ABSTRACT
The central problem in establishing the laws of history is the difficulty experienced in recognizing them. Not because the regularities from which they can be derived do not exist, but because social scientists throughout the ages have persisted in looking in the wrong places. The metaphysical historicists have looked into their own imaginations, the positive historicists and new institutionalists have not looked beyond historical events and structures, and the antihistoricists have preferred not to look at all. The answer to the question ‘If history has laws, how would we recognize them?’ is that we must look at the mechanisms or processes underlying the apparent confusion of the everyday world. It is from these regularities that the laws of history can be derived. To do this we must look to a new form of historicism – existential historicism.
