MEANING
IN HISTORY
to either pagan fate or Christian providence is incompatible in principle with the faith in progress, which is essentially revolutionary and worldly. Christianity, "the great revolt against pagan fate," replaced impersonal fate by personal providence; the task of the modern revolution, according to Proudhon, is the defatalisation of the latter by taking into the hands of man and of human justice the direction of all human affairs. Man has to replace God, and the belief in human progress has to supplant the faith in providence. At first, however, it seems impossible to reduce the working of God to the labor of man; for all traditional understanding of history depends on the distinction between the will of God and the will of man, between hidden designs and visible agencies, between prompting necessity and personal freedom of choice. 4 In the theology of history the hidden designs which work themselves out with providential necessity in the decisions and passions of man were referred to God; in Kant's philosophy of history, to a hidden design of nature. Proudhon tried to solve this antagonism by a sociological transposition. He distinguishes man as a social or collective being from man as an individual person. While the latter acts consciously with rational deliberation, society seems to be acted upon by spontaneous impulsions and to be directed by a superior counsel, apparently superhuman, driving men with irresistible power toward an unknown end. Hence the religious customs of questioning oracles, of public prayers and sacrifices, to safeguard historical decisions; hence, also, the philosophical explanation of history (Proudhon refers in particular to Bossuet, Vico, Herder, and Hegel) by a providential destiny presiding over the movements of men. Against these religious or semireligious interpretations of history, Proudhon argues that it is man's privilege to apprehend the apparent fatality as a social instinct, to penetrate its promptings, and to influence it. The providence of God is nothing else than the "collective instinct" or "universal reason" of man as a social being. The god of history is but man's own creation, and "atheism (i.e., humani'sm) the foundation of every theodicy."
62