Was Henry Thomas Buckle the man who tried to turn history into a science?
In short: A self-taught polymath and world-class chess player, Henry Thomas Buckle spent seventeen years writing a massive history of civilization. He believed human progress followed fixed, predictable laws, much like the physical world. Though his ambitious project remained unfinished, his bold attempt to quantify human destiny sparked intense debate for generations.
Born in 1821, Henry Thomas Buckle was a recluse who avoided formal schooling, preferring to educate himself by reading. Inheriting £20,000 upon his father's death in 1840, he dedicated his life to a singular goal: establishing a 'science of history'. He spent a decade and a half working ten hours a day to produce his magnum opus, History of Civilization in England, which argued that historical events were governed by laws as regular as those in physics.
Buckle’s central thesis was that climate, soil, and food were the primary drivers of intellectual progress. He posited that in Europe, man had successfully subdued nature, whereas elsewhere, nature remained dominant. He famously argued that moral agencies were stationary and balanced each other out, meaning human progress was driven solely by intellectual activity. He believed that statistics could reveal these patterns, effectively rendering individual 'great men' as mere products of their age rather than independent drivers of change.
His work was met with both awe and harsh criticism. While some contemporaries hailed him as a founder of historical science, others, including the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, mocked his belief that civilization inherently makes humanity less bloodthirsty. Critics noted that he often oversimplified complex problems and contorted facts to fit his preconceived theories. Despite these flaws, his influence on sociology and historical methodology remained significant, as he forced scholars to grapple with the possibility of discovering universal laws governing human destiny.
Buckle’s personal life was defined by his devotion to his mother, whose death in 1859 devastated him and prompted him to write extensively on the necessity of immortality. He died of typhoid fever in Damascus in 1862, leaving his monumental project incomplete. Today, he is remembered as a provocative thinker who dared to treat history as an exact science, even if his reach often exceeded his grasp.
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