“The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.” –Jurgen Habermas
Carl Becker: The Heavenly City of Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
“In a very real sense it may be said of the eighteenth century that it was an age of faith as well as of reason, and of the thirteenth century that it was an age of reason as well as of faith.” –Carl Becker
Philosophy of History Part XXVI: Will Durant: The Story of Civilization
“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.” –Will Durant
Philosophy of History Part XXV: Karl Popper and Prophecy in the Social Sciences
“The belief in historical destiny is sheer superstition. There can be no prediction of the course of human history by scientific or any other rational methods.” –Karl Popper
Philosophy of History Part XXIV: Fernand Braudel and the Annales School
“I remember a night near Bahia when I was enveloped in a firework display or phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails.” –Fernand Braudel
Philosophy of History Part XXIII: R.G. Collingwood and Neo-Idealism
“All history is the history of thought.” –R.G. Collingwood
The Open Society and Its Frenemies: Karl Popper’s Defense of Science and Liberalism for the 21st Century
While the world’s attention is focused on religious fundamentalism, there is a new tribalism, and a new revolt against reason, taking shape within liberalism. The name of this movement is New Atheism, but it would be more appropriate to call it Atheist Fundamentalism.
Philosophy of History Part XXII: Carl Gustav Hempel and the Return of Positivist History
“If you cannot predict, you have not explained.” –Carl Gustav Hempel
Philosophy of History Part XXI: Edward Hallett Carr and Totalitarian Historiography
“It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar’s crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all.” –Edward Hallett Carr
Philosophy of History Part XX: Arnold Toynbee and the Challenge of Civilization
“Civilization is a movement and not a condition; a voyage and not a harbor.” –Arnold Toynbee
Philosophy of History Part XIX: Carl Becker and Progressive History
“To establish the facts is always in order, and is indeed the first duty of the historian; but to suppose that the facts, once established in all their fullness, will ‘speak for themselves’ is an illusion.” –Carl Becker
Philosophy of History Part XVIII: Herbert Butterfield and the Whig Interpretation of History
“The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history.” –Herbert Butterfield
Philosophy of History Part XVII: Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West
“One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be—though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain—because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.” –Oswald Spengler
Philosophy of History Part XVI: The Collapse of Civilization in Europe, 1914–1945
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever. –George Orwell
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. –Elie Wiesel
Philosophy of History Part XV: What Is Historicism?
Some background on historicism, an idea first advanced by Giambattista Vico and later taken up by German historians and philosophers.
Philosophy of History Part XIV: Friedrich Nietzsche: History as Art
“History, in so far as it serves life, serves an unhistorical power.” –Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosophy of History Part XIII: Karl Marx’s Historical Materialism
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” –Karl Marx
Philosophy of History Part XII: Jacob Burckhardt: Civilization, Art, and Power Politics
“I know too much of history to expect anything from the despotism of the masses but a future tyranny, which will be the end of history.” –Jacob Burckhardt
Philosophy of History Part XI: Alexis de Tocqueville, Liberalism and History
“The nations of our day cannot prevent conditions of equality from spreading in their midst. But it depends upon themselves whether equality is to lead to servitude or freedom, knowledge or barbarism, prosperity or wretchedness.” –Alexis de Tocqueville
Philosophy of History Part X: Jules Michelet and Romanticism in History
“And I, who have sprung from them, I, who have lived, toiled, and suffered with them—who, more than any other have purchased the right to say that I know them—I come to establish against all mankind the personality of the people.” –Jules Michelet