The further development and diversification of the labour process from savagery to our present civilisation has continued to transform his capacities and characteristics. Slave societies, the ancient mode of production, were formed as productive forces advanced, namely due to agriculture and its ensuing abundance which led to the abandonment of nomadic society. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. Some philosophers, for example, Vico (1668–1744), Herder (1744–1803) and Hegel (1770–1831), sought to discover an organizing theme, meaning, or direction in human history.

In accord with this principle, they turned to the objective realities of nature and society to explain the historical process. Man’s freedom comes not from arbitrary, wilful intervention in events, but from growing insight into the necessities of the objective, universal, contradictory processes of becoming. On a much higher level of social and scientific development, historical thought from the 17th to the 19th centuries tended to become polarised, as in Greece, between idealist and materialist modes of explanation.What bourgeois nation has not proclaimed in time of war that “God is on our side”, guiding its destiny? Hegel', wrote Marx, 'fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought …' [32] On the contrary, Marx contended, the engine of history was to be found in a materialist understanding of society - the productive process and the way humans labored to meet their needs. The proletariat, then, must seize power as the new revolutionary class in a dictatorship of the proletariat.

And after that, a Barth can come along and attack the thing itself, which in his circle has indeed been degraded to a mere phrase. Hegel brought forward the profound truth later developed by historical materialism that labour is imposed upon man as the consequence of his needs and that man is the historical product of his own labour. However, Hegel's contention, in Marx's view, that ideas or the 'spirit of the age' drive history was mistaken.Marxism builds on this insight that history is the result of the collective actions of multitudes, of mass effort extending over prolonged periods within the framework of the powers of production they have received and extended and the modes of production they have created, built up and revolutionised.

g. the capitalist mode of production is characterized by the polarization of society into capitalists and workers. Man made himself by acting upon nature and changing its elements to satisfy his needs through the labour process. Vico brings forward the class struggle in his interpretation of history, especially in the heroic age represented by the conflict between the plebeians and patricians of ancient Rome. Idealistic interpretations of history were promulgated and promoted by numerous theorists from Leibnitz to Fichte.These are the prime principles from which the rest of Marxist theory about the historical process is derived. He asserted at the beginning of the 18th century that since history, or “the world of nations”, had been created by men, it could be understood by its makers. An international team of experts both discuss the basis of their topic and present their own view, offering the reader a cutting-edge contribution while ensuring their chapters are of interest to both students and specialists in the field of historical theory and engaging with the very nature of historical thought, the metaphysics of historical existence, the politics of history-writing, and the intelligibility of the historical process. The low level of their productive powers, the immaturity of their economic forms, the narrowness of their activities and the meagreness of their culture and connections are evidenced in their extremely restricted views of the course of events.

Several centuries later Herodotus, the first anthropologist as well as the father of history, gathered valuable information on the customs of the Mediterranean peoples living in savagery, barbarism and civilisation. I Finley tells us in his introduction to The Greek Historians, believed that “human nature and human behaviour were—essentially fixed qualities, the same in one century as another”. Plato taught that there are “some natures who ought to study philosophy and to be leaders in the state; and others who are not born to be philosophers, and are meant to be followers rather than leaders”. A more widespread manifestation of this approach contrasts to the unthinking mob some upper stratum of the population as the exemplar of reason which alone can be entrusted with political leadership and power.For many centuries after the Greeks, scientific insight into the workings of history made little progress. The amount of historical knowledge possessed by extremely primitive minds may be gauged from the following observations made by the Jesuit father Jacob Baegert in his Account of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the California Peninsula written 200 years ago. The raw materials for genuine history-writing were first collected in the annals of the reigns and chronicles of kings in the river valley civilisations of the Near East, India and China.