PARTISAN REVIEW
hold,
if
valid, for any historical period that can legitimately be regarded
as capitalistic. They would hold even if capitalism as a social system
were to disappear. Natural laws, too, hold under certain limiting condi–
tions which have a temporal character. But once these conditions are
stated, it becomes clear that the laws are not historical. The laws of
human growth would still remain valid even
if
the human race in .its
present form disappeared from the face of the earth.
It is interesting to note that Marx believed that there were social
laws so comprehensive in character that they held for all human societies.
But he regarded them as trivi,al from the point of view of his special
purposes which were to study the laws specific to capitalist production.
With justice he contended that Locke's conception of human behavior
universalized what was true only for capitalist societies. But at the same
time he himself erred in restricting the scope of some of the laws he
formulated to class societies as he defined them. "No ruling class volun–
tarily surrenders its power" holds not only for societies in which instru–
ments of production are privately owned but also for societies in which
they are nationalized.
A more legitimate conception of historical method calls attention
to
the fact that the explanatory categories of historical understand–
ing are purposive and social-that history cannot be "reduced" to
a chapter of physics or biology. But the purposes and traditions of
men to which we relate our historical explanations must be identified in
the same way as we identify other traits in nature and life, not through
a unique act of intuition but through publicly observable acts or what
can legitimately
be
inferred from such acts. But since human purposes
have conditions and efl\ cts that cannot be understood in terms of these
purposes, sometimes a physical or biological explanation will be a relevant
part of the answer to questions of history.
The broadest and the most difficult sense in which the historical
method is taken equates it with tracing the succession of historical ante–
cedents to any event that challenges explanation. The study of the
present as a continuation of the past out of which it has developed, the
uncovering of the genetic pattern which precedes the present, has been
laid down as a mandate for all significant historical inquiry. Not alone
to historians does it seem axiomatic that knowledge of the past is the
key to the understanding of the present. And yet examined more closely
this is a highly dubious proposition.
Tradition, for example, never ex–
plains the influence of tradition, why some traditions disappear, others
are modified, and new ones emerge.
Even in the field of folklore where
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