Push, Pull and the Body Politic : History: Since the Greeks, humans have sought the ‘laws’ of history. But there is only one law, and it explains the downfall of communism.

A historian cannot observe the momentous events of the last few months in Eastern Europe or, indeed, perestroika and glasnost, which opened the way for them, without being greatly instructed as to the nature of history herself--of Clio, Queen of the Muses.

First, it must be said that the distinguishing feature of history is that it is full of surprises. The most renowned expert, the most farsighted prognosticator cannot anticipate the future. We have no idea what the future holds in store for us. The future, Robert Frost wrote, is given form by our faith. We believe the future into existence. Why then can we not predict it? Well, for one thing, our moods are too transitory and unpredictable. We are too fickle and faithless to be relied upon.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, human beings, especially male human beings, have found the obscurity of the future maddening. They have shown remarkable ingenuity in trying to discover the “laws” of history. The Greeks (and to a degree, the Romans) believed that time was cyclical, that nations were compelled to go through preordained cycles--from democracy (which invariably degenerated into anarchy), to dictatorship (which was legitimated into monarchy), to oligarchy (the rule of a rich and powerful class made restive by the arbitrary dictates of the king). And so on, forever.

Christianity, by anticipating an end to time, the Day of Judgment, attacked the pagan notion of endlessly recurring cycles and “straightened history out,” so to speak. Humanity was not condemned to endless repetition; there could be change and progress toward a clearer idea of God’s intentions for man.

In the 19th Century, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel propounded his “dialectical” view of history. The dialectic consisted of a thesis (the dominant consciousness of the age) and an antithesis (a set of opposing propositions). Out of the struggle between the established thesis and its challenger, the antithesis, would come a new synthesis that combined the most enduring values of the rival creeds. Hegel’s theory of the dialectic was one of the great creative notions in all of history--in part at least because it involved the principle of incorporation. The synthesis was larger, more comprehensive, more generous, if you will, than the rival systems. The synthesis, in turn, became a thesis and was once again challenged by a new antithesis.

I have always found Hegel’s system a most fruitful one. Unfortunately, Karl Marx did too. He adapted Hegel’s dialectic, with bourgeoise capitalism as the thesis. The antithesis was communism, which must utilize the technological skills of capitalism and place them in the service of the classless society, run by and for the benefit of all, but especially for the benefit of the workers. Millions of men and women were enthralled by the prospect of a society without class strife, with jobs for all and communist equality.

Marxian communism, moreover, came forward under the banner of the new religion of science. No wonder it had an enormous attraction. It must be kept in mind that the economist system (thesis) it opposed (capitalism) was the most brutal and exploitative system yet invented by the race. It condemned millions to lives of desperate poverty and crushing toil so that a relative few might live in the luxury of Oriental potentates.

Of course it did more than that. It developed a remarkable technology, theoretically at least capable of supplying the needs of all the inhabitants of the globe, and a large and productive (and prosperous) middle class, a substantial number of whom, appalled at its excesses and inequities, became socialists of one kind or another and some of whom became communists (in the U.S. very few workers did). In any event, all the true believers in Marxism were assured that communism was the scientifically inevitable wave of the future. It might be resisted or abetted but it could not be deflected.

I mention all this because the Marxian dialectic is only the most recent of the “laws of history” and, one might add, one of the shortest-lived.

There is, in fact, as far as I can discern, only one law of history. It was simply stated by the English historian-philosopher Lord Acton more than 100 years ago: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Although Acton put the idea in its most familiar form, it is an idea at least as old as classical times. The Greeks expressed it in the idea of hubris , or pride. Success, wealth, power brought in their train hubris. The human who sought and achieved power and wealth challenged the gods and they, angry at such human presumption, brought the pretender down in ignominy.

Christians called it “original sin,” the disposition of the individual to prefer his will to the will of God. Every individual was born with this taint of sin, deriving from Adam’s original disobedience. The most common political manifestation was the proclivity of humans to abuse power and indulge selfish desires rather than seeking the common good.

If the law that “power corrupts” is the only irrefutably established law of history, it has a number of corollaries. In the words of the British historian E.L. Woodward, “Everything good has to be done over again, forever.” Daunting, in one way, encouraging in another, Woodward’s axiom follows naturally from our disposition to abuse power.

It was the Founding Fathers’ acute awareness of this law that prompted them to try to devise a constitution that would prevent any class or interest from exploiting any other. Gouverneur Morris reminded the delegates that the rich had always exploited the poor--no reason to think that they would be any less inclined to do so in a republic than in a monarchy. The only remedy was to hedge the rich with constitutional constraints. There was, of course, no guarantee that human ingenuity could devise effective limitations, but it was worth trying.

So what do we have? No laws of history but a single law and a number of corollaries, among them the assumption that democracy is the best system for calling the powerful to account. There is also the related idea of rotation in office to prevent officeholders from acquiring excessive power and being corrupted by it.

It is not only individuals who aggregate power and almost inevitably abuse it; collections of individuals called bureaucrats also amass power and abuse it, albeit usually in more modest ways. However, it may well be that, in the last analysis, the bureaucrats are more dangerous to the general welfare than single abusers of power if only because they are so much harder to root out.

Which brings us back to Marxian communism. There is, obviously, no such thing as “historical inevitability,” either communist or capitalist; there are only the touching, sometimes illusory dreams and ambitions of human beings who at their best yearn for peace and order and justice and at their worst make an inordinate amount of mischief (often in the process of trying to bring about peace, order and justice in the world).

There are, of course, many reasons why Marxian communism has failed so dismally, but perhaps the most basic reason is that in their pursuit of a utopian social order, the Marxists ignored the only historical law that cannot be ignored: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” By establishing a one-party system, the Bolsheviks ensured that communism would, in time, be corrupted by its unchallengeable monopoly of power.