Philosophy of history

Did You Know?

• Paul Ricœur, Louis Mink, W.B. Gallie, and Hayden White are important thinkers in the area of narrative in history.
• Since Plato's Republic, civic education and instruction has had a central role in politics and the constitution of a common identity.
• Le Tour de France par deux enfants was the French Third Republic's classic textbook for elementary school.

Origins

In his Poetics, Aristotle maintained the superiority of poetry over history because poetry speaks of what ought or must be true rather than merely what is true. Herodotus, a fifth-century BCE contemporary of Socrates, broke from the Homeric tradition in his work "Investigations" (Histories), and later Plutarch freely invented speeches for historical figures, choosing subjects with an eye toward morally improving the reader. From the Classical period to the Renaissance, historians' focus alternated between subjects designed to improve mankind and a devotion to fact, with history composed mainly of hagiographies of monarchs and epic poetry such as The Song of Roland.

In the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun discussed his philosophy of history and society in detail in his Muqaddimah, introducing a scientific method to the philosophy of history and laying groundwork for the observation of the role of the state, communication, propaganda, and systematic bias.

Concepts

Many ancient cultures held mythical and theological concepts of history as cyclical, with alternating Dark and Golden Ages. Plato taught the concept of the Great Year, and other Greeks spoke of aeons; similar examples include the ancient doctrine of eternal return in Ancient Egypt, Indian religions, Greek Pythagoreans, and Stoics. In Works and Days, Hesiod described five Ages of Man: Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron, which some scholars identify as four ages matching the Vedic or Hindu ages of Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, and Kali Yuga.

Many Greeks believed that mankind went through four stages of character during each rise and fall of history, with democracy and monarchy as healthy regimes of higher ages and oligarchy and tyranny as corrupted regimes of lower ages. In the East, cyclical theories developed in China as a theory of dynastic cycle and in the Islamic world in Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah. During the Renaissance, cyclical conceptions became common, with Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy providing an example.

During the Age of Enlightenment, history began to be seen as both linear and irreversible, with Condorcet's interpretations of stages of humanity and Auguste Comte's positivism among the most important formulations.

Operative theories

Early teleological approaches to history can be found in theodicies, which attempted to reconcile the problem of evil with the existence of God, providing a global explanation of history with belief in a progressive directionality leading to an eschatological end. Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and Gottfried Leibniz formulated such philosophical theodicies; Leibniz based his explanation on the principle of sufficient reason and developed the theory of compossible worlds.

G. W. F. Hegel may represent the epitome of teleological philosophy of history, and his teleology was taken up by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man. Thinkers such as Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Althusser, and Deleuze deny any teleological sense to history, claiming it is best characterized by discontinuities and ruptures. Schools influenced by Hegel see history as progressive, directed by a Zeitgeist, with Hegel believing history was moving man toward civilization and that each epochal philosophy is the whole of philosophy apprehended in a specific modality.

Contextual theories

By the 1700s, thinkers were already looking at broader forces shaping history. The Annales School, started in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, pushed historians away from focusing on individuals and toward geography, economics, population, and other social factors. Karl Marx is frequently seen as an economic determinist, arguing that religion, culture, and politics are just products of the economic base, though he allowed some room for individual action.

Michel Foucault’s work on historico-political discourse treats truth as something fragile, born from conflict—initially framed as a struggle between races (meaning peoples or nations, not biology). The writer Boulainvilliers, for instance, used this idea to claim the French nobility descended from conquering Franks, while the commoners came from conquered Gauls, making his history a weapon against both the monarchy and the Third Estate.