Prussian historians, remained wedded to a Lutheran religiosity which, in its optimism, seemed to lack any profound understanding of the propensity of political institutions to abuse power. Others in German Idealistic tradition still saw in history the fulfillment of a great rational process. The increasing orientation toward the natural sciences in the course of the nineteenth century did not destroy this faith. For basic to German idealism and to the optimism of German historicism was not the concept that reality was idea, but that the world was a meaningful process. Nor did the philosophic discussions of the NeoKantians regarding the nature of history and of historical knowledge decisively shatter this faith—at least among the historians—even if they cast doubt on it.22 Only the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century set the stage for a serious and widespread re-examination of historicist principles.
There is a second more general question which interests us, that of the relation of historicism to political theory. Particularly interesting is to what extent historicist concepts were compatible with liberal and democratic political theory. German historicism was indeed a revolt against aspects of the Enlightenment, but by no means as radical a reaction against political liberalism as has often been assumed. Historicism, as we shall see, had its conservative wing, represented by Ranke, Treitschke in his later years, Below, Marcks, and others. But for the most part the historians in the national tradition considered themselves liberals. Indeed, the main currents of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberalism in Germany stood within the historicist tradition. Nevertheless, on the plane of social and political ideas, the historicism of the liberal German historians was marked by profound inconsistencies. Its narrow conception of the state, modeled on the Restoration Prussian monarchy, prevented German historians from adequately taking into account the broad social, economic, and cultural forces operating in history.
Historiography in Germany thus preserved an aristocratic bias far longer than in Western countries. History, at least until Meinecke’s Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, with some notable exceptions, was mostly history in a narrow political sense, relating the actions of statesmen, of generals, and of diplomats, and leaving almost entirely out of account the institutional and material framework in which these decisions were made. Although Meinecke introduced a concern with the political relevance of ideas, his Ideengeschichte centered exclusively around the intellectual biographies of great personalities and consciously ignored the social setting within which political ideas arise and function. Nor was the peculiar synthesis of freedom and authority, which the German historians proposed, a convincing or a lasting one. The German historians in the historicist tradition rejected the doctrine of natural law. As we noted, they insisted that the state should not be judged by external ethical standards or by utilitarian norms of the freedom and welfare of its citizens, but that its conduct must always be guided and judged in terms of its power-political interests and that, therefore, the demands of foreign policy always must have preference over domestic considerations. In contrast to classical social contract theory, they insisted, and probably rightly so, that freedom can be achieved only within and through the state. However, they believed that the freedoms they sought, and which were essentially those of liberals generally, the rights of the person (freedom of expression, rule of law, and the presence of representative institutions through which public opinion could cooperate in the making of political decisions), could be achieved within the framework of the traditional state. They tended to believe that the Hohenzollern monarchy, with its aristocratic and authoritarian aspects and its unique bureaucratic ethos, guaranteed a better bulwark for the defense of individual liberties and juridical security than a democracy in which policy would be more responsive to the whims of public opinion than to considerations of reasons of state. What they wanted, therefore, was a Rechtsstaat best achieved, they thought, in a constitutional monarchy which provided organs of popular representation but maintained important prerogatives of executive rule, especially regarding foreign affairs and a military free of parliamentary control. This position was held even by such early twentieth-century critics of the Wilhelminian state as Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, Hans Delbrück, and Friedrich Naumann. They sought to link the masses more closely to the monarchy through social reforms and a more democratic suffrage.
The political faith of historicism rested upon a metaphysical optimism which in retrospect seems incredibly naive. German historians liked to stress that they understood the realities of power more fully than their Western counterparts who remained closer to natural-law traditions; also that the German idea of freedom better recognized the social character of freedom in an industrial age, and the relation of freedom to the total social and political life of a nation. “There is no pure idea of political freedom,” Ernst Troeltsch commented in a war lecture on the “German Idea of Freedom.” Rather, the concept of political freedom, like all political concepts, has developed from the total spiritual and political life of a nation. In contrast, “the ideas of 1789” conceived freedom in terms of the “isolated individual and his always identical rationality.”23
Confident in the meaningfulness of the historical process, German historians and political theorists from Wilhelm von Humboldt to Friedrich Meinecke almost a century later were willing to view the state as an ethical institution whose interests in the long run were in harmony with freedom and morality. But once the belief in a divine purpose in social existence declined with the increasing secularization of thought in the nineteenth century and the triumph of naturalism, the philosophic foundations of the historicist faith in the harmony of power and morality lost their credibility. The concept of the Rechtsstaat developed by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberal legal philosophers, as exemplified by Hans Kelsen, was fundamentally different from the classical liberal conception of government by “established and promulgated law,” as formulated, for example, by John Locke. For legal positivists like Hans Kelsen, it mattered that the state follow established law and recognize a sphere of private life, but the question of the just or unjust content of the law became irrelevant. As Professor Hollowell has observed, classical integral liberalism has held that the state existed “to preserve human dignity and individual autonomy, to attain values that are inherent in individuals as human beings.” For the late nineteenth-century German advocates of the Rechtsstaat “procedure and the manner of enactment replaced justice as the criterion of law.”24 The ethical restrictions on the power of the state were thus removed. Although historians for the most part remained loyal to the idealistic heritage of the nineteenth century, Treitschke’s frank assertion that the state is sheer power, along with various subsequent expressions of what Meinecke has called a “biological ethics of force,” were in a sense logical consequences of the theoretical premises of historicism.
Historicism prided itself on its openness to historical reality. For its adherents, the great strength of the classical German tradition of historiography rested in its complete freedom from ideology. For Meinecke, German historicism represented the highest point in the understanding of things human because it freed historical thought from normative concepts. Instead, it sought to grasp historical reality in its living individuality without forcing it into the strait jacket of concepts. Nevertheless, German historicism, as a theory of history, possessed many of the characteristics of an ideology. Far from seeking to understand each historical situation from within, the German historians in the national tradition generally committed the sin of which they accused Western historians: imposing concepts or norms on historical reality. It is perhaps inescapable that the historian approaches history from a standpoint that reflects the imprint of his personality and of the social and cultural framework within which he writes. What distinguished German historicism was nevertheless the rigidity of this standpoint, the refusal of its historians to see their timebound political and social conceptions and norms in historical perspective. But in a more narrowly political sense, too, in many ways historicism functioned as an ideology.
Historicism, as we already suggested, was closely tied to the political and social outlook of a class, the academic Bildungsbürgertum. Far from attaining the impartiality and Überparteilichkeit (standing above parties) which Ranke proposed as an ideal of scientific historiography, German historians in this tradition from Ranke to Meinecke and Ritter were all deeply committed politically. Wittingly, and to some extent unwittingly, historicism provided a theoretical foundation
