19th and 20th centuries by authors such as Oswald Spengler and Nikolay Danilevsky, whom conceived the human past as a series of repetitive rises and falls. Spengler, who like Butterfield was writing in reaction to the carnage of the first World War, believed that a civilization enters upon an era of Caesarism after its soul dies. He thought that the soul of the West was dead and Caesarism was about to begin.

The theory advanced in the book, "Five Epochs of Civilization", sees world history as a continuing creation story related to the development of human society, told in successive chapters (or historical epochs). The introduction of major new communication technologies such as writing or electronic communication change the society to such a degree that the change may be said to begin a new civilization. There is no "end" to history (except perhaps catastrophic) but a continuing process of technological innovation and societal development now colliding with the earth's environmental limitations.

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

The Enlightenment's ideal of progress

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

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

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

After Kant, Hegel developed a complex "theodicy" in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which based its conception on history on dialectics: the negative (wars, etc.) was conceived by Hegel as the motor of history. Thus, each thesis encountered its negative antithesis; the clash of both was "superated" in the synthesis, which conserves the contradiction between thesis and its antithesis while sublating it. As Marx would famously explain afterwards, concretely that meant that if Louis XVI's monarchic rule in France was seen as the thesis, the French Revolution could be seen as its antithesis. However, both were sublated in Napoleon, who reconciled the Revolution with the Ancien Régime; he conserved the change. Hegel thought that Reason accomplished itself, through this dialectical scheme, in History. Through labour, man transformed Nature in order to be able to recognize himself in it; he made it his "home". Thus, Reason spiritualized Nature. Roads, fields, fences, and all the modern infrastructure in which we live is the result of this "spiritualization of Nature". Hegel thus explained social progress as the result of the labour of Reason in History. However, this dialectical reading of history involved, of course, contradiction, so History was also conceived of as conflictual: Hegel theorized this in his famous dialectic of the lord and the bondsman.

Social evolutionism

Inspired by the Enlightenment's ideal of progress, social evolutionism became a popular conception in the 19th century. Auguste Comte's (1798-1857) posivist conception of history, which he divided into the theological stage, the metaphysical stage and the positivist stage, brought upon by modern science, was one of the most influential doctrine of progress. The "Whig interpretation of history," one associated with scholars of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in Britain, such as Henry Maine or Thomas Macaulay, gives an example of such influence, by looking at human history as progress from savagery and ignorance toward peace, prosperity, and science. Maine described the direction of progress as "from status to contract," from a world in which a child's whole life is pre-determined by the circumstances of his birth, toward one of mobility and choice.

The publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859 demonstrated human evolution. However, it was quickly transposed from its original biological field to the social field, in "social darwinism" theories. Herbert Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest", or Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Society (1877) developed evolutionist theories independent from Darwin's works, which would be latter interpretated as social darwinism. These 19th-century unilineal evolution theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilised over time, and equated the culture and technology of Western civilisation with progress.

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

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

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

However, the notion itself didn't completely disappeared. The End of History and the Last Man (1992) by Francis Fukuyama proposed a very similar notion of progress, conceiving of liberal democracies as the "End of History", basing itself on a Kojevian reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).

The validity of the "hero" in historical studies

Further information: The validity of the "hero" in historical studies and Great man theory

After Hegel, who insisted on the role of "great men" in history, with his famous statement about Napoleon, "I saw the Spirit on his horse" — although he also payed particular attention to social forces —, Thomas Carlyle argued that history was the biography of a few central individuals, heroes, such as Oliver Cromwell or Frederick the Great, writing that "The history of the world is but the biography of great men." His heroes were political and military figures, the founders or topplers of states. His history of great men, of geniuses good and evil, sought to organize change in the advent of greatness. Explicit defenses of Carlyle's position have been rare in the late 20th century. Most philosophers of history contend that the motive forces in history can best be described only with a wider lens than the one he used for his portraits. Nonetheless, the Great Man approach to history was most popular with professional historians in the 19th century; a popular work of this school is the Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1911) which contains lengthy and detailed biographies about the great men of history. For example to read about (what is known today as) the "Migrations Period", one would consult the biography of Atilla the Hun.

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

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

Does history have a teleological sense?

For further information: Social progress and Progress (philosophy)

Theodicy claimed that history had a progressive direction leading to an eschatological end, given by a superior power. However, this transcendent teleological sense can be thought as immanent to human history itself. Marx, as Auguste Comte, may be said to have an immanent teleological conception of history; although Althusser has argued that discontinuity is an essential element of Marx's dialectical materialism, which includes historical materialism. Thinkers such as Nietzsche, Foucault, Althusser or Deleuze deny any teleological sense to history, claiming that it is best characterized by discontinuities, ruptures, and various time-scales, which the Annales School had demonstrated.

Schools of thought influenced by Hegel and Marx see history as progressive, too — but they saw, and see progress as the outcome of a dialectic in which factors working in opposite directions are over time reconciled. Hegel argued that history is a constant process of dialectic clash, where one idea or event will form the thesis, an opposing idea or event will be its antithesis, and the clash of the two will result in a synthesis. In synthesis, neither the thesis nor the antithesis is destroyed, but the prevailing moment will reflect a conjunction of the two; the contradiction is sublated. History was best seen as directed by a Zeitgeist, and traces of the Zeitgeist could be seen by looking backward. Hegel believed that history was moving man toward "civilization.", and some also claim he thought that the Prussian state incarnated the "End of History". In his Lessons on the History of Philosophy, he explains that each epochal philosophy is in a way the whole of philosophy; it is not a subdivision of the Whole but this Whole itself apprehended in a specific modality.

Marx adapted Hegel's dialectic to develop the materialist dialectic. He saw the struggle of thesis, antithesis, and resultant synthesis as always taking place in economic and material terms. The central contention of historical materialism is that history exhibits progress, not of a linear sort but cumulative nonetheless, and that the motive engine of this progress is the struggle over ownership and control of the means of production. Ideas and political organizations were the result of material production and conditions of material provision and consumption. For Marx, the continual battle between opposing forces within modes of production led inevitably to revolutionary changes in economics and eventually communism, which would be the eventual recreation of an early, literally pre-historic state. Hegel and Marx are both teleological in their histories: they both believe that history is progressive and directed toward a particular end. The history of the means of production, then, is the substructure of history, and everything else, including ideological arguments about that history, constitutes a superstructure.

Is history always written by the victors?

According to a legacy of the "politico-historical discourse" of "race struggle", analyzed by Michel Foucault in his 1976-77 course "Society must be Defended" (See below), it is often argued that the victors of a social struggle — the conflict can be based on any social element, ethnic, nations or class struggle — use their political dominance to suppress their defeated adversaries' version of historical events in favor of their own propaganda, which may go so far as historical revisionism. Walter Benjamin also considered that Marxist historians must take a radically different view point from the bourgeois and idealist point of view, in an attempt to create a sort of history from below, which would be able to conceive an alternative conception of history, not based, as in classical historical studies, on the philosophical and juridical discourse of sovereignty.

Historical accounts of writing history

A classic example of history being written by the victors would be the scarcity of unbiased information that has come down to us about the Carthaginians. Roman historians left tales of cruelty and human sacrifice practiced by their longtime enemies, but as the Carthaginians were utterly exterminated by the Romans, we only have one side of the story.

Similarly, we only have the Christian side of how Christianity came to be the dominant religion of Europe, but not the pagan version of these events. We have the European version of the conquest of the Americas, but not the native version. We have Herodotus's Greek history of the Persian Wars, but no Persian counterpart.

A possible counterexample could be the American Civil War, where it can be argued that the losers (Southerners) have written more history books on the subject than the winners and, until recently, dominated the national perception of history. (Confederate generals like Lee and Jackson are generally held in higher esteem than their Union counterparts, and popular films like Gone with the Wind and The Birth of a Nation have frequently told the story from the Southern viewpoint.)

Obviously the victors do have advantages in promoting their version of events, even if they don't erase their enemies completely from existence, going so far as negationism. In earlier eras, the victors controlled the churches, the courts and education. In dictatorships, ruthless censorship allows only the state-approved version of events to be made public, and much that happens remains secret. Even in liberal democracies, the victors control public school curricula, major news outlets, copyrights and the entertainment industry. Most countries have a kind of national mythology that emphasizes their own virtue, bravery, decency and cultural superiority which they teach in their schools.

Attempts to correct this bias in American education have often been denigrated and dismissed as political correctness. Some people argue that the culturally dominant point of view is by definition the "politically correct" one -- meaning that a widespread societal bias cannot be challenged without exposing oneself to attack.

Often, however, the argument that history is written by the victors is used as a rhetorical trick to distract from the fact that an advocate has no supporting evidence. If you ask why no history book has ever mentioned this event (whatever it is), you'll be told that it's no surprise considering that the winners write the history books. In cases like this, the argument has a lot of similarities with conspiracy theories, where the absence of supporting evidence is proof of how deep the conspiracy goes.

History from below, as subaltern studies, are an attempt to provide an alternate version to such "winner's histories".

Michel Foucault's analysis of historical and political discourse

The historico-political discourse analyzed by Foucault in Society Must Be Defended (1976-77) considered truth as the fragile product of a historical struggle, first conceptualized under the name of "race struggle" — however, "race"'s meaning was different from today's biological notion, being closer to the sense of "nation" (distinct from nation-states; its signification is here closer to "people"). Boulainvilliers, for example, opposed the aristocracy, who formed, according to him, the foreign Franks, while the Third Estate constituted the indigenous Gallo-Romans.

In Great Britain, this historico-political discourse was used by the bourgeoisie, the people and the aristocracy as a means of struggle against the monarchy - cf. Edward Coke or John Lilburne. In France, Boulainvilliers, Nicolas Fréret, and then Sieyès, Augustin Thierry and Cournot reappropriated this form of discourse. Finally, at the end of the 19th century, this discourse was incorporated by racist biologists and eugenicists, who gave it the modern sense of "race" and, even more, transformed this popular discourse into a "state racism" (nazism). According to Foucault, marxists also seized this discourse and took it in a different direction, transforming the essentialist notion of "race" into the historical notion of "class struggle", defined by socially structured position: capitalist or proletarian. This displacement of discourse constitutes one of the basis of Foucault's thought: discourse is not tied to the subject, rather the "subject" is a construction of discourse. Moreover, discourse is not the simple ideological and mirror reflexion of an economical infrastructure, but is a product and the battlefield of multiples forces - which may not be reduced to the simple dualist contradiction of two energies.

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

History and education

One common contention among philosophers is that current historical methods are regional, subjective and selective. A better method would tend, where possible, towards a more universal, objective and exhaustive approach (see World History).

The philosophy of history is intertwined with the philosophy of education because much of the basic history learned at the elementary level is aligned with regional biases, whether unabashed or inadvertent. Though some improvement has been made (In France and Germany, school history books are written altogether by frenchmen and germans, as far as it concerns the common part of their history). In some instances, history is the pure product of propaganda. Either way, history as a discipline has been compromised by adherence to old ways of thinking about its mechanics and purposes.

Further, elementary history is devoid of theory; it is almost purely content-oriented. We are taught "who said what when, who did what when," but not to explore how we verify an event that we did not witness.

For example, how do we know what a given individual said at a specific time if we weren't around to hear him/her? Chances are, we are reading something we believe to have been actually written at the time of the inquiry. But then, how do we know the person who wrote it was really in a position to make an authoritative statement? While this may be easy to do in some circumstances, there are many instances where "facts" can be neither authenticated nor discredited.

See also

External links

Branches of philosophy | Historiography | History | Theories of history | Historiosophy | Philosophy | Political philosophy | Social philosophy

Geschichtsphilosophie | Philosophie de l'histoire | Filosofia della storia | היסטוריוסופיה | Történelemfilozófia | 歴史哲学 | Historiozofia | Filosofia da História | Философия истории

 

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