An End to History: The Determinism Trap
Charles W. King
History is useful in policy-making for two reasons. First, it allows policy makers to better empathize with others and understand what and how they think, facilitating better assessments and strategies. Second, history can be predictive. Understanding how and why events happened in the past can allow historians and policy-makers to predict how events might play out in the future, to a limited extent. However this predictive value is dangerous, at its simplest it can lead to erroneous conclusions; that because events are similar they will produce the same results. At its worst it results in what the historical profession calls ‘Determinism’.
The two most famous examples of Determinism are Karl Marx’s works: The Manifesto of the Communist Party and Das Kapital, and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. While these works argue for differing end states for history, they both purport there to be an specific end point for human history. The dictatorship of the proletariat in Marx’s case, Western liberal democracy in Fukuyama’s. In Marx’s case such a dictatorship of the proletariat did not exist when he died in 1883, making his work almost purely predictive. Not only was it predictive, but Marx argued that his historical materialist approach showed that there was only one single possible outcome of human history: communism. That Western liberal democracies existed when Fukuyama published The End of History does not change the fact that he makes a similar argument: that the only possible outcome of human history is Western liberal democracy. Both authors have taken a step beyond using history as a method for understanding the human condition and current events or predict possible outcomes, and are claiming that there is only a single possible result of the human experience. This is determinism, and it is dangerous.
The craft of history relies on the concept that by investigating past events through primary and secondary sources, oral histories and other artifacts historians can better understand the past and present. It is much harder to do such investigations with a mind open to all the possibilities when the author believes in a specific outcome. In science this is the reason why double-blind studies are the norm for good scholarship. Both Marx and Fukuyama’s works have been examined by other scholars since their publication, and have been rightfully criticized for failures of scholarship.
When using history for policy-making determinism must be at the forefront of policy-maker’s minds. Belief in an inevitable result will result in an assessment of past and present events that is unduly colored. It is important to have a policy objective in mind when establishing policy and strategy. Ignoring historical events and how history affects the perspectives and motivations of others will result in policy that fails to accomplish its objective and weakens American standing. History has tremendous predictive utility—particularly some disciplines of history such as environmental and cliometric history. A historical work does not have to attempt to be predictive to be deterministic, but only to demonstrate a belief that history has a single possible result. Determinism leads to tunnel vision at best, willful ignorance at worst, and it results in bad history and worse policy.
Further Reading
Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, (London, UK: Workers' Educational Association, 1848).
Karl Marx , Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. The Process of Capitalist Production, (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr and Co., 1906).
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (New York, NY: Free Press, 1992).