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The Speculative Tradition

This page follows the first of the subject’s two questions, whether the course of human events has a shape, direction or meaning, from its ancient and medieval forms to its most recent revival. It is the tradition Walsh called speculative, and its history is the history of the patterns proposed and the standpoints claimed for seeing them.

The subject’s name is Voltaire’s, and its questions are older than the name. Augustine’s City of God (completed 426) set the linear, providential model against the cyclical histories of antiquity: two cities, one earthly and one of God, run through all of time towards an end that God directs, and events are read as stages in that single course. Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (1377) offered the great cyclical alternative: dynasties rise on the group feeling (ʿasabiyya) of a hardy periphery, soften in the luxury of the centre, and fall to the next cohesive group, each carrying the seeds of its own end; it is often read as the first attempt at a science of the causes of historical change. The modern starting point is usually given as Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725, revised 1730 and 1744), which proposed that human nature produces a fixed sequence of ages, divine, heroic and human, through which every nation passes, and that we can know the human world because we made it. Johann Gottfried Herder (Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity, 1784–91) took the opposite view of human nature, as itself a historical product, so that people act differently in different periods and each people has its own centre of gravity. Between them lies the tension the speculative tradition never resolved: a universal pattern against irreducible particularity.

Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784) proposed that history could be read as if nature had a plan: the antagonism of individuals, their “unsocial sociability”, drives the species towards a civil constitution and a federation of states, and the philosopher’s task is to find the thread. Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of world history (delivered from the 1820s, published 1837) gave the tradition its most comprehensive form: history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom, realised in successive world-historical peoples and states, and reason works through the passions of individuals who do not know what they serve, the “cunning of reason”. Marx and Engels kept the developmental shape and replaced its motor: the succession of modes of production, driven by the contradiction between forces and relations of production, with class struggle as its engine and communism as its terminus. Auguste Comte’s law of three stages, theological, metaphysical and positive, made the same claim for the history of knowledge. The twentieth century produced two large morphologies of civilisations, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918–22), in which cultures are organisms with a lifespan, and Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History (1934–61), in which civilisations rise by responding to challenges and fall when their creative minorities fail. Both were widely read and are now mostly read as documents of their moment. The line did not end with them. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), expanding an essay of 1989, revived the Hegelian argument in the form Alexandre Kojève had given it: with the Cold War over, liberal democracy stood as the final form of human government, not because conflict had ceased but because no rival principle of legitimacy remained. The thesis drew a debate that is itself part of the subject, from Samuel Huntington’s civilisational alternative (1993) to Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), and Fukuyama has acknowledged democratic backsliding in the decades since while continuing to defend the thesis.

See also: Philosophy of history (the subject landing) · The Critical Tradition · Critiques of Progress · Historical Time · Deep Time and Evolution · Hegel · Marx · Kant