Читать книгу The German Conception of History - Georg G. Iggers - Страница 10

[ 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 of the historicist outlook 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 we wish to understand and 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, including Ranke and the majority of the 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 for the established political and social structure of nineteenth-century Prussia and Germany. There is a great degree of truth to Georg Lukacz’s observation (written from a Marxist point of view) that “the axiom of German historiography, ‘Men make history,’ is only the reverse historiographical and methodological side” of the coin of Prussian-bureaucratic absolutism.²⁵ The contradiction in the German historical conception of ethics and freedom thus appears to reflect contradictions within the fabric of German society and politics themselves.

A study of German historiography therefore can not fully divorce itself from an analysis of the basic theoretical concepts of German historians nor from an awareness of the institutional framework within which nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical thought and writing took place in Germany. We shall not, however, undertake to write a social history of ideas in this book. There is already an extensive literature on the relation of ideas to institutions in Germany. A good deal of this literature revolves around the problem of the political and cultural divergence of Germany from the West, a problem which has become central to almost every significant examination of conscience in Germany since World War I.

Within this literature, written from divergent standpoints by historians, social theorists, and cultural critics standing within German traditions, those seeking a way to liberal-democratic values and institutions, and Marxists, there is a broad area of consensus. Germany, it is generally agreed, entered the age of the democratic masses and of modern industry at a time when aristocratic institutions and attitudes were still much more intact in Germany than in the Western European countries, not to speak of the United States. Marxist and non-Marxist historians alike stress the importance of the decline of the middle class in Germany after the sixteenth century, which Hajo Holborn describes as “in many ways more bourgeois than the eighteenth.”²⁶

Germany lacked the great bourgeois families of commerce or finance which in France, Great Britain, or the Netherlands were able to exert a degree of political influence. To a much greater extent than in the West, the manufactories which came into existence in the age of mercantilism were state-owned. Artisans and shopkeepers, still closely attached to a precapitalistic, corporative outlook, occupied a more influential role among the urban classes than in Western countries. On the other hand, the predominant social and economic position of the land-owning aristocracy remained generally intact in the absolutistic territorial states. The process toward bureaucratic, absolutistic centralization took place in the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury German principalities, as it did elsewhere in Europe. The difference, however, was that the open confrontation which occurred between aristocracy and monarchy in France during the Frondes, or in Bohemia and Moravia in the Winter War, did not come about in Prussia. Here a political compromise emerged between nobility and crown.

The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which saw a decline in trade in the Western areas of Germany, witnessed an increasing economic prosperity among the large scale Junker land-owning nobility east of the Elbe, and an accompanying re-establishment of manorial rights at a time when the seignioral system was disintegrating in the West. As in Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and elsewhere, these developments in East Elbian Prussia were accompanied by the emergence of an aristocratic Ständestaat, in which the manorial lords entrenched themselves by occupying interlocking positions of economic, political, and social dominance. The Thirty Years’ War ushered in a reversal of this trend. The economic decline of the Junkers was accompanied by a rise in princely power. In Prussia, as elsewhere in Europe, the aristocracy progressively lost its political functions but was confirmed in its social privileges, and was able to maintain its control over local government and retain its manorial privileges to a much larger extent than in France. East Elbian towns, on the other hand, retained few of their local privileges but were almost thoroughly subordinated to the Hohenzollern bureaucracy. Where territorial princes were less successful than in Prussia in consolidating their power (as in Saxony or Brunswick), territorial or state-wide diets, in which the aristocracy played a dominant role, continued to exist. As Leonard Krieger observed, the Hohenzollerns went much further “beyond the standard division of labor between political power and social privilege to incorporate the aristocracy into the authoritarian military and civil posts of the state itself than did the Bourbons or the Habsburgs.²⁷ It is true that merit tended to replace birth as a prerequisite for office and advancement. Nevertheless, the aristocratic character of the bureaucracy was maintained to a larger extent than in France or Austria. Frederick II indeed sought to strengthen it, and a new bureaucratic nobility, in part recruited from the middle classes, was integrated with the hereditary East Elbian aristocracy through intermarriage, and encouraged to acquire manorial estates.

On a political plane, Enlightenment demands for social reconstruction expressed themselves in a very different form in German states from those in France. The Prussian aristocracy, integrated into the bureaucratic structure and secure in its local privileges, sought to a much lesser extent than its French counterparts to challenge the centralized structure of the monarchy. Nor did the judicial system represent a check on royal absolutism in Prussia as the parlements did in France. Rather, the spirit of reform sought to free the bureaucracy from arbitrary royal interference, and establish rule by law and established procedure. Among the middle classes, too, the academically trained civil servant (Beamte), the professors, Gymnasium teachers, and pastors, possessed a greater influence upon public life and a relatively higher social status than their counterparts in more commercially oriented Western urban settings. There existed no movement for radical social reorganization, but only demands for reforms within the framework of the old system. Recurrent through the writings of the German Enlightenment are demands for individual freedom, intellectual and religious tolerance, due process of law, and economic liberty. Freedom is more often defined in terms of individual spiritual growth rather than in terms of political participation.

As Hajo Holborn observed, “The entire intellectual (geistige) movement of the eighteenth century aimed almost exclusively at the education of individual man and subordinated all political demands to this goal.”²⁸ The state itself was regarded as a positive good, an institution in which, in many ways, the ideals of the Enlightenment had already been attained, a framework where full development of individuality and culture could take place.²⁹ The young Wilhelm von Humboldt’s definition of freedom in terms of “the highest and most proportionate development of one’s resources into one whole”³⁰ was thus compatible with his later assertion that only within a strong nation was the development of freedom possible.

The early enthusiasm with which many Germans received the initial moderate phases of the French Revolution was soon dissipated by the Jacobin Reign of Terror, and was transformed into intense hostility under the impact of the French occupation of the western sections of Germany and the introduction of the Napoleonic political system. Many of the aspirations of German liberals were fulfilled in the years after 1806 by the reforms introduced into the Prussian monarchy by Stein, Hardenberg, Scharnhorst, and Humboldt after the defeats of Jena and Auerstadt. In many ways these reforms resembled those introduced in France between 1789 and 1791. A large degree of economic liberty was granted, the privilege of the guilds and corporations was broken, the peasants were emancipated. The administrative structure was streamlined. A conscious effort was made to link the citizens to the state more closely through the introduction of municipal self-administration, the announcement of plans for the ultimate creation of diets for the provinces and the monarchy, and the creation of a militia drawn from popular conscription. At the same time, the reforms left intact the authority of the monarchy and the central position of the aristocracy in the bureaucracy.

Hans Rosenberg even suggests that the Reform Era marks the victory of “bureaucratic absolutism” over “monarchical autocracy.” What took place in Prussia was a “revolution from above.” The initiative for reforms in Prussia in 1807, as in France in 1788 and 1789, came from a ministerial bureaucracy. In an acute crisis, this bureaucracy sought to reconstruct the state more rationally by assailing the most obsolete claims of the titled aristocracy. Here, however, the similarity ended. In France, as Rosenberg observes, the opposition of the nobility to the curtailment of their privileges and the restructuring of government “was broken by the political emancipation of the Third Estate. In Prussia, however, throughout the confused and confusing years of Reform, the struggle for predominance remained almost altogether the internal affair of the upper ten thousand.”³¹ The struggle against Napoleonic domination confused the issues of liberal political reforms with those of awakening nationalism. Far from preparing the way for a more radical popular revolt, as in France, the reforms by the aristocratic bureaucrats led to broad middle- and lower-class support for the Hohenzollern monarchy in its struggle for a supposed national cause against foreign absolutism. Further, it sharpened the ideological differences between Prussian liberalism and the heritage of the French Revolution.

Out of the Wars of Liberation arose the myth of the Spirit of 1813 cultivated by Prussian-oriented historians from Droysen to Meinecke and central to the political beliefs of the German historicist tradition. From this perspective, the reformed Prussian monarchy marked a high point in the history of human freedom, a society in which the individual was fully free, but at the same time was integrated into a social whole. Here was the core of the “German conception of freedom,” of the ideas of 1813, which German historians contrasted sharply with the atomistic view of society supposedly inherent in the ideas of 1789.

Although German liberal aspirations were disappointed in the period of reaction which set in after 1815, and especially after 1819, no radical alienation occurred between the German middle classes and the Prussian state. Democratic radicalism found expression in the Young German literature and in Left Hegelian philosophical and theological writings. But these ideas were restricted to a relatively small number of intellectuals who were not part of the academic establishment, as well as to some artisans. Many advocates of radicalism, moreover, went into exile. The liberal critics of Prussian political conditions, both inside Prussia and increasingly elsewhere in Germany, still regarded the Prussian monarchy as capable of returning to the ideals of 1813, and of completing the task of creating a liberal national state in harmony with German traditions. Indeed, the basic reforms of the Stein period remained intact. The Beamtenstaat remained a good deal freer from arbitrary monarchical intervention than it had been in the eighteenth century. Municipal self-administration, peasant emancipation, and economic liberty were maintained. The scope of the latter during these years was even enlarged by the Zollverein. Still not satisfied were the demands of the liberals for increased constitutionalization, for an end to arbitrary restrictions of individual liberties, especially for censorship, and for positive steps toward national unification.

Few of the liberal historians of the Vormärz advocated a parliamentary monarchy as it already existed in Great Britain. Historians, such as Dahlmann and Droysen, who played a significant role in 1848 in the “classical liberal” caucus of the Frankfurt National Assembly, rather sought to preserve the prerogatives of a constitutional monarchy and a bureaucracy which consulted representative institutions without being entirely bound by them and respected civil liberties without necessarily guaranteeing them in writing. We may leave open the question whether parliamentary government was already foredoomed to failure in Germany in 1848 or in Prussia in 1862. The incipient industrialization of Germany and the largely illusionary fear of plebeian revolt, occasioned by the revolutions of 1792, 1830, and 1848 in France and by the isolated incidents of industrial unrest in Germany in the 1840’s, undoubtedly contributed to the hesitation of middle-class liberals to resort to revolutionary violence. The riots in Frankfurt in 1848, after the Malmo Armistice, had underlined the extent to which the German liberals believed that they were forced to rely upon Prussian arms as a bulwark against the radical left. The events in Bohemia, Posen, and Schleswig made clear the dependence of the liberals on Prussian and Austrian arms in order to fulfill their national aims. The defeat of the Prussian liberals by Bismarck, between 1862 and 1867, led to a reconciliation of large segments of middle-class liberalism with the monarchy, which now fulfilled the economic, national, and many of the political aspirations of the Prussian liberals.

On the surface, the ideals of 1813, the constitutional, national Rechtsstaat with representative institutions, had been achieved. “The Bismarckian synthesis, as consolidated after 1871,” Hans Rosenberg observes, “brought peace, great national prestige, and an almost spectacular long-term upswing of material growth, highly competent and honest public administration, with a profound respect for law and order, a substantial measure of personal rights, civil liberties, and social security, and a flourishing intellectual and artistic life to the German people.”³² Among the Prussian-oriented historians only relatively few observers, such as Hermann Baumgarten and Theodor Mommsen, began to perceive the tenuous character of liberal and popular institutions in a society where political power in an age of industrialism rested in the hands of an elite committed to seignioral, militaristic, bureaucratic, and authoritarian traditions. As Theodor Mommsen correctly saw, the authoritarian structure of the German state, its incomplete parliamentarization, its attachment to military and aristocratic values of obedience, prevented the emergence of a spirit of political responsibility among the German people at a time when the emergence of mass political movements within the constitutional framework of the Bismarckian state made such responsible citizenship increasingly necessary. In contrast to Western and Northern European countries, Germany preserved the political influence and social prestige of the landed and military aristocracy during a period when industrialization, with its concommitant social effects, had proceeded much further than in Western countries such as France. Historicism doubtlessly maintained itself in a form relatively unchanged from its classical foundations partly because important aspects of the institutional framework from which it had arisen and which it had served to defend remained relatively unchanged.

The failure of German historical theory to adopt itself to changing social-intellectual realities reflected the institutional basis of the historical profession itself. From the late eighteenth century on, historical scholarship in Germany was centered at the universities. In Europe and the United States, this generally became the case only later in the nineteenth century. The historian, as has often been pointed out, was an employee of the state, a Staatsbeamter. It is questionable, however, whether this status restricted his opportunities to express himself. On the contrary, as a severe critic of the German historicist tradition and of the Prussian state, Eckart Kehr, has recognized, his status as a civil servant in fact gave the university professor a high degree of protection against political pressures.³³ Indeed, until Bismarck’s compromise with the liberals in 1867, the historians in the national tradition mostly were in opposition to the status quo.

It is perhaps more important for an understanding of the historians’ failure to re-examine their historiographical practices and political conceptions that the historians considered themselves a part of the Bildungsbürgertum, the bourgeoisie of culture and education. For the most part they identified themselves with the aspirations of this class.³⁴ Thus, in 1848, they shared the desire for liberalization and national unification, but also the fear of social upheaval which might result from a radical challenge to the established order. Although, with few exceptions, they opposed Bismarck’s highhanded policies during the Prussian constitutional crisis from 1862 to 1867, they were able to accept the compromise with Bismarck in 1867, and to see their liberal and national aspirations largely fulfilled in the German Empire.

Highly decisive for the relative lack of development of German historiographical theory was the manner in which the academic profession was recruited. No basic reform of the German university system had taken place since the establishment of the University of Berlin in 1810. Only in very recent years have there been attempts at such reforms, which have so far had very limited success. The academic profession remained a closed caste. The Ordinarius retained not only an extremely high degree of control over the teaching and research activities of his subordinates, but in concert with his colleagues was able to restrict admission to the profession. The painful process of Habituation, by which a candidate to be admitted to university teaching had to be adopted by an Ordinarius under whose direction he composed his Habilitationsschrift³⁵ effectively, especially after 1871, restricted the admission of historians whose outlook or background did not conform with the academic establishment. The men who broke with basic tenets of the historicist faith, such as Karl Lamprecht, or became deeply skeptical of it, as did Friedrich Meinecke in his later years, generally did so only after they themselves had become Or dinar ien. Revisionists, as in the case of Erich Eyck, either were not professional historians or, like Arthur Rosenberg, were admitted to university teaching (to a Dozentur) early in life. For the most part they were never called to a chair or saw their careers blocked, as in the case of Veit Valentin. The system of recruitment has remained essentially intact since 1945.³⁶ The historicist faith itself has, however, come under critical examination. The creation of new chairs, especially in areas marginal to history, such as political science and contemporary history (Zeitgeschichte), and freer from the intellectual and ideological traditions of the German historical profession, has for the first time enabled larger numbers of historians critical of the classical national tradition of historiography to pursue university careers.

It is therefore not surprising that the theoretical assumptions rooted in German idealistic philosophy, upon which historicism rested, continued to play a role in German political historiography long after these theories had been abandoned or at least seriously questioned by philosophers and cultural scientists. The hold of classical historicist notions on philosophy and the social sciences (as we shall see in Chapter VI) had been effectively challenged before World War I. The cataclysmic events of the twentieth century were required to end the almost exclusive domination by classical historicism over German academic historiography (see chapter VIII). As a political theory, historicism, in rejecting the rationalistic conception of reality inherent in natural law philosophy, had not rejected political liberty. Rather, it assumed that liberal demands for individual liberties, popular participation, and juridical security could be attained within the framework of the traditional, authoritarian Obrigkeitsstaat. As a philosophic theory of value, historicism maintained a similar compromise between apparent opposites. It rejected the possibility of rational ethics, of rights and values not bound to a specific historical situation but derived from the structure of human nature common to all men. Nevertheless, the theory of value of classical German historicism differed profoundly from the expressions of later advocates of philosophical irrationalism. These political decisionists of the 1920’s (e.g., Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger)³⁷ reduced all political value positions to subjective decisions or biological functions in a struggle for national survival.

Classical historicism at no time asserted that the universe was devoid of rational or ethical purpose, but expressed its faith that the apparent expressions of irrationality, individual spontaneity, and will were manifestations of an underlying ethical order. This faith assumed the existence of a God who at each moment in history, actively, created the mysterious balance which linked each sovereign monad to the total whole. The rise of a naturalistic world view in the nineteenth century, which accompanied the mechanization of life, made this faith steadily less convincing. The introduction of the historicist outlook into social and humanistic studies in the nineteenth century contributed to the destruction of the idealistic assumptions of historicist philosophy. By studying each institution, each idea or ideal as a one-time event linked to a specific historical and cultural setting, historicism prepared the way for the relativization of all value. Moreover, it led to the position that the Geisteswissenschaften, the natural sciences, must themselves be “wertfreie Wissenschaften” (value-free sciences) which study values as cultural phenomena devoid of any innate or transcendent validity. The “crisis of historicism” of which Troeltsch spoke revolved around the increasing realization by social theorists and philosophers that the rigorous application of historical method ultimately led to the destruction of all certain knowledge about man and to the relativization of all firm values, an apparently inescapable dilemma resulting from man’s inability to transcend the flux of history.

If the historicist approach remained relatively intact in German historiography into the post-World War I period, in contrast to the social sciences, this undoubtedly reflected the deep emotional commitment of historians not only to the German idealistic tradition but also to the Prussian state. Social theorists of the twentieth century were confronted by the shambles of the idealistic tradition. The historians, on the other hand, lived amidst political realities in which a good deal of the traditional institutional structure had remained intact. World War I led Friedrich Meinecke to re-examine the optimistic notions regarding the harmony of ethics and power. Walter Gotz in the 1920’s called for a thorough re-examination of the political presuppositions of German historiography. Otto Hintze sought to introduce a broad, comparative, sociological note into the state-oriented historiography of the German school. For the majority of German historians, however, defeat and war-guilt theses seemed to provide new incentives to defend the Bismarckian solution and the rightness of German intellectual traditions. The Nazi experience, variously interpreted by German historians both as a repudiation and as a radicalization of these traditions, nevertheless led a great deal of the German academic profession to question seriously, for the first time, the age-old association of liberty with the traditional authoritarian state.

World War II finally destroyed much of the institutional framework within which historicism had arisen. The Bismarckian state was broken apart. Prussia was dissolved as a political unit. East Elbia was either lost to Germany entirely or underwent profound social transformation. The new international realities no longer permitted Germany to play the role of a major power. In Eastern Germany, historiography became a function of a new authoritarian state based upon very different ideological foundations. In Western Germany, democratically as well as conservatively oriented historians, at least in the first two decades after the war, were obliged by the new constellation of realities to identify German political interests with those of the Western democracies. The ideological dichotomy of Germany and Western Europe had lost a good deal of its political foundation. Doubtlessly, the disillusion with the past, the postwar prosperity, the emergence of a consumer-oriented society, and the stability of parliamentary government in the Federal Republic all contributed to the consolidation of an ethos in closer harmony with the realities of a modern mass society. Although older patterns of historical thought and historiographical practice have remained alive in Germany, the traumatic experience of Nazi dictatorship and defeat, and the less traumatic transformation of German realities in postwar Germany, have led to a crisis of conscience among German historians and a re-examination of traditional methodological conceptions and political values.

The present work begins with the divergence of German historical thought from the main patterns of European thought at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. It ends on a mildly hopeful note in regard to the return of broad segments of German opinion to the main streams of Western thought. The final part of Chapter VIII will assess to what extent a revision of basic historical concepts has taken place in Germany since 1945. The German historiographical situation is too complex to reduce it to a common denominator; the classical historical tradition is still very much alive today. For the first time, however, a significant number of historians, particularly in works on the recent past, have written from the standpoint of democratic commitments. Also for the first time, a larger number of historians have sought to come to grips with the realities of a technological mass society, and to integrate the methods of the historian with those of the political scientist and the sociologist.

A return to generally Western traditions of thought in the midtwentieth century no longer means a return to Enlightenment conceptions of natural law. The image of the “West” portrayed by German historians especially since World War I (e.g., Troeltsch) was hopelessly antiquated and failed to recognize the extent to which romanticism, the progress of the natural sciences, the mechanization of life and thought in the nineteenth century, had eroded the Enlightenment heritage. By different paths, main currents of German and other European thought had converged upon a similar point. Historical relativism was not restricted to Germany. Much of modern thought reflected a profound awareness of the apparent ethical meaninglessness of the world, the irrationality of man, and the absurdity of history. Historical reason thus participated in the destruction of faith in reason and purpose in human affairs. If the book treats historicism historically, as a movement of thought, the first section of the concluding chapter seeks to deal with the historicist and relativistic critique of natural law on theoretical grounds. The question is cautiously raised whether there are no elements of the Enlightenment notion of a constant, rational element in man and history which survive this critique, and continue to retain a degree of validity and relevance for historical and political thought.