If we chart the history of human societies with calipers that stretch over millennia can we, from that perspective, say much more than that they, too, have a common pattern and fate? They are born, grow more or less powerful, weaken, and disappear. With a strong government, they last a little longer; with a wise government, the condition of their members is a little more liveable; with a religious government, more of their members die in the odour of sanctity or as heretics at the stake. But they all run the same course—Greece and Persia, Rome and Jerusalem, the societies of Saladin and of Richard I. If this were all the wisdom that could be found in the cyclical theories of Vico, Hegel, Spengler, and Toynbee, they would not be worth reading. The Book of Ecclesiastes would be enough.
Historical enlightenment is not furthered by approaching cultures as wholes and trying to explain them in their entirety. Nor can everything about cultures be understood by intuiting them as “unique totalities of meaning.” Historical understanding is furthered by isolating specific problems of connection within cultures or of interaction between cultures; by tracing structural interrelations and temporal dependencies between the institutions found within a culture; and by showing how determinate phases and changes of a culture are conditioned by features of the non-cultural environment of man. It is doubtful whether anyone knows what he means, or has accurately expressed what he means, when he requests an explanation of Greek culture as a whole or of the entire course of American history. To be historically significant, the uniformities alleged to hold for cultures must go beyond the inadequate metaphors of the cycle of birth, maturity, and decay. They must point to specific mechanisms, to controlling conditions, to casual influences weighted in a certain order—in short, to those recurrent aspects of ever-fresh experience on the basis of which we can predict and act intelligently.
But, then, what happens to the contingent, the unique, the individual, and the novel about which we have previously spoken? Do they not all slip through the meshes of our understanding? Does not the “historicity” of the historical vanish whenever we explain a specific historical event in terms of general relations, functions, causes? This question has given rise to a great deal of discussion, but part of the difficulty lies in the ambiguity of the term “contingent.” The contingent in one sense is that which is given or found, whose existence is not
