ABSTRACT
A philosophy of history argues that as bad a guide to the determination of what actually happened in human societies as an alleged a priori evident metaphysic to the course of nature and the structure of the universe around people. The development of the natural sciences is in debt to the wayward styles of cosmological speculation; the historian may be in debt to Karl Marx for compelling a revised estimation of the relation of constitutional to social and economic history. But, philosophy of history is something whether those insights be individual historical reappraisals or corrected perceptions concerning the proper methods of historical inquiry. The appeal of Marxism is the temptation of the philosophical libertarian to forget the dynamic energies that are released by the sense of providence of a providential order of which one is oneself the agent. It ought to be sufficient to guard against falling into such temptation to remember the example of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Calvinists.
