Universal history as primitive world history?
From the eighteenth century, existing ideas about universal history came to be seen as increasingly out of step with the specialised national research that accompanied the professionalisation of history teaching, research and writing.
Some accommodation was achieved through the production of multi-author, multi-volume universal history compendia or encyclopaedias, and some single-authored world histories continued. For example, right after the devastation of the First World War, and in part as a response to the slaughter, H. G. Wells (1866-1946) wrote The Outline of History, which readers could buy in cheap bi-weekly instalments, just as they had Wells' earlier novel The War of the Worlds, and millions did. In this, he explained that true universal history was defined in part by the ‘unity of presentation attainable only when the whole subject has been passed through one single mind’.11 It is assumed by many historiographical commentators that Wells’ efforts were akin to Canute’s attempt to defy the tide. In their view, universal history was a proto-world history that was ushered aside in the twentieth century as speculation was replaced by rigorous forms of analysis and a greater respect for primary evidence. Universal history, however, survives in many forms, such as philosophies of history (for example, Aron, The Dawn of Universal History, 1961; and Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 2002), compendia (UNESCO, History of Humankind, 1963), the fusion of science and history in the subfield of ‘big’ history (Spier, The Structure of Big History, 1996; and Christian, Maps of Time, 2004) and of course multi-volume overviews such as this.Universal history did not disappear in the twentieth century: it simply became one of a number of approaches to the writing of what was increasingly called ‘world history’. Roughly contemporary with Wells’ Outline of History were Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918-22), Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Arnold J.
Toynbee’s A Study of History (1932-61), Jawaharlal Nehru’s Glimpses of World History (1934), Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934), V. Gordon Childe’s Man Makes Himself (1936), Pitirim A. Sorokin’s Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937), Norbert Elias’ The Civilizing Process (1939), Jose Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), Mary Ritter Beard’s Woman as Force in History (1946), Karl Jaspers’ The Origin and Goal of History (1947), Ortega y Gasset’s An Interpretation of Universal History (1949) and Christopher Dawson’s The Dynamics of World History (1956). Though presenting a wide range of foci - psychological, religious, political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, archaeological and technological - an interest in the trajectories of civilisations spans these works. In Spengler’s view, for example, Western civilisation was ‘Faustian’ because the limitless ambition of its people was likely to be its downfall; similarly, when Toynbee began A Study of History, he detected a number of suicidal tendencies in Western civilisation. During the composition of volume six of twelve, however, he modified his view and concluded that the future would bring an age of universal churches or states of selflessness or compassion. It is worth wondering whether Niall Ferguson’s most recent works such as The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die (2013) are a continuation of the dystopic vision of the world promoted by Spengler. [14]
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