Philosophy of history

The philosophy of history asks at least these questions

what is the proper unit for the study of the human past? the individual, the 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 "a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing"?;
if human race has been a progress toward some end, what is the driving force -- what is the engine of that progress? The difference between Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl 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;
how do historians go about preserving and correcting a record of the past? can philosophers offer them any useful advice?;
on what assumptions do we accept this record as "true";
the shortcomings of current historicist orthodoxy; and
the hope of a new paradigm in historical inquiry.

Table of contents

1 Unit of Study
2 Patterns in the Past
3 Motive Engine of History
4 Political Philosophy and the Philosophy of History
5 History and Education
6 Related topics

Unit of Study

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.

Explicit defenses of Carlyle's position have been rare. 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.

Herbert Spencer, for example, 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 whicht hat race has slowly grown....Before he can remake his society, his society must make him."

Patterns in the Past

The "Whig interpretation of history," one associated with scholars of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in England, 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.

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. Other scholars, such as Oswald Spengler 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 dialectical 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 to mechanistic to be plausible.

Political Philosophy and the Philosophy of History

The way one views the past has consequences for the way one views the future, and accordingly for the platform one adopts as one's own in the present. Carlyle was an advocate of benevolent autocracy, Herbert Spencer of laissez-faire capitalism, Karl Marx of a communist revolution, and in each case the reasons for that platform were to be found in their respective philosophies of history as described above.

See Colonialism in philosophy

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.

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. 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.