A Speculative View of American History to 1876

A Speculative View of American History to 1876

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Human nature is one of curiosity; we are not content with the superficial façade of our existence. Rather, we need understanding. We need to know not only know how we have come to be who we are as a people, but more importantly why we are, and where, as a society, we are destined to end. The answer to our relentless question of existence lies in our past. We must look beyond the mere factual account of events which comprises our history, and take on a more speculative approach, and analyze the philosophy of history: in our case, American history. The world has seen many different historical philosophies throughout time. Two contrasting extremes of historical philosophy were those of ancient Greece and Rome, who subscribed to the Stoic cyclical view of history, and Immanuel Kant’s idea of Progress. Karl Marx, in the eighteenth century, established his socialist ideas in a volume he co-authored, The Communist Manifesto. The historical philosophy, however, which best explains the first half of American history, from its birth in Europe, to the civil war, is that of Augustine.

Augustine’s theory of history can be detected in his major work, The City of God, in which he explains his concept of the City of Man versus the City of God: “Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves; the earthy love of the self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord.”1 As Ronald Nash elaborates:

Augustine explains that the two cities will coexist through human history, even within the bounds of professing Christendom. Only at the last judgment, which brings human history to an end, will the two cities finally be separated, in order that they may share their appointed destinies of heaven and hell. What accounts for people’s placement in one or the other city is the object of their love. People belong to the City of God by virtue of their love of God; the rest of humanity belongs to the City of Man because of their “love of self, even to the contempt of God.”2

This monumental work3 originally began as a response to the accusation of Rome’s Christian conversion ultimately contributing to its sack by Alaric and his Goths.