Spontaneous Order and the History of Nihilism

Abstract While pre-modern intellectual cultures are recognized to have engaged with pessimism, nihilism is, by contrast, often understood to be a distinctly modern phenomenon. The sources of nihilism should then be traceable to or reflected in certain differences between modern and pre-modern thought. This paper identifies one such difference: a conceptual category for large-scale social and political phenomena understood as the product of human activity but not of human design. The paper briefly sketches the development of this concept in the Scottish Enlightenment and its development of a diachronic dimension in Hegel’s philosophy of history. It then points out the implications of this conceptual category both for our understanding of human beings as historical agents and for theories of normativity and the justification of social and political norms. These implications are identified by way of a contrast to the intellectual culture of Classical Greece. Finally, it is argued that this concept contributed to the development of trends in thought and culture commonly associated with nihilism by weakening notions of the historical agency of both individuals and groups.