George Novack's idea of history

1905-1992

http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/history/ch04.htm

1. The most
primitive attempts to explain the origin and development of the world and man
are the creation myths to be found among preliterate peoples. We are best
acquainted with the one in *Genesis* which ascribes the making of heaven
and earth with all its features and creatures to a Lord God who worked on a
six-day schedule.

2. The first
really rational explanation of the historical process as a whole was given by
the outstanding Greek historians from Herodotus to Polybius. This was the
cyclical conception of historical movement. According to this view, society,
like nature, passed through identical patterns of development in periodically
repeated rounds.

3. The Great Man
theory emerged from a dissociation of the dual components of the Great God
theory. The immense powers attributed to the gods become transferred to and
concentrated in some figure at the head of the state, the church or other key
institution or movement. This exceptionally placed personage was supposedly
endowed with the capacity for moulding events as he willed. This is the
pristine source of the tenacious belief that unusually influential and able
individuals determine the main direction of history.

4. A more sophisticated and
philosophical variant of the Great God-Man line of thought is the notion that
history is drawn forward or driven ahead by some ideal force in order to
realise its preconceived ends. The Greek Anaxagoras said: “Reason (*Nous* )
governs the world.” Aristotle held that the prime mover of the universe and
thereby the ultimate animator of everything within it was God, who was defined
as pure mind engaged in thinking about itself.

Hegel was the foremost modern
exponent of this theory that the progress of mankind consisted in the working
out and consummation of an idea. He wrote: “Spirit, or Mind, is the only motive
principle of history.” The underlying goal of the World Spirit and the outcome
of its laborious development was the realisation of the idea of freedom.

5.  the Best Race, the favoured nation, the ruling class alone
make history. The Old Testament assumed that the Israelites were God’s chosen
people. The Greeks regarded themselves as the acme of culture, better in all
respects than the barbarians. Plato and Aristotle looked upon the slave-holding
aristocracy as naturally superior to the lower orders. – Marxism is a version of this theory. We believe that “an
emerging class” is leading the development of history. While Marxism identified
this with “workers”, I think that a refinement should be made. Not simply
“workers” but “creators”.
Creators of new and progressive (revolutionary) ideas, technologies, things,
relationships. Creators
are expansion of workers. Who are the modern creators?

6. *The Human Nature Theory.* Most persistent is the view that history in the last
analysis has been determined by the qualities of human nature, good or bad.
Human nature, like nature itself, was regarded as rigid and unchanging from one
generation to another. – that’s how corruption
in Ukraine is explained by vulgar economists. “This has always been so”.

the empiricist
David Hume flatly asserts in *An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding* : “Mankind are so much the same, in
all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this
particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal
principles of human nature.”

7. Giambattista
Vico of Naples was the great pioneer among these thinkers. He asserted at the
beginning of the 18th century that since history, or “the world of nations”,
had been created by men, it could be understood by its makers. He emphasised
that social and cultural phenomena passed through a regular sequence of stages
which was cyclical in character.

He insisted that
“the order of ideas must follow the order of things” and that the “order of
human things” was “first the forests, after that the huts, thence the village, next
the cities and finally the academies”.

8. The key
thought of the English and French materialists of the 17th and 18th centuries
was that men were the products of their natural and social environments. As
Charles Brockden Brown, an American novelist of the early 19th century, put it:
“Human beings are moulded by the circumstances in which they are placed.” In
accord with this principle, they turned to the objective realities of nature
and society to explain the historical process. – this is the idea of “behaviorists”, such as “Walden-II”

9. Montesquieu, for example,
regarded geography and government as the twin principal determinants of history
and society. The physical factor was most influential in the earlier and more
primitive stages of human existence, although its operation never ceased; the
political factor became more dominant as civilisation advanced.

He and his contemporary
materialists largely ignored the economic conditions which stood between nature
and the political institutions. The economic basis and background of political
systems and the struggles of contending classes which issued from economic
contradictions were beyond their field of vision.

10. The
French historians of the early 19th century acquired a deeper insight into the
economic conditioning of the historical process through their studies of the
English and French revolutions. They had watched the French revolution go
through a complete cycle. This started with the overthrow of the absolute
monarchy, passed through the revolutionary regime of Robespierre and the
bourgeois-military dictatorship of Napoleon and ended in the Bourbon
Restoration. – key is understanding history as
“revolution”, which has certain stages, going upward and downward.

11. Hegel:

approached all historical phenomena from the standpoint of
their evolution, seeing them as moments, elements, phases in a single creative,
cumulative, progressive and ceaseless process of becoming.

the historical process was essentially rational. It had an
immanent logic which unfolded in a law-governed manner defined by the
dialectical process. Each stage of the whole was a necessary product of the
circumstances of its time and place.

The outcome of history, the result of its agonising labour,
is the growth of rational freedom. Man’s freedom comes not from arbitrary,
wilful intervention in events, but from growing insight into the necessities of
the objective, universal, contradictory processes of becoming. – freedom as the goal of history

The necessities of history are not always the same; they change into their
opposites as one stage succeeds another. In fact, this conflict of lower and
higher necessities is the generator of progress. A greater and growing
necessity is at work within the existing order negating the conditions which
sustain it. This necessity keeps depriving the present necessity of its reasons
for existence, expands at its expense, renders it obsolete and eventually
displaces it.

Not only do social formations and their specific dominant principles change
from one stage to the next but so do the specific laws of development.

12. Marx and Engels’
conception of history – shaped by class struggles, drives towards realization
of freedom of humanity as a whole in the form of communist society.

Engels
defined historical materialism as “that view of the course of history which
seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historic events in
the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production
and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and
in the struggles of these classes against one another”.

13. The Great Man theory strutted about
under the swastika in the homage paid to Hitler. Spengler in Germany and
Toynbee in England offer their re-editions of the cyclical round of history. The school of geopolitics makes geographical conditions
in the shape of the heartland and the outlying regions into the paramount
determinant of modern history.

14. Italian
thinker Croce wrote: “History is the record of the creations of the human
spirit in every field, theoretical as well as practical. And these spiritual
creations are always born in the hearts and minds of men of genius, artists,
thinkers, men of action, moral and religious reformers.” This position combines
idealism with elitism, the spirit using geniuses, or the creative minority, as
the agency which redeems the masses. – this position is close to mine. But I think that these creative people
lead the masses, organize for great struggles in their own interests.

15. Stalinism
has provided the most striking example of such an illogical synthesis. The
votaries of “the personality cult” sought to fuse the traditions and views of
Marxism, the most modern and scientific philosophy, with the archaic Great Man
version of the contemporary historical process.

(this shows that) …
generalised thought about the historical process can retrogress after making an
immense leap forward. The history of historical science proves in its own way
that progress is not even or persistent throughout history. Thucydides, the
narrator of the Peloponnesian Wars in the fourth century BC, had a far more
realistic view of history than did St. Augustine, the celebrator of the City of
God, in the fourth century AD.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/history/ch05.htm

(Law of Combined and Uneven Development)

The mainspring of human progress is man’s command over the forces of production. As history advances, there occurs a faster or slower growth of productive forces in this or that segment of society, owing to the differences in natural conditions and historical connections. These disparities give either an expanded or a compressed character to entire historical epochs and impart varying rates and extents of growth to different peoples, different branches of economy, different classes, different social institutions and fields of culture. This is the essence of the law of uneven development.

These variations amongst the multiple factors in history provide the basis for the emergence of exceptional phenomena in which features of a lower stage are merged with those of a superior stage of social development. These combined formations have a highly contradictory character and exhibit marked peculiarities. They may deviate so much from the rule and effect such an upheaval as to produce a qualitative leap in social evolution and enable a formerly backward people to outdistance, for a certain time, a more advanced. This is the gist of the law of combined development.