‘There is no royal road to science,’ Marx (1976a: 104) once famously wrote, ‘and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.’ Marx's lesson should be heeded here too. For to pose effectively the question of what a new science of history might look like is to deliberate judiciously on the hand intellectual history has dealt us. This book has examined the attempts of classical dialectical materialism and the line of contemporary French theory inspired by Louis Althusser. As we saw in Part I, the lasting appeal of the Marxist science is that though beholden to Hegel's dialectical philosophy and at odds with Marx's own methodology, it held out the possibility of an interface between the rational and the empirical worthy of the name materialism. This philosophy may have been derived from a teleological framework that has lost all credibility, but in practice its defensibility rested on Marxists’ ability to discern historical trends supporting their dialectical prophesies. At the very least, the wealth of statistics deployed in the early-twentieth-century debates between Bernstein, Kautsky and Lenin illustrates this philosophy's openness to standing the test of empirical correspondence. For the same reason, despite my sympathies with Althusser, Badiou and Meillassoux's refusal of teleology and their attempt to grant science autonomy, Part II of the book concluded that they fall short of the name materialism. These thinkers are to be commended for capturing the importance of discontinuous events without providing a sceptical view of history as a meaningless string of accidents. Yet they do so by turning their back on the empirical in favour of closed, rationalist and idealist edifices. Both routes, then – classical Marxist and Althusserian – come with advantages matched by equally formidable disadvantages.