QuestionsDoes history have a direction?Every birth is a new beginning: history is not written in advance
Does history have a direction?No direction

Every birth is a new beginning: history is not written in advance

Natality; the miracle that saves the world

Hannah Arendt 1906 · 1975Political philosopher born in Germany, exiled to the United States: she covers the Eichmann trial and speaks of the 'banality of evil', born of a lack of thought.
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What it claims

History obeys no law and has no goal fixed in advance: it stays open, made of unpredictable beginnings. The 'miracle that saves the world' is natality.

Why

Every human born can begin something new: what they will do cannot be deduced from the past, so no law can predict history.

The same idea through history
Hannah Arendt1958The Human Condition: natality, not mortality, is the central category of political thought. Arendt takes the idea from Saint Augustine (humans are created so that there may be a beginning), cited in the same work.
In short

"Every birth is a new beginning: history is not written in advance" is an argument by Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition (1958), sections 1 and 34, 1958) on the question "Does history have a direction?" (answer: no direction). Its claim: History obeys no law and has no goal fixed in advance: it stays open, made of unpredictable beginnings. The 'miracle that saves the world' is natality. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Human Condition (1958), sections 1 and 34
Valid with an implicit premise

Many thinkers have believed that history follows a law, as the planets follow their orbits. Arendt answers with a simple fact: at every moment new beings are born, and each is able to begin something nobody had foreseen. Human action is therefore like a miracle, meaning a very improbable event that nevertheless happens regularly. There is no hidden meaning of history to discover; there are beginnings, and the stories we tell of them afterwards. Careful: 'chance' does not mean 'anything goes'. For Arendt the unpredictable is the mark of freedom, not of a rolling die.

P1Every birth brings someone new into the world, and this newcomer has the capacity to begin something new, that is, to act.
P2Seen from the automatic processes that seem to determine the course of the world, action looks like a miracle: it is the 'infinite improbability which occurs regularly'.
P3 · implicit premiseIf there were a law of history, what will happen could be deduced from what came before, and there would be no true beginning.
P4Human affairs, left to themselves, follow the course of mortality; what saves them from ruin is the birth of new beings and the action they are capable of.
Therefore history obeys no law and has no goal fixed in advance: it stays open, made of unpredictable beginnings. The 'miracle that saves the world' is natality.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Valid with P3. P1 and P2 say that action is an unpredictable beginning. P3, hidden, connects this to history: a law of history would rule out such beginnings. Without P3 one can grant that each person begins something and still believe that the whole follows a general tendency (progress, class struggle): defenders of a law of history therefore mostly dispute P3. Note: this argument does not prove that history is absurd. Arendt thinks events take on meaning, but afterwards, through storytelling, never as a plan directing them.
Analogy. A game in which, every round, new players arrive with their own rules in their pockets. One can study the players' habits, but one cannot write the end of the game in advance.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Hegel 1837 · attacks the conclusion

For Hegel, world history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and reason governs it: individuals believe they act for their own ends, but they unknowingly carry out a larger plan (the 'cunning of reason'). The apparent unpredictability of individual actions therefore does not prevent an overall meaning.

no reply
see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Arendt in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Reply reconstructed from her texts (The Human Condition, section 26; 'The Concept of History', 1961), without quotation: meaning appears only once history is told, to the backward glance of the storyteller, and is wrongly taken for an engine that was acting in the past. Hegelians reply that thinking history is precisely reading it afterwards: the disagreement is over whether the story discovers or invents.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Hegel: reason governs history through unforeseen actions. Arendt: action begins something new and meaning comes afterwards. Core disagreement: does the story discover a meaning or make one?
Karl Marx 1852 · attacks premise 3

Marx writes that men make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing: they make it under circumstances inherited from the past. Their initiatives are therefore bounded by structures (economy, classes) whose tendencies can be identified. Some prediction becomes possible.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Arendt in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Reconstructed reply (our reading): being bounded by circumstances is not being determined. Arendt does not deny conditions (her book is about the human 'condition'); she denies that they suffice to deduce what the newcomer will do. Marxists maintain that over large numbers tendencies emerge all the same.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Marx: inherited conditions limit action and open tendencies. Arendt: they do not deduce the beginning. Core disagreement: how far do large numbers erase individual unpredictability?
P
Peter Turchin (cliodynamics) 2003 · attacks the conclusion

Turchin argues that history can be studied with testable mathematical models ('cliodynamics'), and that regularities recur (cycles of the rise and fall of states, waves of instability). If such regularities exist, history is not lawless.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 2003, after the author's death (1975).
The debate goes on (our summary) Reconstructed reply (our reading): these models describe statistical tendencies, not the content of actions. Arendt had noted (The Human Condition, section 6) that the laws of statistics hold only for large numbers, where acts and events appear only as deviations. Cliodynamicists answer that the predictions remain testable and that this is what matters. The debate is open.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Turchin: statistical regularities exist. Arendt: they do not predict the beginning. Core disagreement: does a law of averages suffice to give history a direction?
A difficulty raised by Arendt herself (the downsides of action) 1958 · attacks premise 4

Arendt notes that action also has two downsides: it is irreversible (one cannot undo what one has done) and unpredictable in its effects. Hence the objection (put by us on the basis of this remark): a beginning is not always a good, and natality saves nothing if the newcomers do harm.

a defender replies
Hannah Arendt defender of the argument · 1958
She answers that action contains its own remedies: forgiving answers irreversibility, and the faculty of making and keeping promises answers the unpredictability of the future.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Objection: a beginning can be bad. Arendt: forgiving and promising correct the downsides of action. Core disagreement: are these remedies enough against catastrophes?