Theories of history and why they are false

By Matthew Parish

Friday 6 November 2026

In December 1991 the people of Ukraine were asked whether they wished to live in an independent country. A majority voted in favour in every region, including Crimea. Three decades later Vladimir Putin maintained that Russians and Ukrainians were one people. There are many ways of disputing his reading of the past, but the referendum poses a particularly awkward difficulty for it. Even if every historical claim he made about the kinship of the two peoples were granted, by what reasoning could it dispose of the question on the ballot paper?

The temptation to settle a political question by consulting history is an old one. It appeals especially to politicians who would like their opponents to understand that they have already lost. An opponent who disputes a policy may have to be answered. An opponent who stands in the way of history can be treated with the indulgence one reserves for a man who has misread the railway timetable. The train will come in any case.

Karl Popper devoted a short book, The Poverty of Historicism, to the intellectual claim underlying this habit. By historicism he meant the belief that the principal business of the social sciences is to discover the laws of historical development and thereby to predict the course of human affairs. His objection was admirably economical. What people will do depends in part upon what they will come to know. If we could set down today the substance of a discovery to be made twenty years hence, we should have made the discovery today. A science that could foretell the course of civilisation would therefore require, amongst its other accomplishments, that we already possess knowledge which we have yet to acquire.

Much ordinary historical reasoning survives this objection perfectly well. A government can estimate how long its stocks of ammunition will last at the present rate of expenditure. Indeed it had better do so. The estimate gives ministers a reason to place an order, whereupon the date on which the ammunition runs out will change. Here a prediction has earned its keep precisely because somebody acted to prevent its fulfilment. Imagine, by contrast, a minister assuring parliament that industrial capacity must ultimately decide a war. Parliament would still need to know who had ordered the shells, from which factories, and when they were due to arrive.

Popper pursued the philosophical ancestry of historicism in The Open Society and Its Enemies, where he gave Hegel and Marx a rather rougher hearing. For Hegel, world history disclosed a development in the consciousness of freedom. There was more subtlety in this proposition than Popper sometimes allowed. Hegel’s famous owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk. The philosopher comes to understand a form of political life when it has already matured. There is a considerable distance between discerning a pattern in retrospect and claiming to know what must happen next. Yet even a retrospective philosophy carries a political danger. Once a state has prevailed, it is remarkably easy to discover the historical reasons why it had to prevail. The people whose institutions it extinguished seldom enjoy the same opportunity to explain their necessity.

Marx brought the argument down to the factory floor. Ownership, wages and the organisation of production gave his account of political conflict a substance that appeals to the spirit of an age often lack. An employer who owns the mill and a worker who must sell his labour enter a negotiation on unequal terms. One can investigate that proposition, dispute its application or legislate in light of it. The difficulty comes with the further claim, hardened into doctrine in Soviet dialectical materialism, that the contradictions of one economic order must produce its appointed successor. What result could oblige a believer to reconsider? A revolution confirms the theory. A prosperous decade without a revolution can be entered in the books as a temporary stabilisation before the next crisis. A doctrine so generously insured against disappointment offers remarkably little guidance to anyone obliged to make a decision on Tuesday.

Few contemporary politicians read Hegel, and fewer still would thank anyone for calling them dialectical materialists. Nevertheless the habit of recruiting history to a party cause has prospered on both sides of the Atlantic. On the American left, Barack Obama often invoked the long arc of the moral universe bending towards justice. In the civil rights tradition from which he drew, the image expressed a faith that sustained people who had excellent grounds for discouragement. In the mouth of a victorious party it can acquire a more comfortable meaning. Consider how differently the same words fall upon the ear of a woman preparing to register voters in a hostile county and upon that of a party official explaining why younger generations will eventually deliver him a majority. The first has work in hand. The second may find in the metaphor an excellent reason to go home early.

Donald Trump supplied the corresponding image of national restoration when he opened his second inaugural address with the declaration that “the golden age of America begins right now”. The attraction of America First lies partly in its apparent simplicity. Yet an American manufacturer who wants protection against imported steel and another who wants affordable steel for the machinery he exports can subscribe to it with equal conviction. A president must choose between them and account for the cost. Announcing a golden age in advance makes that accounting harder. A factory closure can always be described as the last injury inflicted by the old order, while a factory opening belongs to the new one. The calendar alone can scarcely tell us which administration deserves the credit.

In Ukraine these distinctions have had practical consequences. Before the full-scale invasion, a comparison of the two countries’ resources furnished serious grounds for anxiety. Treated as a verdict upon Ukraine’s prospects, the same comparison encouraged the conclusion that assistance might be wasted. Yet the value of assistance was one of the very things the comparison could never settle. A government deciding whether to supply air defence was itself in a position to change what happened next. The comforting conviction that democracies ultimately prevail could excuse precisely the same delay. From a city waiting for the equipment, the difference between the two philosophies would be difficult to detect.

Popper preferred reforms whose consequences citizens could examine and whose authors they could remove. There is a certain modesty in this, although it demands considerably more courage of a politician than announcing the dawn of an era. A minister who says that a measure will bring down the price of electricity by winter has given the public both a date and a means of judging him. The herald of national rebirth can defer the reckoning for as long as an audience will listen.

The modesty extends to the study of history itself. Ukraine’s referendum had causes, amongst them memories of repression, the collapse of Soviet authority and the patient work of people who had kept the idea of independence alive. Historians can argue about the weight of each. What deserves preserving in their account is the moment when millions of citizens, with different memories and different hopes, were handed a ballot paper. There was a question on it. They were entitled to answer either way. Much of Ukraine’s subsequent history turns upon the answer they gave, and upon the extraordinary lengths to which a neighbouring state has gone to deprive that answer of its force.