Historical Theory

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When swift strides are taken from one form of social structure to another, the old days and ways stand out in startling contrast, and even conflict, with the new.

Although Marx never brought together a formal or comprehensive description of historical materialism in one published work, his key ideas are woven into a variety of works from the 1840s onward. Human nature, like nature itself, was regarded as rigid and unchanging from one generation to another. But none of them succeeded in working out a consistent or comprehensive conception of society and history along materialist lines. This Companion provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the conceptual issues that history as a discipline and mode of thought gives rise to. Most persistent is the view that history in the last analysis has been determined by the qualities of human nature, good or bad.United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. He and his contemporary materialists largely ignored the economic conditions which stood between nature and the political institutions. Several centuries later Herodotus, the first anthropologist as well as the father of history, gathered valuable information on the customs of the Mediterranean peoples living in savagery, barbarism and civilisation. It was only through wider society and the state, which was expressed in each historical epoch, by a 'spirit of the age', collective consciousness or Geist, that 'Freedom' could be realized.

The formation, reformation and transformation of social structures over the past million years cannot be understood by recourse to any supernatural beings, ideal agencies, petty personal or invariant causes. Marx underpins his theory of history by drawing attention to a fundamental reality of human existence – the necessity to labor to ensure physical survival. Aristotle held that the prime mover of the universe and thereby the ultimate animator of everything within it was God, who was defined as pure mind engaged in thinking about itself. While most other thinkers did not dispute that divine providence ultimately shaped the course of events, they were far more concerned with the mundane ways and means through which history operated. The volume is an indispensable companion to the study of history and essential reading for anyone interested in the reflection on the nature of history and our historical existence.So long as the ascending bourgeoisie was on its way to supremacy, its most enlightened ideologists had a passionate and persistent interest in boring deeply into economic, social and political realities. The most celebrated latter-day expounder of this viewpoint was Carlyle who wrote: “Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here. Thucydides, the pre-eminent Greek historian, declared that he had written his record of the Peloponnesian wars to teach men its lessons since identical events were bound to happen again. Comparisons with other peoples, or between Greek states in different stages of social, economic, and political development, produced a comparative history along with the first inklings of historical progression.