by contemplation (Anschauung) of its individuality, free of the limitations of conceptual thought. All historical understanding, Humboldt, Ranke, and Dilthey agree, requires an element of intuition (Ahnung).
This rejection of abstract reason by German historicists does not, however, mean a rejection of all rationality in scientific inquiry. On the contrary, as we shall see, historicism is predominantly a scholarly movement which seeks rational understanding of human reality. Recognizing the emotional qualities of all human behavior, it seeks to develop a logic that takes into account the irrational aspects of human life. The same deep faith in the ultimate unity of life in God, which marks the political and ethical thought of historicism, also marks its theory of knowledge. From Humboldt to Meinecke, German historians are aware that all historical study takes place in an historical framework, but they are also confident that scholarly study leads to objective knowledge of historical reality. This leads to the professionalization of historical research and the development of canons of critical scholarship. In practice, German historical scholarship is never able to free itself from conceptualized thinking. It works with a concept of the state which is much more static, far less aware of cultural diversities than that employed by historians outside the tradition. Nor were the German historians able to free themselves of value judgments, to let history speak through them (as Ranke demanded) to the extent that they postulated in theory. They dogmatically ruled out the possibility of a common human substructure subject to rational inquiry by insisting that history was the sphere of the unique. Little place was left for comparative studies of cultures or for the analysis of constant structural characteristics of societies. This is in sharp contrast with attempts elsewhere (Fustel de Coulanges, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jacob Burckhardt, Lord Acton, Frederick Turner) or in Germany (Lorenz von Stein, Marx and Engels, Karl Lamprecht, Max Weber, Otto Hintze) to combine a recognition of the diversity of institutions with a search for the constant or typically recurring elements in historical change, as well as for patterns of development.
These philosophic notions of history were to dominate German historiography for more than a century. As we shall see in the next chapter, they had roots in the cosmopolitan, culture-oriented historicism of the eighteenth century and in the classical Humanitätsideal of Herder, Goethe, and Kant. They acquired their nationalistic and power-oriented form in the period of stress and strain of the Napoleonic invasions, and became a part of the national heritage in the enthusiasm which accompanied the Wars of Liberation. They were integrated into the political faith of a generation who, in the decades of the Restoration, strove against the forces of absolutism for national unity and the establishment of liberal institutions cleansed of alien French ideas and loyal to German traditions. Among conservative historians, these philosophic notions were reinforced by Ranke’s activities as a historian, publicist, and teacher.
In the years immediately preceding 1848, a more liberal generation of young historians, skeptical of Ranke’s conservative leanings and looking for Prussian leadership in German unification, turned back to Humboldt, Fichte, and Hegel for inspiration. The failure of the 1848 Revolution further convinced the same historians of the primacy of state action and of the ethical rightness of political power. The year 1871 seemed to them to be the culmination and justification of historical development. German nationalism had become inextricably interwoven with the “German” idea of history, which in turn now became closely and equally associated with the Bismarckian solution to the German question. Conservatives, liberals, and to an extent even democrats, shared in the common religion of history. Germany’s entry into the area of world politics found historians firmly convinced that Ranke’s conception of the great powers could be extended to the world scene. World War I once more united most historians from left to right in a fervent defense of the “German idea of history” against “Western natural-law doctrine.”
Thus, German historians moved in a world of their own, which remained remarkably unchanged in the midst of the great transformations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their intellectual capital to a large extent remained that of the glorious days of the Wars of Liberation. They were remarkably inattentive to the great social and economic changes brought about by industrialization. History to them remained primarily the interplay of the great powers, and diplomatic and political documents continued to offer the prime sources for historical study. Where historians did acknowledge the emergence of the masses as a political factor, as Heinrich von Sybel did in his study of the French Revolution, they assumed that the principles of international politics and warfare had remained essentially unchanged since the emergence of the modern absolutist state. Sociology was viewed with suspicion. Even the great tradition of economic history, which came into being with Gustav Schmoller, subordinated economic to political and power-political factors. Similarly, at the turn of the twentieth century, the circle of social and political reformers around Friedrich Naumann, which included eminent men such as Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and Friedrich Meinecke, saw the primary solution for the domestic social and economic problems of an industrial society in an expansive foreign policy. They championed democratization of government primarly as a means of strengthening the nation in the international power struggle.
Despite their rejection of the classic idea of progress, German historians and social thinkers still remained remarkably optimistic regarding the future of the modern world at a time when a cultural malaise had become apparent among liberal thinkers in the Western countries. Burckhardt’s and Nietzsche’s words of warning, whatever their impact upon broad masses of young Germans, mostly fell upon deaf ears among the leading German historians. In 1914, with very few exceptions, German historians and social philosophers were unable to understand the completely changed character of warfare and international realities. They were prisoners of an idea. This idea, with its roots in the nineteenth century, influenced their judgment of the political realities of the twentieth century. Only the terrible calamities of Nazism and World War II led to a serious and widespread re-examination of the basic philosophic assumptions of the national tradition of historiographical thought.
This book has a twofold task: one historical, the other theoretical. As an historical study, it will attempt to trace the emergence, transformation, and decline of the main orientation of German historical thought and historiographical practice from Wilhelm von Humboldt and Leopold von Ranke to Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter. The study proceeds on the assumption that this line of thought represented a continuous tradition. In the spirit of that tradition, we will seek to portray this line of thought as a unique event in the history of ideas. The book is not intended as an exhaustive history of German historical thought in the nineteenth or twentieth century. Rather, it proposes to reconstruct the basic conceptual structure of the tradition and to follow the dialogue which took place within this framework. Insofar as the tradition extended to cultural scientists and political theorists, as well as to historians, we must necessarily consider thinkers other than historians who played a decisive role in this dialogue.
In another sense, however, this study consciously violates the spirit of German historicism, for it not only seeks to understand but to judge. It rejects the historicist precept that every historical individuality must be measured only by its own inherent standards. Rather, it proceeds on the antihistoricist assumption that there are tenets of logic and ethics common to all mankind. A main purpose of the study is to analyze the basic theoretical propositions of the German historicist tradition. Within these propositions, it claims to find two types of basic contradictions which led to the dissolution of the tradition. On the philosophic level it sees this contradiction in the historicist attempt to base a positive faith in a meaningful universe on historical relativism. The early representatives of the German historicist tradition were still deeply steeped in the belief that this was a moral world, that man possessed worth and dignity, and that an objective understanding of history and reality was possible. As we observed, they insisted at the same time that all values were unique and historical, that all philosophy was national, and all understanding individual. They insisted upon the radical diversity of men and of human cultures. What preserved them from ethical and epistemological relativism was their deep faith in a metaphysical reality beyond the historical world. They were convinced that each of the diverse cultures merely reflected the many aspects of this reality.
Many,
