Philosophy of History

What it asks

The older question is whether history has a direction - a pattern, a destination, or a logic that makes the sequence more than one thing after another. Answers have been given in terms of divine providence, the unfolding of reason, class struggle and the rise and fall of civilisations. Almost nobody defends any of them now.

The younger question is about method. When a historian explains a revolution, what kind of explanation is that? It cites no laws and cannot be tested by repetition, and it is not therefore worthless - so what makes one account better than another?

The two questions share a name and very little else, which is worth knowing before reading anything in the field.

The recurring problems

Whether historical explanation is causal. The covering-law model held that explaining an event means subsuming it under a general law. Historians pointed out that they cite no such laws and explain successfully anyway, which left the model needing to say that history is defective or that explanation is not what the model said.

Narrative. History is written as story, and stories impose beginnings, middles and ends on material that has none. Whether the narrative form is a way of representing what happened or a shape laid over it is the field's sharpest question.

Objectivity. The historian selects, and selection reflects present concerns. Accepting that without concluding that any account is as good as any other is the standing difficulty.

Counterfactuals. Saying a cause mattered means saying things would have gone otherwise without it. Historians use such claims constantly and are professionally uneasy about them.

How it developed

Vico proposed in the early eighteenth century that human history can be known in a way nature cannot, because we made it - a claim that founded the field and is still argued about.

Hegel gave the speculative tradition its fullest form: history as the development of freedom, working itself out through conflict. Marx inverted the mechanism and kept the structure, and the twentieth century produced cyclical accounts of civilisational rise and decline that were widely read and are not now taken seriously as scholarship.

The speculative project died of the century's events as much as of argument. A pattern in history that ends in the trenches and the camps is a hard thing to present as the unfolding of reason.

The critical tradition took over. Collingwood argued in 1946 that historical understanding means rethinking the thought of the agent, which makes history a distinctive kind of knowledge rather than a defective science. White's Metahistory in 1973 argued that historical writing is structured by literary forms chosen before the evidence is assessed - the most disruptive claim the field has produced, and still contested.

The positions within it

Speculative and critical philosophy of history; covering-law and narrativist accounts of explanation; historicism; objectivism and constructivism about historical knowledge. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

The methodological end is healthy and works closely with practising historians, on evidence, testimony, memory and what historical understanding consists in.

The speculative question has returned in one specific form: whether there is moral progress. That is a claim about the shape of history, it is widely assumed, and it is very hard to state precisely without begging the question of what would count as improvement.