Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Question of the Month

Does History Progress? If So, To What?

Each answer below receives a book. Apologies to the entrants not included.

A remark attributed to Arnold Toynbee is that history is ‘just one damned thing after another’. It must have been said during a moment of self-deprecation, because Toynbee’s A Study of History was an attempt to identify discernible trajectories in world history.

Before and since Toynbee, many writers have tried to find evidence that there is a pattern in historical change. They often claim that not only do historical events exhibit such a pattern, but that together this shows some kind of progress towards a goal. For Hegel, for instance, history is an intelligible process moving towards the realisation of human freedom: “History is the process whereby the Spirit discovers itself and its own concept.

…