UNDERSTANDING AND POLITICS
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can be concealed in the application of general categories to the whole
course of happenings, such as challenge and response, or in the search
for general trends which supposedly are the "deeper" strata from
which events spring and whose accessory symptoms they are. Such
generalizations and categorizations extinguish the "natural" light
history itself offers and, by the same token, destroy the actual story,
with its unique distinction and its eternal meaning, that each his–
torical period has to tell us. Within the framework of preconceived
categories the crudest of which is causality, events in the sense of
something irrevocably new can never happen; history without events
becomes the dead monotony of sameness, unfolded in time-Lucretius'
eadem sunt omnia semper.
Just as in our personal lives our worst fears and best hopes will
never adequately prepare us for what actually happens, because the
moment even a foreseen event takes place, everything changes, and
we can never be prepared for the inexhaustible literalness of this
"everything," so each event in human history reveals an unexpected
landscape of human deeds, sufferings and new possibilities which
together transcend the sum total of all willed intentions and the
significance of all origins.
It
is the task of the historian to detect
this unexpected
new
with all its implications in any given period and
to bring out the full power of its significance. He must know that
though his story has a beginning and an end, it occurs within a
larger frame, history itself. And History is a story which has many
beginnings but no end. The end in any strict and final sense of the
word, could only be the disappearance of man from the earth. For
whatever the historian calls an end, the end of a period or a tradition
or a whole civilization, is a new beginning for those who are alive.
The fallacy of all prophecies of doom lies in the disregard of this
simple but fundamental fact.
For the historian, to remain aware of this fact will be of no
greater importance than to check what the French would call his
deformation professionelle.
Since he is concerned with the past, that
is with certain movements which could not even be grasped by the
mind if they had not come to some kind of an end, he has only to
generalize in order to see an end (and doom) everywhere. It is only
natural for him to see in history a story with many ends and no be–
ginning; and this inclination becomes really dangerous only when-
