The editors introduce the core areas of current debate within historical theory, bringing the reader as up to date with continuing debates and current developments as is possible. There is nothing, notes Professor Leo Oppenhelm, “that would attest the awareness of the scribes of the existence of a historical continuum in the Mesopotamian civilisation”. These are the durable achievements inherited from its predecessors, the special conditions required for its own maintenance, and the opposing forces at work within itself.

Just as the royal despots dominated the city states and their empires, so the will, passions, plans and needs of the gods were the ultimate causes of events. Plato taught the doctrine of the Great Year at the end of which the planets would occupy the same positions as before and all sublunary events would be reduplicated.

This represents the dialectical part of Marx's famous theory of dialectical (or historical) materialism.

While most other thinkers did not dispute that divine providence ultimately shaped the course of events, they were far more concerned with the mundane ways and means through which history operated. Human nature, like nature itself, was regarded as rigid and unchanging from one generation to another. The course and outcome of history is determined by overriding internal necessities which are independent of the will and consciousness of any of its institutional or personal agencies. One of them was expressed in the activation of national life and national movements against the oppressors.As Charles Taylor puts it, "These two directions of influence are so far from being rivals that they are actually complementary. However, Hegel's contention, in Marx's view, that ideas or the 'spirit of the age' drive history was mistaken.

After the bourgeoisie had consolidated its position as the ruling class, its thinkers shrank from probing to the bottom of social and political processes. Marx identified society's relations of production (arising on the basis of given productive forces) as the economic base of society. Theory is metahistorical also in that in its strongest versions it applies to the entire discipline of history, all time periods, and specialized topics. e. the transition from feudalism to capitalism, in that both societies are "stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.Marx and Engels first set out their materialist conception of history in The German Ideology, written in 1845.