Mechanical determinism makes people believe history moves without them.

Evidence

This picture is too simple. The triumphs of science, particularly Newtonian physics, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries persuaded most thinking people that the physical universe had a uniform structure accessible to human reason. It began to seem that human nature and human social systems might have a similarly mechanical structure. This emerging world view cast humankind in an observing mold. Through perception, measurement, and mathematics, the human mind would uncover the secrets of nature (including those of the mind itself, a part of nature) and the laws (natural, not positive) of social interaction-including laws decreeing balanced government, economic behavior in accordance with the principles of supply and demand, and moral and legal principles based on immutable principles of psychology and human behavior. The mind was a camera, recording activities both natural and social and alike determined by natural laws, and an adding machine. — Richard A. Posner, What Has Pragmatism to Offer Law?, 22 (#expands, via linked claim)

Kant’s answer provides release from one of the two oppressions which threaten modern man, nature and history. Both appear to stifle the free, self-possessed personality: the former, because its mechanicism subjects the soul to the same blind forces as the falling stone and the sprouting stalk; the latter, because it makes of the soul a mere point of intersection of social threads spinning through history and reduces its whole creativity to a matter of administering the inheritance of the race. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 163 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Mechanical causality cannot account for qualitative change or historical novelty.; Time travel implies a predetermined history without free will. — Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time, 297; Both nature’s mechanism and history’s determinism oppress the modern self — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 163 (+5 more)

Related

• Human freedom to begin new things resists the tyranny of logical deduction (similarity 0.81)
• Modern mankind splits between belief in omnipotence and experienced powerlessness (similarity 0.80)
• Mechanical causality cannot account for qualitative change or historical novelty. (similarity 0.80)
• Both nature’s mechanism and history’s determinism oppress the modern self (similarity 0.80)
• Social context shaped which mechanical ideas seemed plausible, not their content (similarity 0.79)
• Time travel implies a predetermined history without free will. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Both nature’s mechanism and history’s determinism oppress the modern self #expands (0.80) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 163
• Newtonian science shaped a mechanical worldview of human reason #expands (0.80) — Richard A. Posner, What Has Pragmatism to Offer Law?, 22
• Historical actors act under circumstances transmitted from the past, not freely chosen #corroborates (0.80)
• Time travel implies a predetermined history without free will. #expands (0.75) — Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time, 297
• Whole-trend historical explanations often mask escapes from responsibility #expands (0.72)
• Historical inevitability claims overreach; the past never dictates the future #complicates (0.70)