Historical Theory

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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. g. the capitalist mode of production is characterized by the polarization of society into capitalists and workers. The main trend of their progression since the Greeks has been from heaven to earth, from God to man, from the imaginary to the real. 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.

Many leading philosophers of the bourgeois era had a materialist view of nature and man’s relations with the world around him. These are the prime principles from which the rest of Marxist theory about the historical process is derived. 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.That said, it is precisely because the superstructure strongly affects the base that the base selects that superstructure. will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples.

The low level of their productive powers, the immaturity of their economic forms, the narrowness of their activities and the meagreness of their culture and connections are evidenced in their extremely restricted views of the course of events. One of the polemics was to ridicule the easy "world schematism" of philosophers, who invented the latest wisdom from behind their writing desks.

This method of interpreting history was far more correct, all-encompassing and profound than any of its predecessors. Practising historians claim that their accounts of the past are something other than fiction, myth or propaganda. This started with the overthrow of the absolute monarchy, passed through the revolutionary regime of Robespierre and the bourgeois-military dictatorship of Napoleon and ended in the Bourbon Restoration.

All the different types of historical explanation cast up in the evolution of man’s thought survive today. Man made himself by acting upon nature and changing its elements to satisfy his needs through the labour process. In his 1940 essay Theses on the Philosophy of History, scholar Walter Benjamin comHuman nature, like nature itself, was regarded as rigid and unchanging from one generation to another. 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 Ionian Greeks, who set down the first true written histories, were associates of traders, engineers, craftsmen and voyagers. Marx underpins his theory of history by drawing attention to a fundamental reality of human existence – the necessity to labor to ensure physical survival. Hegel challenged this view and argued that human nature as well as the formulations of art, science and the institutions of the state and its codes, laws and norms were all defined by their history and could only be understood by examining their historical development.

One of Hegel's key critiques of enlightenment philosophy was that while thinkers were often able to describe what made societies from one epoch to the next different, they struggled to account for why they changed. While studying at the University of Berlin, Marx encountered the philosophy of Hegel (1770–1831) which had a profound and lasting influence on his thinking. He emphasised that social and cultural phenomena passed through a regular sequence of stages which was cyclical in character. For Hegel, history was the working through of a process where humans become ever more conscious of the rational principles that govern social development. Against postmodernism, she argures that historical narratives are not simply inventions imposed on the past, and that some answers to historical questions are more plausible or adequate than others.Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late 70s: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist. The conception that human nature must be the basis of social structure is the last-ditch defence of the opponents of socialism as well as the point of departure for the utopian socialism of the American psychoanalyst Erich Fromm and others. Marx identified two mutually interdependent structures to describe how humans interacted with nature, and in the process of producing their subsistence, created ever more complex rules and institutions to manage their interaction between each other and with the environment.