THE WORLD HISTORIANS
359
These two changes seem to the writer much more fundamental
than the question as to whether the whole process is to be regarded
as the development of an "idea" (mind, reason, various other
spiirtual entities), or as the development of either physical or
social "matter." Even the difference between the predominantly
idealist conception of history represented by all bourgeois philos·
ophers up to Hegel and the predominantly materialist conception
represented by Marx is hereby demoted to a secondary distinction.
In the 20th century both Hegelian idealism and Marxian material–
ism survived only for the purpose of mutual political vilification.
The new problems which are bound up with the concepts of history
and universal history arise, as will be shown later, from an entirely
different basis and must be solved in an entirely different manner.
Even less important today are the problems of a so-called
unrestricted " perfectibility" of the human race or society or of
any other noun connected with the adjective "human." In the same
category belong the slightly less obsolete problems of "progress,"
progressive (or retrogressive or mixed) "evolution," and of any
other essentially uni-linear development of a presupposed capacity
or potentiality striving to realize itself in the quasi-providential
course of the historical process. Even Hegel knew that "the general
thought-the category which first presents itself in this restless
mutation of individuals and peoples existing for a time and then
vanishing-is that of
change at large."
(
Op. cit., p. 75-6) In this
assertion he was joined one hundred years later by the forerunner
of present-day Nazi geopolitics, Friedrich Ratzel. In spite of his
general insistence on the laws of the external processes of history
(the laws of space, position, physical movements, "blood and
soil") rather than on those of an internal development, Ratzel was
still prepared to admit "one general law of internal development,
the law of
variation."*
The whole talk about a primarily internal
or a primarily external development results, in the last instance,
from an unwarranted generalization of one or another of the
specific forms in which oppositions and struggles arise in a particu–
lar society either from without or from within, in different phases
of its historical development.
All the characteristics of classical bourgeois world history
discussed so far can be regarded as attempts at an ideological com·
•Ratzel,
Raum und Zeit,
ed. Paul Barth, Leipzig (1907) p. 69.
