The German Conception of History. Georg G. Iggers

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grounds. The question is cautiously raised whether there are no elements of the Enlightenment notion of a constant, rational element in man and history which survive this critique, and continue to retain a degree of validity and relevance for historical and political thought.

      [ CHAPTER II ]

      The Origins of German Historicism

      THE TRANSFORMATION OF GERMAN HISTORICAL THOUGHT FROM HERDER’S COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE-ORIENTED NATIONALISM TO THE STATECENTERED EXCLUSIVE NATIONALISM OF THE WARS OF LIBERATION.

      IT is difficult to set even an approximate date for the beginnings of historicism. If we mean by historicism an approach to history which seeks to re-create the past wie es eigentlich gewesen and to recapture the unique qualities of an historical situation, then a great deal of narrative history written from a secular standpoint has been historicist in outlook since Classical Antiquity. The idea that historical research, with its concern for detail and individuality, basically differed from the generalizing and classificatory approach of the natural sciences was well known long before the eighteenth century. Aristotle already had observed that historical statements deal with “singulars” rather than with “universals.”1

      The basic elements of historical method were well established in the eighteenth century and recognized even by the rationalists. Since the age of humanism, scholarship, especially as carried on in the academies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had recognized criteria for the critical analysis of sources. It is true that there was not yet a well-established tradition of critical inquiry and that the great “pragmatic” historians of the Enlightenment, men such as Voltaire and Gibbon, tended to construct grandiose syntheses based upon inadequate evidence. The scholars, on the other hand, accumulated data with insufficient attention to the continuity and development of institutions.2 But the careful re-creation of individual reality is by no means in contradiction with natural law theory. To “understand” is not yet to “condone” or to “accept.” It is possible to portray an individual in his individuality with his unique values, and yet measure him by standards of right and wrong applicable to a broader humanity.

      If, however, like Friedrich Meinecke, we understand historicism not merely as an approach to history, but as a comprehensive philosophy of life which views all social reality as a historical stream where no two instances are comparable and which assumes that value standards and logical categories, too, are totally immersed in the stream of history, then historicism is a creation of the eighteenth century. More specifically, it is the German reaction against certain Enlightenment patterns of thought, especially the doctrine of natural law. The first two great theoretical formulations of the historicist position in the eighteenth century are very probably Giambattista Vico’s New Science,3 first published in 1725, and Johann Gottfried Herder’s Also a Philosophy of History of 1774.4 Vico had already stressed that the study of social reality requires methods fundamentally different from those of the natural sciences because society, unlike nature, cannot be reduced to the “insensible motion of bodies”; rather, it consists of the conscious acts and volitions of individuals which take place in the stream of time. Men and societies can be understood only when approached historically. To be sure, Vico’s aim in studying history was not to study history for its own sake. For him the history of mankind, far from showing the total diversity of man, still appeared as a clue to general truths about mankind. Every historical epoch has its place in the recurrent cycles (corso and ricorso) which make up the upward spiral of history. Only in Herder’s early work of 1774 do we find the historicist position formulated in its radical form: the conception that every age must be viewed in terms of its own immediate values; that there is no progress or decline in history, but only value-filled diversity.

      We have sought in the Introduction to distinguish a specific, predominantly German tradition of historiography and historical thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from broader currents of thought in Europe generally, which may have been described as forms of historicism. We shall not attempt to study the origins of historicism as a European phenomenon, but in this chapter shall restrict ourselves to the more modest task of following the transformation of German historical thought from the cosmopolitan culture-oriented nationalism of Herder in the late eighteenth century to the nationalistic and power-oriented assumptions of much of German historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

      A history of the emergence of the historicist outlook in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European thought still needs to be written. Meinecke proposed something of the sort in The Origins of Historicism wherein he sought to trace the rise of historicism as a “general Western movement” which had its culmination in German thought. But Meinecke’s book is only marginally related to the emergence of a historical approach to cultural and social reality in the eighteenth century and his concept of historicism has relatively little to do with history. What Meinecke describes as the emergence of historicism, in the course of the eighteenth century, is rather the steady recognition of the limitations of intellect in the understanding of human reality. For Meinecke, the chief obstacle to historical understanding was the doctrine of natural law. Before the life quality of history in its individuality and spontaneity could be understood, the two-thousand-year-old hold of the Stoic-Christian natural law faith in a static, rational world order had to be broken. In its place the recognition had to be established that the human psyche (Seele) occupied the central point in history and that this psyche was “determined not by reason or understanding but by will.”5 Meinecke’s book thus becomes a hymn to the beneficient triumph of unreason in modern consciousness.

      Ironically, Descartes stands at the beginning of Meinecke’s account of the emancipation of modern thought from a rational conception of reality. It was Descartes, Meinecke notes, who reoriented European philosophy from the analysis of the supposedly objective reality of the external world to the examination of human consciousness. The Enlightenment historians—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Gibbon, and Hume—through their universalistic interest, contributed to an understanding of the variety of human institutions; the Pietists, and the Pre-Romantics to an understanding of the intertwining of emotion and intellect; the traditionalists to an awareness of the extent to which there is reason in the apparent unreason of inherited institutions and ideas. The triumph of soul over intellect in Meinecke’s book does not, however, lead to the dissolution of knowledge and values, but rather to the Neo-Platonic conception that behind the apparent irrationality and turbulence of the historical world there stands a realm of great perennial ideas. These ideas are neither abstract nor universally valid, but embody the perennial essences of the fleeting individualities that comprise the historical world. They can be grasped only by the total soul, never by cold reason. The relativistic dilemmas of historicism are thus overcome for Meinecke, and historicism becomes the basis for the recognition of real truths and values. In Goethe, whose relation to history Meinecke recognizes as a very ambiguous one,6 Meinecke sees the culmination of historicist thought. It was Goethe who most fully perceived in each individuality not merely a set of fleeting phenomena, but a concrete manifestation of an individualized eternal idea. He understood that reason expresses itself never abstractly, but only within concrete, historical individuals.

      There are several disturbing contradictions between Meinecke’s theoretical Assumptions in The Origins of Historicism and his application of these ideas. On the one hand, Meinecke argues that history is an open process, and every particular must be understood in terms of its own unique worth rather than as a part of a greater predetermined pattern. But the history of ideas presented by Meinecke has almost a Hegelian ring. Leibniz, Gottfried Arnold, Voltaire, and Edmund Burke all are reduced to steppingstones in the process by which European consciousness reaches its fulfillment in Goethe’s idea of individuality. It is also striking that Meinecke, who so emphatically stressed the interrelatedness of thought and life, so completely isolated the history of ideas from the historical and social settings in which these ideas arose and operated. So thoroughly disillusioned with the course of German politics since World War I, Meinecke now interpreted historicism as a purely cultural

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