Volume 7, Number 10 · December 15, 1966
What Is History?
By George Lichtheim
Shapes of Philosophical History
by Frank E. Manuel
Stanford, 166 pp., $4.75
The Prophets of Paris
by Frank E. Manuel
Harper & Row, 349 pp., $2.25 (paper)
Utopias and Utopian Thought
edited by Frank E. Manuel
Houghton Mifflin, 321 pp., $6.50
The Riddle of History: The Great Speculators From Vico to Freud
by Bruce Mazlish
Harper & Row, 484 pp., $10.95
The Unique and the Universal
by J.L. Talmon
Braziller, 320 pp., $6.50
What is history about? What, to be more specific, is the so-called philosophy of history about? We know who invented the term: It was Voltaire who in 1765 wrote a pseudonymous tract on the subject (characteristically, to amuse a lady friend). But Voltaire, as was his habit, popularized a notion already developed by a more original thinker—in this case Turgot, who in 1750, at the ripe age of twenty-three, had addressed the Sorbonne on a topic then quite new and startling: the 'progressions of the human mind.' The title was preserved by Condorcet for his famous essay of 1794, composed in the shadow of the guillotine, the Sketch of a Historical Survey of the Progressions of the Human Mind. Thus the concept of a philosophical history, or philosophical treatment of history, made its appearance on the eve of the Revolution and took final form while the great event was in progress. After Turgot and Condorcet had left the scene, it was taken up, and converted into a rudimentary sociology, by Saint-Simon. Fourier, and Comte: the second generation of the 'prophets of Paris' discussed by Professor Manuel. While across the Rhine, in the footsteps of Kant and Herder, Hegel set about to underpin the new doctrine with a metaphysic of his own, later to be 'stood on its feet' by Marx. So far the story is familiar, and the authors here under discussion have a wealth of material to go on.
Review, 4166 words
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