Theories of History:-
There is no reason that I can think of that makes it necessary to make history a complicated subject, but strange thinking men have attempted to do just that, to make history into something that it is not; everything from the moving hand of God to that which resembles a living creature, metaphorically moving in a progressive way from stage to stage.
The biblical theory can best be briefly dealt with by quoting Leslie Stevenson of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland:
"When the Jews fail to obey God's laws, there comes the idea of God using the events of history, such as defeat by neighbouring nations, to chastise them for their sin (a theme which recurs throughout the histories and prophets in the Old Testament). And then there is the idea of God's merciful forgiveness, His blotting out of man's transgressions, and His regeneration of man and the whole of creation (Isaiah chapters 43-66)." [Seven Theories of Human Nature (Oxford University Press, 1987) at pp. 48-9.]
As the living creature theory: one of the strangest, and as it turned out the most destructive one, was the Hegelian theory of history. Hegel was a philosopher and his view was that there are fundamental laws which drive the development of a culture or a country; that a culture or a country has a kind of a personality of its own, and its development is to be explained in terms of its own character. In later years, a fellow German, Adolf Hitler, rose to this Hegelian bait, and through the Third Reich brought misery to millions of our fellow human beings.
Marx picked up on the Hegelian view and asserted that there were fundamental laws which drove the development of a culture or a country.3 These notions of historical development and of alienation were to play a crucial role in the thoughts of Marx. Marx had a deterministic view that all events (economic stages) come about as a result of the inevitable progress of history.4
Well, personally, I do not...