The answers to this question got me thinking that, without a formal education in history, my education and the overwhelming public discourse concur in agreeing with an obsolete interpretation of history regarding the supposed technological, moral and "civilizational" progress. What I learned and the public opinion in my (European) country still largely agrees with 19th century notions.
My perhaps biased opinion is that it is only natural that in a society that values human rights and technological progress, and where as a culture we (largely) agree that striving to achieve in those fields is our way to go, that we consider ourselves as more advanced when compared to the past, and look at History as the path to the goals we seek in our future.
(For the record, I'm not saying that I agree with that, only that it seems to be counter-intuitive; I agree with current historians)
What I want to ask is:
If (as I suppose) it is only natural to think like historians would do in the past, how did history as a science manage to break with those notions? What and who lead the way? And when?
Apologies if I did not make myself clear, or if the question is too broad. I accept suggestions :)
That thread has a lot of discussion that I don't want to necessarily rehash, but as a question of historiography, I think the major realization is that teleology is bad at actually explaining history. In other words, insofar as the historians are not just interested in creating a narrative, but also creating explanations about history, historical "progress" just doesn't do the historian a whole lot of good as an explanatory framework.
Let's take Marx's notion of history, for example, to illustrate this point. (This also flows from Hegel, of course)
Marx thought that history was headed towards Communism, and that this path followed from his idea that history was driven by resolving contradictions. Contradictions in this case mean material factors that pull a society in opposing, presumably mutually exclusive, directions. Therefore, in working out those contradictions, societies moved forward along a particular path. Capitalism, according to Marx, was one economic/material economic and social organization, Socialism was another, and Communism the "last" - different from the previous because according to Marx under Communism the contradictions would have reached their final resolution. Without contradictions to keep driving history, history would "end" with Communism.
That's the basic idea, at least. It's the quick and dirty version, so forgive me for that.
Let's call that Marxist history. Very few historians still subscribe to that particular view of history.
However, there is an interesting thing about that theory - the idea of contradictions as drivers and movers of historical change. It is quite possible to think about how material contradictions can be important factors in historical change. This idea on the other hand, is something that many historians still use as a matter of historical analysis. It is not that those contradictions are inexorably leading in a particular direction, but rather than they are one of the things that historians can try to identify and help explain historical change. Let's call this, by contrast, Marxian analysis.
This is one important tool in what I like to call the historian's toolbox. Historical theories are tools historians use to help explain history.
I think it's fair to say that as a matter of historiography this notion of history is largely (but not entirely) a 20th century phenomenon. History, alongside anthropology and sociology as well as other related fields, underwent some pretty big changes in the 1960s and 70s, during which time scholars working in those fields began to take an interest in more "bottom-up" versions of history. I think some of this came through in the discussions in the other thread, but part of the problem with the "progressive" version of history is that is very frequently entirely ignored the vast majority of humanity. You can trace the beginnings of rejecting teleology to well before the 1960s and 70s, certainly to the late 19th century I'd say. But the field has also undergone substantial changes since then, and I think the key changes can be traced to the shifts 40-50 years ago (not that things have been stagnant since then, but this isn't a full discussion of historiography either)
If you subscribe to a progressive notion of history and you are studying, for example, the history of 19th and 20th century Africa, and you presume that 20th and 21st century European society and culture is the “farthest along” (ignoring for a moment how you might define what that means exactly), then you are going to ask a certain set of questions: Why isn’t Africa more like Europe? What is “holding back” African progress when compared to European society? As historical questions, these would only make sense if you believed in historical “progress.” But, if you wanted to ask questions like “What was is like to live East Africa in the late 19th century” or “Why was social organization in such-and-such a community the way it was?” then progressive notions of history are of basically no use to you. Indeed, those questions that presume progressivism are largely considered to be barely historical at all. As historians have come to ask questions that seek to understand history as a complex interplay of factors, people, ideas, events, and so forth, it has become apparent that 1) history is contingent rather than teleological and 2) thinking of history in terms of “progress” does very little to help us understand the past at all.