History

Herodotus originates history as a distinct form of knowledge and literature. In the Greek root, historia signifies inquiry or research, and Herodotus is the first writer to set down the results of such inquiry with the explicit intention of preserving the memory of "the great and marvelous deeds performed by Greeks and barbarians" and of tracing the causes that brought the two peoples into conflict.

His method consists in traveling, questioning witnesses, comparing conflicting accounts, and submitting the evidence to the reader's judgment. He frequently reports what he has been told while indicating his own doubts, and he sets the Persian Wars in an ethnographic and geographic context that encompasses the whole eastern Mediterranean. The causes he identifies are moral and religious as well as political; the pattern he discerns in events is one in which hubris invites nemesis, so that history becomes, in some measure, a study of the relation between human pride and divine retribution. The question of whether the gods or fate or fortune govern the course of events, treated more fully under the ideas of Fate and God, receives its first extended historical treatment here.

Herodotus thus creates a form of writing that differs from poetry in a fundamental respect: it seeks to win the reader's belief not by the plausibility of the narrative but by giving some indication of the sources of information and the reliability of the evidence on which the narrative rests. As Aristotle observes, poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular, and it is the particular that Herodotus pursues.

Thucydides, writing of the Peloponnesian War as a contemporary participant, will sharpen the methods Herodotus originated. Where Herodotus is content to let the reader weigh conflicting testimony, Thucydides claims to have subjected his materials to "the most severe and detailed tests possible," and he explicitly fears that "the absence of romance" in his history may detract from its interest. The difference between curiosity and rigor in historical research, a difference that recurs throughout the tradition, is first visible in the contrast between these two historians.

Thucydides restricts the scope of history and sharpens its methods. Where Herodotus ranged across the Mediterranean collecting customs and marvels, Thucydides confines himself to a single war, recorded by a participant, with sustained attention to causes, motives, and the operations of power. He explicitly sets aside the romantic and the marvelous in favor of rigorously examined evidence, claiming to have trusted neither his own impressions nor the accounts of others without subjecting them to careful comparison.

His purpose is not to entertain but to instruct. He assumes that human nature is constant, and therefore that an exact knowledge of the past is an aid to the interpretation of the future, "which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it." The Melian Dialogue, Pericles' funeral oration, and the Mytilenean debate serve as cases in the logic of power, rhetoric, and empire, and they illustrate the connection between history and political education that is discussed more fully under the ideas of Education and Government.

Thucydides thus gives history the character of a practical discipline. The historian who determines the facts with sufficient care provides the statesman with knowledge that is directly applicable to comparable situations. This conviction that history teaches politics is shared by later writers such as Tacitus, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, each of whom draws on Thucydides' methods or conclusions.

The assumption that human nature is constant gives history its diagnostic power, but it also limits the scope of historical understanding. If the same passions recur indefinitely, there can be no essential progress and no providential direction in the course of events. Augustine, writing from within the Christian tradition, will propose a philosophy of history that rests on the opposite premise: that history is linear and directed, moving under divine providence toward an end that transcends any earthly city.

Plutarch distinguishes the writing of biography from the writing of history, though the two share a common subject in human action. The Lives pair Greek and Roman statesmen so that the virtues and faults of one may be read against those of the other. Plutarch does not confine his attention to the events that alter kingdoms or decide wars. He is most interested in the moments at which character discloses itself, and he takes the view that such moments are more often found in a chance remark or a private gesture than in the public triumphs by which the great are remembered. The kinds of historical writing are treated at §1 of this chapter, and Plutarch occupies the biographical kind with such authority that the division between the narrative of events and the portrait of lives acquires a settled place in the later tradition.

Several features of his practice belong to the general problem of historical method. He compares divergent accounts of Theseus and Romulus and acknowledges that much of the earliest record is fable, asking the indulgence of candid readers where the purification of legend by reason can go no further. He arranges his subjects so that moral comparison becomes systematic: the restraint of Timoleon is set against the excess of Dion, the policy of Lycurgus against the piety of Numa. His interest in the role of the individual in the historical process, which is treated more fully at §4a(4), connects the chapter on History with the ideas of Virtue and Vice and of Honor, where his portraits are among the tradition's principal sources.

Whether history ought to be written for the instruction of the reader or for the strict determination of fact, and what relation the two bear to one another, receives a particular answer in Plutarch. He believes that the portrait of a good man, carefully drawn, works upon the reader as the model works upon the painter, and that the reader so formed carries something of the virtue into his own conduct. This purpose is avowed, and it gives the Lives their particular cast. The relation between history and moral education, treated at §2, receives in Plutarch its fullest ancient expression, and the tension between edifying aim and rigorous inquiry (§3a) is one the tradition has not since resolved.

Plutarch's division of biography from history has been variously received. Montaigne finds in the Lives the window through which the individual reader can know himself and his own time, and Shakespeare draws on North's English translation for the Roman plays, transposing Plutarchan portraits into dramatic action. Gibbon, for his part, treats the Lives as a reservoir of exempla to be used with reservations concerning their anecdotal sources. The distinction Plutarch states so plainly at the opening of the Alexander, between the narrative of events and the portrait of lives, survives as a working distinction in the writing of history long after the classical tradition has ceased to supply its principal models.

Tacitus writes under the conditions of imperial rule, and his stated purpose is moral as well as factual. He regards it as history's highest function "to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds." Of the three great ancient historians, Tacitus alone avows a moral purpose so explicitly, though Herodotus and Thucydides are not without moral concerns of their own.

His method involves close attention to character, motive, and the uses of rhetoric under tyranny. The dissimulation of Tiberius, the excesses of Nero, and the philosophical compromises of Seneca are examined with a compressed and ironic prose that itself embodies the disenchantment of the subject. Tacitus fears comparison with the historian of antiquity who can "enchain and refresh a reader's mind" with descriptions of battles and glorious deaths; his own task, he observes, consists in presenting "the merciless biddings of a tyrant, incessant prosecutions, faithless friendships," and he acknowledges that this may give very little pleasure.

Tacitus thus continues the tradition of political realism that Thucydides inaugurated, but adds to it a sustained concern with the moral judgment of posterity. History, in his view, holds power to account, even when the living cannot. The question of how history relates to justice, treated more fully under the ideas of Justice and Tyranny, receives in Tacitus one of its most forceful treatments.

Tacitus provides the tradition with a model of history as moral witness against tyranny. Later readers, however, have drawn different lessons from his work. Machiavelli, for example, reads the portraits of Roman emperors not primarily as condemnations but as practical instruction in the mechanics of power, treating what Tacitus condemns as material for the political education of princes and founders.

Augustine presents the most comprehensive theological vision of history in the tradition. Writing in response to the pagan charge that Christianity had caused Rome's fall, he argues in the City of God that no earthly city is eternal, and that the true history of the human race is the story of two cities, built by two loves: the love of self unto contempt of God, and the love of God unto contempt of self. These two cities intermingle in time but are directed toward different ends.

The great epochs of history, on Augustine's view, are defined religiously. Man dwells on earth under four distinct dispensations from God: in Paradise before the Fall; in the world after expulsion from Eden and before the Promise and the Law were given to the Jews; under the Law and before the coming of Christ; and between the first and second coming, under the dispensation of grace. History is thus linear and providential: it begins with creation, passes through the incarnation and the pilgrim church, and will end with judgment. The cyclical pattern of history familiar from pagan writers, discussed more fully under the idea of Change, is replaced by a pattern in which the epochal transitions happen only once.

This reframes the understanding of fortune, fate, and politics that the ancient historians assumed. The rise and fall of earthly empires, including Rome, are themselves instruments of providence, and the meaning of history does not reside in any earthly city. The relation between the city of God and the city of man, between church and state, becomes on Augustine's account the central problem of historical understanding.

Augustine bequeaths to the Christian West a conception of history as meaningful, directed, and universal. A comparison between Augustine's theology of history and Hegel's philosophy of history, as Adler observes, suggests that they differ from one another as philosophy from theology. Hegel retains the structure of linear, goal-directed history while replacing providence with the self-development of Spirit, and the City of God with the rational state. The question of the ultimate source of insight concerning human development and destiny distinguishes these two visions more than any difference in their formal pattern.

Machiavelli treats history as a source of political instruction. In the Discourses on Livy, he examines the early Roman Republic as a repository of lessons for the guidance of conduct, and he complains that his contemporaries read the ancients for pleasure and style while refusing to imitate their deeds. Thucydides' conviction that "an exact knowledge of the past is an aid to the interpretation of the future" receives in Machiavelli its most systematic application.

The assumption underlying this project is one that Machiavelli shares with Thucydides: human nature is constant. Men have always been moved by the same passions, including ambition, envy, fear, and the desire for glory, so that political configurations recur. Republics rise and fall through recognizable cycles; regimes corrupt and reform in predictable ways; founders and reformers in different ages face comparable problems. History, on this view, approximates a practical science, and its lessons can be stated with a generality that Aristotle would have denied to historical knowledge as such.

Machiavelli departs from the providential conception of history represented by Augustine. Fortune, he maintains, is the arbiter of one half of our actions, while virtue governs the other; neither is directed by a divine plan. The historian's task is to examine events without pieties and to extract principles usable by princes, founders, and citizens. The question of the causes at work in history, whether they are providential, material, or volitional, is treated more fully under the ideas of Fate and Necessity and Contingency.

Machiavelli thus secularizes the use of history for political purposes. Gibbon will write in a similar spirit, treating the rise and fall of an empire with Enlightenment skepticism and a moralist's detachment, though without Machiavelli's ambition to formulate principles of action from the historical record.

Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire traces thirteen centuries of history, from Trajan to the fall of Constantinople, with an erudition and scope that make it the Enlightenment's greatest work of historical narrative. His approach is skeptical of miracles, attentive to institutions and manners, and concerned with the slow operation of causes. He declares that "the experience of history exalts and enlarges the horizon of our intellectual view," and his own work exemplifies the conviction that history, as literature, ranks among the great productions of the human mind.

Chapters 15 and 16, on early Christianity, treat the rise of the church as a historical phenomenon with natural, traceable causes rather than as a miraculous intervention. This approach, which scandalized Gibbon's contemporaries, represents a departure from the providential conception of history set forth by Augustine. Gibbon does not deny divine causation so much as set it aside in favor of the historian's proper business, which is the determination of secondary causes and the weighing of evidence. The difficulty of combining truth-telling with storytelling, which all the great historians acknowledge, receives in Gibbon one of its most explicit treatments, as he reviews the enormous scope of his work and confesses that "the historian may applaud the importance and variety of his subject" while remaining "conscious of his own imperfections."

Gibbon thus writes with the detachment of a classicist and the moral seriousness of Tacitus. He honors virtue where he finds it and exposes folly without sermonizing, and the whole of ancient and medieval history is set before the reader as one continuous narrative of human weakness and achievement.

Gibbon provides a model of secular, causal, and morally serious history. What his work does not supply is a theory of why history moves as it does, a philosophy of the historical process as a whole. Hegel will undertake precisely this, proposing that the course of events is not a mere register of crimes and follies but the rational self-development of Spirit toward the full consciousness of freedom.

Hegel's Philosophy of History is the only great book devoted entirely, by title and design, to the formulation of a theory that embraces the whole of man's career on earth. "Reason rules the world," he declares, "and therefore the world's history is a rational process." The history of the world, on this view, is the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and its stages correspond to the various grades in which this consciousness has been achieved.

The movement is dialectical. In the Oriental world, only one (the despot) is free; among the Greeks and Romans, some are free; in the German-Christian world, all are known to be free. World-historical individuals, such as Caesar and Napoleon, become the instruments through which Spirit advances; their own "particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World-Spirit," and the "cunning of reason" turns even passion and crime to universal ends. The role of the individual in history, and the question of whether great men make history or are made by it, is treated by Hegel in terms that bear comparison with Tolstoy's very different conclusions.

Hegel regards his philosophy of history as "the true theodicy, the justification of God in History." A comparison with Augustine's theology of history is instructive: both conceive of history as linear, directed, and universal; but whereas Augustine sees everything in the light of God's revelation in Holy Writ, Hegel seeks to find in the records of history itself the laws which govern and the pattern which inheres in the procession of events. The question of whether the causes at work in history are providential, dialectical, or material is the basic issue in the philosophy of history, discussed also under the ideas of Fate and Liberty.

Marx will retain the dialectical and goal-directed structure of Hegel's philosophy of history while inverting its motor. Where Hegel locates the driving force of history in Spirit, Marx locates it in the material conditions of production; the progress of freedom becomes the progress of class conflict toward a classless society. The formal debt to Hegel is total, even as the substantive reversal is complete.

Marx retains the dialectical and goal-directed structure of Hegel's philosophy of history while replacing its foundation. History, on Marx's view, is driven not by the self-development of Spirit but by the material conditions of production. Human beings, in producing their means of subsistence, enter into definite relations of production, and these relations form the economic structure of society, "the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure." Ideas, morals, and laws are consequences of material life, not its causes.

As productive forces develop, they come into conflict with the existing relations of production. The systems of slave labor, feudal serfdom, industrial capitalism, and the communist or classless society are thus seen, in Engels' summary, as stages of progress toward an ultimate emancipation. "The whole history of mankind," Engels writes in his preface to the Communist Manifesto, "has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes." The pattern of progress may be conceived, as by Hegel, as a dialectical motion in the realm of Spirit; Marx conceives it as occurring through the resolution of conflicting material or economic forces.

The question of material forces in history, and the extent to which economic, physical, and geographic factors determine the course of events, is treated more broadly under the ideas of Labor and Wealth. Marx's contribution is to propose that the material factor is not merely one cause among others but the fundamental determinant, with respect to which all other historical causes are derivative.

Tolstoy, writing from a very different standpoint, shares with Marx the conviction that the leadership of great men is largely illusory. But where Marx locates the real force of history in the material conditions of production, Tolstoy locates it in the aggregate will of innumerable ordinary men and women. The question of whether history is moved by impersonal forces or by individual acts of freedom remains one of the basic alternatives in the philosophy of history.

Tolstoy, in the epilogues of War and Peace, presents a philosophy of history that challenges the assumption, common to Hegel and to most conventional historians, that great men lead humanity to the attainment of certain ends. To believe in the efficacy of heroes, Tolstoy maintains, is to commit the fallacy of "the man who, watching the movements of a herd of cattle and paying no attention to the varying quality of the pasturage in different parts of the field, or to the driving of the herdsman, attributes the direction the herd takes to the animal which happens to be at its head."

Great men, on this account, are only celebrated puppets, pushed ahead on the moving front of history. The real motion of events derives its force and direction from the individual acts of innumerable ordinary men and women, each acting on partial motives and local understandings. Historians who explain Borodino or the retreat from Moscow by the genius or failure of commanders impose an illusion of personal control on what is actually the complex resultant of slight impulses tending in many directions. The question of the role of the individual in history, whether the great man is a leader or a label, receives in Tolstoy its most searching treatment.

Yet Tolstoy does not eliminate freedom from his account. However slight the impulse each man gives, his contribution to history is a free act, conditioned only by the circumstances under which he makes a choice and by the divine providence which grants him the freedom to choose. History, according to Tolstoy, thus "appears to us as a certain combination of freedom and inevitability." The alternatives of fate and freedom, treated more fully under the ideas of Fate and Liberty, are here resolved in a way that preserves individual moral responsibility while denying that any single individual directs the course of events.

Tolstoy's view of history stands in contrast both to Hegel's philosophy of Spirit and to Marx's dialectical materialism. Like Marx, Tolstoy regards the leadership of great men as illusory; but unlike Marx, he does not replace the individual with a material or economic force. The meaning of history, if it has one, is to be found in the aggregate of free acts performed by ordinary men and women, and in the providence that works through them.