In most special determinist doctrines that have com-
manded serious attention from historians, some kind
of social group is singled out as the intelligible unit
of historical study. States, nations, races, cultures,
classes, civilizations, and organized religions have all
been accounted such units; and determinist theories
have been offered both about conditions that occur in
them, and about their courses of development.
As put forward by social scientists, hypotheses about
causal factors in the occurrence of this or that social
condition usually fall short of determinism: that is, of
the form,
whenever a condition of the kind C1
occurs
in a group of the kind G, then a condition of the kind
C2,
must, other things being equal, follow. Yet, in pop-
ular presentations, they often assume this form. Thus
race and physical environment, which obviously have
some causal significance, have from ancient times
cropped up in determinist theories. That the powers
of Western Europe developed in the nineteenth cen-
tury conditions that enabled them to dominate the
world was commonly believed to be an inevitable
consequence of the nature of the “white race.” Sophis-
ticated historians like H. T. Buckle persuaded them-
selves that the irregular work habits then characteristic
of Spaniards, by contrast with the steady ones of the
English, were consequences of an extreme as opposed
to a moderate climate. Both racialist and environ-
mentalist forms of determinism are now discredited;
for geographers have produced abundant evidence
with which neither can be reconciled. No special de-
terminist theory relying on other alleged causal factors
is even superficially plausible.
The numerous determinist theories of historical de-
velopment can be classified as cyclical or noncyclical.
