What Drives World History?

When lecturing on the philosophy of history in the early 1820s, German philosopher Georg Hegel remarked astutely that with regard to historical development, theory always comes late to the party.  Hegel’s point, which he explained as a metaphor about a German owl leaving for its nightly hunt hours after dusk, was that the construction of a theoretical model of history always looks backward.  Hegel has been called the ‘most materialist philosopher of idealism’ by some, but his perspectives on historical agency and theory became the foundation of world-history according to Ranajat Guha.  As demonstrated by later scholars and philosophers—including Marx, Dunyavskaya, Braudel, Wallerstein, Lughod, Arrighi, and Chakrabarty—a historically materialist conception of history does not necessarily have to remain “economically materialist” in the most strict sense.  World-history is driven by a series of material and ideal factors; including, but not limited to, the expansion of world-economic systems from material bases of society as well as the cultivation of national identities, the permeation of culture and belief, as well as social ideologies to conform with material conditions.  The strengths of certain models and theories can naturally synthesize to demonstrate, as Jairus Banaji has argued, that theory must reflect the history as opposed to merely explain and frame it.  Synthesizing models can further develop a 21^st century materialist conception of history that accepts the dynamism of cultural and social movements while retaining a strong emphasis on the material base of society.

Economic materialism, also known by other variants such as structuralist Marxism, had its roots in Marx’s early philosophical writings on historical causality and the anarchist writings of Proudhon.  Elaborated on lightly in philosophical essays from the 1840s, Marx exemplified his class analysis of history with The Communist Manifesto and examined the economic relationships of class in Capital Volumes I-III.  In Capital, Marx discussed crises of historical development, which extend from economic contradictions in production, exchange, and the reproduction of daily life.  Pinpointing such tendencies such as the necessity for productive expansion as well as a falling profit rate over time, Marx concluded that capitalism created its own boundaries and limits.  This perspective contributed to much discussion on the role of class as the vehicle by which history is driven, on a road where the nation-state passes by as another actor.  One of the most influential world historians to follow in the footsteps of Marx also favored deconstructing Hegel’s statehood thesis, Fernand Braudel.

When discussing the importance of a new avenue of studying history that expands beyond the nation-state, Braudel emphasized that his longue durée was a reworking of Marx’s early perspectives on history.  Long durations, and the examination of material bases, Braudel contended, was Marx’s ‘just milieu’.  Braudelian schools of thought expand on the Hegelian conception of world-history by negating Hegel’s statehood thesis—the notion that a nation, or a state, provides the only foundation for the prose of historical argument.  In detracting from this approach, Braudel is what Raya Dunayevskaya would later describe as a humanist.  For Braudel, world-history emphasized geographic space and the interconnection of peoples across said space.  Braudel’s seminal work on The Mediterranean extrapolated this perspective by examining a geographic region and the socioeconomic centers of Southern Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa. 

Two main strengths can be identified from Braudelian approaches, the first being the break with the model of Eurocentrism established by Hegel’s statehood thesis.  Dunayevskaya would later call for a ‘return to Hegelian theory’ in the 1980s, but using the logic of Braudel: for her, Braudel synthesized the positive aspects of Hegelian dialectical theory while negating the unnecessary and superficial identities of statehood as a condition for historical agency.  The second major strength of Braudelian approaches to world-history is the emphasis on people and trade; these forms of history unearth levels of analysis that would be unimaginable in an examination of the history of a state.  This more humanist approach necessitates a longue durée and the histories of smaller elements; such as specific commodity production, economic power shifts, as well as the ongoing role of cities in the modern period.  As would be expected, however, no approach to world-history is perfect.

The largest deficiency in Braudelian approaches to world-history is applicability in the classroom.  Thomas Bender explained quite well that to abandon the nation as holding a central role in world-history is to make the same mistake as focusing agency only on the nation.  Particularly in the contemporary period, the nation-state plays a fundamental role in the enforcement and production of national ideologies, defense and war-making, and enforcement of trade agreements.  As demonstrated by both Bender as well as other scholars such as Giovanni Arrighi, the 20^th century would be an incomplete history without an analysis of the role and influence of nations.  Students of history would have a hard time dealing with the broad conceptualizations across geographic space while ignoring the national and cultural identities shared by the peoples discussed.  A less important, but still noteworthy, deficiency in Braudelian theory is the lack of an overall model or framework for contextualizing world-history—which extends from abandoning the Hegelian model but not replacing it.  It did not take long, however, for newer ideas to synthesize out of Braudelian schools to produce such models.

Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of world-systems attempted to build on Braudelian thought to contextualize a framework for historical development, with an economic base.  Acutely focused on capitalism as a world-economic system, Wallerstein set out to analyze the formation of what he termed the ‘modern’ world-system with the rapid advancement of agricultural technology in the late 15^th and 16^th centuries (dubbed the Long 16^th Century).  The model which emerged by the 17^th century was a hegemonic system with a capitalist Core, located in Northwestern Europe, a precapitalist semi-peripheral located in Western Asia and the Americas, and a semifeudal periphery in the colonizing Third World.  At first glance, Wallerstein’s work appears to be an intellectual reworking of Marx’s materialist conception of history; which also emphasized the origin of capitalism with agriculture in the 16^th century.  Upon closer note, however, Wallerstein does not utilize a strict class analysis nor does he rely on what Sam Gindin called the fallbacks of traditional Marxism:  falling rates of profit, and necessity for productive expansion.  Instead, Wallerstein identified economic pressures as the incentives for historical change.  The limitations of feudal production in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, for example, did not hurt the lower classes the most; instead, it most economically disadvantaged the well-to-do peasants and landowners, who then found incentive to invest in agricultural technology and expand the physical and productive capacities of their economic systems.

World-systems theory emphasizes two central points, both of which have their strengths and weaknesses.  First, Wallerstein necessitates at least some agency with the state:  It is the state, he contends, which facilitates the means by which capital accumulation can occur.  Without laws to protect investments, enforce rent laws, and patent commodities, there would be ‘no incentive’ for producers to engage in large-scale production that would produce miniscule profits.  This emphasizes Bender’s point about the inability to negate the state’s role in world-history, but it also binds world-history to specific forms of nation-states.  The ‘modern world-system’ model is ‘modern’ in the sense that it is hegemonic, and that the ‘modern’ European world is in the commanding heights.  Secondly, Wallerstein also emphasizes a fixed model of world-economies—a three-tiered hierarchy that can only exist on a world-scale.  This is extremely useful in classroom settings, as it helps to break down post-French Revolutionary world-history into First, Second, and Third worlds for students to then explore the input/output pressures between each.  It is also a difficult model to accept because of its perceived inflexibility, which scholars Arrighi and Lughod both addressed as follow-ups to Wallerstein’s work.  In Lughod’s words, Wallerstein’s formation-based approach lacks the dynamism of world-history.  Lughod instead preferred a ‘restructuring’ approach to describing the succession of world-economies. 

Eric Hobsbawm developed Marx’s class analysis into an intellectual attempt to explain the development and supremacy of capitalist class relations following the French Revolution in 1789 and the English industrial revolution of the 1830s and 40s.  To Hobsbawm, the French Revolution succeeded in ending the formal class relations of the previous era but failed to erect a new material basis for society.  Instead, coupled with the rise of large-scale industrial production in the 1830s, new class relationships emerged to fit Marx’s depiction of a bifurcated capitalist world between proletarians and bourgeoisie.  To explain the causality of said developments, Hobsbawm utilizes Marx’s ‘crises thesis’ as a crux—insisting that shifts in specific relations to production coincide directly with either an expansion of productive capacity or the offsetting of lost profit rates.  Charles Breunig criticized Hobsbawm’s approach for lacking alternative explanations.  Hobsbawm’s economic materialism failed to explain, Breunig contended, the importance of generating a national identity and ideology to reify and explain the development of new class relationships.  Whereas for Hobsbawm the failure of the anticapitalist 1848 revolts resulted from the entrenchment of power by upper classes, Breunig identified the role of ideology and nationalism as social tools which divided class groups.  Michael Adas as well explained the difficulty in focusing on class, since it ignored the large extent to which ideology and national consciousness drove the everyday interactions of people within a society.  The strength of economic materialism lay in its simplistic approach to historical causality; almost as simple as merely replacing Hegel’s statehood thesis with a “classhood thesis.”  In the classroom, it most certainly would provide an easy model to frame causality.  Its weakness however lay with a tendency to revert to structuralist explanations for development, and a failure to see the dynamism of class interaction within a nation.

Scholars of 21^st century historical materialism, such as Banaji, Leo Pantich, Gindin, and David McNally, have since taken cue from Dunayevskaya to reinterpret the role of the Hegelian dialectic with respect to world-history.  The largest weakness of the materialist conception of history, according to Pantich and Gindin, is its tendency to extrapolate theory as laws of historical change—such as insisting that an end to capitalism necessitates the rise of socialism.  According to Banaji, the theories developed through historical analysis must reflect the socioeconomic material realities of the periods and people discussed.  Banaji thus takes issue with concrete models such as world-systems and Hobsbawm’s class analysis; they fail to account for the dynamic composition of capitalist and peripheral societies, which are made up of more than simply two class groups, or three economic spheres.  Class analysis, Banaji and McNally both point out, cannot explain the rise of Islam as a major factor in the development of Western hegemony in the 13^th century nor the rise of Locke’s theory of universal monetary values in 17^th century Britain.  This more humanist historical materialism should be seen as a synthesis of past models and approaches, including examining the importance and dynamism between economic conditions and political/national ideals, while retaining the philosophical foundation of materialism.  The largest drawback of 21^st century historical materialism (humanist Marxism) is that it is relatively new.  It does not have enough scholars to fill in the gaps or engage in a revisionist endeavor against previous class-based and economically materialist works.

World-history is not driven by any one particular factor—class, statehood, ideology.  It is rather a dynamic sway between the relations of all these agencies.  As Dunayevskaya described it, the conditions of a society set the boundaries for its ideals, but its ideals nevertheless have the capacity to force individuals to transform their social conditions.  A humanist historical materialism helps to illuminate this, but the field is burgeoning and growing.  Nevertheless, the Braudelian, Wallersteinian, and Hobbsian approaches provide a foundation for the ongoing development of a world historical consciousness and historicity.