The Engine of History

On Messi, Mises, Marx... and the Rest of Us

“New ideas and innovations are always the achievement of uncommon men.”

~ Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (1949)

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...

What is the engine of history? What drives a civilization forward? And how will we know if we ever “get there”?

Each generation has its theories, of course... its competing conjectures... crackpot hypotheses and its lunatic explanations.

But which ideas are worth guarding... and which are better jettisoned?

These thoughts and more were rattling around your editor’s caffeinated cranium as we strolled along our favorite avenue yesterday, the grand Avenida Libertador, after a particularly riveting World Cup football match.

Generally speaking, we don’t care much for team sports. There’s plenty of hooting and hollering and macho showboating on display in modern politics... and there we only pay attention as a kind of occupational hazard.

But here in South America, futbol (soccer) is less a simple game and more a way of life... one that occasionally borders on the religious.

Thus, it is impossible not to be swept along in the pomp and ceremony when, every four years, the mundial comes around, with all its attendant customs, anthems, superstitions and cast of larger-than-life characters.

When the Argentine team scores, for example, all the portenos rush to their balconies to wave the national flag, La Albiceleste, and to sing and dance in a kind of citywide communion.

Of course, when the other team scores... the place is quiet as a crypt.

And so it was that yesterday afternoon, during the match against Egypt, Buenos Aires was as silent as its famous Recoleta Cemetery... for 75 harrowing minutes. You could have robbed a bank... or walked the streets in your birthday suit... and not a single one of the 15 million souls who call the capital home would have noticed.

All eyes were on the game, where the fate of a nation seemed to hang by a bootlace...

The Hand of History

But let us turn our attention back to history... its movers and shakers... its great men and grand causes... and the question of what drives it on.

For the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, the engine of history resides in the contradictions inherent within ideas themselves. Every concept, Hegel reckoned, contains tensions that eventually reveal its own limitations, thereby setting in motion a process he famously called the dialectic.

Civil society, Hegel argued, naturally generates these tensions. Think individual liberty and collective obligation, for example. As each contradiction is resolved (say, through constitutional freedom), it is not simply eliminated but rather sublated into a richer conception of freedom. That resolution, in due course, then becomes the starting point for a new dialectical process, and so on and so forth...

Thus does history advance according to Hegel, each resolution revealing new tensions to be reconciled in turn. This process, he thought, occurs necessarily and immanently, which is to say, it comes “from within.”

It is, in a sense, history “reasoning with itself.”

“But wait!” we hear you rejoin, “where is the individual in all this?”

Good question, dear reader! We thought that one might come up...

As Hegel saw it, individuals are less the authors of history than they are the vehicles through which the collective World Spirit (or Geist) gradually realizes itself. When he famously referred to Napoleon as the “World Soul on horseback,” for example, he was thinking of him not as the playwright… but merely as a gifted actor, playing his part.

Dazzling... alluring... confusing... the notion of a World Spirit was appealing to many, but a little squirrely for some.

A Diabolical Dialectic

Karl Marx, for example, admired Hegel’s dialectical method but rejected its idealist foundations. And so, through his own kind of philosophical inversion, he rather immodestly claimed to have turned Hegel “right side up.”

Where Hegel believed ideas moved history... Marx insisted that material conditions did the heavy lifting. Where Hegel suggested consciousness shaped society... Marx argued it was the other way around. And where Hegel placed the dialectic in thought itself... Marx relocated it to the material world, where he saw it playing out through the endless drudgery of class struggle.

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,” Marx wrote (with Engels) in The German Ideology, “but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

A man who never met a horse before which he did not wish to place a carriage, nor one who looks said gift horse in the mouth, Marx gladly retained Hegel’s dialectical engine... but swapped the motive force.

Alas, the essential architecture remained… history’s principal actors were still collective rather than individual. Hegel’s World Spirit disappeared, only to be replaced by Marx’s historical classes. The metaphysics had changed, in other words, but the essential collectivism still remained.

And so the world inherited Marx’s dialectical materialism, a diabolical philosophy of history into which universities, political institutions, governments, and even entire nations disappeared for generations, surrendering individual agency to the march of “historical necessity.”

“Yes, yes… ” we hear our gentle reader nudge. “But enough of mystical ‘World Spirits’ and class struggles! Get to the individual!”

My, my... aren’t we testy today! Okay then...

While both Hegel and Marx described history in fundamentally collective terms... others advanced the idea that it actually came down to individual human beings acting purposefully who shape the course of history.

One such thinker was Ludwig von Mises…

Human Action

Society doesn’t think, Mises boldly insisted. Only individuals think... and therefore, only individuals act. To be sure, individuals often act together. “There is joint action,” Mises readily acknowledged, “but no joint thinking.”

Nations don’t choose; classes don’t decide; history doesn’t possess a “mind of its own.” At least, not one separate and detached from the individuals that comprise it.

Nor, Mises argued, is there any predetermined destiny that history is attempting to realize, whether through class struggles or unholy ghosts or any other philosophical prestidigitation. Economics can (and does!) discover universal laws of human action, he asserted, but history itself unfolds through the purposive choices of individuals, not according to any deterministic script or teleological endgame.

History is not “reasoning with itself” after all. It possesses no predetermined destination, no discoverable telos. It is, rather, the accumulated consequence of billions of purposeful individual choices... the “ultimate given of history,” as Mises himself put it.

So where does this leave the so-called “great men” of the ages? Does Mises allow room for, say, a Milei... or even a Messi?

And how do such individuals take their place on history’s grand stage, for better or for worse?

This we reckoned over on the stroll home, simultaneously swept along by the celebratory crowd, while passing statesmen in bronze and marble lining the grand avenue...

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman