in the eighteenth century was bound up with the attempts of political theorists to defend local rights and privileges against the encroachment of the centralizing Enlightenment state. This held particularly true in areas such as the Swiss cantons and the German petty states, where the modern bureaucratic state was not yet firmly established.9 Antoni has suggested that historicism can serve as the common denominator for a Europe-wide “reaction and revolt of national traditions against French Reason and the Age of Enlightenment,” as expressed in the application of an abstract mathematical mentality to culture and politics.10 But it was in Germany that the conflict between national traditions and French ideas was particularly intense. Germany lacked the heritage of a great literature which England, Spain, and Italy possessed.
The literary revival in Germany in the late eighteenth century involved the attempt to free national literature from the influence of French neo-classic patterns, and was far more conscious than the romantic stirrings elsewhere. But, most important, German political nationalism arose in the struggle against the French domination of Germany in the aftermath of the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic victories, a struggle which intensified the anti-Enlightenment bias of German political thought. The tradition of historical thought with which we are dealing in this book was a child of the German national revival and the Wars of Liberation. The liberal historians in the tradition sought to derive their liberalism from the spirit of reform which guided the great bureaucrats. Men such as Stein, Humboldt, Gneisenau, and Scharnhorst, sought by edicts from above to create an efficient, modernized monarchy, able to mobilize the human resources of the nation and willing to provide the conditions in which personal liberty, juridical security, and a degree of popular participation in public affairs would be balanced with a respect for traditional organs of authority. In the Spirit of 1813 they saw a saner German counterpart to the ideas of 1789. The radically equalitarian demands of the French Revolution and its challenge to all tradition, they feared, laid the road open to the systematic tyranny of the state over man, such as exercised by a Robespierre or a Napoleon.
Three sets of ideas occupy a central role in the theoretical position of the German national tradition of historiography with which we are concerned in this book: a concept of the state, a philosophy of value, and a theory of knowledge. None of these three concepts is entirely peculiar to German historiography, but all three have found an extreme formulation in German historical thought.11
1. The state as an end in itself and the concept of the Machtstaat. Historicism in Germany, as elsewhere, viewed the state as the product of historical forces. In Germany, as in Great Britain or France, the culture-oriented historiography of the eighteenth century exemplified by Voltaire or Gibbon gave way to a nation-centered politically oriented approach to the past. However, German historians looked back to political traditions which were very different from those of French or British historians. To be sure, the historians with whom we deal idealized neither the Holy Roman Empire nor the remnants of medieval corporatism. Rather, their model is the enlightened Obrigkeitsstaat, best represented by the Hohenzollern monarchy of the Prussian Reform Era. Their conception of the state thus contains an aristocratic and bureaucratic bias together with an appreciation of the position of the cultured, propertied middle classes as pillars of society. The state for them is neither the nation in Michelet’s sense nor is it embodied in the history of parliamentary institutions in the British meaning. They maintain a much sharper distinction between government and governed than do their French and British counterparts. In Ranke’s words: “No matter how we define state and society, there always remains the contrast between the authorities and the subject, between the mass of the governed and the small number of governors”12
In place of the utilitarian concept of state, as an instrument of the interests and welfare of its population, German historiography emphatically places the idealistic concept of the state as an “individual,” an end in itself, governed by its own principles of life. States have more than merely empirical existence, Ranke observes; they each represent a higher spiritual principle, “so to say an idea of God.… It would be foolish to consider them as so many institutions existing for the protection of individuals who have joined together, let us say, to safeguard their property.”13
2. Antinormativität, the rejection of the concept of thinking in normative terms. Closely related to the concept of the state, as an individual and an end in itself, is a certain philosophy of value. By definition, any form of historicism has to recognize that all values arise within the concrete setting of an historical situation. The tradition of historicism with which we are dealing, however, goes a step further by assuming that whatever arises in history is per se valuable. No individual, no institution, no historical deed can be judged by standards external to the situation in which it arises, but rather must be judged in terms of its own inherent values. There are thus no rational standards of value applicable to a diversity of human institutions. Instead, all values are culture-bound, but all cultural phenomena are emanations of divine will and represent true values. In the realm of political values, the foundations are thus laid for an ethical theory of the doctrine of state. If Machiavelli viewed the striving for power in amoral terms, German historicism raises it to an ethical principle. It must be the uppermost task of the state, Ranke observes, to achieve the highest measure of independence and strength among the competing powers of the world, so that the state will be able to fully develop its innate tendencies. To this end all domestic affairs must be subordinated.14
The critics of the doctrine of reason of state, Meinecke declares, overlook that “morality has not only a universal but also an individual side to it and the seeming immorality of the state’s egoism for power can be morally justified from this perspective. For nothing can be immoral which comes from the innermost, individual character of a being.”15 The state can thus not sin when it follows its own higher interests, generally interpreted in power-political terms, for in pursuing these interests it furthers high ethical aims. Only in a strong state, Humboldt and Droysen assure us, are freedom, law, and cultural creativity secure. The state is thus not sheer power, but the institutional embodiment of morality. International conflicts are never merely a struggle of power, but beyond this a conflict of moral principles. Victory in war, Ranke agrees with Hegel, generally represents the victory of the higher moral energies.16
The identification of national power with freedom and culture is by no means unique to German historicism. Nevertheless, there is missing in the German tradition the conscious attempt so frequent in nineteenth-century nationalism in Italy, France, America, and Britain, which identifies national aspirations with universal human values.17 Beginning with Ranke, historians in the German tradition stress the intransferability of political institutions.18 Germany has little to learn from France; it must rather strive to develop institutions fully in its own traditions. Every state is unique, embodying a particular and inimitable spirit and ethics. German nationalism is thus much more historically oriented, far more devoid of an idea which transcends the political or ethnic nation.19 The historicism of Johann Gottfried Herder in the eighteenth century had initiated a keen awareness of the variety of human values; in the nineteenth century it increasingly tended to lead to a negation of universal human values.20
3. Anti-Begrifflichkeit, the rejection of conceptualized thinking. In the theory of knowledge as well, the break with the natural law belief in the rational substructure of human existence is carried to a greater extreme than in other forms of historicism. The uniqueness of individualities in history restricted the applicability of rational methods in the study of social and cultural phenomena. The spontaneity and dynamism of life refused to be reduced to common denominators. From Humboldt and Schleiermacher on, German historians and cultural scientists have tended to stress the very limited value of concepts and generalizations in history and the cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften).21 Conceptualization, they assert, empties the reality of history of its vital quality. History, the area of willed human actions, requires understanding. But this understanding (Verstehen) is possible only if we cast ourselves into the individual character of our historical subject matter. This process is not accomplished by abstract reasoning, but by direct confrontation with the subject
