The Folly of Historicism
If you’ve studied politics or history for long enough, you are likely to have heard narratives like: “Free markets lead to democratic development,” or “Socialism is inevitable due to the tendencies of capitalism,” or even “Our society has been attacked by outsiders throughout history and we must defend it at all cost.” Proponents of these narratives often paint history as a scripted process, one that can be plotted along a linear path to construct a tight-fitting narrative. This idea — that history acts according to certain historical laws — is known as historicism.
In contemporary times, historicism can infect all ideologies across the political spectrum. These modern historicist arguments, however, are often founded on what Timothy Snyder calls the politics of eternity and the politics of inevitability.
Still Waiting for the Revolution
In the politics of inevitability, ideologies present the triumph of their ideas as fated when the world reaches history’s termination. Often inevitability politicians portray history as a journey from savagery to civilization and assume this trend will continue to their desired outcome.
For Marxists, the foundations of their inevitability politics come from the philosophy of Georg Hegel, adapted later by Karl Marx into historical materialism. Marx believed that society had changed between various modes of production — from neolithic hunter-gatherers to ancient slavery to feudal serfdom and then to capitalism — and that these modes of production dictated how societies operated, and ultimately their contradictions led to the next mode. Marx argued that history was, at its core, a class struggle and that this struggle defined the path of history, as opposed to the idealism of other philosophers. In the modern period, Marx posited, the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat would lead to the collapse of capitalism and the rise of socialism. As it’s written in the Communist Manifesto:
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes…The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Marx invokes the inevitable in the very charter of the Communist Party’s program, imbuing it into the Communist ethos. Thus, when revolutions did occur in China and Russia (along with many other places), regimes committed atrocities with impunity, as everything they did was in service of the righteous and inevitable world revolution — just as the dogma told them.
Dollar Diplomacy
Another form of inevitability politics comes not from the political extremes, but rather from the political center. In the liberal historical canon, great thinkers who developed ideas of universal liberties and property rights influenced the institutions of countries like the Netherlands, England, and the United States to adopt the most optimal forms of government. To liberal historicists, the two extremes of communism and fascism failed because they did not take into account the innate yearning for freedom inside all people. Furthermore, many 20th-century liberals believed that capitalism combined with democracy would provide the perfect balance for governance, and as a consequence take root in all countries. Accordingly, when the Soviet Union fell liberals felt vindicated that their way of life was dominant and that the “end of history” had arrived. The last vestiges of communism, located mainly in China, were to be converted to the true religion via open markets. Liberals believed a new emerging Chinese middle class would demand inclusive political reforms, just as they claimed American and British citizens did, and liberal capitalist democracy would reign supreme.
This fantasy of perpetual liberal domination is of course a lie. We have witnessed in the past 30 years the degradation of liberal democracy, the spread of Islamic terror across borders, and the resilience of the illiberal Chinese political system. Additionally, across liberal democracies around the world institutions are under assault. Whether Orban in Hungary, Bolsanaro in Brazil, or Trump in the United States, liberal democracy’s worst enemies come from within. The liberal arrogance shown at the end of the 20th century paved the way for the blowback of the 21st. Liberals failed to confront the innate inequality of the post-war international order: with Security Council seats withheld from the global south, international finance dominated by the global north, and international trade rules hampering the development of poor countries. Liberal inevitability politics sealed its own fate. By failing to address the problems of the now rapidly collapsing global order, those who are committed to democracy and strong institutions have spent this century trying to pick up the pieces.
Eternity Means Forever
In the politics of eternity, a group or nation is placed at the center of collective and perpetual historical victimhood. To peddlers of eternity politics, their nation is under constant assault from outsiders, and so the only innocent body in the entire world is the national government.
Where eternity politics is best on display currently is in the Russian narrative on their invasion of Ukraine. As President Vladimir Putin tells it, the West has for millennia attempted to penetrate Russia: to force so-called western culture, western institutions, and western morals onto the Russian state. Russia, as an “innocent organism,” has merely sought to protect itself and its “little brother states” like Ukraine from western domination, or so the story goes.
The narrative of western aggression on its very face may seem plausible to some. The United States did attempt to thwart Soviet expansion during the Cold War. The Reagan and H. W. Bush Administrations did put pressure on the Eastern bloc, and successive American presidents and European Union diplomats have expanded NATO and the EU into former communist states. To the Russian eternity politician, the West is simply repeating its century-old tactic to assault Russian values and Russia’s greatness, as they did in the Crimean War, Great Northern War, or any other conflict they may pick. Putin’s 2023 New Year Address so perfectly encapsulated this when he said:
Russia’s future is what matters the most. Defending our Motherland is the sacred duty we owe to our ancestors and descendants. The moral and historical truth is on our side.
…
The West lied to us about peace while preparing for aggression, and today, they no longer hesitate to openly admit it and to cynically use Ukraine and its people as a means to weaken and divide Russia. We have never allowed anyone to do this and we will not allow it now.
But the eternity politician makes the same mistake as the inevitability politicians, they remove agency from individuals and movements with personalized beliefs, motivations, and tactics. To the Russian inevitability politician (and those in the western far-left and far-right who parrot their factually bankrupt talking points) Ukrainian pro-EU sentiment during the Revolution of Dignity was merely a western plot. The war in Ukraine is boiled down into a proxy war between two great powers. An entire nation of people is stripped of its agency.
Free At Last, Free At Last
Herein lies the problem with both the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity: they ignore the fact that developments in the political and social conscience of individuals and societies determine history, not the other way around. This is not to deny the real fact that developments in the social sciences cannot be predicted. For instance, economists can use data to access the effect of a certain policy they enact and statisticians can analyze the voting patterns of different groups to assess trends. Nor does it mean we cannot analyze historical events or periods and examine the material and social conditions which led to societal change. However, what cannot be done is to create a single coherent narrative about the historical past, the political present, and the prospective future because of the simple fact that human beings do not have omniscience. We cannot possibly isolate the individuals and communities that shape historical development. We cannot aggregate history, and we should not try.
The most dangerous facet of the politics of eternity and politics of inevitability is not the gross oversimplification of history they embody, but rather the societal implications they necessitate. In the case of liberal capitalist democracies, it leads to a small group of wealthy individuals amassing such great control that it threatens the very institutions liberals revere as eternal. For the Marxist, it leads to the justification of mass arrest, disenfranchisement, and slaughter in the name of an inevitable world revolution that will never arrive. And for the nationalist, it means a constant paranoid struggle for dominance against their neighbors, no matter the cost.
Finally, these historicist narratives disempower the individual’s ability to make a change alongside their community. They deny one of the most fundamental factors of historical development — that individuals, institutions, and interest groups can and must drive forward “progress.” Historicist ideas, as Timothy Snyder writes, put us in an “intellectual coma.” In denying historicism, we shouldn’t deny that progress is possible, rather we should accept that progress is not pre-determined, and relies on all of us as active participants to truly make history.
This was my very first article on Medium, I hope you enjoyed it. I probably have made a plethora of mistakes in my grammar, structure, or content, so please feel free to reach out to me here or on Twitter to correct those, or to just discuss your thoughts.
Sources:
The Poverty of Historicism by Karl Popper
The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe America by Timothy Snyder
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
“Vladimir Putin’s politics of eternity” by Timothy Snyder published in the Guardian
“New Year Adress to the Nation” by Vladimir Putin published in Britannica