Commentary One of the most important but least acknowledged psychological factors that affects a person’s way of being in the world is his conception of history. It can make one glad to be alive, or bitter and resentful against all that exists. These days, bitterness and resentment are usually taken as signs of enlightenment. In his “History of England from the Accession of James II,” Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote that “the history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.” In his “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” Marx wrote that “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” The former was published in 1848, the latter in 1851: the difference between them is as much that of temperament and outlook on the world as of evidence. Is true history that of progress or of …