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Philosophy of History
 First published Sun Feb 18, 2007 
The concept of history plays a fundamental role in human thought. It invokes notions of humanagency, change, the role of material circumstances in human affairs, and the putative meaning of historical events. It raises the possibility of “learning from history.” And it suggests the possibility of better understanding ourselves in the present, by understanding the forces, choices,and circumstances that brought us to our current situation. It is therefore unsurprising that philosophers have sometimes turned their attention to efforts to examine history itself and thenature of historical knowledge. These reflections can be grouped together into a body of work called “philosophy of history.” This work is heterogeneous, comprising analyses and argumentsof idealists, positivists, logicians, theologians, and others, and moving back and forth over thedivides between European and Anglo-American philosophy, and between hermeneutics and positivism.Given the plurality of voices within the “philosophy of history,” it is impossible to give onedefinition of the field that suits all these approaches. In fact, it is misleading to imagine that werefer to a single philosophical tradition when we invoke the phrase, “philosophy of history,” because the strands of research characterized here rarely engage in dialogue with each other.Still, we can usefully think of philosophers' writings about history as clustering around severallarge questions, involving metaphysics, hermeneutics, epistemology, and historicism: (1) Whatdoes history consist of—individual actions, social structures, periods and regions, civilizations,large causal processes, divine intervention? (2) Does history as a whole have meaning, structure,or direction, beyond the individual events and actions that make it up? (3) What is involved inour knowing, representing, and explaining history? (4) To what extent is human historyconstitutive of the human present?
 
1. History and its representation
What is history? Most prosaically, it is the human past and our organized representations of that past. We can of course write about the chronology of non-human events—the history of the solar system, the history of the earth's environment over a billion-year expanse of time. But the keyissues in the philosophy of history arise in our representations of the human past—a pointemphasized in Collingwood's philosophy of history (1946: 215–16). And history is fascinatingfor us, because, in Marx's words, “Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing” (1852). That is to say: history reflects agency—the choices by individuals andgroups; and it reflects constraining structures and circumstances. So historical outcomes areneither causally determined nor entirely plastic and accidental. Therefore it is open to thehistorian to attempt to discover the historical circumstances that induced and constrainedhistorical agents to act in one way rather than another—thus bringing about a historical outcomeof interest. So we might begin by saying that history is a temporally ordered sequence of eventsand processes involving human doings, within which there are interconnections of causality,structure, and action, within which there is the play of accident, contingency, and outside forces.But we might also say: there is no such thing as “history in general.” The description just provided suggests that there is a comprehensible collection of historical processes that might becharacterized as a “total” human history: population growth, urbanization, technologicalinnovation, economic differentiation, the growth of knowledge and culture, etc. But thisimpression is highly misleading. It suggests a degree of order and structure that history does not possess. There are only specific histories: histories of various conditions or circumstances of interest to us. Historical space is dense: at any given time there are countless human actions andsocial processes underway in the world. So to single out the history of something specific— agriculture, the French Revolution, modern science, Islam—is unavoidably to select, from thefull complexity of events and actions, a limited set of related historical features that will betraced through a process of development. And this in turn raises the point that “history” depends partly on “what occurred” and partly on “what we are interested in.” This point does not undercutthe objectivity of judgments about the past. Events and actions happened in the past, separatefrom our interest in them. But organizing them into a narrative about “religious awakening” or “formation of the absolutist state” imposes an interpretive structure on them that dependsinherently on the observer's interests. There is no such thing as “perspective-free history.” Sothere is a very clear sense in which we can assert that history is constituted by historicalinterpretation and traditions of historical interest—even though the underlying happeningsthemselves are not.What, then, is historical representation? We want to know, represent, understand, and explain the past. This perspective emphasizes our cognitive or epistemic relationship to the past. We usefacts in the present—ruins, inscriptions, documents, oral histories, parish records, and thewritings of previous generations of historians—to support inferences about circumstances and people in the past. Here we can single out several ideas: the idea of learning some of the factsabout human circumstances in the past; the idea of providing a narrative that provides humanunderstanding of how a sequence of historical actions and events hangs together and “makessense” to us; and the idea of providing a causal account of the occurrence of some historicalevent of interest. Notice that these descriptions invoke some of the important philosophicalissues that arise in the philosophy of history: the interpretation of meaningful human actions;
 
causal explanation; the status of empirical knowledge about the past; and the status of assertionsabout the “meaning” of large historical events. Each of these formulations raises new anddifficult issues for philosophical clarification.But our relationship to the past is not only cognitive, but also expressive or performative. Wecreate, interpret, fictionalize, mythologize, and valorize the past. And we use some of our storiesabout the past—our “histories”—to represent the right way of acting, good and bad political behavior, the character of one nationality as opposed to another, and to justify our conduct in thefuture. This feature of historical representation too raises philosophical problems. Do thesestories have epistemic standing? Are some of these value-laden interpretations more justifiedthan others? And can we sharply distinguish between the two kinds of representation of the past?A third important thread within philosophical reflections on history concerns the relation between history and the constitution of humanity. In what sense are human beings “historical”creations? How do human beings relate to our historical origins? How do human culture andhuman nature reflect and embody history? Historicism is the view that human creations— meanings, values, language, institutions, and culture—are historical products, the results of  previous historical circumstances, and that historical change is in turn the result of historicallyconstructed persons. So human beings are both historically constructed and historically creative.Universalism, by contrast, maintains that people are essentially the same, whether in ancientEgypt or contemporary Brooklyn; so the task of historical explanation is to discover how peoplemuch like us might have been led to act as they did.It will be noted that the concept of “meaning” comes into discussions of history in at least threedifferent ways: the meaning of individual actions within historical events; the meaning of a set of historical events within the broad sweep of history; and the meanings created in later actors asthey thematize and represent the narratives of their past. It is important to distinguish thesedifferent aspects of meaning, since the processes of investigating and understanding thesemeanings are quite different. But the interpenetration of the concepts of meaning and history inturn gives validity to the emphasis of the tradition of continental philosophy on the distinction between the human sciences and the natural sciences and the importance of using methods of investigation that shed light on the meaning of actions and ensembles.Finally, it is worth noticing that historical questions can be posed at a wide range of levels of scope and scale. For example, if we are interested in the French Revolution, we can ask questions of rising generality: What was the standard of living in the French countryside in thethird quarter of the eighteenth century? Why did aristocrats, artisans, and peasants act as they didin the crisis of 1789? What political and economic circumstances caused the French Revolution?What is the meaning of the French Revolution within the arc of European civilization? And wecan pose historical inquiries at various levels of geography and population. Thus we can focus onthe economic history of the English midlands, Britain, Western Europe, or Eurasia—with units of ascending geographical scope and complexity encompassed by the various frames of analysis. Sothe choice of the units and frame of historical analysis is itself historiographically significant anddeserves philosophical attention.
2. Continental philosophy of history
The topic of history has been treated frequently in modern European philosophy. A long, largelyGerman, tradition of thought looks at history as a total and comprehensible process of events,structures, and processes, for which the philosophy of history can serve as an interpretive tool.This approach, speculative and meta-historical, aims to discern large, embracing patterns and
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