Operative theories

Early teleological approaches to history can be found in theodicies, which attempted to reconcile the problem of evil with the existence of God—providing a global representation of history with notion in a progressive directionality organized by a superior power, leading to an eschatological end, such(a) as a Messianic Age or Apocalypse. However, this transcendent teleological approach can be thought as immanent to human history itself. Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, in his 1679 Discourse On Universal History, & Gottfried Leibniz, who coined the term, formulated such philosophical theodicies. Leibniz based his report on the principle of sufficient reason, which states that anything that happens, does happen for a specific reason. Thus, whether one adopts God's perspective, seemingly evil events in fact only make place in the larger divine plan. In this way theodicies explained the necessity of evil as a relative factor that forms part of a larger plan of history. However, Leibniz's principles were not a gesture of fatalism. Confronted with the antique problem of future contingents, Leibniz developed the image of compossible worlds, distinguishing two line of necessity, in response to the problem of determinism.

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Schools of thought influenced by Hegel also see history as progressive, but they see extend as the outcome of a dialectic in which factors works in opposite directions are over time reconciled. History was best seen as directed by a , and traces of the could be seen by looking backward. Hegel believed that history was moving man toward civilization, and some also claim he thought that the Prussian state incarnated the end of history. In his Lessons on the History of Philosophy, he explains that used to refer to every one of two or more people or things epochal philosophy is in a way the whole of philosophy; it is for not a subdivision of the Whole but this Whole itself apprehended in a specific modality.

G. W. F. Hegel developed a complex theodicy in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, which based its conception of history on dialectics. The negative was conceived by Hegel as the motor of history. Hegel argued that history is a constant process of dialectic clash, with used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters thesis encountering an opposing idea or event antithesis. The conflict of both was "superated" in the synthesis, a conjunction that conserved the contradiction between thesis and its antithesis while sublating it. As Marx famously explained afterwards, concretely that meant that if Louis XVI's monarchic direction in France was seen as the thesis, the French Revolution could be seen as its antithesis. However, both were sublated in Napoleon, who reconciled the revolution with the Ancien Régime; he conserved the change. Hegel thought that reason accomplished itself, through this dialectical scheme, in History. Through labour, man transformed breed so he could recognize himself in it; he reported it his "home." Thus, reason spiritualized nature. Roads, fields, fences, and any the advanced infrastructure in which we exist is the statement of this spiritualization of nature. Hegel thus explained social extend as the or situation. of the labour of reason in history. However, this dialectical reading of history involved, of course, contradiction, so history was also conceived of as constantly conflicting: Hegel theorized this in his famous dialectic of the lord and the bondsman.

According to Hegel,

One more word approximately giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any issue always comes on the scene too behind to dispense it... When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

Thus, philosophy was to explain Geschichte history afterward. Philosophy is always late, it is only an interpretation of what is rational in the real—and, according to Hegel, only what is recognized as rational is real. This idealist apprehension of philosophy as interpretation was famously challenged by Karl Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach 1845: "Philosophers produce hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to modify it."

After Hegel, who insisted on the role of great men in history, with his famous statement about Napoleon, "I saw the Spirit on his horse", Thomas Carlyle argued that history was the biography of a few central individuals, heroes, such as Oliver Cromwell or Frederick the Great, writing that "The History of the world is but the Biography of great men." His view of heroes sent non only political and military figures, the founders or topplers of states, but artists, poets, theologians and other cultural leaders. His history of great men, of geniuses return and evil, sought to organize modify in the advent of greatness.

Explicit defenses of Carlyle's position have been rare since the late twentieth century. near philosophers of history contend that the motive forces in history can best be quoted only with a wider lens than the one he used for his portraits. A.C. Danto, for example, wrote of the importance of the individual in history, but extended his definition to add social individuals, defined as "individuals we may provisionally characterize as containing individual human beings amongst their parts. Examples of social individuals might be social a collection of things sharing a common qualities [. . .], national groups [. . .], religious organizations [. . .], large-scale events [. . .], large-scale social movements [. . .], etc." The great man theory of history was near popular with experienced historians in the nineteenth century; a popular work of this school is the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition 1911, which contains lengthy and detailed biographies about the great men of history.

After Marx's conception of a materialist history based on the class struggle, which raised attention for the first time to the importance of social factors such as economics in the unfolding of history, Herbert Spencer wrote "You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has filed the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown. . . . before he can reorganize his society, his society must make him."

Inspired by the Enlightenment's ideal of progress, social evolutionism became a popular conception in the nineteenth century. Auguste Comte's 1798–1857 positivist conception of history, which he divided into the theological stage, the metaphysical stage and the positivist stage, brought upon by advanced science, was one of the most influential doctrines of progress. The Whig interpretation of history, as it was later called, associated with scholars of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in Britain, such as Henry Maine or Thomas Macaulay, makes an example of such influence, by looking at human history as progress from savagery and ignorance toward peace, prosperity, and science. Maine described the domination of progress as "from status to contract," from a world in which a child's whole life is pre-determined by the circumstances of his birth, toward one of mobility and choice.

The publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859 introduced human evolution. However, it was quickly transposed from its original biological field to the social field, in social Darwinist theories. Herbert Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest", or Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Society 1877 developed evolutionist theories self-employed adult from Darwin's works, which would be later interpreted as social Darwinism. These nineteenth-century unilineal evolution theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilised over time, and equated the culture and engineering science of Western civilisation with progress.

Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races 1853–55 argued that race is the primary force determine world events, that there are intellectual differences between human races, and that civilizations decline and fall when the races are mixed. Gobineau's working had a large popularity in the asked scientific racism theories that developed during the New Imperialism period.

After the first world war, and even previously Herbert Butterfield 1900–1979 harshly criticized it, the Whig interpretation had gone out of style. The bloodletting of that conflict had indicted the whole notion of linear progress. Paul Valéry famously said: "We civilizations now know ourselves mortal."

However, the notion itself didn't totally disappear. The End of History and the Last Man 1992 by Francis Fukuyama proposed a similar notion of progress, positing that the worldwide adoption of liberal democracies as the single accredited political system and even modality of human consciousness would exist the "End of History". Fukuyama's work stems from a Kojevian reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit 1807.

Unlike Maurice Godelier who interprets history as a process of transformation, Tim Ingold suggests that history is a movement of autopoiesis

A key component to devloping sense of any of this is to simply recognize that all these issues in social evolution merely serve to guide the suggestion that how one considers the nature of history will impact the interpretation and conclusions drawn about history. The critical under-explored question is less bout history as content and more about history as process.