Mises, Ludwig von. Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution

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Chapter 9. The Concept of Historical Individuality

The Ultimate Given of History

THE HUMAN SEARCH for knowledge cannot go on end-

lessly. Inevitably, sooner or later, it will reach a point

beyond which it cannot proceed. It will then be faced

with an ultimate given, a datum that man's reason can-

not trace back to other data. In the course of the evolu-

tion of knowledge science has succeeded in tracing

back to other data some things and events which pre-

viously had been viewed as ultimate. We may expect

that this will also occur in the future. But there will al-

ways remain something that is for the human mind an

ultimate given, unanalyzable and irreducible. Human

reason cannot even conceive a kind of knowledge that

would not encounter such an insurmountable obstacle.

There is for man no such thing as omniscience.

In dealing with such ultimate data history refers to

individuality. The characteristics of individual men,

their ideas and judgments of value as well as the actions

guided by those ideas and judgments, cannot be traced

back to something of which they would be the deriva-

tives.

There is no answer to the question why Frederick

II invaded Silesia except: because he was Frederick II.

It is customary, although not very expedient, to call the

mental process by means of which a datum is traced

back to other data rational. Then an ultimate datum is

183

184 EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF HISTORY

called irrational. No historical research can be thought

of that would not ultimately meet such irrational facts.

Philosophies of history claim to avoid referring to in-

dividuality and irrationality. They pretend to provide a

thorough-going interpretation of all historical events.

What they really do is relegate the ultimate given to

two points of their scheme, to its supposed beginning

and its supposed end. They assume that there is at the

start of history an unanalyzable and irreducible agency,

for example Geist in the system of Hegel or the material

productive forces in that of Marx. And they further

assume that this prime mover of history aims at a

definite end, also unanalyzable and irreducible, for in-

stance the Prussian state of about 1825 or socialism.

Whatever one may think about the various systems of

philosophy of history, it is obvious that they do not

eliminate reference to individuality and irrationality.

They merely shift it to another point of their interpreta-

tion.

Materialism wants to throw history overboard en-

tirely. All ideas and actions should be explained as the

necessary outcome of definite physiological processes.

But this would not make it possible to reject any ref-

erence to irrationality. Like history, the natural sciences

are ultimately faced with some data defying any further

reduction to other data, that is, with something ulti-

mately given.

The Role of the Individual in History

In the context of a philosophy of history there is no

room left for any reference to individuality other than

CONCEPT OF HISTORICAL INDIVIDUALITY 185

that of the prime mover and his plan determining the

way events must go. All individual men are merely tools

in the hand of ineluctable destiny. Whatever they may

do,

the outcome of their actions must necessarily fit into

the preordained plan of Providence.

What would have happened if Lieutenant Napoleon

Bonaparte had been killed in action at Toulon? Friedrich

Engels knew the answer: "Another would have filled the

place/' For "the man has always been found as soon as he

became necessary/'* Necessary for whom and for what

purpose? Obviously for the material productive forces to

bring about, at a later date, socialism. It seems that the

material productive forces always have a substitute at

hand, just as

cautious opera manager

has

an understudy

ready to sing the tenor's part in case the star should

catch a cold. If Shakespeare had died in infancy, an-

other man would have written Hamlet and the Sonnets.

But, some people ask, how did this surrogate while

away his time since Shakespeare's good health relieved

him from this chore?

The issue has been purposely obfuscated by the

champions of historical necessity, who confused it with

other problems.

Looking backward upon the past, the historian must

say that, all conditions having been as they were, every-

thing that happened was inevitable. At any instant the

state of affairs was the necessary consequence of the

immediately preceding state. But among the elements

determining any given state of historical affairs there

Letter to Starkenburg, Jan. 25, 1894, Karl Marx and Friedrich

Engels, Correspondence 1846-1895 (London, M. Lawrence, Ltd.,

1934),

p. 518.

186 EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF HISTORY

are factors that cannot be traced back further than to

the point at which the historian is faced with the ideas

and actions of individuals.

When the historian says that the French Revolution

of 1789 would not have happened if some things had

been different, he is merely trying to establish the forces

that brought about the event and the influence of each

of these forces. Taine did not indulge in idle specula-

tions as to what would have happened if the doctrines

that he called Tesprit revolutionnaire and I'esprit das-

sique had not been developed. He wanted to assign to

each of them its relevance in the chain of events that

resulted in the outbreak and the course of the Revolu-

tion.

A second confusion concerns the limits drawn upon

the influence of great men. Simplified accounts of his-

tory, adapted to the capacity of people slow of compre-

hension, have presented history as a product of the feats

of great men. The older Hohenzollern made Prussia,

Bismarck made the Second Reich, William II ruined it,

Hitler made and ruined the Third Reich. No serious

historian ever shared in such nonsense. It has never

been contested that the part played even by the greatest

figures of history was much more moderate. Every man,

whether great or small, lives and acts within the frame

of his age's historical circumstances. These circum-

stances are determined by all the ideas and events of

the preceding ages as well as by those of his own age.

The Titan may outweigh each of his contemporaries;

Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine, 1, Bk. Ill

(16th ed. Paris, 1887), 221-328.

CONCEPT OF HISTORICAL INDIVIDUALITY 187

he is no match for the united forces of the dwarfs. A

statesman can succeed only insofar as his plans are ad-

justed to the climate of opinion of his time, that is to

the ideas that have got hold of his fellows' minds. He

can become a leader only if he is prepared to guide

people along the paths they want to walk and toward

the goal they want to attain. A statesman who antago-

nizes public opinion is doomed to failure. No matter

whether he is an autocrat or an officer of a democracy,

the politician must give the people what they wish to

get, very much as a businessmanraust supply the cus-

tomers with the things they wish to acquire.

It is different with the pioneers of new ways of think-

ing and new modes of art and literature. The path-

breaker who disdains the applause he may get from the

crowd of his contemporaries does not depend on his

own age's ideas. He is free to say with Schiller's Marquis

Posa: "This century is not ripe for my ideas; I live as a

citizen of centuries to come." The genius' work too is

embedded in the sequence of historical events, is condi-

tioned by the achievements of preceding generations,

and is merely a chapter in the evolution of ideas. But it

adds something new and unheard of to the treasure

of thoughts and may in this sense be called creative.

The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas.

It is ideas that distinguish man from all other beings.

Ideas engender social institutions, political changes,

technological methods of production, and all that is

called economic conditions. And in searching for their

origin we inevitably come to a point at which all that

can be asserted is that a man had an idea. Whether the

188 EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF HISTORY

name of this man is known or not is of secondary im-

portance.

This is the meaning that history attaches to the notion

of individuality. Ideas are the ultimate given of histor-

ical inquiry. All that can be said about ideas is that

they came to pass. The historian may point out how a

new idea fitted into the ideas developed by earlier gen-

erations and how it may be considered a continuation

of these ideas and their logical sequel. New ideas do

not originate in an ideological vacuum. They are called

forth by the previously existing ideological structure;

they are the response offered by a mans mind to the

ideas developed by his predecessors. But it is an arbi-

trary surmise to assume that they were bound to come

and that if A had not generated them a certain B or C

would have performed the job.

In this sense what the limitations of our knowledge

induce us to call chance plays a part in history. If Aris-

totle had died in childhood, intellectual history would

have been affected. If Bismarck had died in 1860, world

affairs would have taken a different course. To what ex-

tent and with what consequences nobody can know.

The Chimera of the Group Mind

In their eagerness to eliminate from history any ref-

erence to individuals and individual events, collectivist

authors resorted to a chimerical construction, the group

mind or social mind.

At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of

the nineteenth centuries German philologists began to

CONCEPT OF HISTORICAL INDIVIDUALITY 189

study German medieval poetry, which had long since

fallen into oblivion. Most of the epics they edited from

old manuscripts were imitations of French works. The

names of their authors—most of them knightly warriors

in the service of dukes or counts—were known. These

epics were not much to boast of. But there were two

epics of a quite different character, genuinely original

works of high literary value, far surpassing the conven-

tional products of the courtiers: the Nibelungenlied and

the Gudrun. The former is one of the great books of

world literature and undoubtedly the outstanding poem

Germany produced before the days of Goethe and

Schiller. The names of the authors of these master-

pieces were not handed down to posterity. Perhaps

the poets belonged to the class of professional enter-

tainers (Spielleute), who not only were snubbed by the

nobility but had to endure mortifying legal disabilities.

Perhaps they were heretical or Jewish, and the clergy

was eager to make people forget them. At any rate the

philologists called these two works "people's epics"

(Volksepen). This term suggested to naive minds the

idea that they were written not by individual authors

but by the "people." The same mythical authorship was

attributed to popular songs (Volkslieder) whose au-

thors were unknown.

Again in Germany, in the years following the Napo-

leonic wars, the problem of comprehensive legislative

codification was brought up for discussion. In this con-

troversy the historical school of jurisprudence, led by

Savigny, denied the competence of any age and any

persons to write legislation. Like the Volksepen and the

190 EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF HISTORY

Volkslieder, a nation's laws, they declared, are a spon-

taneous emanation of the Volksgeist, the nation's spirit

and peculiar character. Genuine laws are not arbitrarily

written by legislators; they spring up and thrive organ-

ically from the Volksgeist.

This Volksgeist doctrine was devised in Germany

as a conscious reaction against the ideas of natural law

and the "un-German" spirit of the French Revolution.

But it was further developed and elevated to the dig-

nity of a comprehensive social doctrine by the French

positivists, many of whom not only were committed to

the principles of the most radical among the revolu-

tionary leaders but aimed at completing the "unfin-

ished revolution" by a violent overthrow of the capital-

istic mode of production. Emile Durkheim and his

school deal with the group mind as if it were a real phe-

nomenon, a distinct agency, thinking and acting. As

they see it, not individuals but the group is the subject

of history.

As a corrective of these fancies the truism must be

stressed that only individuals think and act. In dealing

with the thoughts and actions of individuals the histo-

rian establishes the fact that some individuals influence

one another in their thinking and acting more strongly

than they influence and are influenced by other indi-

viduals. He observes that cooperation and division of

labor exist among some, while existing to a lesser extent

or not at all among others. He employs the term "group"

to signify an aggregation of individuals who cooperate

together more closely. However, the distinction of

groups is optional. The group is not an ontological en-

CONCEPT OF HISTORICAL INDIVIDUALITY 191

tity like the biological species. The various group con-

cepts intersect one another. The historian chooses, ac-

cording to the special plan of his studies, the features

and attributes that determine the classification of indi-

viduals into various groups. The grouping may integrate

people speaking the same language or professing the

same religion or practicing the same vocation or occu-

pation or descended from the same ancestry. The group

concept of Gobineau was different from that of Marx.

In short, the group concept is an ideal type and as such

is derived from the historian's understanding of the

historical forces and events.

Only individuals think and act. Each individual's

thinking and acting is influenced by his fellows' think-

ing and acting. These influences are variegated. The

individual American's thoughts and conduct cannot be

interpreted if one assigns him to a single group. He is

not only an American but a member of a definite reli-

gious group or an agnostic or an atheist; he has a job,

he belongs to a political party, he is affected by tradi-

tions inherited from his ancestors and conveyed to him

by his upbringing, by the family, the school, the neigh-

borhood, by the ideas prevailing in his town, state, and

country. It is an enormous simplification to speak of

the American mind. Every American has his own mind.

It is absurd to ascribe any achievements and virtues or

any misdeeds and vices of individual Americans to

America as such.

Most people are common men. They do not have

thoughts of their own; they are only receptive. They

do not create new ideas; they repeat what they have