History

The word history comes from the German verb “to happen.” History is more than a name for what has already happened, however. One must not think of history simply as the sum of all past events. History is a story about those events. According to Eric Voegelin, the historian selects events that show a pattern. History itself is obviously incomplete; nobody knows how it ends, so nobody can know its meaning. Nonetheless, historians can detect patterns such as patterns of social and political change. Leadership appears to be part of those patterns and therefore is an element within history.

This is not to suggest that historians all see the same pattern. For instance, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Voegelin made an effort to get away from the dominant view of history as a linear progression, from dark ages shrouded in myth toward enlightenment and ultimately some kind of future utopia. That pattern is simply inadequate, yet they disagreed among themselves about what to put in its place.

One reason for such disagreements is that historians begin from different assumptions. Hannah Arendt once explained that ancient history attempted to preserve the memory of human achievement against the ravages of time. Its subject matter tended to be extraordinary leadership worthy of preservation. In a world of fixed laws and unchanging nature, leadership was memorable and rare. Modern history takes a different approach. Because people tend to believe that nothing is fixed, modern historians attempt to describe the process by which things evolve. Leaders are part of a process. What they do is a process. The subject matter of modern history, therefore, is not the leader. Rather, it is the process in which leaders participate.

Since the eighteenth century, a number of historians have gone further, rejecting leadership because it is a guise for impersonal processes such as economic production, biological evolution, and disenchantment. Their creed is known as determinism.