Yet even in the 19th century, when speculation of this type was at its height, there were informed skeptics—Joseph de Maistre and Arthur Schopenhauer, for example, and later the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt—who challenged the optimistic and rationalistic presuppositions on which it was founded. It was pointed out that notions such as that of the perfectibility of humanity or of the existence of some foreseeable goal toward which the course of events was inexorably leading were not empirically established truths but mere articles of faith; in subscribing to them, historical theorists often appeared to be tacitly importing into their allegedly scientific interpretations teleological conceptions of a kind that it had been their declared intention to banish forever from social enquiry. These objections were repeated and amplified in the 20th-century by critics such as Karl Popper, who also maintained that the theorists in question were, in any case, working with an unacceptably crude notion of scientific reasoning and that their high-sounding generalities conspicuously failed to measure up to the requisite standards of conceptual precision and observational testability.
Jacob Burckhardt, 1892Courtesy of the Universitats-Bibliothek Basel
Although such strictures have considerable force, they should not obscure the significant contribution that had been made toward extending human knowledge and understanding. The tendency, for example, to insist upon the relevance of scientific modes of procedure to the areas of historical and social investigation at least achieved the salutary effect of throwing into relief the inadequacy of previous work in these domains; moreover, it indirectly brought to the fore the entire question of the status of history as a legitimate form of thought. For, if history should prove resistant to attempts to assimilate it to other accredited branches of enquiry, it would be necessary to show why this was so and to exhibit those features of historical thinking that lent it its distinctive and irreducible character. The new science: Vico and Herder
Among the 18th-century theorists, two writers can indeed be picked out who—while remaining firmly within the speculative tradition—at the same time possessed sufficient genius and prescience to realize that the solution to the problem of establishing history as a reputable discipline might be found by pursuing a course different from one modelled upon the methodology of the natural sciences. Partly because of the obscure and scholastic manner in which it was written, the Scienza nuova (1725; New Science) of Giambattista Vico was a work whose importance remained for a long time wholly unrecognized, and it was not until the 20th century that its significance and originality were fully appreciated.
Central to the book is the contention that the kind of knowledge that humans can achieve of their own actions, creations, and institutions is of a radically different type from the knowledge that is acquired by the observation and investigation of the nonhuman or natural world. Knowledge of the former variety is, moreover, held to be in principle superior to that of the latter. For, in Vico’s opinion, in order truly to know something it is necessary in some sense to have made it: it followed that, whereas the reality studied by the physical scientist is the creation of God and therefore only properly known by God, the “world of nations” that forms the subject matter of history is the creation of humans and is therefore something that humans can “hope to know.” Thus, Vico was led to stress the differences rather than the analogies between historical and other forms of enquiry; in particular, he emphasized the need for the historian to enter imaginatively into the spirit of past ages, re-creating the outlooks and attitudes that informed them as opposed to seeking to impose upon them inappropriate or falsifying interpretations—“pseudomyths”—that derived from the cultural ethos of his own time. Vico propounded a cyclical theory of human history, according to which “nations” or societies pass through determinate stages, and he combined this with the idea that a providential principle is in some manner immanent within the various forms of life that humans construct. He employed such conceptions, however, in a fashion that treated human nature as historical and emphasized that human powers and capacities do not conform to a fixed or static pattern but are necessarily subject to change and development in the course of time.
In a similar vein, the German writer Johann Gottfried von Herder, in his influential Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91; Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man), implied that it was vital to view human actions and achievements from a standpoint that took proper account of “time, place and national character”—in other words, cultural milieu and the inevitable limits imposed by historical situation and circumstance. In its general direction, Herder’s historical thought reflected the Enlightenment preconceptions of humans as progressive beings. Herder’s chief importance lies, however, in his insistence upon the misconceptions involved in treating the products of past thought and action as if they were the manifestations of an unchanging human consciousness and as if they could be explained by reference to abstract laws eternally valid for humans everywhere. According to Herder, such an approach failed to recognize the complex influences that act upon human beings as members of particular historical societies; each of these societies possessed its unique life-style, subtly but inescapably determining the mentalities of those born within its confines in a manner that rendered futile all attempts to reduce human propensities and needs to the terms of some simple set of abstract formulas.
Herder, detail of an oil painting by Gerhard von Kugelgen, 1808; in the Library of Tartu State UniversityCourtesy of the Library of Tartu State University
Many of Vico’s and Herder’s ideas appear familiar today, but it is easy to forget that the emergence of what has come to be known as the “historical sense” is a comparatively recent phenomenon, one that represents a genuine revolution in European thought. It is largely because of this revolution that social and political theories of the kind elaborated by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza in the 17th century now seem oddly artificial, so remote are the categories in which they sought to explain human life and behaviour from those that have subsequently found acceptance. History as a process of dialectical change: Hegel and Marx
The suggestion that there is something essentially mistaken in the endeavour to comprehend the course of history “naturalistically” and within an explanatory framework deriving from scientific paradigms was powerfully reinforced by conceptions stemming from the development of German idealism in the 19th century. The “philosophy of spirit” of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel made its appearance upon the intellectual scene contemporaneously with Saint-Simonian and Comtean positivism, rivalling the latter in scope and influence and bringing with it its own highly distinctive theory of historical evolution and change. Hegel’s stress upon the “organic” nature of social wholes and the incommensurability of different historical epochs owed evident debts to Herderian ideas, but he set these within an overall view that conceived the movement of history in dynamic terms. Regularities and recurrences of the sort that typically manifest themselves in the realm of nature are foreign, Hegel maintained, to the sphere of mind or spirit, which was characterized instead as involving a continual drive toward self-transcendence and the removal of limitations upon thought and action. Humanity is not to be conceived according to the mechanistic models of 18th-century materialism; essentially humans are free, but the freedom that constitutes their nature can achieve fulfillment only through a process of struggle and of overcoming obstacles that is itself the expression of human activity. It was in this sense that Hegel claimed that spirit was “at war with itself”—“it has to overcome itself as its most formidable obstacle.” In concrete terms, this meant that historical advance did not proceed through a series of smooth transitions. Once the potentialities of a particular society had been realized in the creation of a certain mode of life, its historical role was over; its members became aware of its inadequacies, and the laws and institutions they had previously accepted unquestioningly were now experienced as fetters, inhibiting further development and no longer reflecting their deepest aspirations. Thus, each phase of the historical process could be said to contain the seeds of its own destruction and to “negate” itself; the consequence was the emergence of a fresh society, representing another stage in a progression whose final outcome was the formation of a rationally ordered community with which each citizen could consciously identify himself and in which there would therefore no longer exist any sense of alienation or constraint. Somewhat curiously, the type of community Hegel envisaged as exemplifying this satisfactory state of affairs bore a striking resemblance to the Prussian monarchy of his own time.