HISTORY AND IMMORTALITY
23
the true distinction between human and animal life; he found the
distinction instead in the ability to reckon with "the effects of some
present or past cause ... of which I have not at any time seen any
sign but in man only."
(Leviathan,
Book I, ch. 3.)) The modern age
not only produced at its very start a new and radical political philoso–
phy-Hobbes is only one example though perhaps the most interest–
ing-it also produced for the first time philosophers willing to orient
themselves according to the requirements of the political realm; and
this new political orientation is not only present in Hobbes, but
muta–
tis mutandis,
in Locke and Hume as well. It can be said that Hegel's
transformation of metaphysics into a philosophy of history was pre–
ceded by an attempt to get rid of metaphysics for the sake of a
philosophy of politics.
In any consideration of the modern concept of history one of
the crucial problems is to explain its sudden rise during the last
third of the eighteenth century and the concomitant decrease of in–
terest
in
purely political thinking. (Vico must be said to be a fore–
runner whose influence was not felt until more than two generations
after
his
death.) Where a genuine interest in political theory still sur–
vived
it
ended in despair, as in Tocqueville, or
in
the confusion of
politics with history, as in Marx. For what else but despair could
have inspired Tocqueville's assertion that "since the past has ceased
to throw its light upon the future the mind of man wanders in ob–
scurity"? This is actually the conclusion of the great work (
Democ–
racy in America)
in which he had "delineated the society of the
modern world" and in the introduction to which he had proclaimed
that "a new science of politics is needed for a new world." And
what else but confusion-a merciful confusion for Marx himself
and a fatal one for his followers-could have led to Marx's identifica–
tion of action with "the making of history"?
Marx's notion of "making history'' had an influence far beyond
the circle of convinced Marxists or determined revolutionaries. Al–
though it is closely connected with Vico's idea that history was made
by man, as distinguished from "nature" which was made by God,
the difference between them is still decisive. For Vico, as later for
Hegel, the importance of the concept of history was primarily the–
oretical. It never occurred to either of them to apply this concept
directly by using it as a principle of action. Truth they conceived
of .as being revealed to the contemplative, backward-directed glance
