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fact. Only statements can be true or false. And as little information
as the affective experiences of evaluation convey objectively about
empirical matters of fact, just so little can they be derived from facts
or founded on them. These insights have penetrated only slowly in
Western Europe, since the Enlightenment and even the older positiv–
ism had ethical-political aims too strong to permit easy acceptance
of this view of human values. Only Neo-Positivism has fully appropri–
ated Hume's point of view: "We feel, that even if all
possible
scientific
questions were answered, our vital problems are not yet touched." 2
To these developments must be added also a tradition, often in–
terrupted but never wholly suppressed, which, like the Platonic phil–
osophy, proceeded from the collapse of the Athenian city-state culture.
If
Plato set everything in motion, from mathematics to myth, from
the contemplation of the ideas to the judgment of the dead, in order
to transcend and overcome this devastation, Thucydides, with re–
strained passion, investigated the actual events in their inner rela–
tionships, and created a work which to some extent embraces,
in
statu nascendi,
the foundations of an empirical-critical science of his–
tory, sociology and political theory. With deep earnestness and manly
austerity the historian confronts the undeniable brutality of the course
of history. He is still steeped in the concrete ethic of the Periclean
city-state, but he never gives the slightest hint of an attempt to win
back through speculation what no longer existed in reality. He ex–
cludes not only popular belief, but also all quasi-philosophizing on
the line of the "cosmos" doctrine, especially since its impotence was
obvious to the political thinker in the catastrophe of the city-state
cosmos.
The foundations laid by Thucydides were, indeed, soon drowned
out by normative-philosophical and historical-theological currents,
quite apart from the fact that rhetoric seized control of history and
suffocated every serious endeavor in vapid euphuism. Only rarely
does something of the spirit of the Athenian break through, when
shrewd and disinterested men speak up-men schooled in classical
historiography and in actual politics-such as Tacitus, Machiavelli,
Hobbes or Hume. Even thinkers with the scientific ardor of a Comte
or Marx are still searching, in the first half of the last century, for
a social "world-law" entirely in the sense of Logos and Cosmos–
metaphysics: a law which was to represent at one and the same time
