To turn to the question of Providence now is to address directly something that has always been implicit and often explicit in the forgoing. Nonetheless, Providence is a dangerous topic. To face up to it on its own terms is tantamount to smuggling into the historical undertaking an ingredient that is threatening. An easy and more attractive proposition would be to label it as alien and block its path at the threshold. One would then argue that Providence belongs to a different epistemology. That epistemology, as far as it had any claim to academic credentials, might, at best, shift between theology and philosophy. But there the line would have to be drawn. For surely nothing is more disturbing to the professional historian, especially one educated in the empirical British tradition (which would exclude the Marxists), than the devious Hegelian axiom, addressed in the introduction, that history in fact amounts to the philosophy of history. Better dismiss all questions as to providence, teleology, meaning, and so forth as bunk. But if one does that, one is forced, as I will attempt to show, to dismiss narrative (or narratives) as bunk. And if we dismiss narrative as bunk, then we have arrived at the easy conclusion that liberates us from any problems to do with history whatsoever, simply because we are forced—Henry Ford-like as it were—to accept that history is bunk. That, however, is not the agenda here.

One might begin the argument by taking a seemingly further—and therefore even more heretical—step away from history. If we go back beyond Hegel to Kant we completely upset the balance of the terms found in “the philosophy of history.” If Hegel uses philosophy as the justification (or proof) of a particular account of history, Kant uses the notion of history (or narrative) as an essential concept in his philosophical argument.