whom Hegel terms “the Peoples.”39 Each people, in developing its own unique character, simultaneously plays its role in the world process. Although Hegel’s conception of progress thus brings individuality into harmony with the overall process, it nevertheless significantly violates the historicist theory of the radical autonomy of the individual. In the Hegelian system, the individual becomes a means within a larger process. Historicism, however, stresses that the spontaneity of the individual must be preserved. His growth cannot be forced into a scheme.
Nevertheless, an important aspect of the German Idealist view of history as a rational process is incorporated into historicist thought. Humboldt acknowledges that collective groups, too, possess the characteristics of individuality, as he steadily moves from the position of the Humanitätsideal to that of historicism. He believes that although every individuality and its idea are radically unique, they directly form part of a divine design in a “mysterious” way which we cannot perceive.40 “World history,” he wrote in 1825, “is unthinkable without a cosmic plan governing it.”41 Similarly, Ranke sees in the state an entity “real-and-spiritual-at-once (real-geistig).” With Hegel he is convinced that, in pursuing its own power-political interests, the state acts in accordance with a higher order that governs the world. As he has Friedrich say in the Political Dialogue: “But seriously, you will be able to name few significant wars for which it could not be proved that genuine moral energy achieved the final victory.”42
However, the most important factor in the transition from an Enlightenment to an historicist outlook was doubtless the impact of political events upon the German intellect between 1792 and 1815. The educated German public, with few exceptions, had hailed the French Revolution. The tremendous disappointment which had set in in Germany after the revolution reached its terroristic phase, led to a widespread re-examination of natural law doctrine. The reaction against the ideology of the revolution was intensified by the Napoleonic domination of Germany. This strengthened national feeling, and in the public mind identified Enlightenment values with a hated French culture. German opinion, for the most part, did not want a restoration of prerevolutionary political and social conditions. The defeat of Prussia in 1806 initiated a period of extensive reforms in that kingdom. But reformers, such as Baron von Stein, Hardenberg, and Humboldt, searched for liberal institutions peculiarly suited to German traditions.
In three important ways the German attitude toward history changed in these years:
1. The Enlightenment faith in universally applicable ethical and political values, which had been already challenged before the Revolution, was now completely shattered. Except for a few isolated thinkers who like the Freiburg historian Carl Rotteck remained faithful to the principles of 1789, German educated opinion now agreed that all values and rights were of historic and national origin and that alien institutions could not be transplanted to German soil. Moreover, they saw in history, rather than in abstract rationality, the key to all truth and value. Within this broad consensus there were, of course, many nuances from traditionalists like Savigny and Haller who emphasized the extreme diversity and spontaneity in history to German Idealist philosophers such as Fichte and Hegel who viewed history as a rational process.
2. The concept of the nation had changed fundamentally.43 Herder’s nationalism was still cosmopolitan in spirit. Each nation contributes to the richness of human life. Nationalism links the nations to each other rather than separates them. Herder optimistically believes that the nationalization of political life contributes to international peace. “Cabinets may betray each other.… But fatherlands will not move against each other. They will rest peacefully by each other’s side and stand by each other like members of a family. Fatherlands at war with each other would be the worst barbarism of the human language.”44 In 1806, Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation could distinguish the Germans as an original nation that, unlike others (e.g., the French), had not lost touch with the original genius transmitted through its speech. The French had then become a superficial nation, who, as Humboldt wrote in 1814, lacked “the striving for the divine.”45 Nationalism no longer united, it divided. In Ernst Moritz Arndt’s poetic definition of the war winter of 1812-1813, the German fatherland was to be found “where every Frenchman is called foe, and every German is called friend.”46
3. Finally, the state occupies a very different role. Herder wrote in 1784 that it is “inconceivable that man is made for the state.” He considered the state an artificial institution, and held it to be generally detrimental to human happiness.47 Humboldt argued for the limitation of state powers in very similar terms in 1792. The activities which mattered, he wrote, were carried on by civil society. The state, which he and Herder held to be a mechanical device without real ties to society, restricted the free development of the individual wherever it exceeded its minimum function of preserving order. Along with Herder or Schiller, he viewed Germany as a cultural rather than a political nation. But by 1813 he came to identify “nation, people and state.”48 Similarly, Fichte who wrote in 1794 that “the aim of all government” is “to make government superfluous,”49 by 1800 in his The Closed Commercial State50 bestowed extensive economic functions on the state. In his Addresses to the German Nation of 1806, he raised the state to the role of the moral and religious educator of the German nation.51 Moreover, the state was increasingly viewed in power-political terms. Humboldt did so in his famous “Memorandum on a German Constitution” of 1813. Fichte, in his Machiavelli essay of 1807, warned that in the relation between states “there is neither law nor right except the right of the stronger.” This condition placed the prince, who was responsible for the interests of the people, “in a higher ethical order whose material substance is contained in the words, ‘Salus et decus populi suprema lex esto.’ “52
This assumption implies that, in following its own interests, the state acts not only in accordance with a higher morality than that represented by private morality, but also in harmony with the basic purpose of history. In its most extreme form, this theory of the identity of raison d’état and cosmic plan probably appears in Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1820). “Each nation as an existing individuality is guided by its particular principles,” Hegel writes, “and only as a particular individuality can each national spirit win objectivity and self-consciousness; but the fortunes and deeds of States in their relation to one another reveal the dialectic of the finite nature of these spirits. Out of this dialectic rises the universal Spirit, pronouncing its judgments,” the highest judgment, “for the history of the World is the world’s court of justice.”53 This conception that the struggles of the individual nations are part of a cosmic, rational dialectic violates historicist principles. Nevertheless, even Ranke, who rejected any schematization of history, accepted the idea that generally the victors in a conflict represent the morally superior nation.
Historicism, in the course of the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, had thus not only increased its hold upon the educated public, but also had changed its character. An aesthetic, culturally oriented approach to nationality increasingly gave place to the ideal of the national state. The concept of individuality, which Goethe and Humboldt still applied to the uniqueness of persons, now primarily referred to collective groups. The historical optimism of Herder, which saw a hidden meaning in the flow of history, had been fortified by an even more optimistic idea of identity: the assumption that states, in pursuing their own power-political interests, act in accord with a higher morality. A third idea, absent in earlier historicism, now occupies a central place in historicist doctrine: the concept of the primacy of the state in the nation and in society. In the course of Wars of Liberation and even more so after 1815, the political interests of the nation were increasingly identified with the power-political interests of the Prussian state. Together, these three concepts were to provide the foundations for the theoretical assumptions of much of German historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
[ CHAPTER III ]
The Theoretical Foundations of German Historicism
