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New Cult. The book is perhaps most significant for what it suggests about current views of history. For centuries history was either a form of national propaganda or an antinomian catalogue, the kind described by Toynbee as "just one damned thing after another." The brilliant school that evolved from Vico to Hegel to Spengler to Toynbee was an immensely fruitful corrective. But, particularly in the hands of amateurs, it can lead to the kind of fatalistic oversimplification that Britain's gifted Philosopher-Historian Isaiah Berlin took apart in his pithy pamphlet, Historical Inevitability:
"For the omniscient being, who sees why nothing can be otherwise than as it is, the notions of responsibility or guilt, of right and wrong, are necessarily empty . . . There has grown up a quasi-sociological mythology which, in the guise of scientific concepts, has developed into a new animism. Such questions as 'Is War Inevitable?', or 'Is Civilization Doomed?' imply a belief in the occult presence of vast impersonal forces . . . which we have but little power to control. [This] is one of the great alibis, pleaded by those who cannot face the facts of human responsibility."