The suggestion that there is something essentially mistaken in the endeavour to comprehend the course of history “naturalistically” and within an explanatory framework deriving from scientific paradigms was powerfully reinforced by conceptions stemming from the development of German idealism in the 19th century. The “philosophy of spirit” of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel made its appearance upon the intellectual scene contemporaneously with Saint-Simonian and Comtean positivism, rivalling the latter in scope and influence and bringing with it its own highly distinctive theory of historical evolution and change. Hegel’s stress upon the “organic” nature of social wholes and the incommensurability of different historical epochs owed evident debts to Herderian ideas, but he set these within an overall view that conceived the movement of history in dynamic terms. Regularities and recurrences of the sort that typically manifest themselves in the realm of nature are foreign, Hegel maintained, to the sphere of mind or spirit, which was characterized instead as involving a continual drive toward self-transcendence and the removal of limitations upon thought and action. Humanity is not to be conceived according to the mechanistic models of 18th-century materialism; essentially humans are free, but the freedom that constitutes their nature can achieve fulfillment only through a process of struggle and of overcoming obstacles that is itself the expression of human activity. It was in this sense that Hegel claimed that spirit was “at war with itself”—“it has to overcome itself as its most formidable obstacle.” In concrete terms, this meant that historical advance did not proceed through a series of smooth transitions. Once the potentialities of a particular society had been realized in the creation of a certain mode of life, its historical role was over; its members became aware of its inadequacies, and the laws and institutions they had previously accepted unquestioningly were now experienced as fetters, inhibiting further development and no longer reflecting their deepest aspirations. Thus, each phase of the historical process could be said to contain the seeds of its own destruction and to “negate” itself; the consequence was the emergence of a fresh society, representing another stage in a progression whose final outcome was the formation of a rationally ordered community with which each citizen could consciously identify himself and in which there would therefore no longer exist any sense of alienation or constraint. Somewhat curiously, the type of community Hegel envisaged as exemplifying this satisfactory state of affairs bore a striking resemblance to the Prussian monarchy of his own time.

The notion that history conforms to a “dialectical” pattern, according to which contradictions generated at one level are overcome or transcended at the next, was incorporated—though in a radically new form—in the theory of social change propounded by Karl Marx. Like Hegel, Marx adopted a “directional” view of history; but, whereas Hegel had tended to exhibit it as representing the unfolding in time of an inner spiritual principle, Marx looked elsewhere for the ultimate determinants of its course and character. Humans, according to Marx, are creative beings, situated in a material world that stands before them as an objective reality and provided this field for their activities. This primitive truth, which had been obscured by Hegel’s mystifying abstractions, afforded the key to a proper understanding of history as a process finally governed by the changing methods whereby humans sought to derive from the natural environment the means of their subsistence and the satisfaction of their evolving wants and needs. The productive relations in which people stand to one another, resulting in such phenomena as the division of labour and the appearance of economically determined classes, were the factors fundamental to historical movement. What he termed the superstructure of society—which covered such things as political institutions and systems of law, ethics, and religion—was in the last analysis dependent upon the shape taken by the “material production” and the “material intercourse” of human beings in their struggle to master nature: “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Hence, the inner dynamic of history was held to lie in conflicts arising from changes in the means of production and occurring when modes of social organization and control, adapted to the development of the productive forces at one stage, became impediments to it at another; they were to be resolved, furthermore, not by abstract thought but by concrete action. Thus, the Hegelian conception of spirit as involved in a relentless struggle with itself and with what it had created underwent a revolutionary transformation, explosive in its implications.

Marx’s interpretation of the historical process, with its stress upon necessity and the operation of ineluctable laws, was often portrayed by its proponents as being scientific in character. It has, however, more than one aspect, and it would be an error to identify its underlying methodology with that associated with Comtean positivism. Generally speaking, the basic categories within which it was framed derived from a theory of human nature that had more in common with the postulates of German Romantic thought than with those of British and French empiricism: to this extent, the logical structure Marx sought to impose upon the data of history belonged to a tradition that stressed the differences rather than the resemblances between the human and the natural world.

Later systems

The tendency to detect in history the presence of large-scale patterns and comprehensive uniformities continued into the 20th century in the work of a number of writers, most notably Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–22; The Decline of the West), wherein the history of humankind is presented in terms of biologically conceived cultures whose careers conformed to a predetermined course of growth and decay, was widely acclaimed during the years of disillusionment that followed World War I; and a somewhat similar reception was given to Toynbee’s massive A Study of History (1934–61) immediately after World War II. Toynbee, like Spengler, undertook a comparative study of civilizations, thereby repudiating attempts to treat the past as if it exhibited a single linear progression: at the same time, he diverged from Spengler in suggesting that current Western society might not after all be necessarily doomed to extinction and in tempering a predominantly deterministic mode of thought with reservations that allowed a place for human free will and the possibility of divine intervention. Yet, as some of his critics were quick to point out, such qualifications were not easy to reconcile with his original insistence upon the need to adopt “a scientific approach to human affairs”; nor was it clear that his own use of inductive methods to establish the laws governing the development of civilizations was above logical suspicion or reproach. Toynbee’s experiment might have been impressive as an individual achievement; nevertheless, with the multiplication of objections and in a theoretical climate that had become skeptical of speculative system-building of any kind, the very feasibility of engaging upon a project of the type he had undertaken came to be seriously questioned. It was felt increasingly that philosophy of history in the traditional sense—resting largely upon uncriticized assumptions concerning the nature of historical inquiry and its relations with other disciplines—had reached something of an impasse; if history was still to be treated as a proper subject for philosophical examination, it must be along lines quite different from those previously pursued.