Engels explained history as unintended outcomes of conflicting individual wills.

Evidence

This type of alienation by the fact of collectivity itself was already described by Engels in one of his letters of the early 1890’s in which he said: “history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant—the historical event. This may again be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.” The dialectical twist given to this model is, however, the idea that even if everyone wills the same thing, quantity turns over into quality and indeed into negation. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 497

Categorization

• XREF: Engels’s ‘parallelogram of forces’ model connects directly to Weber’s unintended-consequences sociology and to Adam Smith’s invisible hand — and Jameson’s point is exactly that the dialectic exceeds all three by claiming convergence too yields negation. — connects to: Invention of narrative is how people claim responsibility for unintended history — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 537; Engels proposed qualifying ‘history’ as ‘written’ before Marx’s death — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 745; Situation arises from freely chosen ends colliding with surrounding facticity. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1276
• DEFINE: Embeds the classic Engels formulation of history as the intersection of individual wills, followed by Jameson’s gloss of the specifically dialectical (quantity-into-quality) twist Sartre adds.

Broader Connections

• Invention of narrative is how people claim responsibility for unintended history #expands (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 537
• Engels proposed qualifying ‘history’ as ‘written’ before Marx’s death #qualifies (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 745
• Situation arises from freely chosen ends colliding with surrounding facticity. #complicates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1276