Historical Theory

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Marx observed that nations arose at the time of the appearance of capitalism on the basis of community of economic life, territory, language, certain features of psychology, and traditions of everyday life and culture. Plato taught that there are “some natures who ought to study philosophy and to be leaders in the state; and others who are not born to be philosophers, and are meant to be followers rather than leaders”. In their conflicts with the ruling feudal hierarchy and the Church the intellectual spokesmen for progressive bourgeois forces rediscovered and reasserted the ideas of class struggle first noted by the Greeks and instituted historical comparisons with antiquity to bolster their claims. Yet they seldom make use of such phrases, because they hardly ever speak among themselves of years, but merely say, ‘long ago’, or ‘not long ago’, being utterly indifferent whether two or 20 years have elapsed since the occurrence of a certain event. The main preconditions for an historical outlook upon history in the West were brought into being from about 1100 to 700 BC by the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age in the Middle East and Aegean civilisations.

B. Tylor, the founder of British anthropology, wrote in 1889: “Human institutions, like stratified rocks, succeed each other in series substantially uniform over the globe, independent of what seems the comparatively superficial differences of race and language, but shaped by similar human nature. The raw materials for genuine history-writing were first collected in the annals of the reigns and chronicles of kings in the river valley civilisations of the Near East, India and China. The cyclical character of human affairs was closely affiliated with the conception of an all-powerful, inscrutable, inflexible Destiny which came to replace the gods as the sovereign of history. The pioneer of Western historians, Hecaeteus, lived in the same commercial city of Miletus as the first philosophers and scientists and belonged to the same materialist trend of thought.b) The nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces (the Primacy Thesis proper). The materialistic theorists who came after Vico in Western Europe looked for these “universal and eternal principles” which determined history in very different quarters than the idealists. The straightforward theological view of history is too crude and naive, too close to primitive animism, too much in conflict with civilised enlightenment to persist without criticism or change except among the most ignorant and devout. This notion of cosmic tragic fate from which human appeal or escape is impossible not only became the major theme of the classic Greek dramatists but is also embedded in the historical work of Herodotus.

In each of these stages of production, people interact with nature and production in different ways. Marx and Engels first set out their materialist conception of history in The German Ideology, written in 1845. This eminent Moslem statesman was very likely the first scholar to formulate a clear conception of sociology, the science of social development.

But our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian. For example, capitalism tends to increase the rate at which the forces develop and stresses the accumulation of capital. And these spiritual creations are always born in the hearts and minds of men of genius, artists, thinkers, men of action, moral and religious reformers. However, production does not get carried out in the abstract, or by entering into arbitrary or random relations chosen at will, but instead are determined by the development of the existing forces of production.