II. DOES SCIENTIFIC HISTORIOGRAPHY
PRESUPPOSE DETERMINISM?
The truth of universal determinism is still disputed.
It is usually advocated on naturalist or materialist
grounds, and assailed on the ground that it is incom-
patible with the freedom of the will, and therefore with
moral responsibility. Those issues are treated elsewhere
in this work; but they are neglected by most historians,
whose interest in determinism is confined to its appli-
cations in history. Pieter Geyl spoke for the antideter-
minists among them when he described his position
as “not that determinism is a fallacy, but that to apply
determinism to history is an impossible and necessarily
misleading method” (Debates with Historians, p. 239).
Even if universal determinism were true, it would not
follow that any special determinist theory of history
is true.
In consequence, determinism in history is usually
defended philosophically, not by inferences from uni-
versal determinism, but by methodological arguments
that scientific historiography presupposes it.
In A Study of History, Vol. IX (1954), Toynbee
acknowledges that “antinomian” modern historians
consider “Man in Process of Civilization” to be a
province of the universe that is not subject to laws
of nature, and observes that such a view must be rep-
robated as “blasphemy” by all right-minded devotees
of natural science. There are, Toynbee declares, only
two possibilities: the province of man in process of
civilization is either one of “Order” or it is one of
“Chaos.” If of Order, then processes in it are subject
to laws of nature; if of Chaos, then processes in it are
unintelligible: history is “just one damned thing after
another.” Now, whatever their antinomian professions,
historians do not in practice treat history as a Chaos.
They profess to find intelligible patterns in it, and even
to furnish explanations. Hence, Toynbee concludes,
historians methodologically presuppose that history is
a province of Order: that is, that historical events are
subject to laws of nature.
When the determinist implications of this conclusion
were made clear to Toynbee, he repudiated them, and
announced that, although he cannot alter the laws of
nonhuman nature, man can alter the laws of his own
nature with God's help. Toynbee appears to have re-
mained unaware that this implies that man in process
of civilization is not subject to laws of nature—the very
blasphemy against science he had denounced in anti-
nomian historians! Of course, his implicit recantation
does not invalidate his original argument.
Toynbee makes several questionable assumptions:
such as, that the only intelligible order there can be
in human history must be of the kind discovered by
science in natural processes. To state this assumption
is to throw doubt upon it. Like all social scientists,
historians seek order in what they study. They classify,
compare, and generalize. But not all classifications are
of natural kinds, and very few generalizations even
remotely resemble putative laws of nature. In their
present state, it is plausible neither that the social
sciences have as their sole scientific function to estab-
lish the lawful determinants of the events they study,
nor even that they presuppose that all human actions
have lawful determinants.
