INTRODUCTION
The title of this book indicates its subject matter, not a special philosophy of history. It could with as much justice have been entitled “The Limits of the Hero in History.” That, too, would tell what the book is about and not what we believe about it. What we believe about it is detailed in the book. The reader is begged not to infer it from the title alone.
That history is made by men and women is no longer denied except by some theologians and mystical metaphysicians. And even, they are compelled indirectly to acknowledge this commonplace truth, for they speak of historical personages as “instruments” of Providence, Justice, Reason, Dialectic, the Zeitgeist, or Spirit of the Times. Men agree more readily about the consequences of the use of “instruments” in history than they do about the ultimate ends “instruments” allegedly serve, or the first causes by which they are allegedly determined.
Consequences are difficult to establish; human intentions more so. In principle, where there is a desire to know the truth, we can intelligently answer questions about our intentions. But there can be no scientific agreement about the intentions of capitalized abstractions and the determinations of first causes, for in respect to them we cannot make the same assumptions about meaning, evidence, and truth.
We know that the ravages of Attila accelerated the decline of the Roman Empire. We cannot be so sure as some of his pious victims that he was “the scourge of God;” nor altogether convinced, like some modern scholars, that he was the end effect of a chain of causes whose first link was forged in the climatic variations of China.
We know that Hitler gave the signal which plunged all the six continents of the world into war. It is doubtful that, as one initiate in God’s mysteries recently proclaimed. Hitler and other tyrants are “instruments of Divine Justice, chastening a people who had departed from the way of truth;” or, as others have it, that he is merely the result of the basic cause of our time of troubles—the failure to bring the social relations of production into line with the expanding forces of production.
Let men be instruments, if the metaphor is pleasing. But let it also be remembered that instruments may be used for various
