HISTORY AS A GOD MACHINE AND ITS WORSHIPERS

A major example of the Historisist belief was Karl Marx. He analysed what he saw as history and, in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, came to the conclusion that:

Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

- or as Friedrich Engels said at the funeral of Karl Marx:

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.

-and with these beliefs Marx painted a picture of laws of history that would inevitably lead humanity to a 'higher phase of communist society' where:

 . . . the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly . . . from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs . . .

Well, Messrs Marx and Engels, not so far. The two major attempts at Communism in Russia and China both led to mass starvation and persecution; and most of their victims were not capitalists or aristocrats, but the ordinary people that Communism promised to benefit. Communists try to explain this away by saying that Stalin and Mao deviated from true Communism. If so, it seems like the so-called Laws of History aren't quite as inevitable as as Communists believe; since Stalin and Mao simply disobeyed them.

Anyway, Marx's Communism is just one version of a historicist belief. To learn more about Marx and historicism generally, it's worth reading Carl Popper and Edmund Wilson:

Popper, K: The Poverty of Historicism. 1957. The Open Society and its Enemies.

Wilson, E: To the Finland Station. 1940.

Marx generalised that:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

-which means that a unique human being counts for nothing as compared with a 'class'. A belief that is not so far from Adolf Hitler who replaced the 'class' of Marx with another class called the 'nation' and said:

It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole.

Hitler's use of the word 'nation' disguised a more sinister generalisation in the form of 'race'. In doing so he was borrowing ideas that had grown up in the Nineteenth Century. These proposed that classifying human beings according to physical appearance and geographical origin could enable prediction of their abilities and characteristics. This then led to the idea that some races were superior to others. The horrors that came from that generalisation are one of the great stains on human history, but it is important to also note that this was part of Hitlers historicist dream:

Es ist unser Wunsch und Wille, dass dieser Staat und dieses Reich bestehen sollen in den kommenden Jahrtausenden. Wir können glücklich sein zu wissen, dass diese Zukunft restlos uns gehört. (It is our wish and will that this State and this Reich will continue to exist through the next millennia. We can rest assured and be happy that this future belongs to us unrestrictedly).

Someone who believes that the future belongs to them is clearly a believer in historicism. Thus Hitler, like Marx, thought he knew 'the law of development of human history'.

BUT WE HAVE BEEN WARNED . . .