MEANING
IN
HISTORY
The political revolution in France and the industrial revolution in England and their universal effects upon the whole civilized world enhanced the modern feeling of living in an epoch when historical changes are all and everything. The philosophy of history has become a more fundamental concern than ever before, because history itself has become more radical. Not only have the innovations by natural science accelerated the speed and expanded the range of sociohistorical movements and changes, but they have made nature a highly controllable element in man's historical adventure. By means of natural science we are now, as never before, "making" history, and yet we are overwhelmed by it because history has emancipated itself from its ancient and Christian boundaries. With Vico divine providence has already become the natural law of history; and with Descartes nature has already become a mathematical project, serving man's mastery. Thus history now occupies a position which is analogous to that occupied by mathematical physics in the seventeenth century, and in consequence of it. To interpret sociopolitical history still in terms of ancient physics and cosmology or in terms of Christian ethics and theology seems to have become an anachronism for modern thinking on history. There is only one very particular history-that of the Jewswhich as a political history can be interpreted strictly religiously. Within the biblical tradition, the Jewish prophets alone were radical "philosophers of history" because they had, instead of a philosophy, an unshakable faith in God's providential purpose for his chosen people, punishing and rewarding them for disobedience and obedience. The exceptional fact of the Jewish existence could warrant a strictly religious understanding of political history, because only the Jews are a really historical people, constituted as such by religion, by the act of the Sinaitic revelation. 4 Hence the Jewish people could and can indeed understand their national history and destiny religiously, as a religious-political unity. The eternal law which the Greeks saw embodied in the regular movement of the visible heavens was manifested to the Jews in the vicissitudes of their history, which
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