Meaning in History

Löwith, a German philosopher who fled the Nazi regime, works backward through the Western philosophy of history — Burckhardt, Marx, Hegel, Voltaire, Vico, Bossuet, Joachim of Fiore, Augustine, Orosius — to argue that the modern belief in historical progress is a secularized version of Jewish and Christian eschatology. The Greeks, on his account, had no philosophy of history at all, because a cyclical cosmos gives history nowhere to go; only a faith in fulfillment produces one.

Why it’s on the list: Assigned in UATX’s “History, Historiography, and the Philosophy of History”, where it pairs with Becker’s Heavenly City and Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return as the secularization thesis in its strongest form, then hands off to Strauss and Fukuyama later on the same syllabus.

Where I saw it: The University of Austin’s Fall 2025 reading list, 65 Texts Our Students Are Reading, published November 13 2025 and saved to Kyle’s “Books To Read” Apple Note. The full 65-text curriculum is transcribed on UATX Fall Reading List.

Connections

• UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this is assigned in.
• Philosophy of History — the discipline the book is an argument about.
• Progress — the idea Löwith traces to a theological origin.
• Christianity — the eschatology he says modern history-writing inherited.
• The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers — the adjacent argument, assigned in the same course.