Good and Bad Arguments Against Historicism

Abstract

From time to time historians and political scientists, perhaps noting some striking similarities in the development of various societies, or regularities within the evolution of one civilization, have formed the idea that these are the key to a universal feature which could provide the foundation for a general law of history. And some politicians have even seemed to act on the basis of such theories, often with disastrous consequences. For instance, Marx is supposed to have claimed that all human societies pass through feudal, capitalist and communist stages, in that order. Comte also had a three-stage theory of society and, more recently, Arnold Toynbee has developed a complicated hypothesis describing the various steps in the development and disintegration which all so-called ‘civilizations’ traverse.