Hegel’s proposition, now almost universally dismissed or derided even, nonetheless addresses a problem presumably generic to any historical study; namely a kind of optical paradox, whereby what appears close up as a collection of random and capricious acts assumes, from a suitable distance, a certain necessity and coherence surely unbeknown to the actors themselves. The ‘subject’ of historical study such as the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, the Roman state, strikes us as having its own logic which is not simply the sum total of individual acts. Institutions, we might say, appear to the suitably retrospective gaze as ‘subjects’ of history in some meaningful sense not reducible to the molecular/ atomic level of subjective intentions. This, presumably, is partly because those same ‘individuals’ are themselves bearers of institutional and class identities, symbolic mandates and ideological imperatives which are transpersonal and which can be fulfilled or (sometimes) refused but hardly ignored (since to ignore in this context is to refuse).
These thoughts occurred to me whilst writing something on J.B. Yeats (W.B.’s father), who aborted his legal career and became a bohemian and (failed) portrait painter. Viewed pragmatically and from the inside, JBY’s destiny appears as the result of purely capricious and personal decisions, as the signature of his famously idiosyncratic self. His ‘destiny’ is then no more than the purely nominal unity or collective name we give to an ensemble of anecdotes; looked at awry, however, these highly idiosyncratic decisions seem utterly consistent with, typical of, a larger class destiny, and part of a collective narrative, the ‘subject’ of which is the Protestant Ascendancy, a being which, if only fictional, nonetheless appears, to the retroactive eye of history, to have its own coherence, ‘character’ and agency. And viewed this way, JBY’s own involvements come to be seen as strategic and local moves within a larger narrative. But it is this larger narrative, in turn, which seems to account for the ‘dissolution’ of the individual life into a series of colourful anecdotes and contingent, eccentric acts. And so we return to the question of what, in the historical fabric has ‘loosened’ so that the individual is now ‘at liberty’ in this sense, and wherein a series of (hitherto unthinkable) options and possibilities assume shape and plausibility, now unconstrained by any class mandate.