Philosophy of History

The Philosophy of History is an area of Philosophy concerning any significance of “Human History”, and is speculative about Teleological Ends to our historical development. We should not confuse the “Philosophy of History” with the storied but less confusing “History of Philosophy”, which is the study of the development of Philosophy itself. Nor should we confuse the Philosophy of History with “Historiography”, which is the study of History, a separate academic discipline. Instead, philosophers of History ask if there is any Design, Purpose, Directive Principle, or Finality to the processes of Human History:

• What is the proper “unit” for the study of our human past - is it the Individual or a general subject? Is it the Polis (“City”) or Sovereignty, perhaps Civilization or Culture, or simply, the whole of the human species?
• Are there any broad patterns we can discern through the study of the human past? Are there, for example, patterns of progress, cycles, or are there no patterns or cycles? Is History merely random, devoid of any meaning? Are we doomed to repeat our mistakes?
• If History can indeed be said to progress, what is the ultimate direction or end point? Are we moving in a positive or negative direction, and what would be the driving force of that progress?

Ancient Overview

In his Poetics, Aristotle argued that Poetry is superior to History, because Poetry speaks of what must or should be true, rather than merely what is true. This reflects early axiological concerns, or good/bad, right/wrong, over metaphysical concerns for what “Is”. By contrast, classical historians have always felt a duty to ennoble the World. Herodotus, considered by some as the first systematic historian, and later, Plutarch, freely invented speeches for their historical figures and chose their historical subjects with an eye toward morally improving the reader. History for them was supposed to teach us good examples to follow, and this influenced how History was written.

From the Classical Period through the Renaissance, historians alternated between focusing on things designed to improve Humankind, and on the other hand to things reflecting their devotion to the “facts”. History was composed mainly of hagiographies of Monarchs, or Epic Poetry describing heroic gestures. Many times, events of the past were considered to show poor examples not to be followed, so the historians did not record or interpret them in a Purpose-driven way.

By the Eighteenth Century, historians had turned toward a more “Positivist” approach, focusing on facts as much as possible, but still with an eye on telling stories which would instruct and improve. Starting with Fustel de Coullanges and Theodor Mommsen, historical studies began to progress towards a our more Modern scientific form. In the Victorian Era, the debate in Historiography was not so much whether History was intended to improve the Reader, but what causes turned the wheels of History and how historical change could be understood.

Cyclical and Linear History

Given that human beings are currently understood (by humans) to be the single Earthly creatures capable of abstract thought, a perception of Time, and a manipulation of thought concerning the past, the future, and the present, any inquiry into the nature of History is based in part on some working understanding of Time in the human experience. Western Thought tends allow for linear progression, that this happened, and then that happened, then that happened because this other thing happened first. This is post hoc, ergo propter hoc, or the presumption of Cause from an Effect. But this linear assumption is not universally or biologically inherent, even in our human species. There are other cultures with other assumptions about the nature of Time and, as such, the very Philosophy of historical inquiry would be affected. If Time is cyclical, we could ask, then can “the past” also be “the future”? George Santayana said, “those who don't learn from History are doomed to repeat it”, which perhaps suggests the past can happen again and again in the future. Perhaps Time is a line where we are at once moving away from the past and toward the past as a future.

This mythical or mystical conception holds that Time is not linear, but cyclical. Examples are the Ancient doctrine of the Eternal Return, which existed in Ancient Egypt (and was made Modern by Friedrich Nietzsche), the Dharmic Religions, and the Pythagorean and Stoic conceptions of Time. In The Works and Days, Hesiod described the five Ages of Man: The Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron Ages, which all began with the Dorian Invasion. Plato also wrote about the Myth of the Golden Age. The Greeks believed in a cyclical conception of Government, in which each regime necessarily fell into its corrupted form. Aristocracy, Democracy, and Monarchy were the healthy regimes, while Oligarchy and Tyranny the corrupted. Even in the East, such cyclical theories of History were developed in China (as a Theory of Dynastic Cycle).

In the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Religions of the World, “Theodicies” were claims that History had a progressive direction leading to an eschatological End, such as the Apocalypse, which was given by a Supreme Being. Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, or Bossuet in his Discourse On Universal History (1679), formulated such Theodicies, but Gottfried Leibniz (who coined the term “Theodicy”, as well as “Dynamism”), based his explanation on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which states that anything that happens, does so for a specific reason. Thus, what Humans saw as Evil, such as War, Epidemics, and Natural Disasters, were an Effect of Perception of a Divine Plan. Hence, Theodicies explained the necessity of Evil as a relative element within a larger plan of History. Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason was not, however, a gesture of Fatalism. Confronted with the Antique Problem of Future Contingents, Leibniz invented the Theory of “Compossible Worlds”, distinguishing two types of Necessity to cope with the problem of Determinism.

During the Renaissance cyclical conceptions of History would become common, as illustrated by Niccolò Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy (1513-1517), and a notion of Empire contained within its own Ascendance (and Decadence), as in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), which was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Cyclical conceptions throughout the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries were based on the human past as a series of repetitive rises and falls. Some were based on reactions to the carnage of the first World War, with a belief that a civilization enters upon an era of Caesarism after its soul dies.

Enlightenment and Social Progress

During the Enlightenment, History began to be seen as both linear and irreversible. The Marquis de Condorcet's interpretations of the various “stages of humanity” and Auguste Comte's “Positivism” were important formulations of such conceptions of History and trust in social progress. As in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762), the Englightenment involved a conception of the human species as “perfectible”. Human Nature could be infinitely developed through a well-thought Pedagogy. In What is Enlightenment? (1784), Immanuel Kant defined the the German Enlightenment (Aufkläurung) as having the audacity to think for oneself, without reference to a authority figures, any Prince or King, or Church traditions:


Kant supported enlightened Despotism, purely as a way of leading humanity towards its Autonomy and Cosmopolitanism. Kant spoke of this process of History in his short treaty, Toward an Idea For A Universal History With A Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784). Enlightenment would lead nations and peoples toward their liberation, and progress was thus inscribed in the very scheme of History. Such liberation could only be acquired by the singular gesture, Sapere Aude! Thus, Autonomy ultimately relied on the individual's “determination and courage to think without the direction of another.”

After Kant, G.W.F. Hegel developed a complex Theodicy in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), based in his conception of History as Dialectics. The negatives (Wars, Poverty) were for Hegel the motor of History. Hegel argued that History is a constant process of dialectic clash, with each thesis encountering an opposing idea or event antithesis. The clash of both was “superated” in the synthesis, a conjunction which conserved the contradiction between thesis and its antithesis while sublating it. As Marx would famously explain afterwards, this meant that if Louis XVI's monarchic rule in France was seen as the thesis, the French Revolution could be seen as its antithesis. However, both were sublated in Napoleon, who reconciled the Revolution with the Ancien Régime. Through labour, Humanity transformed Nature in order to be able to recognize ourselves in it, thus, Reason spiritualizes Nature. Roads, fields, fences, and all the modern infrastructure in which we live is the result of this social progress as the result of the labour of Reason in History, much like Hegel's famous Master and Slave Dialectic of the Lord and the Bondsman. This Idealism in Philosophy as interpretation was famously challenged by Karl Marx, in Theses on Feuerbach (11th, 1845). “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

Inspired by the Enlightenment's ideal of progress, Social Evolutionism became a popular conception in the Nineteenth Century. The publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) demonstrated the basics of Evolution. However, Evolution was quickly transposed from its original scope in Biology into the social realm. Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest”, or Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Society (1877) developed evolutionist theories independent from Darwin's works, which would be later interpreted as Social Darwinism. These unilineal evolutionary theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilized over time, thus equating the Culture and Technology of Western Civilization with Progress itself.

Is History Teleological?

The claim that History has a progressive direction leading to an eschatological end, given by a superior power, is a transcendent teleological notion. However, thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, or Gilles Deleuze denied any teleological function within History, and further claimed History is best characterized by discontinuities, ruptures, and incongruent time-scales. Hegel believed that History was moving us toward “Civilization”, but the events and conflicts of the Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries have helped instill strong doubts in such a claim.


Revisionism, that is, to craft a “national story”, is at the heart of the contemporary problem with History. To some degree, all nations are active in the promotion of a “national story”, but most are benign cultural concerns, far less ominous than some of the overt efforts to censor. Others are ominous, such as the burning of books, the “re-education” of leaders from a defeated opposition, and the more recent, if far more vast attempts to “dumb down” the US and other developed nations through Television, Infotainment, and Fake News, in a continual “War on Truth”. George Orwell's work of fiction, 1984, prompts the reader to ponder assumptions about the nature of History, to learn from History, rather than repeat it, as Santayana warned.

Obviously the victors do have advantages in promoting their version of events, even if they don't erase their enemies completely from existence. The victors may have control over the churches, the courts and schools. This may give the ruling elites nearly total control over the molding of consciousness and discourse over those they rule. In dictatorships, ruthless censorship allows only the state-approved version of events to be made public, and much that happened remains secret if it proved hurtful to the ruling elite. These changes to how History is written, whether in the guise of “victory” or “political correctness” simply reflect the shifting nature of Power within society and the ability, or inability, of different voices in a Democracy to contribute their own unique viewpoint to what eventually becomes our overall historical fabric. In short, not all views agreed upon by a group are necessarily the Truth.

Michel Foucault spoke of the historico-political discourse as political weapon, and according to Foucault, Marxists seized this discourse and took it in a different direction, transforming the essentialist notion of “Race” into the historical notion of “Class Struggle”, defined by socially structured position - Capitalist or Proletariat. This displacement of discourse is not tied, for Foucault, to the Subject, but rather, the Subject is itself a construction of discourse. Moreover, discourse is not the simple ideological and mirror reflection of an economical infrastructure, but is a product and battlefield of a panoply of forces. Foucault showed that what specifies this discourse from the juridical and philosophical discourse is its conception of Truth. No longer Absolute, Truth is the product of “struggle”. History itself, which was traditionally the Sovereign's Science and Legend, became the discourse of the People, a political stake. For Foucault, the Sovereign is nothing more than “an illusion, an instrument, or, at the best, an enemy” of Truth.

Scholarship by M.R.M. Parrott

Synthetic A Priori: Philosophical Interviews Interviews, Discussion ©1998-1999 M.R.M. Parrott First Published: 99,00,02,08,11 Published by rimric press 0-9662635-6-1 | 978-0-9662635-6-5 232 Pages, Paperback & eBook, 2025 2025 Edition Extras: Both Prefaces, Notes on the Text and Cover Art Amazon Paperback (author) Barnes & Noble Paperback (author) Waterstones Paperback (author)

The Ethos of Modernity: Foucault and Enlightenment Philosophical Monograph ©1995-1996 M.R.M. Parrott First Published: May 96/Oct 02 Published by rimric press 0-9662635-2-9 | 978-0-9662635-2-7 160 Pages, Paperback & eBook, 2025 2025 Edition Extras: Afterword Amazon Paperback (author) Barnes & Noble Paperback (author) Waterstones Paperback (author)

Further Reading

• Mink, LO. “Narrative form as a cognitive instrument.”? The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding. (1978): 129-149.
• Ricoeur, Paul. “Time and Narrative”, Volumes 1 and 2. Reprint, University Of Chicago Press, 1990.
• Parrott, M.R.M., books Philosophy, including “The Ethos of Modernity” (1996), “Synthetic A Priori” (1999)