New YorkAugust 30, 1967
THE GERMAN CONCEPTION OF HISTORY
[ CHAPTER I ]
Introduction
IN few countries in modern times have professional historians been as consciously guided in their practice by a conception of history as in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. This was true under circumstances where, except for the Hitler years, historians were free of the intellectual regimentation which prevails in totalitarian regimes.
With much more justification than in France, Britain, or the United States, we may speak of one main tradition of German historiography. This tradition, broad and varied in its manifestations, was given a degree of unity by its common roots in the philosophy of German Idealism. One of its founding fathers was Leopold von Ranke, but he was by no means the only one. Another, perhaps equally important in the translation of German Idealist philosophy for historical practice and of greater influence upon German historians in the mid-nineteenth century, was Wilhelm von Humboldt.
What gave the tradition its distinguishing characteristics was not its critical analysis of documents, so closely associated with the name of Ranke. The critical method and the devotion to factual accuracy were not peculiar to Ranke or the nineteenth-century German historians. To an extent, they were developed by an earlier generation of historians, philologists, classicists, and Bible-scholars. Moreover, they were easily exported and adapted by historians in other countries who wrote under the impact of very different outlooks. The critical method became the common property of honest historical scholars everywhere. What distinguished the writings of the historians in the main tradition of German historiography was rather their basic theoretical convictions in regard to the nature of history and the character of political power.
This historical faith determined historical practice as well as the problems that historians posed. For the most part it centered upon the conflict of the great powers and determined the methods they employed: their heavy emphasis on diplomatic documents to the neglect of social and economic history and of sociological methods and statistics. This faith also gave the works of these historians a political orientation, not in the narrow sense of party partisanship—for within the broad tradition we find conservatives, liberals, democrats, and socialists of every description—but in the central role they assigned to the state and in their confidence in its beneficial effects.
There were, to be sure, important thinkers who were not part of this tradition, historians such as Jacob Burckhardt, Julius von Ficker, Johann von Döllinger, Max Lehmann, and Franz Schnabel, and philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Other scholars, such as Lorenz von Stein and Karl Lamprecht, stood at the margins of this tradition in their attempts to discover great social and economic forces operative in history. Nevertheless, the basic philosophic assumptions upon which the tradition rested were accepted not only by the majority of German historians, but also by scholars in other disciplines. The philosophy and methodology of historicism permeated all the German humanistic and cultural sciences, so that linguistics, philology, economics, art, law, philosophy, and theology became historically oriented studies.
Historicism has too many meanings to be useful as a term without careful delimitation.1 In Chapter II, we shall discuss the term at greater length. In this book, when we speak of historicism, we shall generally refer to the main tradition of German historiography and historical thought which has dominated historical writing, the cultural sciences, and political theory in Germany from Wilhelm von Humboldt and Leopold von Ranke until the recent past. It should nevertheless be emphasized that historicism as a movement of thought was not restricted to Germany, but that since the eighteenth century this historical outlook has dominated cultural thought in Europe generally.2
The core of the historicist outlook lies in the assumption that there is a fundamental difference between the phenomena of nature and those of history, which requires an approach in the social and cultural sciences fundamentally different from those of the natural sciences. Nature, it is held, is the scene of the eternally recurring, of phenomena themselves devoid of conscious purpose; history comprises unique and unduplicable human acts, filled with volition and intent. The world of man is in a state of incessant flux, although within it there are centers of stability (personalities, institutions, nations, epochs), each possessing an inner structure, a character, and each in constant metamorphosis in accord with its own internal principles of development. History thus becomes the only guide to an understanding of things human. There is no constant human nature; rather the character of each man reveals itself only in his development. The abstract, classificatory methods of the natural sciences are therefore inadequate models for the study of human world. History requires methods which take into account that the historian is confronted by concrete persons and groups who once were alive and possessed unique personalities that called for intuitive understanding by the historian. These methods must take into account that not only the historian’s subject matter but he himself stands within the stream of time, and that the methods and logic by which he seeks objective knowledge are themselves timebound.
Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, and others have recognized that the historical outlook was the outcome of broad currents of European thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, they have maintained that only in Germany did historicism attain its full development. Historicism liberated modern thought from the two-thousand-year domination of the theory of natural law, and the conception of the universe in terms of “timeless, absolutely valid truths which correspond to the rational order dominant thoughout the universe” was replaced with an understanding of the fullness and diversity of man’s historical experience. This recognition, Meinecke believes, constituted Germany’s greatest contribution to Western thought since the Reformation and “the highest stage in the understanding of things human attained by man.”3 Western European thought, Troeltsch and Meinecke maintained, nevertheless continued to be committed to natural law patterns of thought into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 This difference in philosophic outlook, they claimed, lay at the basis of the deep divergence in cultural and political development which they observed between Germany and “Western Europe” after the French Revolution.
This juxtaposition of German historicism and Western natural law, however, undoubtedly distorts the realities of the intellectual situation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the break with natural-law patterns, which Troeltsch and Meinecke observed in Germany, occurred in Western Europe as well. Here, too, romanticism and the reaction against the French Revolution were accompanied by a new interest in historical studies. Moreover, the impact of German literature, philosophy, and historical studies left deep impacts in France, England, and elsewhere.5
The relation between history and political science was reversed generally in Europe. The historian no longer looked to political philosophy for the principles of rational politics, as in the Enlightenment, rather, the political theorist turned to history. Not only conservative writers, such as Burke and Carlyle, but liberal theorists as well (Constant, Thierry, Michelet, Macaulay, and Acton) sought the roots of French or English liberty in the remote national past rather than in the rights of man.6 Even the positivistic sociology of Auguste Comte or Herbert Spencer, which later German critics regarded as the antithesis of German historicism, viewed society in terms of historical growth.
It is undoubtedly true, nevertheless, that historicism received its most radical expression in Germany. This radicalism unquestionably reflected the peculiar role which historicism played in German political thought. For far from representing a purely cultural phenomenon devoid of all political connotations, as Meinecke maintained in the face of his disillusionment with the course of German politics in the 1930’s7, historicism from the beginning was permeated with political ideas.8 Carlo Antoni has shown how closely the emergence
