But neither school doubted that history, like nature, was subject to general laws which the philosopher of history was obligated to find.

Hegel could not provide a satisfactory theory of social evolution and the materialists did not penetrate to the most basic moving forces of history. This is confirmed by the fact that “the longest and most explicit Assyrian royal inscriptions—were embedded in the substructure of a temple or a palace, safe from human eyes and only to be read by the deity to whom they were addressed”. Every type of state is a powerful institution of the ruling class; the state is an instrument which one class uses to secure its rule and enforce its preferred relations of production and its exploitation onto society.As envisaged by Hegel, this freedom was not realised through the emancipation of mankind from oppressive and servile social conditions but from the overcoming of false, inadequate ideas. Marx locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. To Marx, the higher-stage of communist society is a free association of producers which has successfully negated all remnants of capitalism, notably the concepts of states, nationality, sexism, families, alienation, social classes, money, property, commodities, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, division of labor, cities and countryside, class struggle, religion, ideology, and markets.

This superstructure not only has its origin in the economic base, but its features also ultimately correspond to the character and development of that economic base, i. Most persistent is the view that history in the last analysis has been determined by the qualities of human nature, good or bad. They were followed by a series of materialists in France in the 18th century such as Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Claude Adrien Helvétius, and Baron d'Holbach. Mary Fulbrook argues that all historians face key theoretical questions, and that an emphasis on the facts alone is not enough.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. Hegel approached all historical phenomena from the standpoint of their evolution, seeing them as moments, elements, phases in a single creative, cumulative, progressive and ceaseless process of becoming. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. That is to say, we all laid, and were bound to lay, the main emphasis, in the first place, on the derivation of political, juridical and other ideological notions, and of actions arising through the medium of these notions, from basic economic facts.

Historical theory is a coherent yet flexible framework which supports the analysis of historical knowledge, and assists our understanding of what kind of knowledge we can have of the past, and precisely how that knowledge is constructed, assembled, and presented.We are best acquainted with the one in Genesis which ascribes the making of heaven and earth with all its features and creatures to a Lord God who worked on a six-day schedule. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. 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. But they remained unable to uncover the fundamental determinants which led to the reconstruction and replacement of property relations as well as political forms.