Historical Figure - Significance - Inevitability or Determinism

Inevitability or Determinism

Taken to an extreme, one may consider that what Hegel calls the "world spirit" and T. S. Eliot calls "those vast impersonal forces" hold us in their grip. What will happen is predetermined. Both Hegel and Marx advocated historical inevitability in contrast to the doctrine of contingency, allowing for alternative outcomes, that was advocated by Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and others. However, Marx argued against the use of the "historical inevitability" argument when used to explain the destruction of early communes in Russia. As an orthodox Marxist, Vladimir Lenin accepted the laws of history that Marx had discovered, including the historical inevitability of capitalism followed by a transition to socialism. Despite this, Lenin also believed the transition could be effected faster by voluntary action.

In 1936 Karl Popper published an influential paper on The Poverty of Historicism, published as a book in 1957, that attacked the doctrine of historical inevitability. The historian Isaiah Berlin, author of Historical Inevitability, also argued forcibly against this view, going as far as to say that some choices are entirely free and cannot be predicted scientifically. Berlin presented his views in a 1953 lecture at the London School of Economics, published soon afterwards. When speaking he referred to Ludwig Wittgenstein's views, but the published version speaks approvingly of Karl Popper, which caused a stir among academics.