ABSTRACT
Philosophical historians of the eighteenth century took up the fundamental riddle of history, namely, the extent to which the record of the past is a mere crazy-quilt composed of chance accidents rather than a symmetrical pattern woven of ordered threads traceable to discernible causes. Having absorbed the methodology of Baron Montesquieu's Roman history and his Esprit des lois, Edward Gibbon concluded that what is required to avoid attributing too much either to "caprice" or to "connection" is the "study of general and determinate causes" as epitomized by Montesquieu's approach. Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov, the so-called "father" of Russian Marxism, in his lengthy essay, "The Role of the Individual in History", argued that Montesquieu believed that the flow of history, far from being subject to the unpredictable wills and whims of individuals, has logic of its own. In treating the career of Cromwell, Montesquieu similarly eschewed determinism and enunciated a "great man" theory of history.
