Contingency and historical inevitability

Abstract

While secular historiography distances itself from eschatological claims about fate and the destined outcomes of the course of history, questions about the inevitability of historical developments or the contingency of historical events remain central to any theory of history. Contingency and historical inevitability are especially important because of the implicit normative claims about human spontaneity in relation to a deterministic account of historical forces on the one hand, and the plausibility of an explanatory historical narrative at all, which requires strong causal claims about forces that determine human behaviour and events, on the other. In this chapter, I trace the way these issues are negotiated by some crucial figures in the philosophy of history. After drawing on Theodor Adorno’s account of “natural-history” to lay out the importance of a historiographical method that allows for freedom both in history and in the present, I next turn to Kant, who speculates on the trajectory of humankind via a wager on nature’s ends. For Hegel, then, because the practice of history involves recognition of the norms that make giving a historical account possible, he gives a backwards-looking developmental account of history that borders on determinism towards the present. I conclude with Adorno and Horkheimers’s model of speculative history, where contingency and historical inevitability are explicitly thematized in order to make clear that what is at stake are the ways in which historical subjects might also consider themselves to be historical agents.