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Major Theories Of History

From The Greeks To Marxism

Historical materialists would be untrue to their own principles if they

failed to regard their method of interpreting history as the result of a
prolonged, complex and contradictory process. Mankind has been
making history for a million years or more as it advanced from the
primate condition to the atomic age. But a science of history capable of
ascertaining the laws governing man’s collective activities over the
ages is a relatively recent acquisition.
The first attempts to survey the long march of human history, study
its causes, and set forth its successive stages along scientific lines were
made only about 2500 years ago. This task, like so many others in the
domain of theory, was originally undertaken by the Greeks.
The sense of history is a precondition for a science of history. This
is not an inborn but a cultivated, historically generated capacity. The
discrimination of the passage of time into a well-defined past, present
and future is rooted in the evolution of the organisation of labour.
Man’s awareness of life as made up of consecutive and changing
events has acquired breadth and depth along with the development and
diversification of social production. The calendar first appears, not
among food gatherers, but in agricultural communities.
Primitive peoples from savagery to the upper stages of barbarism
have as little concern for the past as for the future. What they
experience and do forms part of an objective universal history. But
they remain unaware of the particular place they occupy or the part
they play in the progression of mankind.
The very idea of historical advancement from one stage to the next
is unknown. They have no need to inquire into the motive forces of
history or to mark off the phases of social development. Their
collective consciousness has not reached the point of an historical
outlook or a sociological insight.
The low level of their productive powers, the immaturity of their
economic forms, the narrowness of their activities and the meagreness
of their culture and connections are evidenced in their extremely
restricted views of the course of events.
The amount of historical knowledge possessed by extremely
primitive minds may be gauged from the following observations made
by the Jesuit father Jacob Baegert in his Account of the Aboriginal
Inhabitants of the California Peninsula written 200 years ago. “No
Californian is acquainted with the events that occurred in the country
prior to his birth, nor does he even know who his parents were if he
should happen to have lost them during his infancy—The Californians
—believed that California constituted the whole world, and they
themselves its sole inhabitants; for they went to nobody, and nobody
came to see them, each little people remaining within the limits of its
small district.”
In pre-Spanish times they marked only one repetitive event, the
pitahaya fruit harvest. Thus a space of three years is called three
pitahayas. “Yet they seldom make use of such phrases, because they
hardly ever speak among themselves of years, but merely say, ‘long
ago’, or ‘not long ago’, being utterly indifferent whether two or 20
years have elapsed since the occurrence of a certain event.”
Until several thousand years ago, peoples took their own particular
organisation of social relations for granted. It appeared to them as fixed
and final as the heavens and earth and as natural as their eyes and ears.
The earliest men did not even distinguish themselves from the rest of
nature or draw a sharp line of demarcation between themselves and
other living creatures in their habitat. It took a far longer time for them
to learn to distinguish between what belonged to nature and what
belonged to society.
So long as social relations remain simple and stable, changing
extremely slowly and almost imperceptibly over vast stretches of time,
society melts into the background of nature and does not stand out in
sharp contrast from it. Nor do the experiences of one generation differ
much from another. If the familiar organisation with its traditional
routine is disrupted, it either vanishes or is rebuilt on the old pattern.
Moreover, surrounding communities, so far as they are known (and
acquaintance does not extend very far either in space or time), are
much the same. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the North
American Indian could travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or the
Australian native thousands of miles, without encountering radically
different types of human societies.
Under such circumstances, neither society in general nor one’s own
special mode of living is looked upon as a peculiar object which is
worth special attention and study. The need for theorising about history
or the nature of society does not arise until civilisation is well
advanced and sudden, violent, and far-reaching upheavals in social
relations take place during the lifetime of individuals or within the
memories of their elders.
When swift strides are taken from one form of social structure to
another, the old days and ways stand out in startling contrast, and even
conflict, with the new. Through trade, travel and war, the
representatives of the expanding social system undergoing construction
or reconstruction come into contact with peoples of quite different
customs on lower levels of culture.
More immediately, glaring differences in the conditions of life
within their own communities and bitter conflicts between antagonistic
classes induce thoughtful men who have the means for such pursuits to
speculate on the origins of such oppositions, to compare the various
kinds of societies and governments, and to try and arrange them in an
order of succession or worth.
The English historian M.I. Finley makes a similar point in
reviewing three recent books on the ancient East in the August 20,
1965, New Statesman : “The presence or absence of a ‘historical sense’
is nothing less than an intellectual reflection of the very wide
differences in the historical process itself.”
He cites the Marxist scholar, Professor D.D. Kosambi, who
attributes “the total lack of historical sense” in ancient India to the
narrow outlook of village life bound up with its mode of agricultural
production. “The succession of seasons is all important, while there is
little cumulative change to be noted in the village from year to year.
This gives the general feeling of ‘the Timeless East’ to foreign
observers.”
The other civilised peoples of the ancient Near and Middle East
likewise lacked a sense of history. There is nothing, notes Professor
Leo Oppenhelm, “that would attest the awareness of the scribes of the
existence of a historical continuum in the Mesopotamian civilisation”.
This is confirmed by the fact that “the longest and most explicit
Assyrian royal inscriptions—were embedded in the substructure of a
temple or a palace, safe from human eyes and only to be read by the
deity to whom they were addressed”.
The main preconditions for an historical outlook upon history in the
West were brought into being from about 1100 to 700 BC by the
transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age in the Middle East and
Aegean civilisations. The comparatively self-sufficient agricultural
kingdoms and settlements were supplemented or supplanted by
bustling commercial centres, especially in the Phoenician and Ionian
ports of Asia Minor. There new classes—merchants, shipowners,
manufacturers, artisans, seafarers—came to the fore and challenged the
institutions, ideas and power of the old landed gentry. Patriarchal
slavery became transformed into chattel slavery. Commodity relations,
metal money, mortgage debt corroded the archaic social structures.
The first democratic revolutions and oligarchic counterrevolutions
were hatched in the city states.
The Ionian Greeks, who set down the first true written histories,
were associates of traders, engineers, craftsmen and voyagers. The
pioneer of Western historians, Hecaeteus, lived in the same
commercial city of Miletus as the first philosophers and scientists and
belonged to the same materialist trend of thought.
The writing of history soon engendered interest in the science of
history. Once the habit of viewing events in their sequence of change
was established, the questions arose: How did history unfold? Was
there any discernible pattern in its flux? If so, what was it? And what
were its causes?
The first really rational explanation of the historical process as a
whole was given by the outstanding Greek historians from Herodotus
to Polybius. This was the cyclical conception of historical movement.
According to this view, society, like nature, passed through identical
patterns of development in periodically repeated rounds.
Thucydides, the pre-eminent Greek historian, declared that he had
written his record of the Peloponnesian wars to teach men its lessons
since identical events were bound to happen again. Plato taught the
doctrine of the Great Year at the end of which the planets would
occupy the same positions as before and all sublunary events would be
reduplicated. This conception was expressed as a popular axiom in
Ecclesiastes: “There is no new thing under the sun.”
The cyclical character of human affairs was closely affiliated with
the conception of an all-powerful, inscrutable, inflexible Destiny which
came to replace the gods as the sovereign of history. This was
mythologised in the persons of the Three Fates and further rationalised
by learned men as the ultimate law of life. This notion of cosmic tragic
fate from which human appeal or escape is impossible not only became
the major theme of the classic Greek dramatists but is also embedded
in the historical work of Herodotus.
Comparisons with other peoples, or between Greek states in
different stages of social, economic, and political development,
produced a comparative history along with the first inklings of
historical progression. As early as the eighth century BC the poet
Hesiod talked about the copper age that had preceded the iron one.
Several centuries later Herodotus, the first anthropologist as well as the
father of history, gathered valuable information on the customs of the
Mediterranean peoples living in savagery, barbarism and civilisation.
Thucydides pointed out that the Greeks once lived as the barbarians
did in his own time. Plato in his Republic, Laws and other writings,
and Aristotle in his Politics, collected specimens of different forms of
state rule. They named, classified and criticised them. They sought to
ascertain not only the best mode of government for the city state but
also the order of their forms of development and the causes of political
variation and revolution.
Polybius, the Greek historian of the rise of the Roman empire,
viewed it as the prize example of the natural laws which regulated the
cyclical transformation of one governmental form into another. He
believed, like Plato, that all states inevitably passed through the phases
of kingship, aristocracy and democracy which degenerated into their
allied forms of despotism, oligarchy and mob rule. The generation and
degeneration of these successive stages of rulership was due to natural
causes. “This is the regular cycle of constitutional revolutions, and the
natural order in which institutions change, are transformed, and return
to their original stage”, he wrote.
Just as they knew and named the major kinds of political
organisation from monarchy to democracy, so did the Greek thinkers
of both the idealist and materialist schools originate the basic types of
historical interpretation which have endured to the present day.
They were the first to try to explain the evolution of society along
materialist lines, however crude and awkward were their initial efforts.
The Atomists, the Sophists and the Hippocratic school of medicine put
forward the idea that the natural environment was the decisive factor in
the moulding of mankind. In its extreme expressions this trend of
thought reduced social-historical changes to the effects of the
geographical theatre and its climatic conditioning. Thus Polybius
wrote: “We mortals have an irresistible tendency to yield to climatic
influences; and to this cause, and no other, may be traced the great
distinctions which prevail among us in character, physical formation
and complexion, as well as in most of our habits, varying with
nationality and wide local separation.”
These earliest sociologists taught that mankind had climbed from
savagery to civilisation by imitating nature and improving upon her
operations. The finest exponent of this materialist view in Graeco-
Roman culture was Lucretius who gave a brilliant sketch of the steps in
the development of society in his poem On The Nature of Things .
 Predominant among the Greek thinkers, however, were the sorts of
explanation which have ever since been the stock in trade of the
historical idealists. There were five of these.
1. The Great God Theory. The most primitive attempts to explain
the origin and development of the world and man are the creation
myths to be found among preliterate peoples. We are best acquainted
with the one in Genesis which ascribes the making of heaven and earth
with all its features and creatures to a Lord God who worked on a six-
day schedule. These fanciful stories do not have any scientific validity.
The raw materials for genuine history-writing were first collected in
the annals of the reigns and chronicles of kings in the river valley
civilisations of the Near East, India and China. The first synthetic
conception of history arose from the fusion of elements taken over
from the old creation myths with a review of these records. This was
the Great God, or theological version of history which asserted that
divine beings directed human affairs together with the rest of the
cosmos.
Just as the royal despots dominated the city states and their empires,
so the will, passions, plans and needs of the gods were the ultimate
causes of events. The king is the agent who maintains the world in
being by means of an annual contest with the powers of chaos. This
theological theory was elaborated by the Sumerians, Babylonians and
Egyptians before it came down to the Greeks and Romans. It was
expounded in the Israelite scriptures whence it was taken over and
reshaped by the Christian and Mohammedan religions and their states.
Under the theocratic monarchies of the East the divine guidance of
human affairs was wrapped up with the godlike nature of the priest-
king. In Babylon, Egypt, the Alexandrian Empire and Rome the
supreme ruling force of the universe and the forceful ruler of the realm
were regarded as equally divine. The Great God and the Great Man
were one and the same.
2. The Great Man Theory. The straightforward theological view of
history is too crude and naive, too close to primitive animism, too
much in conflict with civilised enlightenment to persist without
criticism or change except among the most ignorant and devout. It has
been supplanted by more refined versions of the same type of thinking.
The Great Man theory emerged from a dissociation of the dual
components of the Great God theory. The immense powers attributed
to the gods become transferred to and concentrated in some figure at
the head of the state, the church or other key institution or movement.
This exceptionally placed personage was supposedly endowed with the
capacity for moulding events as he willed. This is the pristine source of
the tenacious belief that unusually influential and able individuals
determine the main direction of history.
Fetishistic worship of the Great Man has come down through the
ages from the god-kings of Mesopotamia to the adoration of a Hitler. It
has had numerous incarnations according to the values attached at
different times by different people to the various domains of social
activity. In antiquity these ranged from the divine monarch, the tyrant,
the lawgiver (Solon), the military conqueror (Alexander), the dictator
(Caesar), the hero-emancipator (David), and the religious leader
(Christ, Buddha, Mohammed). All these were put in the place of the
Almighty as the prime mover and shaper of human history.
The most celebrated latter-day expounder of this viewpoint was
Carlyle who wrote: “Universal history, the history of what man has
accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men
who have worked here.”
3. The Great Mind Theory. A more sophisticated and philosophical
variant of the Great God-Man line of thought is the notion that history
is drawn forward or driven ahead by some ideal force in order to
realise its preconceived ends. The Greek Anaxagoras said: “Reason
(Nous ) governs the world.” Aristotle held that the prime mover of the
universe and thereby the ultimate animator of everything within it was
God, who was defined as pure mind engaged in thinking about itself.
Hegel was the foremost modern exponent of this theory that the
progress of mankind consisted in the working out and consummation
of an idea. He wrote: “Spirit, or Mind, is the only motive principle of
history.” The underlying goal of the World Spirit and the outcome of
its laborious development was the realisation of the idea of freedom.
The Great Mind Theory easily slides into the notion that some set
of brilliant intellects, or even one mental genius, supplies the
mainspring of human advancement. Plato taught that there are “some
natures who ought to study philosophy and to be leaders in the state;
and others who are not born to be philosophers, and are meant to be
followers rather than leaders”.
Thus some 18th century rationalists who believed that “opinion
governs mankind” looked toward an enlightened monarch to introduce
the necessary progressive reconstruction of the state and society. A
more widespread manifestation of this approach contrasts to the
unthinking mob some upper stratum of the population as the exemplar
of reason which alone can be entrusted with political leadership and
power.
4. The Best People Theory. All such interpretations contain
infusions of the prejudice that some elite, the Best Race, the favoured
nation, the ruling class alone make history. The Old Testament
assumed that the Israelites were God’s chosen people. The Greeks
regarded themselves as the acme of culture, better in all respects than
the barbarians. Plato and Aristotle looked upon the slave-holding
aristocracy as naturally superior to the lower orders.
5. The Human Nature Theory. Most persistent is the view that
history in the last analysis has been determined by the qualities of
human nature, good or bad. Human nature, like nature itself, was
regarded as rigid and unchanging from one generation to another. The
historian’s task was to demonstrate what these invariant traits of the
human constitution and character were, how the course of history
exemplified them, and how the social structure was moulded or had to
be remodelled in accordance with them. Such a definition of essential
human nature was the starting point for the social theorising of
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and other great idealists.
But it will also be found at the bottom of the social and political
philosophy of the most diverse schools. Thus the empiricist David
Hume flatly asserts in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding :
“Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history
informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is
only to discover the constant and universal principles of human
nature.”
Many of the 19th century pathfinders in the social sciences clung to
this old standby of “the constant and universal principles of human
nature”. For example, E.B. Tylor, the founder of British anthropology,
wrote in 1889: “Human institutions, like stratified rocks, succeed each
other in series substantially uniform over the globe, independent of
what seems the comparatively superficial differences of race and
language, but shaped by similar human nature.”
Although they may have held different opinions of what the
essential qualities of humanity were, idealist and materialist thinkers
alike have appealed in the last resort to permanent principles of human
nature to explain social and historical phenomena. Thus the materialist-
minded Thucydides, as M.I Finley tells us in his introduction to The
Greek Historians, believed that “human nature and human behaviour
were—essentially fixed qualities, the same in one century as another”.
For many centuries after the Greeks, scientific insight into the
workings of history made little progress. Under Christianity and
feudalism the theological conception that history was the manifestation
of God’s plan monopolised social philosophy. In contrast to the
stagnation of science in Western Europe, the Moslems and Jews
carried forward the social as well as the natural sciences. The most
original and unsurpassed student of social processes between the
ancients and moderns was the 14th century thinker of the Maghreb, Ibn
Khaldun who analysed the stages of development of the Mohammedan
countries and cultures and the causes of their typical institutions and
features in the most materialist manner of his epoch.
This eminent Moslem statesman was very likely the first scholar to
formulate a clear conception of sociology, the science of social
development. He did so under the name of the study of culture.
He wrote: “History is the record of human society, or world
civilisation; of the changes that take place in the nature of that society,
such as savagery, sociability, and group solidarity; of revolutions and
uprisings by one set of people against another with the resulting
kingdoms and states, with their various ranks; of the different activities
and occupations of men, whether for gaining their livelihood or in the
various sciences and crafts; and, in general, of all the transformations
that society undergoes by its very nature.”
The next big advance in scientific understanding of history came
with the rise of bourgeois society and the discovery of other regions of
the globe associated with its commercial and naval expansion. In their
conflicts with the ruling feudal hierarchy and the Church the
intellectual spokesmen for progressive bourgeois forces rediscovered
and reasserted the ideas of class struggle first noted by the Greeks and
instituted historical comparisons with antiquity to bolster their claims.
Their new revolutionary views demanded not only a wider outlook
upon the world but a deeper probing into the mechanism of social
change.
Such bold representatives of bourgeois thought as Machiavelli and
Vico in Italy, Hobbes, Harrington, Locke and the classical economists
in England, the Scottish school of Adam Ferguson, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Montesquieu, D’Holbach and others in France helped accumulate the
materials and clear the site for a more realistic picture of society and a
more rigorous understanding of its modes and stages of development.
On a much higher level of social and scientific development,
historical thought from the 17th to the 19th centuries tended to become
polarised, as in Greece, between idealist and materialist modes of
explanation. Both schools of thought were animated by a common aim.
They believed that history had an intelligible character and that the
nature and sources of its laws could be ascertained.
Theological interpreters like Bishop Bossuet continued to see God
as the director of the historical procession. While most other thinkers
did not dispute that divine providence ultimately shaped the course of
events, they were far more concerned with the mundane ways and
means through which history operated.
Giambattista Vico of Naples was the great pioneer among these
thinkers. He asserted at the beginning of the 18th century that since
history, or “the world of nations”, had been created by men, it could be
understood by its makers. He emphasised that social and cultural
phenomena passed through a regular sequence of stages which was
cyclical in character.
He insisted that “the order of ideas must follow the order of things”
and that the “order of human things” was “first the forests, after that
the huts, thence the village, next the cities and finally the academies”.
His “new science” of history sought to discover and apply “the
universal and eternal principles—on which all nations were founded,
and still preserve themselves”. Vico brings forward the class struggle
in his interpretation of history, especially in the heroic age represented
by the conflict between the plebeians and patricians of ancient Rome.
The materialistic theorists who came after Vico in Western Europe
looked for these “universal and eternal principles” which determined
history in very different quarters than the idealists. But neither school
doubted that history, like nature, was subject to general laws which the
philosopher of history was obligated to find.
The key thought of the English and French materialists of the 17th
and 18th centuries was that men were the products of their natural and
social environments. As Charles Brockden Brown, an American
novelist of the early 19th century, put it: “Human beings are moulded
by the circumstances in which they are placed.” In accord with this
principle, they turned to the objective realities of nature and society to
explain the historical process.
Montesquieu, for example, regarded geography and government as
the twin principal determinants of history and society. The physical
factor was most influential in the earlier and more primitive stages of
human existence, although its operation never ceased; the political
factor became more dominant as civilisation advanced.
He and his contemporary materialists largely ignored the economic
conditions which stood between nature and the political institutions.
The economic basis and background of political systems and the
struggles of contending classes which issued from economic
contradictions were beyond their field of vision.
The French historians of the early 19th century acquired a deeper
insight into the economic conditioning of the historical process through
their studies of the English and French revolutions. They had watched
the French revolution go through a complete cycle. This started with
the overthrow of the absolute monarchy, passed through the
revolutionary regime of Robespierre and the bourgeois-military
dictatorship of Napoleon and ended in the Bourbon Restoration. In the
light of these vicissitudes they learned the crucial role of class
struggles in pushing history forward and pointed to sweeping shifts in
property ownership as the prime cause of social overturns. But they
remained unable to uncover the fundamental determinants which led to
the reconstruction and replacement of property relations as well as
political forms.
Many leading philosophers of the bourgeois era had a materialist
view of nature and man’s relations with the world around him. But
none of them succeeded in working out a consistent or comprehensive
conception of society and history along materialist lines. At a certain
point in their analyses they departed from materialist premises and
procedures, attributing the ultimate causal agencies of human affairs to
an invariant human nature, a farseeing human reason, or a great
individual.
What was generally responsible for their inability to reach bedrock
and their deviation into nonmaterialist types of explanation in the
fundamental areas of historical and social determination? As bourgeois
thinkers, they were hemmed in and held back by the inescapable
restrictions of the capitalist horizon. So long as the ascending
bourgeoisie was on its way to supremacy, its most enlightened
ideologists had a passionate and persistent interest in boring deeply
into economic, social and political realities. After the bourgeoisie had
consolidated its position as the ruling class, its thinkers shrank from
probing to the bottom of social and political processes. They became
more and more sluggish and shortsighted in the fields of sociology and
history because discovery of the underlying causes of change in these
fields could only threaten the continuance of capitalist domination.
One big barrier to the deepening of social science was their tacit
assumption that bourgeois society and its main institutions embodied
the highest attainable form of social organisation. All previous
societies led up to that point and stopped there. There was apparently
no progressive exit from the capitalist system. That is why the
ideologists of the English bourgeoisie from Locke to Ricardo and
Spencer tried to fit their conceptions of the meaning of all social
phenomena into the categories and relations of that transitory order.
This narrowness made it equally difficult for them to decipher the past,
get to the bottom of their present, and foresee the future.
Idealistic interpretations of history were promulgated and promoted
by numerous theorists from Leibnitz to Fichte. Their work was
consummated by Hegel. In the early decades of the 19th century Hegel
revolutionised the understanding of world history, placing it at the
widest vantage point of the bourgeois era. His contributions may be
summed up in thirteen points.
1. Hegel approached all historical phenomena from the standpoint
of their evolution, seeing them as moments, elements, phases in a
single creative, cumulative, progressive and ceaseless process of
becoming.
2. Since the world about him, which he called “objective mind”,
was the work of man, he, like Vico, was convinced that it was
intelligible and could be explicated by the inquiring mind.
3. He conceived history as a universal process in which all social
formations, nations and persons had their appropriate but subordinate
place. No single state or people dominated world history; each was to
be judged by its role in the development of the totality.
4. He asserted that the historical process was essentially rational. It
had an immanent logic which unfolded in a law-governed manner
defined by the dialectical process. Each stage of the whole was a
necessary product of the circumstances of its time and place.
5. Every essential element of each stage hung together as
components of a unified whole which expressed the dominant principle
of its age. Each stage makes its own unique contribution to the
advancement of mankind.
6. The truth about history is concrete. As the Russian thinker
Chernyshevsky wrote: “Every object, every phenomenon has its own
significance, and it must be judged according to the circumstances, the
environment, in which it exists—A definite judgment can be
pronounced only about a definite fact, after examining all the
circumstances on which it depends.”
7. History changes in a dialectical manner. Each stage of social
development has had sufficient reasons for coming into existence. It
has a contradictory constitution, arising from three different elements.
These are the durable achievements inherited from its predecessors, the
special conditions required for its own maintenance, and the opposing
forces at work within itself. The development of its internal
antagonisms supplies its dynamism and generates its growth. The
sharpening of its contradictions leads to its disintegration and eventual
dispossession by a higher and antithetical form which grows out of it
by way of a revolutionary leap.
8. Thus all grades of social organisation are interlinked in a
dialectically determined series from lower to higher.
 9. Hegel brought forward the profound truth later developed by
historical materialism that labour is imposed upon man as the
consequence of his needs and that man is the historical product of his
own labour.
10. History is full of irony. It has an overall objective logic which
confounds its most powerful participants and organisations. Although
the heads of states apply definite policies, and peoples and individuals
consciously pursue their own aims, historical actuality does not fall
into line or accord with their plans. The course and outcome of history
is determined by overriding internal necessities which are independent
of the will and consciousness of any of its institutional or personal
agencies. Man proposes—the historical necessity of the Idea disposes.
11. The outcome of history, the result of its agonising labour, is the
growth of rational freedom. Man’s freedom comes not from arbitrary,
wilful intervention in events, but from growing insight into the
necessities of the objective, universal, contradictory processes of
becoming.
12. The necessities of history are not always the same; they change
into their opposites as one stage succeeds another. In fact, this conflict
of lower and higher necessities is the generator of progress. A greater
and growing necessity is at work within the existing order negating the
conditions which sustain it. This necessity keeps depriving the present
necessity of its reasons for existence, expands at its expense, renders it
obsolete and eventually displaces it.
13. Not only do social formations and their specific dominant
principles change from one stage to the next but so do the specific laws
of development.
This method of interpreting history was far more correct, all-
encompassing and profound than any of its predecessors. Yet it
suffered from two ineradicable flaws. First, it was incurably idealistic.
Hegel pictured history as the product of abstract principles which
represented differing degrees of the ceaseless contest between
servitude and freedom. Man’s freedom was gradually realised through
this dialectical development of the Absolute Idea.
Such a logic of history was an intellectualised version of the notion
that God directs the universe and history is the fulfilment of His
design, which in this case is the freedom of humanity. As envisaged by
Hegel, this freedom was not realised through the emancipation of
mankind from oppressive and servile social conditions but from the
overcoming of false, inadequate ideas.
Second, Hegel closed the gates on the further development of
history by having it culminate in fact with the German kingdom and
the bourgeois society of his own era. The exponent of a universal and
never-ending history concluded that its ultimate agent was the national
state, a characteristic product of its bourgeois phase. And in its
monarchical form, modified by a constitution! He mistook a transient
creation of history for its final and perfected embodiment. By thus
setting limits upon the process of becoming, he violated the
fundamental tenet of his own dialectic.
These defects prevented Hegel from arriving at the true nature of
social relations and the principal causes of social change. However, his
epoch-making insights have influenced all subsequent thought and
writing about history. With the indispensable revisions, they have all
been incorporated into the structure of historical materialism.
Hegel, the idealist dialectician, was the foremost theorist of the
evolutionary process as a whole. The French social thinkers and
historians carried the materialist understanding of history and society
as far as it could go in their day. But even within their own provinces
both fell short. Hegel could not provide a satisfactory theory of social
evolution and the materialists did not penetrate to the most basic
moving forces of history.
Not until the truthful elements in these two contrary lines of thought
converged and combined in the minds of Marx and Engels in the
middle of the 19th century was a rounded conception of history
produced that was solidly anchored in the dialectical development of
the material conditions of social existence from the emergence of early
man to contemporary life.
All the different types of historical explanation cast up in the
evolution of man’s thought survive today. Not one has been
permanently buried, no matter how outmoded, inadequate or
scientifically incorrect it is. The oldest interpretations can be revived
and reappear in modern dress to serve some social need or stratum.
What bourgeois nation has not proclaimed in time of war that “God
is on our side”, guiding its destiny? The Great Man theory strutted
about under the swastika in the homage paid to Hitler. Spengler in
Germany and Toynbee in England offer their re-editions of the cyclical
round of history. The school of geopolitics makes geographical
conditions in the shape of the heartland and the outlying regions into
the paramount determinant of modern history.
Nazi Germany, Verwoerd’s South Africa and the Southern white
supremacists exalt the master race into the dictator of history in its
crudest form. The conception that human nature must be the basis of
social structure is the last-ditch defence of the opponents of socialism
as well as the point of departure for the utopian socialism of the
American psychoanalyst Erich Fromm and others.
Finally, the notion that reason is the motive force in history is
shared by all sorts of savants. The American anthropologist Alexander
Goldenweiser stated in Early Civilisation : “Thus the whole of
civilisation, if followed backward step by step, would ultimately be
found resolvable, without residue, into bits of ideas in the minds of
individuals.” Here ideas and individuals are the creative factors of
history.
In describing his philosophy, the Italian thinker Croce wrote:
“History is the record of the creations of the human spirit in every
field, theoretical as well as practical. And these spiritual creations are
always born in the hearts and minds of men of genius, artists, thinkers,
men of action, moral and religious reformers.” This position combines
idealism with elitism, the spirit using geniuses, or the creative
minority, as the agency which redeems the masses.
These diverse elements of historical interpretation can appear in the
most incongruous combinations in a given country, school of thought
or individual mind. Stalinism has provided the most striking example
of such an illogical synthesis. The votaries of “the personality cult”
sought to fuse the traditions and views of Marxism, the most modern
and scientific philosophy, with the archaic Great Man version of the
contemporary historical process.
Except in Maoist China, this odd and untenable amalgam of ideas
has already crumbled. Yet it demonstrates how generalised thought
about the historical process can retrogress after making an immense
leap forward. The history of historical science proves in its own way
that progress is not even or persistent throughout history. Thucydides,
the narrator of the Peloponnesian Wars in the fourth century BC, had a
far more realistic view of history than did St. Augustine, the celebrator
of the City of God, in the fourth century AD.
Marxism has incorporated into its theory of social development not
only the verified findings of modern scientific research but all the
insights into history of its philosophical predecessors, whether
materialist, idealist or eclectic, which have proved valid and viable. To
do otherwise would flout the mandate of its own method which teaches
that every school of thought, every stage of scientific knowledge, is an
outgrowth of the past work of men modified and sometimes
revolutionised by the prevailing conditions and concepts of their
existence. Scientific inquiry into history and society, like the process
of history itself, has given positive, permanent and progressive results.
 At the same time Marxism rejects all versions of antiquated theories
which have failed to provide an adequate or correct explanation of the
origins and evolution of society. It does not deny that historical
idealisms contain significant ingredients of truth and can even exhibit a
forward march. The main trend of their progression since the Greeks
has been from heaven to earth, from God to man, from the imaginary
to the real. Individuals, influential or insignificant, and ideas,
innovating or traditional, are essential parts of society; their roles in the
making of history have to be taken into account.
The idealists rightly pay attention to these factors. Where they go
wrong is in claiming decisive importance for them in the total process
of historical determination. Their method confines their analyses to the
outer layers of the social structure so that they remain on the surface of
events. Science has to delve into the nuclear core of society where the
real forces which determine the direction of history are at work.
Historical materialism turns away from the Divine Director, the
Great Man, the Universal Mind, the Intellectual Genius, the Elite, and
an unchanging and uniformly acting Human Nature for its explanation
of history. The formation, reformation and transformation of social
structures over the past million years cannot be understood by recourse
to any supernatural beings, ideal agencies, petty personal or invariant
causes.
God didn’t create the world and hasn’t superintended the
development of mankind. On the contrary, man created the idea of the
gods as a fantasy to compensate for lack of real control over the forces
of nature and of society.
Man made himself by acting upon nature and changing its elements
to satisfy his needs through the labour process. Man has worked his
way up in the world. The further development and diversification of
the labour process from savagery to our present civilisation has
continued to transform his capacities and characteristics.
History is not the achievement of outstanding individuals, no matter
how powerful, gifted or strategically placed. As early as the French
Revolution Condorcet protested against this narrow elitist view which
disregarded both what moves the mass of the human race and how the
masses rather than the masters make history. “Up to now, the history
of politics, like that of philosophy or of science, has been the history of
only a few individuals: That which really constitutes the human race,
the vast mass of families living for the most part on the fruits of their
labour, has been forgotten, and even of those who follow public
professions, and work not for themselves but for society, who are
engaged in teaching, ruling, protecting or healing others, it is only the
leaders who have held the eye of the historian”, he wrote.
Marxism builds on this insight that history is the result of the
collective actions of multitudes, of mass effort extending over
prolonged periods within the framework of the powers of production
they have received and extended and the modes of production they
have created, built up and revolutionised.
It is not elites but the many-membered body of the people who have
sustained history, switched it in new directions at critical turning
points, and lifted humanity upward step by step.
History has not been generated nor has its course been guided by
preconceived ideas in any mind. Social systems have not been
constructed by architects with blueprints in hand. History has not
proceeded in accord with any prior plan. Socio-economic formations
have grown out of the productive forces at hand; its members have
fashioned their relations, customs, institutions and ideas in accordance
with their organisation of labour.
Human nature cannot explain the course of events or the
characteristics of social life. It is the changes in the conditions of life
and labour which underlie the making and remaking of our human
nature.
In the introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific Engels defined historical materialism as “that view of the
course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving
power of all historic events in the economic development of society, in
the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the
consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles
of these classes against one another”.
These are the prime principles from which the rest of Marxist
theory about the historical process is derived. They have come from
two and half millennia of inquiry into the laws of human activity and
social development. They represent its most valid conclusions.
Historical materialism is itself the synthetic product of historically
elaborated facts and ideas which are rooted in the economy and come
to fruition in the science of society taken in the full span of its
development.