Theological origins
Western speculation concerning the meaning of history derived in the first instance chiefly from theological sources. The belief that history conforms to a linear development in which the influence of providential wisdom can be discerned, rather than to a recurrent cyclical movement of the kind implicit in much Greco-Roman thought, was already becoming prevalent early in the Common Era. Traces of this approach are to be found in the conception of the past developed in the 4th century by St. Augustine in his De civitate Dei (City of God) and elsewhere; it is, for example, compared on one occasion to “the great melody of some ineffable composer,” its parts being “the dispensations suitable to each different period.” Yet the cautious subtlety of Augustine’s suggestions and the crucial distinction he drew between sacred and secular history make it important not to confuse his carefully qualified doctrines with the cruder positions advanced by some of his self-proclaimed successors. This applies, par excellence, to the work of the most renowned and thorough of these, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet. Written 1,250 years after Augustine’s death, Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681; Discourse on Universal History) is imbued throughout with a naïve confidence that the entire course of history owes its pervasive character to the contrivance of a “higher wisdom.” In the eyes of Bossuet, to grasp and understand the great procession of empires and religions was “to comprehend in one’s mind all that is great in human affairs and have the key to the history of the universe.” For the rise and fall of states and creeds depended in the end upon the secret orders of Providence, the latter being the source of that manifest historical justice and retribution to which, on nearly every page, the annals of the past bore clear and unmistakable witness. Bossuet’s vast survey was, in fact, the last major contribution to its genre. Although it made a considerable impression when it was first published, it appeared just before the discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton effected a massive transformation of the European outlook, and the book’s impact was short-lived. Thus, the development of historical speculation in the 18th century was generally marked by a tendency to reject theological and providential interpretations in favour of an approach more closely aligned, in method and aim, to that adopted by natural scientists in their investigations of the physical world.
Secular approaches: the Enlightenment and beyond
For many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers, the project of establishing a science of history and society, comprising hypotheses and laws of an explanatory power analogous to that attained by theories in the physical sciences, acquired an almost obsessive importance. The age of religious and metaphysical conjectures concerning the destiny of human affairs had, in their opinion, come to a close. The task that now presented itself was one of constructing, upon the basis of hard observable facts, interpretations that would not only rescue the human studies from ignorance, uncertainty, and primitive superstition but also create an instrument for predicting and controlling the fate of humanity. Thus, the idea of establishing a universally valid social science, capable of accounting for the phenomena of history in terms of causal principles comparable to those employed in the natural sphere, came to be linked with the promotion of reformist and revolutionary ideals. Figures such as Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and the marquis de Condorcet in the 18th century and Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Thomas Buckle in the 19th century all believed that it was feasible to apply scientific procedures to the study of human development. But equally—though in widely different ways—they were deeply concerned with practical objects and committed to changing existing institutions and ways of life. To these thinkers, theory was complementary to practice; knowledge was power.
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.
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.