In a famous essay on history the philosopher Kant, in the wake of the appearance of his famous Critique of Pure Reason, gave birth to a new perspective on the philosophy of history. This essay, Idea For A Universal History  from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, opens with the following implicit question:

Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.

Kant's significance lies in the way he responds to and yet challenges the new physics and the legacy of Newton. This essay is the grandfather to much later discussion of the question of historical laws, from Isaiah Berlin and his discussion of historical inevitability to Karl Popper and his critique of historicism. His classic discourse on the limits of metaphysics balanced with the forced march passage through the metaphysics of free will constituted a revolution in philosophy and a practical effort to consider the implications of science just short of the crystallization into scientism that will come to be such a notable feature of the modern scientific continuation of the seventeenth century 'Scientific Revolution'. Kant's essay after proposing brilliantly in this paragraph the crux of the question of history, in the search for a science of its 'laws', moves uncertainly into a discussion of what Kant calls 'asocial sociability' and the nature of conflict in the generation of historical forms. Thus, in a canonical example, the legacy of warfare might sustain nonetheless the uncertain hope that initiatives of peace might be generated from the extremes of historical warfare itself. This perspective on historical dynamics is a close cousin to many other such themes, e.g. the tenets of Adam Smith as to the relationship of altruism to economic development, to say nothing of the soon to arrive bastard child of Adam Smith, the 'naked conflict' theory of Charles Darwin. 

But a close look at Kant's essay shows that he is moving uncertainly in this direction, and that he is really proposing a question, and a challenge to the future. In fact, the first paragraph of his essay actually stumbles on the answer in the form of a question. Can we detect a play of the human will in the large to discern a regular movement in it? 

In fact, we can. And we can examine world history 'in the large' to show the exact correspondence of a pattern of universal history to this rumination on freedom and causality. 

Note that, as it were, Kant stumbles on the answer, too inchoately in probing vagueness, by considering the terms as if some a priori derivation. But this can tell us nothing until we examine empirically the facts of the case, here 'world history', whatever that is. The point is that this unwitting deduction leaves us with the question as to how nature will satisfy or compute the dialectic of freedom and causality. 

Kant's own attempts to solve the problem were not so cogent, for as he sensed he lived too early to be able to answer his own question. He threw the question into the future. And modern archaeological research has proceeded apace to vastly increase our data on the emergence of civilization. We find ourselves only within the last century with a reasonable minimum chronicle of world history to be able to really apply his implicit question to the facts that we have. 

The result is a remarkable discovery that echoes Kant's unwitting anticipatory solution to the problem, that flows spontaneously from his pen in the wisp of opening rhetoric of his classic essay.  

Top