 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. Free Thoughts is a project of the Cato Institute's libertarianism.org. I'm Aaron Powell, editor of libertarianism.org, and a research fellow at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Historicism is the idea that historical forces work to determine the ideas and values of individuals, and that historical trends have some direction or purpose. It's a popular idea, one that influences the way many people think about the world today. But is it true? Our guest today is our colleague, Jason Kuznicki, a research fellow here at the Cato Institute, an editor of Cato Unbound. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Jason. Hi, good to be here. Before we get into questions of just what historicism is, let's talk about the kind of thing it is, which is it's a theory of history. That's right. And what is it, I guess, what does it mean to talk about theories of history? What is it, because I thought history was just, you know, we think of it as... One thing after another. Yeah, it's this catalogue of facts. It's just we... It's the story of what happened in the past. But now we're talking about how there are different to potentially competing theories of history. Unfortunately, there have to be. A catalogue of facts is by nature limited. And anyone who chooses to study history only has a limited amount of time to do it in. And history is really, really big if you consider it to be the totality of everything that happened in the past. You have to select. You have to choose which events or which people or which ideas are important and which ones are not so important and you will neglect. And making that kind of selection demands a theory. Is it a demand? I mean, what does it mean to say it demands a theory as opposed to it's just this is... I'm just going to select the things that I happen to find interesting and talk about those and not talk about the other things. Which doesn't seem to be a theory based selection process. Well, it really is. It is because why do you find them interesting? You find them interesting because you think that they illustrate something about human nature or about the story that is unfolding over time. You think that it may illustrate some connections among groups of people or their relationships to one another. And when you're dealing with those questions, you are having an implicit theory even if you haven't articulated one. So what if I was to say that the way we should do history is we should figure out which facts in the past matter for why things are the way they are now. Right. Isn't that a generally acceptable view of history? I think that that's the beginning of coming up with a theory of history. A causal connection between the facts and the past. Now, there might have been a peasant named Bob who lived in the middle of England in 1420. But I don't think Bob's existence or non-existence has a lot to do with the death of Charles, the beheading of Charles the first in the middle 17th century. Right, right. And similarly, what I ate on this date 20 years ago for lunch may actually be completely inconsequential. I don't recall what it was to be honest. However, you might be able to make a much stronger case, for example, that the aggregate of what everyone was eating for lunch is actually part of the history of food. And that's an interesting thing and you might say that that's justifiably important. Or all of the Bob's because historians have documented the rise and fall of names and what names mean and why people come to be named different things in different eras. So as libertarians then, if the theory of history is inevitable and we have to have one even if we don't realize it, then what do we have to say about or some of us or you have to say about what a theory of history needs to entail? Well, theories of history are a minefield because many, many, many of them are collectivist nature. What do you mean by collectivist? Well, I mean that they do not begin with methodological individualism. So for example, a theory that postulates that people are predictable because of the socioeconomic class that they belong to and that class interests explain the broad sweep of history. But not looking at the individuals as individuals. They're the ones who make the choices. They're the ones who make the choices. Not looking at the individuals who make the choices. So one observation Ludwig von Mises made is that stones react according to a perennial pattern, which we call law of nature. Men, however, do not react in such a uniform way. They behave as both praxeologists and historians say in an individual way. Nobody has ever succeeded in assigning various men to classes, each member of which behaves according to the same pattern. Interesting. So in that way then the freedom-centered view of the world, the libertarian view would eschew a theory of history? A libertarian view of history would be very comfortable looking at things like, for example, the progress of economic specialization and trade or technological developments or even the history of states. But it would be very hesitant to say that social class or race or ethnicity are the things that explain all of history. And in fact theories of this type are usually referred to as historicists. And this is exactly the subject of our talk today. The idea that people and history are explainable with reference to larger groups, with reference to groups in conflict with one another and that these conflicts constitute the story of history and that it's headed in some direction and that individuals are essentially powerless against it. Before we plunge into talking about historicism and where it goes wrong, let me just ask a clarifying question. When we talk about people approaching history with a theory, do we mean that they just have a set of beliefs that they developed for whatever reason, either consciously or unconsciously, and those just happen to inform the way they approach history? Or is this more they're saying, I am a person of theory school X and therefore I'm going to do history by applying this theory to the facts that I get. Well, the thing about historical theories, particularly historicist theories of history is that it's not just about how I sit down to write history. It's also about implicit claims about the future. Particularly Marxism is a very obvious example of this that Marx himself claimed to have found the laws that drive history. And he said, by the way, I know what's in store in the future. I know what's coming. And this is a particularly signal historicist claim. The idea that not only can we look at the past and generalize laws from it, but also we can use those laws to know what's coming in the future. Is that really that, I guess, not understandable? Isn't it something that people say all the time? Well, we're going to see, if I just said something like, we're going to see a backlash from the Democrats in 2016 who will reassert themselves as more economic populist party. Am I making an erroneous theory of history there or making a claim about a group of people? Well, a lot of people would really like to have a theory that predicts the future, of course, and it's understandable. And we all seek security. That's just human nature. But to be able to predict to the future with the kind of confidence that, for example, Marx had takes a lot more. And that's one of the problems with it. It relies implicitly on knowledge that we can't actually have. One of the observations that Karl Popper made in his book, The Poverty of Historicism, is that not only do these claims suppose that we know what the laws were that governed history in the past, but in carrying forward these laws to the future, we also have to know about future technological developments. But if we knew those, we would have them now and they wouldn't be future technological developments after all. If technology influences human societies at all in any meaningful sense, then you're going to run into some amount of problems and possibly very large problems, particularly if you're making historical claims like Marx did that were very much reliant on technology. His foundation for how human societies change was a technological foundation. And that calls into question his entire system, his entire intellectual program. You've mentioned Marx as this example of historicism. But did historicism begin with Marx or how far back does this type of belief or school of theories go? Well, if you believe Karl Popper and I tend to, Popper traced historicism back to Plato and even back to Heraclitus, which I find that a little bit speculative, but he did believe, I think with good reason, that Plato was a historicist. How so? Plato was very concerned to set up a community, in his political writings at least, set up a community that he hoped to be immune from history, which he saw as essentially a process of decay. And he's very concerned in the republic and in the laws to set up a static society, one that will not change, one that will endure forever. He believed that if something is perfect, then it will never undergo any changes. It will never undergo any decay. And to attempt to set up a society in that way was to him the ideal. Doesn't seem like that's very libertarian. I don't think Plato was libertarian. Of course it's not. It's horrifically unlibertarian. There will be 5,040 families in this community. 5,040. 5,040 for numerological reasons. How big is each family, do we know? There would be a head of the household, a father and wife and children. So we're talking a pretty small. It was a small society. And the problem was if the society became successful, of course, there would be larger families and there would be people wanting to set up on their own. And if there was some sort of calamity, if there were a famine or a plague or something, families might die out. And he said if a family finds itself lacking members, they're to be taken out of other families and placed into the lacking families. And if the society grows too big, people will be forcibly shipped out. So that all seems to be it. That would be about as a non-freedom loving society as you possibly can imagine. Is that why these are paired? Because I think maybe people aren't seeing right now what is the connection between historicism and non-liberalism in the classic sense or oppression possibly? Is there a constant connection there or usually an expected connection between types of oppressive societies that have these rules that don't allow people to have as many kids as they wanted to move around as they want in a theory of history and possibly a future of the future too about the path of that society? I do think there is a connection. For Plato, the connection was that as I said, he saw history as a process of decay and government was supposed to try to resist that decay. And the medium with which the government works is in fact people's lives. They will be moved around. They will be assigned to positions in society. They will be expelled from the society all for achieving this goal of stasis. And that obviously has some very horrific consequences to our way of thinking. The goal of a historicist though isn't necessarily stasis. For Marx, Marx in fact thought he was aiming at progress. He thought that society would improve over time through revolution in which case society proceeds to communism. But there is one thing that remains the same between Plato and Marx which is that the individuals are the medium with which the government or the state or the rulers of the society act. Act upon. They act upon people, exactly. In order to achieve a goal that is larger than the individual in order to achieve a collective goal. So it has to ignore the individual on some level. It has to ignore the individual on some level. Not just as a unit of analysis but also as an individual who has their own dignity and moral concern. Yes, their own moral value. Can I offer a pushback on that a bit for Plato at least? One reading of Plato that I've come across is a little bit unfair to him to say that he wanted to control everybody and thought everybody should be rigidly controlled because he, in his ideal state, there's these different levels of souls. And the lowest level is bronze. Yes, that's right. He acknowledges the metals. And he talks about them a bit but most of the republic which is the book where a lot of this political theory is laid out is about the higher level souls which are the guardians and then the philosopher kings. And the guardians lives are… And they're the gold souls, I assume. The guardians, the gold or the… Platinum. I'm forgetting. Gold, yeah. And then the philosopher kings… Adamantium. But that the guardians lives are extremely controlled and regimented, right? And the philosopher kings are fairly open except they're bound by following truth which is this very objective thing for Plato. But that those bronze level people who are basically everyone but the guardians, he has very little to say about what they're allowed to do, what they're up to, they're kind of the merchant class and everything else. And so that freedom kind of can exist for those guys or freedom that's at least substantially more free than what's available for the guardians. So does that mean he thinks that freedom is something that the lower classes have more than the upper classes or should have more? I don't really think that that's the case. I don't think he would have said that they would have more freedom. In particular, they have no political rights. When you look at the laws, you realize Plato thinks that the philosopher kings, in the true sense of the word, are exceptionally rare. In fact, he says in the laws, the only reason why we write down laws at all is because genuine philosopher kings are so rare that once we find one of them, and I do happen to be one of them, but once we find one of them, we must write down what this person says are the laws so that we can continue to follow these laws until the next one comes along. There's no other reason to Plato to ever write down laws. It would actually maybe be better. Yes, more like a prophet, it would maybe be better if we could have one of these people around all the time and never write down any laws and they just rule on all of the different points that need to be decided and they're not bound by the laws at all. But a genius like me, like Plato, never comes along except very, very rarely, and so we will bind everyone to the laws. So that, again, sort of seems to show why this isn't inextricably connected to very illiberal societies because a lot of the worst genocides, genocide artists, if you want to, that's not a bad word, genocide perpetrators of the 20th century saw themselves as philosopher kings of a new era and needing to have that kind of authority and then telling a story about how history led up to them being there. And that's the other part of this, which I'd like you to comment on, which is talk about Plato and decay and then what about progress? Is there anything we can say about sort of theories of history that have progress versus theories of history that have decay? Because maybe the conservatives, for example, the moral decay of society type of theory versus the uplifting progress of moving toward the light. And there are certainly historicists of progress and there are people who will tell you, yes, history is progressing toward something and it's doing so by conflict and it's doing so by clashes of civilizations leading toward some ultimate goal. And the progenitor really of all of these in the modern era is Hegel. The philosopher Hegel believed that he had sort of figured this out, much like Marx would later come along and build upon similar theory. But Hegel's philosophy of history was not one that was based on economics or technology. It was based on national consciousness. It was much more oriented toward nationalism. And he believed that there was essentially a story going on of competing nationalisms. And each nationalism represented a different grade or step or progress of civilization. And of course, naturally, he was a Prussian and believed that Prussia had reached the pinnacle of civilization so far. And that they represented the highest and the best of all of the nations. And they were the ones who were on the cutting edge of history. And it's easy to see how if you think this way, other nations, other groups of people become sort of a means to whatever. Or cannon fodder possibly. Or cannon fodder if you're so inclined. So how does this tie into – you've talked about nationalism. Nations themselves and their stories, their mythos, their points for being the people, everything else, the Reich, however you want to call it. They all seem to be intertwined with – I mean, obviously it's collective to some degree. But they're intertwined with some sort of theory of struggle and against the light, against the darkness, those kind of struggles. Story of the American founding. The founding, yes. To a great degree, what people study in history classes is this study of conflict of nations or conflict of peoples. And that is, I would say, a problem because it neglects many, many things that are, first of all, peaceful. Peaceful processes don't get into the history textbooks. And that's – The bias to violence. That's an obvious consequence of the theory. There's a bias toward violence. There's a bias toward seeing states and their governments as natural, as being entirely almost God-given and not subject to questioning. They may succeed or fail, but if they fail, it wasn't because they were a state. It's just because that was how history was destined to be. And that's a very serious shortcoming, at least from an individualist standpoint. Most of us, though – I mean, our teachers in middle school and high school history say are not Platonists. They're not Hegelians. They're not Marxists. Oh, well, see, I would say they're not Platonists. But I would say that there's a great deal of Hegel in the way that history is usually taught. So would that be – so I guess my question is why – They just don't realize it possible? But at the same time, they're teaching this history as violent struggle, history as the actions of states and leaders. And so why is this such a prevalent? If they're not explicitly saying, I'm going to be a Hegelian or I want to do a historicist reading of history, why is there this appeal in history as struggles for power? I wish I had the answer to that. And I think I dare say it's becoming decreasingly true. I think that particularly in say college-level history classes, there is much more of an interest in things that sometimes are derided as being silly or frivolous. But in particular, they are trying to get somewhat away from event-driven political history and look at economic history, not just as how can we mine this for Marxist talking points, but actually how can we consider the ways in which people interact with each other in peaceful ways? How is say the family or the market working in history? And a good example of that I would say is actually Deutre McCloskey's work. Deutre McCloskey looks at the market process and the ethos that surrounds it. And I find that tremendously interesting. But would you also say maybe a good example of that would also be something like Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States? Or is he trying to get past the conflict, past the kings and queens and down to the people? See again, again, why is he doing it? He's doing it to establish essentially a Marxist view of history. He is essentially a Marxist and he is looking at economic history really only to establish that we've been looking at the wrong collectives and we need to stop looking at the collectives of national identity and start looking at socioeconomic classes. And really though, the intent is very much the same to establish a government that will serve a collective. And at that level of analysis, there's still a problem to this. There's still a great danger in looking at history that way. So far it seems you've leveled two types of criticism against historicism. One is that it seems to be goal-oriented. It's doing history in order to accomplish something, establish something. And the other is that the view that it has or the thing that it's trying to establish is opposed to freedom in a meaningful sense. So it's dangerous in that way because it's opposed to human freedom. But neither one of those get to it being wrong, right? Their interpretation of history could be correct and these could be the conclusions, but just because we don't like the conclusions doesn't mean that their interpretation is inaccurate. So what's wrong with the way they're interpreting things that's distinct from just the conclusions that they reach? Well, if I could be a bit of a consequentialist just for a while, I would say that historicist theories have been at the root of a great deal of the evil that we have seen in recent history. People who are armed with theories like this have a very strong tendency to do horrifically evil things. And that's an indictment of the theory, I would say. It's an indictment of the approach. It would seem like it would be very difficult and I think we need to move on. We'll talk about what the actual maybe libertarian theory of history would be. But if you didn't have a completely collectivist theory of history, it would be very difficult to commit the kind of atrocities that have been committed if you looked at people and as individuals and had some amount of skepticism to the arbitrariness of the nation state. We're skeptical of the stories that we tell that said everything has led to this moment and we are now on the precipice. And think about how politicians talk, right? And they talk in that language. That's how the crowd gets going. Right. And it's not just a Nazi Germany rally. It's an inaugural speech on the steps of the Capitol saying, you know, the time is now. The moment has been leading to this. We are now at the moment of history where it is time to act. And it seems like all of those might have historicism in them too. But again, they should be approached with skepticism exactly because claims of that type involve an enormous pretense of knowledge. They involve implicitly saying that I have looked at all of history and I have figured it out. And that's really a very difficult claim to sustain. It seems that we're kind of making two sorts of claims here though that I want to disentangle if possible. What we've been talking about here is that people use historicist theories of history. Historicist stories. You know, the historicist historian goes and tells a story of history that's informed by this theory. And then people use that to do these horrific things. But that's not quite the same thing, right? As saying that their interpretation of history is wrong. There are truths out there. There are things that can be true but have bad consequences. And the fact that something has a bad consequence doesn't make it not true. Are you asking though what kind of – because the theory is not – it's not really about the facts on the ground, right? It's not historically inaccurate because it's a theory of history. What I'm saying is so say I tell – say I say that the – I tell this story about the history of Europe that I think the history of Europe is explained by people acting within these national identities, these nation states that kind of work as collectives. And I tell the story that then here's why Europe looks the way that it looks. And so I've done a historicist reading of European history. So far. That's key. That's key. It's very important because a good scientific theory is not only going to explain what has happened so far. It will also have predictive value. Okay. And the problem with that is that historicist theories actually have a lousy predictive value. Okay, so that gets to what I'm – my question is then that's a knock against the truth value, I guess, of historicist theories as opposed to a knock against the consequences of historicists. They have bad predictive power. If one were to be very, very good about recording facts of history and selecting them according to some reasoned defensible criteria and to offer explanations for all of the things that had gone so far, that would still not be enough to predict people's behavior in the future. People are still individuals. They are still free to act in ways that are not necessarily consonant with their social class or with their national identity or with their received ideology. People have new ideas and those are impossible to predict and that's why the study of the past may be interesting and edifying and important and yet not be very good at predicting the future. But there's a normative element too about why this could be wrong or right and not just what Jason said about consequentialism and maybe how many people have died in the name of such theories or assisted – with the assistance of such theories. But this idea of whether or not you should be doing history that way because it maybe ignores huge swaths. I mean, that's what I asked about the Howard Zinn because Howard Zinn is making class distinctions but he's also making a normative history that claim I think that we shouldn't ignore the people who lived in tenements in New York in 1905. We shouldn't ignore – we shouldn't just look at the bourgeoisie and their culture. We should look at other types of culture and that's an obligation that we have as historians to not forget them almost. Yes and I would not want to forget or neglect groups or say you're not important in history. But I think that really what's going on there is not so much a claim that they've just been forgotten. There's more to it than that. Not only have they been forgotten, it's also they are the future inheritors of the world. They are the ones who will take over and so we need to tell their history. And that's really I think what's going on there and that's a revolutionary claim and it's also a predictive claim. It's one that may or may not come true and I think actually has failed to come true. I mentioned Deidre McClossey who some of our listeners may not be familiar with and so if we have an idea maybe that she does history in a way that you would endorse more. So what kind of stuff does she write about and where does she go that's different that you like? Well I think that what I like about her is that she is doing economic history but it's economic history that looks at why people do things like become a businessman. Why would you do that? What would make you think that that was an okay thing to do? And what are the consequences for a society that values entrepreneurship versus a society that hates or mistrusts or fears entrepreneurs and her claim which yes to some degree I guess is predictive is that societies that view trade as a potentially honest and worthwhile and noble activity. Those societies tend to first of all have more traders which is reasonable enough, obvious enough but also they tend to become richer and more peaceful and more cultured and that there are many many benefits that can be had simply by adopting an ethos that allows people to exchange one thing for another according to what they think is best for them. But it seems like you could also maybe describe it as an organic theory of history that looks at how the attitudes towards merchants changed over 200 plus years not because of some massive power struggle or some group against some group but because of a far more individualistic basis of people coming to adopt different thoughts and different positions on what was virtuous about being a merchant or not and everyone doing that on their own sort of rate until there was a slow shift to a social change. Yes, and one of the things that's actually very distinct about this approach to history as opposed to say Marxist approach is that it doesn't actually have any large scale social project that it calls for demands. It's not asking for there to be a revolution. There doesn't have to be one. It's a slow gradual change. It's a change that happens in people's minds not in a battlefield and that's just inherently going to be a less dangerous theory of history even if it is a wrong theory of history saying I've noticed how people are thinking differently and I think that this has some effect on their society even if it's wrong which I don't think it is. It's not going to have the kind of devastating consequences that say fascism would have. So is it possible that we could take an analogy of someone who looks at history as an organic process constituted by individuals choosing on their own methods and then us who look at the economy in the current world is also an organic, more of an organic entity and then those people who look at the current world as a struggle between classes now including possibly identity politics where the question is who gets what, who's fighting for the rights of the LGBT community, of Native Americans, of the lower class, of the upper class, of the middle class. We talk about that now and I think there might be a connection between looking at history as something where it's just this group against this group against the rights of these people, the rights of these people which doesn't seem very organic. It seems more like all the crayons in the box rather than a sort of a mixture of all the colors together. To a high degree the categories really are contrived and I think this is something that historians have been reckoning with at least during my lifetime that people do have fluid identities, that someone may have either a fluid national identity or class identity, people undergo religious conversions, people age and so they go from certain categories in society to others more or less inevitably and the way that these categories do change is something that I think ought to be a clue to their inessentiality. So where an economist might speak of the law of supply as being true everywhere and not really admitting of exceptions ever, a law holding that people of the upper class will behave in a certain way, you can always find exceptions to it. It's trivially easy. I think you see it in weird claims about identity and bizarre attempts to try and keep people in boxes. I think it's very strange when someone says that person is not speaking like an authentic African American. I was recently told not that long ago that I would change my mind if only I knew some gay people and as a gay person I was actually startled by this. So yes, there are definitely claims that are made like that that just fall apart immediately. I wonder if this explains a bit of the appeal of the historicist approach because if history is – you're trying to tell a story about the past, right? That you've got to – in order to tell a story that works, it's a narrative that you can follow and that you can get something out of, you've got to limit the number of characters you have. There's got to be some cap where people just can't keep up and so you're trying to teach students and so what you do is you say, we're just going to talk about America, that's a character, and Russia, that's a character and these are the things that they did and these groups were going to lump them all together and give them all common characteristics so we can think of them as a group because otherwise it would just be history would be so overwhelmingly complicated that we wouldn't even know how to really begin in telling these stories about our past. It's particles. To some degree that's inevitable because the brain can only handle so many concepts at a time and you just can't tell the event history of every single person getting up in the morning and taking a shower and eating breakfast. Especially if you have like half an hour a week with a bunch of sixth graders. Right, right. I mean these are in a sense, they're tricks we play on ourselves but they're tricks that we have to play on ourselves and that's part of the unfortunate that's the curse of being a historian is that we don't get laws that have predictive value like the laws of economics have a predictive value and yet sort of our minds demand that there be laws and that there be causality and I think we need to recognize that in talking about history we can describe what happened in the past and it can be very interesting and valuable and it can be valuable in lots of different levels but it is not going to be a scientific pursuit, it just can't be. But understanding that to approach the study of history understanding that you have a tendency to want to look at this in groups and then maybe challenge your own conclusions about that I mean it's not that groups don't exist it's just that they're not the only thing that matters and people are fluid amongst groups and there were Jacobites and there was... Oh yes, there absolutely are groups I mean there's actually a very instructive quote from Mises again this is from his book Theory and History which is published by Liberty Fund what constitutes group membership is the way a man acts in a concrete situation hence group membership is not something rigid and unchangeable it may change from case to case the same man may in the course of a single day perform actions each of which qualifies him as a member of a different group he may contribute to the funds of his denomination and cast his ballot for a candidate and he may act at one instant as a member of a labor union and another as a member of a religious community at another as a member of a political party at another as a member of a linguistic or racial group and so on or he may act as an individual working to earn more income to get his son to college to purchase a home, a car or a refrigerator people have lots of different identities and they take on and cast off identities very frequently then the question becomes okay so what's an identity and this is a very difficult question in history Jacobites yes they're an identity they're a political group that wanted to restore the Jacobites accession in England and they never succeeded I'm sure there were gynos to write Jacobites in name only Well I mean there were symbolic gestures that you could make to affiliate yourself with that group or to reject that group and those were politically important in say the early 18th century but how much that explains a given person's behavior that's one question and then how much it predicts a person's behavior is almost impossible to say it because people may be very gung-ho on the Jacobite movement for a while and they say no okay just forget about it that's something that we can't predict we can't look into people's hearts no matter how much we know about what they've done in the past I want to pick up on something that you said a minute or so ago you said that history is not science and we can't make it science even if we want it to be but there are sciences that look towards the past geology and paleontology evolutionary and what's the difference between those and history and why do those yet to be science and history not? History can't be a science in those senses because it involves making predictions about behavior of people who will be acting in circumstances that we can't control psychology is an attempt to predict people's behavior but a psychologist who's conducting an experiment will go to very very great lengths to control the variables the circumstances that people find themselves in and make very modest claims on the basis of that very rigorously controlled set of circumstances history though is a one-way trip it happens and it never happens again in the same way and we can't do experiments on history so it's very very difficult to make predictions that end up holding up in the future a psychologist can say I can reliably predict we put a person in this experimental condition we will see if we have enough trial runs with different people we will see these different patterns emerging historians don't get to do that because history doesn't happen in a laboratory we can't repeat the collapse of Rome over and over and see what happens and you know I would love to do that I think there's no historian who thinks about this question who doesn't wish that they could rerun the fall of Rome or the French Revolution or what would have happened if Lincoln hadn't been assassinated or just any number of questions but we don't get to do that so we write alternate history novels about it right exactly we'll leave it to Harry Turnbull though so for talking about partially this is about a theory of human psychology which I think is interesting connecting all these to different types of economic beliefs and political beliefs but there's a theory of psychology if you're asking about what explains this in the past you have some theory about what explains human behavior and different people have different theories about that so maybe what's really going on is that Aaron and I have talked about on an earlier podcast the criticism that we're anti-community so some people have a theory of psychology that says people mostly have motivations based off of community and group membership and that's what matters to us so they analyze psychology in that way and then other people have a theory of psychology that's more individualistic and not so much into group membership and then if you do history you just apply that psychology to the history and you look at it as community-based or individual-based I wish it were that easy well that's what I think maybe that's what they do they use some psychology and apply it to history and I think nobody is going to be free of that I mean it's a lot like having a theory of history you also have a theory of how minds work and you try to plug that into whatever facts you find in the archives and say okay this set of facts must imply that these people had a particular mind state but that can be very difficult because people in the past did very routinely things that we find incomprehensible things that we find very very weird and why was it that in Salem, Massachusetts there was this witch craze that came upon them very very suddenly and then departed again very suddenly and there are various interesting theories about exactly what happened but it seems like a fairly safe bet that's not going to happen in 2014 in Washington D.C. that's a thing that has stopped happening we have different type of witch hunts we have different witch hunts we have different superstitions we have different sort of reflexive patterns of behavior that might lead to similarly irrational panics we might say but we're not going to believe that people are acquiring supernatural powers by making pacts with the devil this is something we don't believe happens generally speaking we don't see that anymore there are these two theories of history that you hear about a fair amount and I want to see if these are examples of historicism the first is the wig theory of history and the other one is the great man theory of history okay, yes the wig theory of history can be historicist a wig theory of history is one that says things are basically getting better we're on the track toward better and better and better things why we are there people will disagree about causality but the idea that history is progress is the wig theory of history in a nutshell and it can be historicist if you think that the progress is automatic and that it happens through impersonal forces and that it's not actually composed of individual actions but if you believe that history is actually potentiated or created by things that individuals do then immediately you look at the wig theory of history and think that there's nothing inevitable about progress we can regress just as easily as we can progress and if you realize that then maybe some people would say you're not really a wig anymore because you don't think the progress is automatic I think progress is undeniable at least since the end of the 18th century people have been better and better and better off and there have been horrific examples of backsliding here and there but they have been for the most part local and people are wealthier and better educated and freer and more equal in their political rights and they have been in the past just vastly so and that's something that ought not to be denied but I think that it's come about through individual agency and not through some impersonal force working through humanity so wig theories of history can be historicist or maybe not and the second thing you asked about was the great man theory of history the great man theory of history would say something like Napoleon himself through his own force of personality and his own talent changed to the face of Europe and many people would say that that was true a historicist might say something like if Napoleon had never existed someone else would have come along and filled that place so if you imagine that Napoleon died of smallpox when he was three which was very common at that time then perhaps another French general would have been the one to win the battles all throughout Europe and to have nearly united Europe under French hegemony maybe that would have happened instead and maybe he would have I don't know been smart enough not to invade Russia and Europe would still be under French hegemony we don't know the forces that work through history from the historicist standpoint and that's just the problem is that we don't actually know whether it was Napoleon or whether it was some impersonal force or causality behind Napoleon that made him successful I'm inclined to think that it was neither an impersonal force nor Napoleon in particular I'm inclined to think that it was the institution of conscription forced conscription and and secondarily it was opening careers in the French military to talent which allowed first of all it brought a large number of people into the military and then second when you don't have to be a noble to be a general you get generals who can actually command and who are actually interested in running an army well and France was the first one to try that and so that's why that's why Napoleon had this very very successful army I want to ask about historicism today because we talked again we've talked about Plato we've talked about Hegel and we've talked about Marx but is this something that's still being done now and is it something that still is impacting us today is it something we should I guess still be concerned about as opposed to it just being kind of this thing that people did in the past I think you can still find very clearly historicist approaches to to analyzing current events so for example a lot of people will say things along the lines of we have a conflict of civilizations a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam and these two things are implacably opposed to each other and either you're a Westerner or you are with Islam and the question then is which one is going to win and while there there may be some conflicts between them and clearly there are it is a historicist mistake to say that those conflicts are inevitable and they will always be that way those those may be the conflicts right now some people would even deny that there is a meaningful conflict between Islam broadly conceived and the West broadly conceived and say no it's actually it's actually Western governments and certain very small terrorist organizations and they're not even representative of Islam and I think that's actually the more the more accurate view but to take this conflict and to say that it's one large group of people against another and they represent different forces in history and those forces are always opposed to each other and one of them is going to win that's that's recognizably historicist and that's happening right now also and I would say that that which one does the future belong to I don't know I don't think we can predict that but I also don't think that these identities will necessarily continue in the future I don't think that what we see of what we imagine Islam to be today is necessarily going to be how things are in 20 years and certainly certainly the recent past is any guide our conception of what we think of as Islam as some people call an enemy has only sprung onto the scene very recently also and I have no reason to think that that we are actually enemies I don't believe this I think that I think that that's a conflict that we're conditioned to see unfortunately and then what about in a similar vein possibly there is a lot of narrative of progressives by adopting the moniker of progressive maybe you're already setting us up but the idea of the forces of progress which is the forces who are retarding progress whether which are usually Republicans in their mind with the inevitability of centralization and socialized healthcare and all that stuff is coming and people are standing against the progress of history because the real progress ends up with everything being centralized in Washington DC and all the backward states being subdued under it is that sort of historicist? I think that there is something to that yes and I think it's also fair to ask whether that's genuinely progress I wouldn't call it progress to collectivize healthcare at all I would call that regress and if we don't agree on the terms then we need to really ask whether this is a good idea with reference to something other than theories of history we need to look at how healthcare is actually provided in market systems or not and so we have that idea with the politics of it and history is political power and how it works how historicist theories work with political power yes and what people think of as history actually is usually a history of political power there's a really great quote from Carl Popper that I'd like to read to kind of close out on this they speak about the history of mankind people speak of the history of mankind but what they mean and what they have learned about in school is the history of political power there is no history of mankind there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life and one of those is the history of political power this is elevated into the history of the world but this I hold is an offense against every decent conception of mankind it is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or robbery or poisoning as the history of mankind for the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder this history is taught in schools and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as its heroes to close I want to ask I guess where this leaves the study of history because if you've if you've criticized historicism for believing perhaps too much in the predictive power of history that we can you know draw conclusions about the future from these stories we've told about the past does that mean that studying history is now left as just something we do because it's kind of it's fun and interesting but doesn't give us much more or is there still room to learn important valuable lessons from the study of history well I certainly find history fun and interesting I am often told however exactly opposite and I would say that the real lesson of history is that running societies is very very hard and the history of mankind in a lot of ways is the history of failed social experiments so I think if there is a lesson of history it is that we ought to be modest in our social engineering if we undertake any at all and that what we need to do is in fact allow people a space in their own lives to be the authors of their own lives and not to attempt to to guide or to push things in and what we may think is an inevitable direction that it needs to go most of history has been history of failure and that's you know in a way that's depressing but in a way that can be very liberating also I want to thank Jason for joining us today on Free Thoughts and I want to thank you for listening if you have any questions or comments about today's episode you can find me on Twitter at A Ross P that's A-R-O-S-S-P and you can find me on Twitter at T-C Burris T-C-B-U-R-R-U-S and I'm available on Twitter at Jason Kuznicki that's K-U-Z-N-I-C-K-I Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org in the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks. To learn more about Libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org