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2. Views Improperly Classified as Determinist. (a)
“Logical Determinism” and Predestinarianism. “Logi-
cal determinism” is the doctrine that the future is as
fixed and unchangeable as the past: that just as what
has been, has been and cannot be altered; so what will
be will be, despite anything anybody may do. In the
classical “logical determinist” argument stated and
criticized in Aristotle's De interpretatione (18b 9-16)
this is said to follow from the premiss that, when it
is made, a prediction is necessarily either true or false.
Aristotle rejected this premiss as false; and A. C. Danto
has pointed out that, if Aristotle was right in doing
so, then historical foreknowledge is in principle impos-
sible. If that is so, then it follows that neither universal
determinism nor any special determinist doctrine in
historiography can be true.

Predestinarianism, sometimes called “theological
determinism,” is the doctrine that from all eternity God
has foreordained everything that happens. It has influ-
enced Christian historiography, although most Chris-
tian historians have accepted Saint Augustine's view,
in De civitate Dei, that divine revelation has to do
with the fortunes of the heavenly rather than of the
earthly city.

Both universal determinism and all special deter-
minist historical theories treat historical events as fall-
ing within a universal or a limited deterministic system.
Neither logical determinism nor predestinarianism does
so. Logical determinism is independent of any causal
theory at all; and predestinarianism is not only consist-
ent with, but is usually held together with, the doctrine
of special providence, according to which the foreor-
dained future contains undetermined interventions by
God into the normal course of events. It can, therefore,
produce nothing but confusion to classify these doc-
trines as determinist.

(b) Absolute Idealism and “Historism.” Absolute (or,
honoris causa, German) idealism reached its consum-
mation in G. W. F. Hegel's doctrine that the true
theodicy, or justification of God to man, is to be found
in the philosophy of history. History is the process in
which Spirit (Geist), or God, or the Idea, carries out
its self-appointed task of attaining self-knowledge: first
externalizing itself in Nature, and then overcoming that
externalization. The working of Spirit manifests itself
at different times in different peoples and cultures, it
being for Hegel a commonplace that, in his own time,
it was doing so chiefly in the Western (Germanisch)
world, especially in its Protestant parts. But although
Hegel thought it dialectically necessary that the self-
development of Spirit should in his time have culmi-
nated in the western Protestant constitutional state,
dialectical necessity is not deterministic. This is shown
by Hegel's repudiation of historical prophecy, the pos-
sibility of which is implicit in determinism in both its
universal and its special forms. “Philosophy,” he de-
clared, “... appears only when actuality is already
there cut and dried after its process of formation has
been completed” (Philosophy of Right [1822], Preface).
It is even more evident from the nature of historical
development as Hegel conceived it. It is axiomatic with
him that what is real is rational. Hence to exhibit the
present as the highest stage yet reached by Spirit is
not only the task of philosophy of history, but also the
mark of its success. To suspect that the present is less
than this betrays a shallowness of mind characteristic
of abstract thinking.

Hegel did not notice that the dialectical necessity
he professed to find in history simply reflected his
axiom. His belief that his philosophical theory of his-
tory was confirmed by his ability to interpret his abun-
dant store of historical information in accordance with
it is therefore a delusion. Any historian of moderate
parts, once assured that the present is the highest stage
reached by Spirit, could discover in the course of
history a main line of development culminating in it.
But such a line of development would not be deter-
ministic. It is not intelligible in the way in which
changes in a deterministic system are, which in princi-
ple are calculable in advance. Rather, it is intelligible
in the same way as, say, the development of sonata
form down to Haydn, which historians of music could
not possibly discern unless they were acquainted with
Haydn's work.

Although the main tradition of nineteenth-century
European historiography rejected the absolute idealist
conception of historical development, and affirmed,
with Leopold von Ranke, that every epoch is “imme-
diate to God,” its value residing in itself, it nevertheless
inherited two fatal legacies from absolute idealism. The
reality of any historical epoch is of course concrete;
and historians who reflected philosophically on their
work generally agreed with the idealists (1) that to
describe the concrete in terms of abstract concepts
must falsify it, and (2) that no aspect of anything con-
crete can be correctly understood except in relation
to all its other aspects. These two doctrines are fused
in the motto used by F. Meinecke for his DieEntste-
hung des Historismus (1936), Individuum est ineffa-
bile.

Until the mid-1940's, this historiographical tradition,
known in Germany as Historismus, on the infrequent
occasions on which it was referred to in English was
mostly called “historism.” That usage will be adopted
in this article, although “historicism” has become the
commoner rendering since the appearance of F.
Engel-Janosi's much-cited The Growth of German
Historicism (1944).

Because of its tenet that every aspect of life in a
given historical situation is conditioned by every other,
historism is sometimes held to be determinist. As the
historians who embraced historism themselves per-
ceived, if all institutions and ideas are to be understood
only in terms of their historical context, then the value
of each is relative to that context: there is neither
absolute good or evil nor absolute truth. Such relativ-
ism is suicidal. No theory which implies that there is
no absolute truth can present itself as absolutely true.
Yet although historism is relativist in this way, it is
not determinist. The “historists” did not think that an
institution or an idea is conditioned by its historical
context in the determinist sense of being a causally
necessary response to it, but only in the much weaker
sense of being an intelligible response to it.

In sum, absolute idealism and historism are not forms
of determinism: neither the dialectical necessity of one
nor the historical relativism of the other is determinist.

(c) “Historicism” and Historical Inevitability. In a
series of papers written in the late 1930's, and pub-
lished in 1944-45, Sir Karl Popper introduced the then
unfamiliar word “historicism” as a label for what he
later described as

(The Poverty of Historicism, 1957). Popper sharply
distinguished historicism from Historismus, which as
was usual when he wrote, he called “historism.” His-
toricism, in Popper's sense, was a fashionable position
in the 1930's, and it has a long history, even though
Popper classified some philosophers as historicists who
were not (e.g., Hegel). There is an enormous variety
of historicist positions, some of which are determinist
and some not. An historicist position is determinist if
and only if the historical patterns or trends the exist-
ence of which it affirms are conceived as falling within
a deterministic system. Theological predestinarians are
historicists, because they make predictions on the basis
of historical patterns which they take to be revealed
by God; but, since they do not think those patterns
to fall within any deterministic system, they are not
determinists.

For this reason, determinism must be distinguished
from the thesis that what happens in history happens
inevitably. Historical inevitability may be asserted on
either determinist or nondeterminist grounds. Those
fatalists who hold that the future can be predicted by
magic, accept historical inevitability; but they are not
determinists, for reasons given above.