THE RESURGENCE OF HISTORICAL LAWS.(Review)

THE IDEA that history trundles along according to inexorable laws is widely thought to have had its day. The schemes of Hegel, Marx and Comte--and of a host of lesser lights such as Henry Thomas Buckle--have, it is claimed, long since ganged agley. History no more feels bound to follow the tracks carefully prescribed for it than does a New South Wales Railways train.

It is surprising, then, to come across a recent work which ably presents a case for the existence of such general laws for both human history and biological evolution. Indeed, Robert Wright argues so well for that position in his recent Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny as to require a re-examination of the now classical arguments against it. In the following I shall not, except in passing, say what such laws might be, and nor will I be providing a review of Wright's book so much as a sort of Lockean underlabourer response provoked by it whereby the modest task is attempted of clearing some of the rubbish in the way of enquiry in this area.

The rake I shall use to this end is provided by John Anderson's claim (for example in his 1954 lectures on "Criticism") that the obstacles to sociological and historical enquiry often involve persistent logical-metaphysical mistakes about very general categorial matters such as causality, generality and particularity and so on--although I do not guarantee to stick closely to Anderson's own account of the categories. (For an account of Anderson's social theory and a working out of his position, see A.J. Baker's two works: Anderson's Social Theory and Social Pluralism.)

I should add that an assumption underlying my discussion is that human history and evolutionary history have important features in common, sufficiently so to enable and justify taking them together in the sort of general discussion I envisage. I recognise, though, that there are also important differences between the two which are liable to show up as we consider details which might be of fundamental importance to the discussion of the possibility of historical or evolutionary laws. Especially, recognition of the existence of consciousness and language in our species might make all the difference to that discussion so that, for example, the reality of laws might be denied for human history yet affirmed, or at least the issue left open, for evolution up to the origin of Homo sapiens or thereabouts. Also important, so I suspect, are the findings of evolutionary psychology (sociobiology) in so far as they suggest certain constancies in human social behaviour no matter at what stage of history this occurs. My excuse for not getting down to these immensely important details is that the underlabouring general discussion is sorely needed in its own right and--here I come dangerously close to what might be generically designated as the politician's or hangman's excuse--someone has to do it.

In trying to get at the categorial matters bound up with the possibility of historical or evolutionary laws it will be useful to look at some of the more influential arguments against that possibility. Of these perhaps the simplest, the most influential and, for our purposes, the most revealing consists in the assertion (for it is often little more than that) that history is unique. "The evolution of life on Earth or of human society, is a unique historical process," is how Sir Karl Popper put it in his The Poverty of Historicism. Here, just barely in the background and pressing forward, we come across a categorial issue because this use of the notion of "uniqueness" evidently relates to the categorial pair particularity/generality and especially to the particularity bit of the duo. The unique is the but once-appearing particular, the never to be repeated occurrence.

But, the categorial question now unabashedly in the open, we see that, despite the obvious truth of Popper's claim that laws concern generalities, the assertion of uniqueness establishes nothing against the possibility that unique objects can be brought under laws. For nothing in our universe is purely particular-uniquely unique, so to speak. Everything whatsoever--with the possible exception(s) of the God of negative theology and the differance of Derrida--is an individual with its own particularity (its own space-time location and character) and also with general features in common with other objects or individuals. My love is a particular and red, red roses are in their turn particulars yet none of this stops all these things having beauty in common as if somehow blocking off the truth of "My love is like a red, red rose".

The case is similar with that darling of the postmodernist set, the categorial identity/difference pair with which the concept of uniqueness also connects and where to refer to identity is not to rule out difference or vice versa. This is to make the point that categorial "dualities" are not contraries, that attribution of one of a pair of them (for example, cause) to a thing does not, and cannot, rule out attribution of the other (for example, effect). Categorial pairs are not made up of contrary properties, like roundness and squareness attributed to the same figure, because in that sense they are not properties at all. (For those with the patience I have tried to make more of this point in my "The Law of the Exclusive Muddle", Australian Journal of Anthropology, 1993, Special Issue 1.)