Philosophy of History

Does history have a meaning? A thread, a direction, perhaps even a law governing the succession of empires, revolutions, and ideas — or is history merely, as Macbeth put it, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? This apparently simple question actually conceals two very different questions, and confusing them accounts for much of the muddle surrounding “philosophy of history.” The first question is speculative: what is the meaning, the motor, or the law of the historical process as a whole? The second is critical or epistemological: how do we know the past, what kind of science (if any) history is, and what it means to “understand” a human event. This article traces the most influential answers to the first question — from Augustine to Fukuyama — and shows how, in the twentieth century, the second question turned against the first, in a movement of suspicion running from Dilthey to Popper and Lyotard. ...

Arnold Toynbee Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889–1975) was born in London and trained in classical Greco-Roman history at Balliol College, Oxford. He served in the British Foreign Office during and after the First World War and directed, for decades, the research department of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), combining academic erudition with intense engagement in the analysis of international affairs. His magnum opus, A Study of History, published in twelve volumes between 1934 and 1961, is the twentieth century’s most ambitious attempt to write a comparative history of all known civilizations, identifying roughly twenty-one of them across human history and proposing a common scheme for understanding their genesis, growth, breakdown, and disintegration. ...

Francis Fukuyama Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama (1952–) was born in Chicago, the son of a second-generation Japanese-American Protestant minister with a doctorate in sociology and of a woman born in Kyoto, daughter of the economist Shiro Kawata, founder of the Economics Department at Kyoto University. He earned a degree in classics from Cornell University — where he studied under Allan Bloom — and a doctorate in political science from Harvard University. He was serving on the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department when he published, in the summer of 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the essay that would make him world-famous: “The End of History?”, in the journal The National Interest. Expanded into the book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), the argument sparked one of the most intense intellectual debates of the late twentieth century. ...

Giambattista Vico Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was born and died in Naples, where he spent nearly his entire life as professor of rhetoric at the local university — a post he held from 1699 onward that secured him a modest living but little academic prestige compared to the jurists and scientists of his day. Trained in law but self-taught in classical philology, Roman history, and philosophy, Vico built his work at a remove from the dominant currents of his time, above all Cartesian rationalism, which ruled the European universities and which he subjected to systematic critique as early as De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time, 1709). Against the Cartesian ambition to found all knowledge on the mathematical-deductive model, Vico argued that the human sciences — history, law, philology — require a method of their own, grounded not in geometric evidence but in the imaginative and historical reconstruction of human works. ...

Johann Gottfried Herder Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was born in Mohrungen, East Prussia, the son of a Lutheran schoolteacher and cantor, in a pietist household that shaped his religious sensibility and his lasting interest in language and popular culture. In 1762 he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he attended the lectures of Kant — then a young Privatdozent (an untenured lecturer without a chair), still far from the critical philosophy that would make his name — and formed a decisive friendship with Johann Georg Hamann, who instilled in him a deep suspicion of abstract rationalism and an enduring interest in the relationship between language, thought, and faith. Between 1764 and 1769 he worked as a schoolteacher and pastor in Riga, a cosmopolitan Baltic port that sharpened his interest in the diversity of languages and popular customs. A sea voyage to France in 1769, recorded in the Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769, and his meeting with the young Goethe in Strasbourg in 1770, drew him into the nascent Sturm und Drang movement. In 1776, at Goethe’s invitation, he took up the post of general superintendent (court preacher) in Weimar, where he remained until his death in 1803, forming with Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland the circle later known as Weimar Classicism. ...

Oswald Spengler Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (1880–1936) was born in Blankenburg, Germany, the son of a postal official. He trained in mathematics and natural science, taught briefly at secondary level, and then devoted himself entirely to writing as an independent author in Munich. His magnum opus, The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in two volumes — Form and Actuality (1918) and Perspectives of World History (1922) — turned him almost overnight into one of the most discussed authors of interwar Europe: the first volume appeared just months before Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and its title seemed to prophesy the collapse then under way. ...