The science of history

First, because no records are kept for the whole of any period; the sheer weight of data that is available requires the historian to choose what will be published and in choosing the data the historian is compelled to make value judgments.

Second, because history does not repeat itself. Every human life faces its own unique problems in its own unique terms and the way each person deals with them depends on the moral principles that have formed that person’s character.

The nature of moral principles and how they can be acquired is not something that can be obtained from a history book. Only an already moral person will see the moral principle in a particular event.

The most influential book on education ever written did not consider history a necessary subject of instruction. For over 2,000 years, The Republic of Plato not only provided a pattern for its students to examine, it anchored the education in literature and ideas that we know as a liberal education. A liberal education is an education in books, the great books. It cultivates the reason by allowing the student to engage in a dialogue with the thought of the greatest minds as they examine the eternal problem of how man ought to live.

Unfortunately, a liberal education has never been available in this country whose universities are dominated by the positivistic social sciences and, to a lesser extent, the value-relative science of history, historicism.

The study of history gripped the intellectuals of the 19th century who were convinced that history alone held the key to answering the eternal questions about man. As Professor Leo Strauss states in his book Natural Right and History, the historical school “believed that by understanding their past, their heritage, their historical situation, men could arrive at principles that would be as objective as those the older prehistoricist political philosophy had claimed to be …”

The implicit premise on which the science of history rests is that mankind’s actions are not the result of any deliberate choice; rather they are a reaction by the passions to factors. A person might think that he chooses to act because it was in his opinion the right thing to do. The historian, however, understands his actions as a reaction to the surrounding circumstances. Thus the historicist understands people better than they understand themselves. If scientific history bears a strange similarity Newton’s law of action and reaction, it is because when free choice is removed only action and reaction, matter in motion, remains - and, this, science can explain.

The most striking example of historicism is Marx’s analysis of capitalism, where the means of production is the force causing the development of human rationality until, at the end of history, everyone is rational. That historicists have a tendency towards the left is to be expected when they share Marx’s view that all thought is relative to its time.

But, if all thought is a product of its time, is not the historicist’s truth merely a product of his time? His absolute insight merely relative to his epoch? The historicist will claim that the scientific method allows him to stand outside of the historical forces that determine humanity’s actions. Thus, he says, he can show objectively what are the causes of human thought and action. He can show that reason, rather than being free to choose, is merely the slave of the passions.

We should, however, contrast this view with the understanding of ordinary people. Every person understands their own actions to be the result of the choices they have made to do or not to do things they thought would produce some good. This is the essence of free will; and Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics that every choice is said to aim at something good.

The retreat from human reason to human history was the result of Jean Jacques Rousseau argument with the Enlightenment.

In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau describes the origin of pre-social, natural man as a speechless pre-reasoning animal in a state of nature. Rousseau is the first to investigate man’s history in order to understand present man. His Discourse on Inequality was published almost 100 years before Darwin’s Origin of the Species.