Philosophy of history
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Philosophy of history designs a classical question concerning the eventual signification of history and a possible teleological end. It explores the classic branches of philosophy — metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology — and their implications on the assumptions and methods of historical inquiry. Saint Augustine, Bossuet and Leibniz are followers of a specific form of philosophy of history, called Theodicy, which accords to human history a transcendent sense and believe it is controlled by God. Hegel, Kant, Auguste Comte and Karl Marx are main thinkers of history issued from the Enlightenment tradition. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man gave a new popular life to the Hegelian expression of the "end of history". However, critics, including Hegelian scholars, argued that Hegel's conception of an "end of history" must not be thought as if history would stop itself, once achieved a perfect stage.
The philosophy of history asks at least these questions:
- What is the proper unit for the study of the human past? the individual subject, the polis ("city") or sovereign territory, the civilization, or nothing less than the whole of the species?;
- What broad patterns can we discern through the study of the human past? Are there, for example, patterns of progress? or cycles? or, in the words of William Shakespeare's character MacBeth, is it "life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?" and devoided of any teleological meaning?;
- If history can be said to progress toward some end, in a progressive or in a decadent direction, what is the driving force — what is the engine of that progress? (The difference between Hegel and Marx in their respective philosophies of history is a difference in the answers they give to this question — attributing a spiritual and a material engine to progress, respectively.)
Furthermore, philosophy of history necessarily includes history of philosophy, as in Hegel's works. Its questions might include: How can changes in philosophy be accounted for historically — a dissuasive question, since philosophical truth is usually thoughts as absolute ? What drives the development of thought in its historical context? To what degree can philosophical texts from prior historical eras (for instance, the teachings of Heraclitus or Anaximander dug up by Nietzsche and Heidegger) even be understood today?
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Unit of study
In the Poetics, Aristotle had argued that poetry is superior to history, because poetry speaks of what must or should be true, rather than merely what is true. Accordingly, classical historians felt a duty to ennoble the world. Herodotus, whom can be considered as the first historian, and, later, Plutarch freely invented speeches for their historical figures and chose their historical subjects with an eye toward morally improving the reader. History was supposed to teach you good examples to follow. From the Classical period through to the Renaissance, historians alternated between focusing on subjects designed to improve mankind and on a devotion to fact.
By the 18th century, historians had turned toward a more positivist approach focusing on fact as much as possible, but still with an eye on telling histories that could instruct and improve. Starting with Fustel de Coullanges and Theodor Mommsen, historical studies would take their modern scientifical form. In the Victorian era, the debate in historiography thus was not so much whether history was intended to improve the reader, but what causes turned history and how historical change could be understood.
The validity of the "hero" in historical studies
Further information: The validity of the "hero" in historical studies
After Hegel, Thomas Carlyle argued that history is the biography of a few central individuals, heroes, such as Oliver Cromwell or Frederick the Great. His heroes were political and military figures, the founders or topplers of states. His history of great men, of geniuses good and evil, sought to organize change in the advent of greatness.
Explicit defenses of Carlyle's position have been rare in the late 20th century. Most philosophers of history contend that the motive forces in history can best be described only with a wider lens than the one he used for his portraits.
After Marx's conception of a materialist history based on the class struggle, which raised attention for the first time to the importance of social factors such as economics in the unfolding of history, Herbert Spencer wrote "You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown....Before he can remake his society, his society must make him."
The Annales School, founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, were a major landmark on the shift from a history centered on individual subjects to studies concentrating in geography, economics, demography, and other social forces.
Does history have a teleogical sense?
For further information: Social progress and Progress (philosophy)
Theodicy claimed that history had a progressive direction leading to an eschatological end, given by a superior power. However, this transcendent teleological sense can be thought as immanent to human history itself. Marx, as Auguste Comte, may be said to have an immanent teleological conception of history; although Althusser has argued that discontinuity is an essential element of Marx's dialectical materialism, which includes historical materialism. Thinkers such as Nietzsche, Foucault, Althusser or Deleuze denies any teleological sense to history, claiming that it is best characterized by discontinuities, ruptures, and various time-scales, which the Annales School had demonstrated.
The "Whig interpretation of history," one associated with scholars of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in Britain, such as Henry Maine or Thomas Macaulay, looks at much of human history as progress from savagery and ignorance toward peace, prosperity, and science. Maine described the direction of progress as "from status to contract," from a world in which a child's whole life is pre-determined by the circumstances of his birth, toward one of mobility and choice.
After the first world war, and even before Herbert Butterfield (1900 – 1979) harshly criticized the Whig interpretation, it had gone out of style — the bloodletting of that conflict had indicted the whole notion of linear progress. However, The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama proposed a very similar notion of progress.
Schools of thought influenced by Hegel and Marx see history as progressive, too — but they saw, and see progress as the outcome of a dialectic in which factors working in opposite directions are over time reconciled. Hegel argued that history is a constant process of dialectic clash, where one idea or event will form the thesis, an opposing idea or event will be its antithesis, and the clash of the two will result in a synthesis. In synthesis, neither the thesis nor the antithesis is destroyed, but the prevailing moment will reflect a conjunction of the two. History was best seen as directed by a zeitgeist, and traces of the zeitgeist could be seen by looking backward. He believed that history was moving man toward "civilization." Marx adapted Hegel's dialectic to develop the materialist dialectic. He saw the struggle of thesis, antithesis, and resultant synthesis as always taking place in economic and material terms. Ideas and political organizations were the result of material production and conditions of material provision and consumption. For Marx, the continual battle between opposing forces within modes of production led inevitably to revolutionary changes in economics and eventually communism, which would be the eventual recreation of an early, literally pre-historic state. Hegel and Marx are both teleological in their histories: they both believe that history is progressive and directed toward a particular end.
Other scholars, such as Oswald Spengler and Nikolay Danilevsky, have seen in the human past a series of repetitive rises and falls. Spengler, who like Butterfield was writing in reaction to the carnage of the first world war, believed that a civilization enters upon an era of Caesarism after its soul dies. He thought that the soul of the West was dead and Caesarism was about to begin.
Motive engine of history
The central contention of historical materialism is that history exhibits progress, not of a linear sort but cumulative nonetheless, and that the motive engine of this progress is the struggle over ownership and control of the means of production.
The history of the means of production, then, is the substructure of history, and everything else, including ideological arguments about that history, constitutes a superstructure.
Critics have contended that this is either too vague to be useful or too mechanistic to be plausible.
Is history always written by the victors?
According to a legacy of the "politico-historical discourse" of "race struggle", analyzed by Michel Foucault in his 1976-77 course "Society must be Defended" (See below), it is often argued that the victors of a social struggle — the conflict can be based on any social element, ethnic, nations or class struggle — use their political dominance to suppress their defeated adversaries' version of historical events in favor of their own propaganda, which may go so far as historical revisionism. Walter Benjamin also considered that Marxist historians must take a radically different view point from the bourgeois and idealist point of view, in an attempt to create a sort of history from below, which would be able to conceive an alternative conception of history, not based, as in classical historical studies, on the philosophical and juridical discourse of sovereignty.
Historical accounts of writing history
A classic example of history being written by the victors would be the scarcity of unbiased information that has come down to us about the Carthaginians. Roman historians left tales of cruelty and human sacrifice practiced by their longtime enemies, but as the Carthaginians were utterly exterminated by the Romans, we only have one side of the story.
Similarly, we only have the Christian side of how Christianity came to be the dominant religion of Europe, but not the pagan version of these events. We have the European version of the conquest of the Americas, but not the native version. We have Herodotus's Greek history of the Persian Wars, but no Persian counterpart.
A possible counterexample could be the American Civil War, where it can be argued that the losers (Southerners) have written more history books on the subject than the winners and, until recently, dominated the national perception of history. (Confederate generals like Lee and Jackson are generally held in higher esteem than their Union counterparts, and popular films like Gone with the Wind and The Birth of a Nation have frequently told the story from the Southern viewpoint.)
Obviously the victors do have advantages in promoting their version of events, even if they don't erase their enemies completely from existence, going so far as negationism. In earlier eras, the victors controlled the churches, the courts and education. In dictatorships, ruthless censorship allows only the state-approved version of events to be made public, and much that happens remains secret. Even in liberal democracies, the victors control public school curricula, major news outlets, copyrights and the entertainment industry. Most countries have a kind of national mythology that emphasizes their own virtue, bravery, decency and cultural superiority which they teach in their schools.
Attempts to correct this bias in American education have often been denigrated and dismissed as political correctness. Some people argue that the culturally dominant point of view is by definition the "politically correct" one -- meaning that a widespread societal bias cannot be challenged without exposing oneself to attack.
Often, however, the argument that history is written by the victors is used as a rhetorical trick to distract from the fact that an advocate has no supporting evidence. If you ask why no history book has ever mentioned this event (whatever it is), you'll be told that it's no surprise considering that the winners write the history books. In cases like this, the argument has a lot of similarities with conspiracy theories, where the absence of supporting evidence is proof of how deep the conspiracy goes.
For instance, the writing of history in the West was tremendously influenced by what was written in the Soviet Union after the birth of communism in 1917. Not only did the West mirror many of the same studies to correct the "communist bias" but it failed to examine those areas neglected by Soviet scholars. So, once again, not only were the winners shaping the writing of history generally but did not allow alternate interpretations to appear. Consequently, Menshevik writers and revolutionaries became one of the largest groups to lose in this struggle. The Menshevik view of Russian history has been all but forgotten. That is why the leading Menshevik historian Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rozhkov (1868-1927) is little known in Russia and almost unheard of in the West. Rozhkov has been dismissed as a ‘minor Menshevik historian with a Bolshevik past’ or even as just ‘another free-thinker’, but this is unfair. He was one of V.O. Kliuchevskii’s most gifted disciples and the most influential Russian Marxist historian of the late imperial and early Soviet period of Russia’s history. In fact, there were only two well-known and respected Marxist historians in Russia after the Bolshevik seizure of power late in 1917: N.A. Rozhkov and M.N. Pokrovskii. The importance of both men to Russian historical scholarship and intellectual work in general in the first decade after the revolution cannot be underestimated. Pokrovskii, unlike Rozhkov, maintained his allegiance to Bolshevism. Rozhkov, having formally disassociated himself from the Bolshevik organisation in 1911, becamean outspoken critic of Bolshevik tactics at political meetings and organisations and a zealous activist for Menshevism. Being on the winning side after 1917 meant that Pokrovskii was fêted as the doyen of Soviet historians during the first decade of Soviet rule. Rozhkov, by contrast, fared poorly at the hands of Soviet critics because of his Menshevik beliefs and was lambasted by Pokrovskii himself.
See: Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rozhkov (1868-1927) in http://hronos.km.ru/biograf/bio_r/ro.html or contact Dr John Gonzalez at the Rozhkov Historical Research Centre at http://www.rozhkovcentre.org in case of further studies, contact Seguya Swaib 0741588979
Michel Foucault's analysis of historical and political discourse
The historico-political discourse analyzed by Foucault in Society Must Be Defended (1976-77) considered truth as the fragile product of a historical struggle, first conceptualized under the name of "race struggle" - however, "race"'s meaning was different from today's biologized notion, as it considered a "nation" (distinct from nation-states; its signification is here closer to "people") to be composed of two opposing historical "races".
In Great Britain, this historico-political discourse was used by the bourgeoisie, the people and the aristocracy as a mean of struggle against the monarchy - cf. Edward Coke or John Lilburne. In France, Boulainvilliers, Nicolas Fréret, and then Sieyès, Augustin Thierry and Cournot reappropriated this form of discourse. Finally, at the end of the 19th century, this discourse was incorporated by racists biologists and eugenicists, who gave it the modern sense of "race" and, even more, transformed this popular discourse into a "state racism" (nazism). According to Foucault, marxists also seized this discourse, transforming the essentialist notion of "race" into the historical notion of "class struggle", defined by socially structured position: capitalist or proletarian. This displacement of discourse constitutes one of the basis of Foucault's thought: discourse is not tied to the subject, rather the "subject" is a construction of discourse. Moreover, discourse is not the simple ideological and mirror reflexion of an economical infrastructure, but is a product and the battlefield of multiples forces - which may not be reduced to the simple dualist contradiction of two energies.
Foucault shows that what specifies this discourse from the juridical and philosophical discourse is its conception of truth: truth is no longer absolute, it is the product of "race struggle". The subject is not any more a neutral arbitrate, judge or legislator, as in Solon's or Kant's conceptions. Therefore, - what became - the "historical subject" must search in history's furor, under the "juridical code's dried blood", the multiples contingencies from which a fragile rationality temporarily finally emerged. This may be, perhaps, compared to the sophist discourse in Ancient Greece. Foucault warns that it has nothing to do with Machiavelli's or Hobbes's discourse on war, for to this popular discourse, the Sovereign is nothing more than "an illusion, an instrument, or, at the best, an enemy. It is {the historico-political discourse} a discourse that beheads the king, anyway that dispenses itself from the sovereign and that denounces it".
History and education
One common contention among philosophers is that current historical methods are regional, subjective and selective. A better method would tend, where possible, towards a more universal, objective and exhaustive approach (see World History).
The philosophy of history is intertwined with the philosophy of education because much of the basic history learned at the elementary level is aligned with regional biases, whether unabashed or inadvertent. Though some improvement has been made (In France and Germany, school history books are written altogether by frenchmen and germans, as far as it concerns the common part of their history). In some instances, history is the pure product of propaganda. Either way, history as a discipline has been compromised by adherence to old ways of thinking about its mechanics and purposes.
Further, elementary history is devoid of theory; it is almost purely content-oriented. We are taught "who said what when, who did what when," but not to explore how we verify an event that we did not witness.
For example, how do we know what a given individual said at a specific time if we weren't around to hear him/her? Chances are, we are reading something we believe to have been actually written at the time of the inquiry. But then, how do we know the person who wrote it was really in a position to make an authoritative statement? While this may be easy to do in some circumstances, there are many instances where "facts" can be neither authenticated nor discredited.
See also
External links
- An Introduction to the Philosophy of History by Paul Newall, aimed at beginners.
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