Historical Theory

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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. But they remained unable to uncover the fundamental determinants which led to the reconstruction and replacement of property relations as well as political forms. 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.

This means that all parts of society, for example, science, art, law, labor and the economy, the state and the family etc. Hegel could not provide a satisfactory theory of social evolution and the materialists did not penetrate to the most basic moving forces of history. 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. 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. Some philosophers, for example, Vico (1668–1744), Herder (1744–1803) and Hegel (1770–1831), sought to discover an organizing theme, meaning, or direction in human history.Marx emphasized that "[t]here is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits. Such a definition of essential human nature was the starting point for the social theorising of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and other great idealists. The Ionian Greeks, who set down the first true written histories, were associates of traders, engineers, craftsmen and voyagers. He also explained that on the foundation of the economic base, there arise certain political institutions, laws, customs, culture, etc. They were followed by a series of materialists in France in the 18th century such as Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Claude Adrien Helvétius, and Baron d'Holbach.

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. Marx's view of history is shaped by his engagement with the intellectual and philosophical movement known as the Age of Enlightenment and the profound scientific, political, economic and social transformations that took place in Britain and other parts of Europe in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Engels expressed irritation with dilettante academics who sought to knock up their skimpy historical knowledge as quickly as possible into some grand theoretical system that would explain "everything" about history. 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. These ideas were inspirational to Marx and the Young Hegelians who sought to develop a radical critique of the Prussian authorities and lambasted the failure to introduce constitutional change or reform social institutions.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.

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. Practising historians claim that their accounts of the past are something other than fiction, myth or propaganda. 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. This has given our adversaries a welcome opportunity for misunderstandings, of which Paul Barth is a striking example. 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”.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. Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late 70s: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist. 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. Montesquieu, for example, regarded geography and government as the twin principal determinants of history and society.