In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant – the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals – each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) – do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it. . Friedrich Engels
About This Quote

Hegel's view of history is that history is made by the interactions between myriad individual wills. Each individual will is shaped by its own unique circumstances, but in the end all these individual wills merge into a common set of circumstances, which then shape the outcome of history. For Hegel, this "common resultant" is not something that any one person controls, but something that emerges from the interaction between all of the individual wills.

Source: On Historical Materialism

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