Henry Thomas Buckle
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 202nd anniversary of the birthday of Henry Thomas Buckle (24 November 1821–29 May 1862), who was born in London on this date in 1821. He died at only forty years of age in Damascus, Syria.
While largely forgotten today, Buckle gained reputation during his life and is sometimes called the Father of Scientific History. Lord Acton said that Buckle, “… is a gentleman who has had the rare fortune of jumping to celebrity at a bound, by the publication of an elaborate book on a profound subject.” This was written in 1858, while Buckle was still living. Acton summarized Buckle’s aims thusly:
“The object which he proposes to himself is, to prove that history may be reduced to a science. To comprehend the full meaning of this proposition we must ask, what is ‘history,’ and what is ‘science’? History is a generalised account of the personal actions of men united in bodies for any public purposes whatever; and science is the combination of a great mass of similar facts into the unity of a generalisation, a principle, or a law, which principle or law will enable us to predict with certainty the recurrence of like events under given conditions. Now, then, can there be a science of history? Can we ever arrive at such a complete knowledge of all the motives and laws of human conduct as to be able to predict with certainty of any bodies of men what their conduct in given circumstances will be? Mr. Buckle thinks we can. Not that he ever hopes to be able to predict the actions of individual men; but for men in masses, for humanity in general, for large races, for nations, he supposes that pretty close approximations may be arrived at. The ‘history’ which Mr. Buckle proposed to write is not history in general, nor history of such kind as biography, or accounts of families, but the special history of civilisation.”
Acton also tells us what he believes to be the fatal flaw in Buckle’s ambition:
“Mr. Buckle asserts that the moral actions of men depend on particular laws, to him unknown, which laws are in their operation antagonistic to the great laws that govern society. And elsewhere he says that the laws of society are the rule for the individual, the actions of men are regular because ‘they are governed by the state of the society in which they occur.’ Here, then, we see that there is a fundamental impossibility, because a self-contradiction, in Mr. Buckle’s method and system, when applied to anything beyond the limits to which he himself is conscious it should be confined. If he would really eliminate all the moral actions of men, all the ‘flux and reflux’ of society, all war and politics, from his speculations, and apply his theory to the ‘discoveries of genius’ and to the progressive knowledge and subjugation of nature alone, he would escape all contradiction. But if he insists on applying his method to history, in the usual acceptation of the word, we are forced to tell him that his pretensions are untenable. These pretensions may perhaps be traced to that characteristic which Socrates holds up to such ridicule in his speech in the Apologia. Every artisan, he says, because he is expert in his own art, thinks he knows every other art. The tendency of the intellect is to complete its own circle; whatever gaps a man finds in his knowledge are filled up by an unwarrantable stretching of the next subject which he knows. The whole system of positive philosophy is the work of under-educated, or half-educated men, adepts in physical science, but ignorant of the principles of any other, who insist that all science must have the same method as theirs, and that metaphysical realities must be measured and explained by physical laws. We state this to show that Mr. Buckle’s absurdities and dishonesties are not his own, but those of his school.”
In his day, then, even if Buckle did not persuade contemporaries like Acton, he was understood to be a figure to whom a response was due, if only to point out his follies. Not long after Buckle’s death, John S. Stuart-Glennie in his Pilgrim-memories: Or, Travel and Discussion in the Birth-countries of Christianity with the Late Henry Thomas Buckle (1875), recounted his travels with Buckle in Egypt, Sanai, Judea, Palestine, and Lebanon; Stuart-Glennie was with Buckle when he died. Stuart-Glennie writes that he had conceived a project not unlike Buckle’s, although focused on law. In the Preface of this book he describes what he takes to be both Buckle’s and his own motivation:
“But the discovery even of an Ultimate Law of History was not, with me, an end, but only a means. For, through all the weak or worldly sophisms of contemporary presentations of Christianity, it was clear that the backbone of it, as a religion, is a certain theory or philosophy of History. It was dear that this Christian Philosophy of History is opposed, in the very conceptions that are its bases, to that New Philosophy of History which, especially since Hume and Kant, it has been the great and variously labouring aim of Modem Science to construct. And, so, just as the Christian Synthesis of History has been, it appeared that a Scientific Synthesis of history — expressed in the characteristic scientific form of a Law — would be, in the moral or emotional presentation of it, an Ideal, a Religion. Clear it was, therefore, that the scientific inquirer who has for his aim the discovery of an Ultimate Law of History, must aim also, if he has a true consciousness of the nature of his task, at discovering what will alone be an adequate basis of that New Ideal rendered necessary by the incredibility now of the Christian theory of History. And clear also it was that, conversely, the religious inquirer who would gain a more satisfying Ideal than that Christian one which Science makes more and more incredible, must, if he has a true knowledge of the conditions of such an Ideal, aim, first of all, at the discovery of an Ultimate Law of History. And the second, therefore, of my three main objects in recording these Pilgrim-Memories is at the Holy Places themselves, to bring home to the reader the untenableness of the Christian theory of History, and so to prepare the way for that New Ideal which gradually dawns on us as we gain a glimpse of the Law of Progress, the Law of Human Development.”
This passage positions Buckle’s thought in the tradition of Hume and Kant, with this tradition in turn contrasted to providential philosophies of history such as we find in Augustine and Bossuet. This, then, is Buckle’s “school,” to which Acton alluded. Gilbert J. Garraghan, in his A guide to Historical Method, also places Buckle in the company of Marx:
“Buckle, and Marx, viewing history from an entirely materialistic angle, sought to reduce historical processes to the rigid uniformity characteristic of physical law. The attempt was futile, as must be any attempt that runs counter to nature; but the mirage of some ironclad law or laws, as yet undiscovered, that will unravel the skein of history and make its processes as clear as the solution of a geometrical problem, has still power to intrigue the unwary.”
Wilhelm Dilthey, while also differing from Buckle, gave a somewhat more sympathetic account of Buckle’s project:
“He asserts that among historians ‘a strange idea prevails, that their business is merely to narrate events, which they may occasionally enliven by such moral and political reflections as seem likely to be useful.’ He wants to transform history into an exact science, like natural history; he wants to demonstrate what is law-governed in historical events and thereby put himself in the position of predicting them. He expresses the conviction that the law of necessity, that is, a cause-and-effect relation, prevails universally in the realms of historical as well as of natural events; that we must conceive of each individual action as the inevitable effect of certain causes that for their part are in turn effects of other events; that consequently we must totally exclude chance as well as providence, or direct divine intervention from the sphere of history. The entire work rests on this basic idea: Only in relation to it do the work’s individual parts, which are joined together in rather motley arrangement, obtain any coherence and value. The reader’s judgment regarding the work will depend on the attitude he adopts toward this basic idea. I express my own judgment on the matter succinctly by saying that I consider this basic idea as correct in the abstract, but that because of the distinctiveness of the content of historical writing it can be useful only to a limited degree. Moreover, in his attempt to derive comprehensive conclusions from it Buckle is completely off the mark.” (Collected Works, Vol. IV, Hermeneutics and the Study of History, p. 262)
It is interesting here that Dilthey does not simply reject Buckle’s approach (as many would, and many have); rather, he finds its utility limited and Buckle’s conclusions wrongheaded. But the project itself he does not reject, implying that if the limitations were addressed and conclusions were revised, Buckle’s approach to history might be valuable.
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