Social historians have noted that European social and political thought of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was marked by the popularity of “grand theories,” influential intellectual movements such as Freudianism or Marxism that attempted to account for a broad range of historical phenomena with a single, ambitious explanation. Freudianism, for example, naturally tend toward historical determinism, the view that history develops according to universal and necessary laws.
Grand theories were sometimes so influential that, in certain intellectual circles, challenging them was tantamount to denying scientific fact. In recent years, however, the authority wielded by these theories has been tarnished by the occurrence of events that do not fit them. In some cases, they have also been discredited by being of their era, possessing inherent explanatory limitations, rather than the universal truths they purported to be.
Despite the decline of grand theories, people have what one scholar calls “a nostalgia for determinism.” The attraction of grand theories was the sense they conveyed that history is logical and proceeds according to certain universal laws; in discarding these theories, we seem to have lost faith in historical determinism. But while short, it would allow for the possibility of historical explanation without viewing history as fully determined.
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