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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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Theological and Metaphysical Conceptions. It is not,
for instance, the case that the causal agencies regarded
as determining the sequence of occurrences have al-
ways been conceived to be empirical factors lying
within the historical process. On the contrary, it has
sometimes been assumed that the clue to all that hap-
pens must ultimately be located in something that lies
outside that process, such as the will of a divine or
transcendent being. One potent source of speculation
has been the belief that the pattern of historical events
represents the unfolding of some overall purpose or
design, views of this sort originating in religious notions
of the universe and of man's place within it. Thus, early
in the Christian era, certain of the Church fathers were
already reacting against Greco-Roman views that
pictured history in terms of recurrent cycles, seeking
to substitute a conception of linear movement wherein
the intentions of a sovereign providential power were
clearly discoverable; while by the fifth century Saint
Augustine had given articulate philosophical expression
to a directional view which presupposed a providential
order and which was to prove immensely influential.
Augustine's ideas admittedly diverged widely from the
cruder hypotheses of his predecessors; moreover, he
was notably reticent about the possibility of interpret-
ing the details of terrestrial history in a providential
manner, implying for the most part that such things
fell outside the range of human cognizance and con-
cern. The same cannot, however, be said of some later
writers who looked back to Augustine for inspiration,
and least of all of the seventeenth-century French
historian, J. B. Bossuet. Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire
universelle
(1681) was indeed remarkable for the con-
fidence displayed by its author in his capacity for
penetrating the workings of the divine intelligence
insofar as these impinged upon the affairs of men. It
was not merely that he took pleasure in offering exam-
ples of the retribution visited by God upon erring
nations and individuals; he further professed to know


280

that even the most (apparently) fortuitous occurrences
had been “contrived by a higher wisdom, that is to
say, in the everlasting mind who has all the world's
causes and all the effects contained in one single order.”

The modern development of historical enquiry as
a firmly established discipline in its own right has
been—not unnaturally—accompanied by a marked
decline in the tendency to try to explain the general
course of history by reference to a governing agency
external to it. It is true that some latter-day theologians,
for example, Reinhold Niebuhr, have spoken as if cer-
tain forms of providential interpretation remained fea-
sible: but the proposals put forward have usually been
so tentative and heavily qualified, so imbued with a
desire not to trespass upon areas occupied by profes-
sional or “technical” historians, that to treat them as
strictly comparable with the ambitious programs of
earlier periods would be a mistake. Nevertheless, the
view that the totality of historical events can and
should be understood as composing an intelligible tele-
ological sequence has been a persistent one in human
thinking, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies this found expression in systems in which the
purposive element stressed by previous theological
writers was, so to speak, absorbed within the historical
process itself. Thus various attempts were made to
portray history as moving in a determinate and mean-
ingful direction, but without thereby positing a tran-
scendent entity which could be regarded as ultimately
responsible for the direction it took; the providential
principle was regarded as being immanent in world
history rather than as deriving from an extraneous
source.

Some such thought underlies the theories of history
propounded by Vico, Kant, and Hegel. Despite their
considerable differences on other counts, these philos-
ophers at least shared the common assumption or
methodological postulate that what happens in the
historical sphere possesses an inner “logic” which can
be regarded as being intrinsic to the course of events.
By this they did not mean that the actual participants
in the process were always aware of the long-term
significance of their actions: on the contrary, they
implied that the historical purposes served by particu-
lar agents were obscure or even unknown to the agents
themselves; it was only in retrospect—and from a
vantage point that transcended the contingencies of
immediate occasion and circumstance—that the deeds
of individuals could be seen as contributing towards
the realization of a state of affairs which was in some
sense implicit from the beginning as a final goal or
end. At the same time, they did not wish to be under-
stood as recommending a kind of applied theology.
When Vico, for instance, spoke of there being an “ideal
eternal history... whose course is run in time by the
histories of all nations” (Scienza nuova, §114), he ex-
pressly repudiated the suggestion that he was postulat-
ing a divine “potter who molds things outside himself.”
It was man who made his own history; he did so,
however, in a fashion such that each stage of social
development could be interpreted as having a part to
play in a sequence that, taken as a whole, displayed
a necessary teleological structure. Likewise, Kant was
insistent upon the possibility of conceiving history in
a way that portrayed the conflicts and vicissitudes to
which men are subject by virtue of their own activities
as representing the means whereby the human species
progressively realized the capacities originally im-
planted in it by nature and thus moved towards the
fulfilment of its earthly destiny. The case of Hegel is
more complicated, since his conception of history was
impregnated with conceptions deriving from a com-
prehensive metaphysical system that encompassed
every aspect of human experience; yet here, too, a
similar theme may be discerned. For history, along
with everything else, exemplified the unfolding of a
rational principle or “Idea” that was destined to realize
itself in time. Hegel admittedly spoke of the operations
of a “World Spirit” (Weltgeist) in history, but he does
not seem to have envisaged this as an independent
agency; rather, it expressed itself directly in the activi-
ties of historical individuals and was nothing apart from
these. So understood, the historical process moved
inexorably forward, one phase giving way to another
in a dialectical progression that culminated in a form
of social life which—as the embodiment of freedom—
constituted its ultimate objective, being referred to by
Hegel as “the final cause of the world at large.”

Hegel himself sometimes gave the impression that
his interpretation of history could be regarded as a
“hypothesis” that both accounted for and was grounded
upon the empirical data at his disposal. And a major
attraction, indeed, of teological theories of the type
to which his may be said to belong has been the feeling
that, unlike explicitly theological conceptions, they do
not in the end require for their support anything other
than the attested facts of historical experience. Such
a feeling is understandable. For what, from one point
of view, the historical teleologist can be considered
to be doing is making a claim to the effect that a
certain trend or tendency has manifested itself in
human affairs; and such a claim, it would seem, is one
fully capable of being confirmed or disproved by expe-
rience alone. It is, however, one thing to assert that
events have, as a matter of fact, exhibited a particular
tendency or direction; it is another to say that it was
necessary that they should have taken the course that
they did: and it is another again to seek to confirm this


281

necessity by reference to the state of affairs in which
they have issued or to which they eventually led. To
argue that certain things had to happen if something
else was to happen is not in itself to explain why the
earlier events in the series occurred as they did; the
most that would be shown is that the occurrence of
the prior events was a necessary condition of the oc-
currence of the sequel. The situation would, of course,
be different if, on independent grounds, it could be
demonstrated that the end-product of history was in
some manner intended or preordained from the start
and, moreover, that there was only one route by which
such a consummation could be attained. But it remains
hard to see how such an additional assumption could
be established, or even assigned a clear meaning, in
the absence of anything over and above the facts of
man's past as determined by ordinary historical inves-
tigation. For this reason, among others, a number of
empirically-minded theorists, such as Saint-Simon and
Comte, were led to look elsewhere in their search for
an explanatory key with which to unlock the secrets
of historical evolution and change.