ABSTRACT
Metahistory seeks to find one all-encompassing meaning in history.1 Metahistorians and system builders believe that history has its own meaning internally. Historians can thus discover meaningful laws and patterns in history over time. The intellectual revolutions initiated by the British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) made God extraneous to history, if not entirely dead. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity provide powerful divine metahistories. But after 1850, the idea of God’s will and design acting in history gave way to ideas of the survival of the fittest species by natural selection, and to the will to power of the Overman. But Darwinian natural selection and Nietzschean escape from the prison of history were only two varieties of historicism, the view that history has its own meaning and pattern and laws. Historians merely had to discover those meanings, patterns, and laws. Metahistorians wanted to discover (or construct) the Big Idea behind history.
