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Philosophy of History

Philosophy of history asks two questions that are often run together and are better kept apart. The first is about history itself: whether the course of human events has a shape, a direction or a meaning, and if so what kind. The second is about historical knowledge: what historians do when they explain, whether their explanations are of the same kind as a physicist’s, and what a narrative adds to or takes from the record. W. H. Walsh’s mid-century labels, speculative for the first and critical for the second, still organise the Stanford Encyclopedia entry and most textbooks. Around them lie the working traditions of historians themselves, which have posed the same questions in their own vocabulary: the Annales school’s scales of time, conceptual history’s semantics of experience and expectation, and the recent programmes that push history’s starting line back to the origin of the species or of the universe. The subject’s standing figures include Hegel, Marx, Dilthey, Collingwood, Benjamin, Popper and Ricoeur.

The word Historismus was coined around 1800, and its later sense, associated with Ranke and Droysen and named in Friedrich Meinecke’s Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936), is the doctrine that every age is to be understood in its own terms, as an individuality in development, rather than judged by a standard outside it. That sense of historicism is a hermeneutic caution, distinct from the target of the same word’s most famous attack, Popper’s (see Critiques of progress).

The branches

The speculative tradition — whether history has a shape: Augustine’s providence and Ibn Khaldun’s cycle, Vico and Herder, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Comte, the morphologies of Spengler and Toynbee, and the line’s revival in Fukuyama.
The critical tradition — what kind of knowledge history is: Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer, Collingwood, the covering-law debate between Hempel and Dray, Danto, and narrativism from White to Ricoeur.
Critiques of progress — the attacks on the assumption that history goes somewhere: Benjamin, Löwith, Popper, and Foucault’s counter-histories.
Historical time — how a society orders past, present and future: Koselleck, Hartog, postcolonial history, and the Annales school’s long duration.
Deep time and evolution — history’s frame widened to the species and the universe, and the contested line over whether evolution describes cultural change or mistakes it.

What the subject carries

The subject’s two questions keep returning to each other. Any claim that history has a shape, providential, cyclical, progressive or ended, is also a claim about the standpoint from which the shape can be seen, and the critical tradition has made that standpoint its object: Vico’s maker’s knowledge, Dilthey’s understanding from within, Collingwood’s re-enactment, Popper’s limit on prediction, White’s tropes. Any account of historical knowledge, in turn, carries an assumption about what the past is made of, and the historians’ traditions have answered in their own terms: Braudel’s durations, Koselleck’s layered time, Hartog’s regimes, the deep and big histories’ widened frame, the postcolonial question of whose time is being told. The disputes the subject holds open are which of these questions comes first, whether explanation and narrative are rivals or the same act, and whether the vocabulary of evolution describes cultural change or mistakes it.

Persons

Augustine (354–430) — City of God; the linear providential model
Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) — the Muqaddimah; ʿasabiyya and the cycle of dynasties
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) — the New Science; the ages of nations; the human world knowable because made
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) — human nature as a historical product; each people its own centre
Immanuel Kant — universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose (1784)
G. W. F. Hegel — history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom
Karl Marx — modes of production; class struggle as motor
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) — the law of three stages
Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) and Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) — morphologies of civilisations
Francis Fukuyama (1952–) — The End of History and the Last Man; the Hegelian line revived
Friedrich Nietzsche — the uses and disadvantages of history for life
Wilhelm Dilthey — understanding, historicity, the human sciences
R. G. Collingwood — re-enactment; all history the history of thought
Carl Hempel (1905–1997) and William Dray (1921–2009) — the covering-law debate
Hayden White (1928–2018), Louis Mink (1921–1983), Frank Ankersmit (1945–) — narrativism
Paul Ricoeur — Time and Narrative
Walter Benjamin — the theses on the concept of history
Karl Löwith (1897–1973) — Meaning in History
Karl Popper — The Poverty of Historicism
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) — archaeology and genealogy as counter-history
Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) and François Hartog (1946–) — historical time
Ranajit Guha (1923–2023) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (1948–) — Subaltern Studies; Provincializing Europe
Marc Bloch (1886–1944), Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) — the Annales
David Christian (1946–), Daniel Lord Smail (1961–) — big and deep history
Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), Herbert Spencer, Franz Boas (1858–1942) — social evolutionism and its rejection
Leslie White (1900–1975), Julian Steward (1902–1972), Marshall Sahlins (1930–2021), Elman Service (1915–1996) — neo-evolutionism
Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, Joseph Henrich — cultural evolution
Joseph Fracchia and Richard Lewontin; Tim Ingold (1948–) — critics of the evolutionary frame