THE WORLD HISTORIANS
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we must go back into the preceding centuries of European and
American thought. We have to show how illusory were the dreams
of the classical philosophers and historians of the bourgeois epoch
who imagined that in some way they were dealing with the Uni·
verse while all the time they dealt with an exceedingly small sector
of that Universe. Like their despised predecessors in an earlier
epoch and, in fact, like any isolated tribe in some remote or inac–
cessible corner of the earth, they mistook their own habitat for the
whole world. We must follow some of the intricate ways in which
they tried to make up for that secretly felt deficiency. We must
reveal the political, economic and social aims that were hidden
behind those ideological self-deceptions. We shall finally show the
various, and variously frustrated, attempts that were made during
the last phase to break through those barriers and to transform the
universal history of the bourgeois class of the West into a really
universal history.
1.
World history as it developed during the last two hundred
years was not an entirely new growth. The world historians of this
period are linked in one close line of descent to those inspired
scholars who during the first centuries of the Christian era had
drawn the outlines of a providential world history which was
further developed by a series of clerical historians from Augustine
in the 4th to Bossuet in the 17th century. The history of the pro–
gressive evolution of human society from the Stone Age, Primitive
Man or the Ape to the perfect freedom of reason, democracy or
socialism, as worked out by the latter-day philosophers, is nothing
but a secularized form of the "holy history" of their predecessors.
They had dealt with the same "universal" process as a progressive
unfolding of Christendom from Adam or Creation to the Last
Judgment; or, in a less Utopian mood, to the establishment of a
universal Catholic church.
The general acceptance of the arbitrary distinction between
a "medieval" and a "modern" type of universal history by the
bulk of present day "historians of history" is itself further proof
of the tendency of the bourgeois newcomers to contrast their own
new "universe" with the assumedly more restricted concepts of the
so-called "Dark Ages." We note this tendency at the very begin-
