It is very common to see history today as History, with a capital “H”. What is implied in this conception of history? When we say “History is full of twists!”, or “We need to change history!”, or even “We want to make History [that is, act on History, in the sense of transforming it]!”, what we want to say? Generally, in this conceptmoderninstory, there is the idea that it (History) is a singular entity, something substantive that has its own substance and that men can be “shaped” like a mass of clay.
As stated, this is a modern concept of history, which indicates that history was not always seen in this way. History was not always conceived as something that could be transformed, something that was available to be changed and that it fit the aspirations of groups or social classes, the State or whoever were. This, in fact, started around the 18th century and intensified in the 19th century.
Until the mid-eighteenth century, history was seen in a non-uniform way, that is, there was not yet "History", but stories, in the plural, or rather, a set of stories that could not be reduced to a single and universal movement of man on Earth. Until then, the idea of a universal movement that commanded the destiny of men was only attributed to Divine Providence. But it was exactly through the process of secularization, that is, attribution of divine characteristics to instances human, that the histories, which were before plural, from the 18th century onwards, converged into a single, singular and collective: the HistoryUniversal, The HistorygivesHumanity.
As the German historian Reinhart Koselleck said, history, in the 19th century, “became omnipotent, very fair, omniscient, and finally we became responsible to it. As something semi-secularized, religious meanings were attributed to History, which could hardly have been derived from the concept itself”. (KOSELECK, Reinhart. “The configuration of the modern concept of history”. In: KOSENLECK [et al.] the concept of history. Belo Horizonte: Authentic Publisher, 2013. P. 217)
This concept of history as a singular and universal history was systematically worked on by philosophers, who became known as “philosophersgivesstory". The first ones who dedicated themselves to thinking about history in these terms were the Enlightenment, such as Kant and Voltaire. But it was in the nineteenth century, with the development of history as a scientific discipline, that philosophers like Hegel they were able to give a special format to the concept of story.
THE RevolutionFrench, which took place at the end of the 18th century, ended up giving breath to perspectives on a history that can “be made”, that can be transformed. Hegel and the other philosophers of nineteenth-century history were greatly affected by the uniqueness of this revolution. The very concept of revolution came to be associated with that of history, and both, in turn, associated with the idea of radical transformation. Of Hegel's heirs, Karl Marx was one of the main authors who “framed” the modern concept of history. Still following the reasoning of the historian Koselleck, mentioned above, “'History' has become a source of all imaginable ideologies.” (KOSELECK, Reinhart. “The configuration of the modern concept of history”. In: KOSENLECK [et al.] the concept of history. Belo Horizonte: Authentic Publisher, 2013. p 218)
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
