Marx and Engels were German emigres living in London while revolutions rocked the capitals of several other European countries. They employed the moment to produce a manifesto of a new party called the Communists. Their statement doubled as an outline of an alternative theory of human history, one based on the never-ending struggle for control of the material means of human sustenance and enrichment.

Classes were the key to unlocking the human past. “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes,” wrote Marx and Engels.

In each era, the class struggle took a shape characteristic of the age. Lords and serfs were the contenders when agriculture supported Europe. In the 1840s, as machines replaced muscle in the production process, owners of capital faced off against industrial workers. “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”

The bourgeoisie was a revolutionary force dissolving the social bonds of the preindustrial era. In this it was a driver—a harsh driver—of history. “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

It was in the nature of the class struggle that the dominant class in any era created its opposite. The bourgeoisie was producing the proletariat. “The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself,” Marx and Engels wrote. “But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians. In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.”

The proletarians wouldn’t abide their oppression forever. Other theories of history were projectable forward. Augustine’s providential history would advance generation by generation toward the city of God. Per Carlyle, new heroes would arise to carry humanity through new crises. But neither of those theories forecast a future as specific and imminent as that of Marx and Engel’s materialism.

“Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist,” they wrote. “Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.”

Workers at first were unorganized. Their defensive efforts were unavailing. But industrialization eventually consolidated the proletariat. “With the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.”

The workers discovered their common interests. “The workers begin to form combinations (trades unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.”

The violence intensified and the solidarity of the workers grew. They realized they could improve their condition only by seizing the means of production. “All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.”

Augustine’s Christian vision posited an end to history at the second coming of Jesus. In the materialist thinking of Marx and Engels, history would end when the proletariat overthrew the bourgeoisie and destroyed the system of private property. Everything would be held in common. The class struggle would be over at last.

Thomas Carlyle made this straightforward statement in 1840, in a lecture series he called “On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History.”

By Carlyle’s day, Britain was well into its industrial revolution, a transformation triggered by the discoveries and inventions of clever men. Europe was recovering from the Napoleonic wars, a succession of conflicts caused by Bonaparte or by reactions to Bonaparte. The rationalism of the Enlightenment had segued into the romanticism of Byron and Scott, Beethoven and Wagner, Delacroix and Turner.

For Carlyle, this suggested a theory of history centered on outstanding individuals. “Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here,” he said. “They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of thoughts that dwelt in the great men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.”

Carlyle’s great men were all great, but they weren’t all alike. He identified six classes of heroes: the hero as divinity, as prophet, as poet, as priest, as writer, as king. The classes themselves were stretchy. The divine heroes weren’t men but gods. Yet myths treated them like humans, with faults and foibles, and so did Carlyle, if only because they provided the training ground for worship of fully human heroes. Carlyle’s archetypal god was Odin, who “in his wild Norse vesture, with his wild beard and eyes, his rude Norse speech and ways, was a man like us; with our sorrows, joys, with our limbs, features.”

His model prophet was Muhammad, who served as a link between a particular version of the divine and the humans of his day. Carlyle’s poets, Dante and Shakespeare, gave the Italians and the English their languages as templates for interpreting the world. His type specimen priests, Martin Luther and John Knox, saved Christianity from the corruption of papism. Carlyle’s writers—“men of letters”—Samuel Johnson, Rousseau and Robert Burns brought prose and poetry into the modern age.

Carlyle’s kingly class included military commanders. The king figure was the one the other great men foreshadowed. “The Commander over Men, he to whose will our wills are to be subordinated, and loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfare in doing so, may be reckoned the most important of Great Men. He is practically the summary for us of all the various figures of Heroism; Priest, Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual dignity we can fancy to reside in a man, embodies itself here, to command over us, to furnish us with constant practical teaching, to tell us for the day and hour what we are to do. He is called Rex, Regulator, Roi: our own name is still better; King, Konning, which means Can-ning, Able-man.”

Carlyle wasn’t kidding when he referred to hero worship, an attitude and activity deeply rooted in the human psyche. “We all love great men; love, venerate and bow down submissive before great men. Nay can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really above him? No nobler or more blessed feeling dwells in man’s heart.”

The great men carried their countries and cultures through crises. They cut Gordian knots, resolving conundrums impervious to lesser men. Carlyle’s model king—commander, actually—was Oliver Cromwell, whose greatness transcended his personal traits. “Poor Cromwell—great Cromwell! The inarticulate Prophet; Prophet who could not speak. Rude, confused, struggling to utter himself, with his savage depth, with his wild sincerity; and he looked so strange. . . . A kind of chaotic man. The ray as of pure starlight and fire, working in such an element of boundless hypochondria, unformed black of darkness! And yet withal this hypochondria, what was it but the very greatness of the man?” When England needed a champion of Parliament, Cromwell rose to the challenge.

Carlyle’s heroic theory of history provoked objections during his own time. No man, however great, rules alone. Conditions and context influence history too.

But the most serious objections arose a century later, when arguments akin to his were used by the supporters of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. If great-man history produces tyrants like these, said the critics, we want nothing of it.

The German historian wasn’t the first or last to wonder if history made sense—if there was a rational or theoretical framework for understanding human activities and accomplishments over the last several millennia.

Most historians content themselves explaining this episode or that of the past. But a few big thinkers have tried to put it all together. The boldest of their theories have been as broad as the planet and as long as our species’ time on earth. Even the less ambitious of these meta-histories have covered continents and centuries. Together they’ve illuminated much about their subject, namely we humans and our times, and no less about the authors and the author’s times.

Providential history: Augustine

The first theorists of history were theologians, even if they didn’t always label themselves as such. Early accounts of how peoples and nations came to be typically began with a creation story referencing some divinity or higher power. The Babylonians depicted gods battling amid the primordial storm and humans arising from the wreckage. The Chinese started with an egg from which Pangu emerged and created the sky and the earth, which became the home of humans. The Hebrews posited a six-day creation culminating in Adam and Eve.

Most of the origin stories specified a continuing connection between the divine and humans. In Greek mythology the gods consorted with humans to produce demigods and mischief. The god of the Hebrews formed a covenant with them that became their defining trait among the other nations.

Christians inherited the Hebrew origin story and developed it further. The most influential of the theorists of Judeo-Christian history was Augustine of Hippo, who was born in the fourth century in Roman North Africa. Augustine’s twenty-two volume City of God cast human history in the form of an abiding struggle between two “cities,” as he characterized them. “Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of 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. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God, ‘Thou art my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.’ In the one, the princes and the nations it subdues are ruled by the love of ruling; in the other, the princes and the subjects serve one another in love, the latter obeying, while the former take thought for all. The one delights in its own strength, represented in the persons of its rulers; the other says to its God, ‘I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength.’”

Christianity afforded the closest earthly approximation to the city of God. For centuries it struggled with the paganism of imperial Rome. It was finally legalized by Constantine in 313 and adopted as Rome’s official religion by Theodosius in 380, when Augustine was a young man.

The struggle continued. Paganism persisted in parts of the empire. Much of The City of God consisted of a refutation of paganism. After the sack of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths in 410, traditionalists blamed the disaster on the government’s abandonment of the pagan gods, who had protected the city for centuries. Augustine countered that those centuries of paganism had produced a corrupt culture that a few decades of Christianity couldn’t erase. Paganism, not Christianity, was the cause of the calamity.

The struggle continued in a deeper sense. It was nothing less than the struggle of good against evil. It took place in the souls of men as much as in the streets of Rome. Citizens of the heavenly city could live peaceably in earthly cities, yet they would always be at odds with earthly goals. “The earthly city, which does not live by faith, seeks an earthly peace, and the end it proposes, in the well-ordered concord of civic obedience and rule, is the combination of men’s wills to attain the things which are helpful to this life. The heavenly city, or rather the part of it which sojourns on earth and lives by faith, makes use of this peace only because it must, until this mortal condition which necessitates it shall pass away.”

Augustine’s theory of history as the unfolding of God’s will supplied a meaning and direction to the affairs of men. Ultimately God would triumph. The city of earth would give way to the city of God.

Augustine was not so rash as to proclaim a timeline. Humans were willful. They would resist God’s grace. But grace would prevail.

Christians could advance the project. “This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace. It therefore is so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adopts them, so long only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced.”

In the ultimate triumph, the city of earth and indeed the earth itself would fade away. “When we shall have reached that peace, this mortal life shall give place to one that is eternal, and our body shall be no more this animal body which by its corruption weighs down the soul, but a spiritual body feeling no want.”

Augustine’s interpretation of history shaped Christian belief for centuries. By virtue of that fact it surfaced repeatedly in the policies of governments of countries largely Christian. Spanish conquistadores claimed territory in the name of the Christian God. French and English explorers and colonizers did likewise. As Americans spread west across their continent in the 19th century, many asserted a Christian dispensation in the form of “manifest destiny.” In America’s Cold War, the enemy was regularly described as “godless communism.” To contrast themselves more strikingly, Americans added “under God” to their pledge of allegiance. In America’s 21st century war against terrorism, the enemy was often characterized as “radical Islam.”

Was the city of God actually getting closer?

Some thought so. Some took comfort in thinking so. Some took advantage of such thinking in others.

Augustine might have said it was always so.

(More theories of history coming.)