The dialectics of history

The dialectics of history
(Coordinator Comment)

A few years ago an academic book made the best-seller list with the title "The End of History." For those who were among the super-rich, this was indeed good news.

But for the rest of us, and for all those who study history closely, like Galileo, we could have said under our breath, "And yet it does move." Galileo, the great astronomer, had just been forced by the Inquisition, under threat of torture and death, to recant his claim that the earth moves around the sun.

To understand how history moves, it is useful to understand the laws of cultural evolution, for which I have found the book, The Evolution of Culture by the anthropologist Leslie White, to be especially useful.

The German philospher Friedrich Hegel, tried to understand the laws by which history moves, and since then his ideas have been taken seriously by all those who seek to change history, including Karl Marx, the founder of the communist movement, who said "Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it."