Deep History, Secular Theory

12. Evolution, Cognition, and History

The true difference [between history and poetry] is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is the more philosophical…for poetry tends to express the universal; history the particular.

—Aristotle (Poetics 1415b)

Aristotle’s view of history as the expression of unique events has characterized historiography from its establishment as an academic field in the mid-nineteenth century until the present. Nineteenth-century proposals for “scientific history,” for example, were strictly concerned with an empirical description of facts—a position of particularism often unfairly associated with Leopold von Ranke’s dictum that the historian should only show wie es eigentlich ...