In Search of the Present by Octavio Paz

“The last in this hasty enumeration of the elements of our crisis marks the collapse of all the philosophical and historical hypotheses that claimed to reveal the laws governing the course of history. The believers, confident that they held the keys to history, erected powerful states over pyramids of corpses. These arrogant constructions, destined in theory to liberate men, were quickly transformed into gigantic prisons. Today we have seen them fall, overthrown not by their ideological enemies, but by the impatience and the desire for freedom of the new generations. Is this the end of all Utopias? It is, more precisely, the end of the idea of history as a phenomenon whose outcome can be known in advance. Historical determinism has been a costly and bloodstained fantasy. History is unpredictable, because its agent, mankind, is the personification of indeterminacy.”

-Octavio Paz, 1990