Historical Theory

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What bourgeois nation has not proclaimed in time of war that “God is on our side”, guiding its destiny?

An international team of experts both discuss the basis of their topic and present their own view, offering the reader a cutting-edge contribution while ensuring their chapters are of interest to both students and specialists in the field of historical theory and engaging with the very nature of historical thought, the metaphysics of historical existence, the politics of history-writing, and the intelligibility of the historical process. Against postmodernism, she argures that historical narratives are not simply inventions imposed on the past, and that some answers to historical questions are more plausible or adequate than others. Marx rejected the enlightenment view that ideas alone were the driving force in society or that the underlying cause for the rise and fall of kingdoms, empires and states, was due to the actions of people at the top of society: kings, queens, emperors, generals, or religious leaders.Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Over time, the forces of production tend to develop and expand as new skills, knowledge and technology (for example wooden scratch plows then heavier iron plows) are put to use to meet human needs. He and his contemporary materialists largely ignored the economic conditions which stood between nature and the political institutions. One of Hegel's key critiques of enlightenment philosophy was that while thinkers were often able to describe what made societies from one epoch to the next different, they struggled to account for why they changed. 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.

Institutions and bodies are never static – they undergo a constant process of modification and development over time.Fetishistic worship of the Great Man has come down through the ages from the god-kings of Mesopotamia to the adoration of a Hitler.

The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory is an essential resource for practicing historians, and students of history, and will appeal to scholars in related disciplines in the social sciences and humanities who seek a closer understanding of the theoretical foundations of history. The main modes of production that Marx identified include primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism and communism.This is the pristine source of the tenacious belief that unusually influential and able individuals determine the main direction of history. Individuals, influential or insignificant, and ideas, innovating or traditional, are essential parts of society; their roles in the making of history have to be taken into account. He conceived history as a universal process in which all social formations, nations and persons had their appropriate but subordinate place.