Modern history has replaced the ‘divinely ordained’ aims of various peoples – the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans – which ancient historians saw as the progressive aims of humanity as a whole, by new aims of its own – the well-being of the French people, the German or the English, or, in the most abstract terms, the single, noble aim of civilizing all of humanity, by which is usually meant the inhabitants of a small north-western corner of a large continent.
