B. Tylor, the founder of British anthropology, wrote in 1889: “Human institutions, like stratified rocks, succeed each other in series substantially uniform over the globe, independent of what seems the comparatively superficial differences of race and language, but shaped by similar human nature. As Charles Brockden Brown, an American novelist of the early 19th century, put it: “Human beings are moulded by the circumstances in which they are placed. Thucydides, the narrator of the Peloponnesian Wars in the fourth century BC, had a far more realistic view of history than did St. The volume is an indispensable companion to the study of history and essential reading for anyone interested in the reflection on the nature of history and our historical existence. It does not deny that historical idealisms contain significant ingredients of truth and can even exhibit a forward march.

Spengler in Germany and Toynbee in England offer their re-editions of the cyclical round of history. He emphasised that social and cultural phenomena passed through a regular sequence of stages which was cyclical in character. The raw materials for genuine history-writing were first collected in the annals of the reigns and chronicles of kings in the river valley civilisations of the Near East, India and China. Every type of state is a powerful institution of the ruling class; the state is an instrument which one class uses to secure its rule and enforce its preferred relations of production and its exploitation onto society.The main modes of production that Marx identified include primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism and communism. As early as the French Revolution Condorcet protested against this narrow elitist view which disregarded both what moves the mass of the human race and how the masses rather than the masters make history. In the light of these vicissitudes they learned the crucial role of class struggles in pushing history forward and pointed to sweeping shifts in property ownership as the prime cause of social overturns.

Retrospectively, historical processes could be understood to have happened by necessity in certain ways and not others, and to some extent at least, the most likely variants of the future could be specified on the basis of careful study of the known facts. Marx and Engels first set out their materialist conception of history in The German Ideology, written in 1845. With the indispensable revisions, they have all been incorporated into the structure of historical materialism. b) The nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces (the Primacy Thesis proper). That said, it is precisely because the superstructure strongly affects the base that the base selects that superstructure.Marxist-Leninists believe that this society may still maintain the concepts of property, money, and commodity production. In accord with this principle, they turned to the objective realities of nature and society to explain the historical process. The materialist conception of history has a lot of [dangerous friends] nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history.

Plato taught that there are “some natures who ought to study philosophy and to be leaders in the state; and others who are not born to be philosophers, and are meant to be followers rather than leaders”. The proletariat, then, must seize power as the new revolutionary class in a dictatorship of the proletariat.This conception was expressed as a popular axiom in Ecclesiastes: “There is no new thing under the sun.