Social history is a conscious and purposeful activity of human beings, and ideological factors play an important role in historical development. Human history includes the history of thought, and it is of great significance to study the history of thought for a deeper understanding of human history and its development.
Historical materialism holds that human social existence determines social consciousness, and social history is first of all the history of production and development of material materials, the history of human practical activities and the history of class struggle in class society. The view that all history belongs to the history of thought is essentially an idealistic view of history. ?
History runs through people's unique civilized motives, and people want to use history to improve and perfect their present lives. This improvement is achieved through rational reflection on past life. History is not a cut and paste of past events, but a selection and enrichment. It focuses on the ideological motivation behind the event and carries some thoughts through a specific language, that is, narrative form.
For example, Confucius wrote Spring and Autumn Annals to "make rebel thieves afraid", and Aristotle studied the city-state system to prove that "the rule of law is better than the rule of man". Moreover, this thought not only had an impact at that time, but also can continue to affect future generations. Historical facts are only the carrier of ideas, and what history really needs to do is to convey ideas.
History is an anthology of human development process, which is selected and recorded by historians. They decide what can become history and what can only become stories or even be forgotten. So what we see is the history that historians want to show us, not the whole history. And these narratives are not all truth-seeking.
Moreover, the process of historians recording history is not a negative copy, but a re-description of historical scenes. They involve themselves in the event intentionally or unintentionally, and evaluate the event according to their own judgment, so every description will bring the personal knowledge and opinions of historians. When we read history, we can clearly feel the personal color of historians, such as Sima Qian's admiration for rangers.
Historical events have never been value-neutral. Since they were written into history books, they have been painted with the thoughts of historians. Even readers of history should imagine, participate and evaluate with their own thoughts, and finally establish their own positions and beliefs.
Extended data:
"All history is the history of ideas" was put forward by the British philosopher Robin George Collingwood in his book The Concept of History. Commenting on the weakness of Hegel's and Marx's philosophy of history, collingwood pointed out that they only chose one aspect of human life (Hegel's politics and Marx's economy) to look at history.
Therefore, they mistakenly limited the field of historical thought to political history or economic history. In the eyes of ordinary historians, all so-called history is a history of personnel. He pointed out that as far as nature is concerned, there is no internal or external difference between an event.
Historians, on the other hand, draw a line between the outside and the inside of an event. The outside refers to everything that can be described by the body and its movements, and the inside refers to things that can only be described by thoughts.
"Historians will never only care about either of them and exclude the other. What he studied was not a simple event (simple event here, I mean only external events without internal events), but an action. And an action is the external and internal unity of an event. "
"His work can start from discovering the outside of an event, but it must not end there; He must remember that events are actions, and his main task is to put himself into this action to think and identify the thoughts of the actors. " This means that in the historical context, events contain thoughts, while in the natural context, events have no dimension of thoughts.
At this point, Collingwood further put forward his famous view in this book: all history is the history of ideas. "Natural processes can be accurately described as a series of simple events, but historical processes cannot. The process of history is not a simple event but a process of action, which has an internal aspect composed of ideological processes; It is these ideological processes that historians seek. All history is a history of thought. " ?
References:
Baidu encyclopedia-the concept of history