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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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Pluralistic and Antinomian Views. Ideas like those
of Buckle and Marx brought to the fore issues that have
not always been clearly distinguished. Thus the ques-


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tion of whether history is interpretable by reference
to some unitary principle (whether teleological or
causal in character) has sometimes been identified with
the question of whether history can be said to form
an intelligible field of study, susceptible to rational
understanding and elucidation. The twentieth-century
historian Arnold Toynbee has, for example, suggested
that in the absence of such a principle, history would
amount to no more than a “chaotic, fortuitous, dis-
orderly flux”; while others have spoken as if the sole
alternative to regarding historical phenomena as ulti-
mately determined by some specific set of material or
social forces was to relegate them to the sphere of the
merely random and contingent. Alleged dilemmas of
this kind may be challenged, however, on the grounds
both that they exploit ambiguities inherent in such
notions as intelligibility and contingency and that at
the same time they presuppose a too restricted model
of acceptable explanation. It can be maintained, for
instance, that a pluralistic conception of historical
causation—one, that is, which ascribes causal efficacy
to a variety of independent factors without according
paramount status to those of any single type—is in no
way incompatible with the belief that historical events
and developments can be rendered intelligible in a
perfectly straightforward sense; it has, indeed, been
argued that such a conception accurately reflects the
practice of the majority of working historians, few of
whom would admit that they were thereby committed
to the view that their subject matter was in some
fashion radically incoherent or intractable. Nor, like-
wise, need a historian think that history is the product
of arbitrary caprice, or even that it is essentially (in
Carlyle's famous phrase) “the biography of great men,”
if he subscribes to the opinion that the characters and
decisions of individual figures often play a central and
irreducible role in determining what occurs. In this
connection it is interesting to observe that the Marxian
theorist G. V. Plekhanov (1857-1918), himself an
avowed adherent to the “monist view of history” and
insistent upon the stringent limits that social conditions
and “general causes” imposed upon the capacity of
individuals to affect the course of events, was none-
theless prepared to allow that personal disposition and
talent, as expressed in the activities of individuals,
could make a real difference to what happened in
certain historical contexts. Any theory (he held) which
tried wholly to dispense with a consideration of indi-
vidual factors would assume an implausible “fatalistic”
appearance, just as one that by contrast attributed
everything to these would end, absurdly, by depicting
history as an inconsequential and wholly fortuitous
series of happenings.

A further source of difficulty and confusion has been
the tendency to conflate issues of the kind discussed
with others relating to the place of freedom in history
and to the general status of determinism. As Buckle
correctly noted, a powerful motive for resisting deter-
ministic or scientifically orientated conceptions of his-
torical development has been the conviction that their
acceptance is inconsistent with a belief in human free
will and responsibility. One characteristic reaction to
such theories has accordingly taken the form of em-
phasizing the decisive contributions made by out-
standing individuals and of arguing that if, for example,
Napoleon or Lenin had not been born, European his-
tory might have followed a markedly different course.
But the claim that the deeds of particular personalities
have often had profound long-term effects does not by
itself entail that the historical process cannot be re-
garded as constituting a causally determined sequence.
All that the determinist postulates (it may be objected)
is that, given any historical event, an explanation of
the occurrence of that event could in principle be
provided in terms of causally sufficient conditions. And
this in no sense contradicts the contention that “great
men” or “world-historical individuals” sometimes ex-
ercise a decisive influence upon what happens; what
it states is that, if and when they do, their choices and
actions must themselves always be susceptible to a
complete causal explanation.

Somewhat similar considerations apply to the claim
that the obtrusion of accidental or chance happenings
into history represents a refutation of deterministic
assumptions. It is, of course, quite true that historians
are apt to employ the notions of chance or accident
in the course of unfolding their narratives and explana-
tions: this was a feature strongly underlined by the
British historian J. B. Bury. However, as Bury himself
pointed out in a well-known essay entitled “Cleopatra's
Nose,” it is a mistake to conclude from that that the
use of such concepts presupposes “the intrusion of a
lawless element” into history. It would appear rather
that, when a historian refers to something as having
happened by chance, he implies that its explanation
lies—in a manner admittedly not easy to characterize
with precision—off the main track of his enquiry or
concern. An event that is described as fortuitous or
accidental in the context of one set of interests may
take on a different aspect when it is surveyed from
another standpoint, being seen there as intrinsically
related to the historian's principal theme or subject:
in neither case, though, need the suggestion that it has
no causal explanation be present. Bury himself, echoing
the account provided by A. Cournot in his Considéra-
tions sur la marche des idées et des événements dans
les temps modernes
(1872), referred to chance as in-
volving the “valuable collision of two or more inde-
pendent chains of causes.” As a definition this may not
be impeccable, but it at least avoids the pitfall of


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presuming that, in talking of chance occurrences, the
historian is irrevocably committed to some form of
indeterminism.