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Rather similar to these ideas is the universal history of Giambattista Vico, who in his ``Universal Law'' of 1720 described how every society cyclically progresses through a fixed sequence of stages. Initially, we find ourselves in a savage and lawless state. The rise of strong patriarchal leaders leads to an orderly but autocratic society, which Vico calls the Divine Age. This is followed by the Heroic Age, in which alliances are formed between individual patriarchies, then by the Human Age, in which democracies arise. According to Vico, these democracies will inevitably become corrupt and, unless they are first overthrown by other cultures, will degenerate back into savagery, at which point we start the cycle over again.
Two later `universal historians' were Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler. Spengler, in ``Untergang des Abendlands'' [``Decline of the West''], published in 1926, suggested that all societies pass through set stages, ending in `culture' - characterised by artistic creation - `civilization' - characterised by a concern for comfort - and `decline', which was the stage he believed the western democracies were just entering.
A more influential philosopher and historian was Hegel, who saw history as the working out of an escalating series of contradictory ideas, which he called the `dialectic'. Each stage of society is characterised by the struggle between two great ideas, a `thesis' and its `antithesis'. The stuggle ends in the emergence of a synthesis of the two, which then becomes the thesis for the next stage in history. Through this process, said Hegel, we proceed from the earliest stage of despotism (which he rather arbitrarily identified with ancient China) to democracy, and finally to monarchy, which Hegel believed to be the highest state (and which also happened to be the form of government in Prussia, where Hegel lived.)
It strikes us as peculiar to place monarchy ahead of democracy. Hegel accomodated this by distinguishing the general will of the people from the will of all. The latter is merely a numerical majority, as might be expressed in a popular vote, whereas the general will of the people can only be sensed and implemented by the monarch. The people's freedom, in Hegel's sense, consisted in their right to obey the laws laid down by the monarch.
For Hegel, the dialectical working out of history was a process of competing ideas. For Karl Marx, historical change sprung from changes in the material basis of society, specifically, from changes in the way in which production was organised. He saw all societies as necessarily passing through the successive stages of savagery, barbarism, feudalism, capitalism, and, he predicted, socialism and communism. Each stage is characterised by a struggle between classes. During the capitalist stage, Marx argued, competition between individual capitalists would force the wages of workers down to the lowest level compatible with life - since any company paying its workers more than that would eventually be undersold, and hence driven out of business, by harder-headed rivals. This process he called `the immiseration of the proletariat'. Socialism comes about when the immiseration of the working class under capitalism leads to a working class revolution. After a certain period of socialism, classes will disappear entirely and the State and its institutions will wither away, ushering in the final political form, communism.
Although Marx does not have a very good reputation today, the socialist movements in Russia and China showing no signs of developing into classless societies, his record over the hundred years following the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 is impressive: he wrote in a world that was entirely capitalist, yet in the succeeding century, half of humanity went through the socialist revolution he'd predicted.
Karl Popper, commenting on Marx, noted that it's possible to separate historical
description from prescription: a historian might agree that society was bound to go
through the stages Marx outlined, yet still harbour a personal preference for
capitalism over socialism. (Just as a physicist might accept that the universe
is ultimately destined to finish up at a uniform four degrees Kelvin, yet still prefer
to keep the thermostat in her home at twenty degrees Celsius.)
In practice, though, all Marxist historians seem to feel a personal obligation to
move history along in the direction they suppose it to be going.
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