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[ CHAPTER II ]

The Origins of German Historicism

THE TRANSFORMATION OF GERMAN HISTORICAL THOUGHT FROM HERDER’S COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE-ORIENTED NATIONALISM TO THE STATECENTERED EXCLUSIVE NATIONALISM OF THE WARS OF LIBERATION.

IT is difficult to set even an approximate date for the beginnings of historicism. If we mean by historicism an approach to history which seeks to re-create the past wie es eigentlich gewesen and to recapture the unique qualities of an historical situation, then a great deal of narrative history written from a secular standpoint has been historicist in outlook since Classical Antiquity. The idea that historical research, with its concern for detail and individuality, basically differed from the generalizing and classificatory approach of the natural sciences was well known long before the eighteenth century. Aristotle already had observed that historical statements deal with “singulars” rather than with “universals.”¹

The basic elements of historical method were well established in the eighteenth century and recognized even by the rationalists. Since the age of humanism, scholarship, especially as carried on in the academies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had recognized criteria for the critical analysis of sources. It is true that there was not yet a well-established tradition of critical inquiry and that the great “pragmatic” historians of the Enlightenment, men such as Voltaire and Gibbon, tended to construct grandiose syntheses based upon inadequate evidence. The scholars, on the other hand, accumulated data with insufficient attention to the continuity and development of institutions.² But the careful re-creation of individual reality is by no means in contradiction with natural law theory. To “understand” is not yet to “condone” or to “accept.” It is possible to portray an individual in his individuality with his unique values, and yet measure him by standards of right and wrong applicable to a broader humanity.

If, however, like Friedrich Meinecke, we understand historicism not merely as an approach to history, but as a comprehensive philosophy of life which views all social reality as a historical stream where no two instances are comparable and which assumes that value standards and logical categories, too, are totally immersed in the stream of history, then historicism is a creation of the eighteenth century. More specifically, it is the German reaction against certain Enlightenment patterns of thought, especially the doctrine of natural law. The first two great theoretical formulations of the historicist position in the eighteenth century are very probably Giambattista Vico’s New Science,³ first published in 1725, and Johann Gottfried Herder’s Also a Philosophy of History of 1774.⁴ Vico had already stressed that the study of social reality requires methods fundamentally different from those of the natural sciences because society, unlike nature, cannot be reduced to the “insensible motion of bodies”; rather, it consists of the conscious acts and volitions of individuals which take place in the stream of time. Men and societies can be understood only when approached historically. To be sure, Vico’s aim in studying history was not to study history for its own sake. For him the history of mankind, far from showing the total diversity of man, still appeared as a clue to general truths about mankind. Every historical epoch has its place in the recurrent cycles (corso and ricorso) which make up the upward spiral of history. Only in Herder’s early work of 1774 do we find the historicist position formulated in its radical form: the conception that every age must be viewed in terms of its own immediate values; that there is no progress or decline in history, but only value-filled diversity.

We have sought in the Introduction to distinguish a specific, predominantly German tradition of historiography and historical thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from broader currents of thought in Europe generally, which may have been described as forms of historicism. We shall not attempt to study the origins of historicism as a European phenomenon, but in this chapter shall restrict ourselves to the more modest task of following the transformation of German historical thought from the cosmopolitan culture-oriented nationalism of Herder in the late eighteenth century to the nationalistic and power-oriented assumptions of much of German historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A history of the emergence of the historicist outlook in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European thought still needs to be written. Meinecke proposed something of the sort in The Origins of Historicism wherein he sought to trace the rise of historicism as a “general Western movement” which had its culmination in German thought. But Meinecke’s book is only marginally related to the emergence of a historical approach to cultural and social reality in the eighteenth century and his concept of historicism has relatively little to do with history. What Meinecke describes as the emergence of historicism, in the course of the eighteenth century, is rather the steady recognition of the limitations of intellect in the understanding of human reality. For Meinecke, the chief obstacle to historical understanding was the doctrine of natural law. Before the life quality of history in its individuality and spontaneity could be understood, the two-thousand-year-old hold of the Stoic-Christian natural law faith in a static, rational world order had to be broken. In its place the recognition had to be established that the human psyche (Seele) occupied the central point in history and that this psyche was “determined not by reason or understanding but by will.”⁵ Meinecke’s book thus becomes a hymn to the beneficient triumph of unreason in modern consciousness.

Ironically, Descartes stands at the beginning of Meinecke’s account of the emancipation of modern thought from a rational conception of reality. It was Descartes, Meinecke notes, who reoriented European philosophy from the analysis of the supposedly objective reality of the external world to the examination of human consciousness. The Enlightenment historians—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Gibbon, and Hume—through their universalistic interest, contributed to an understanding of the variety of human institutions; the Pietists, and the Pre-Romantics to an understanding of the intertwining of emotion and intellect; the traditionalists to an awareness of the extent to which there is reason in the apparent unreason of inherited institutions and ideas. The triumph of soul over intellect in Meinecke’s book does not, however, lead to the dissolution of knowledge and values, but rather to the Neo-Platonic conception that behind the apparent irrationality and turbulence of the historical world there stands a realm of great perennial ideas. These ideas are neither abstract nor universally valid, but embody the perennial essences of the fleeting individualities that comprise the historical world. They can be grasped only by the total soul, never by cold reason. The relativistic dilemmas of historicism are thus overcome for Meinecke, and historicism becomes the basis for the recognition of real truths and values. In Goethe, whose relation to history Meinecke recognizes as a very ambiguous one,⁶ Meinecke sees the culmination of historicist thought. It was Goethe who most fully perceived in each individuality not merely a set of fleeting phenomena, but a concrete manifestation of an individualized eternal idea. He understood that reason expresses itself never abstractly, but only within concrete, historical individuals.

There are several disturbing contradictions between Meinecke’s theoretical Assumptions in The Origins of Historicism and his application of these ideas. On the one hand, Meinecke argues that history is an open process, and every particular must be understood in terms of its own unique worth rather than as a part of a greater predetermined pattern. But the history of ideas presented by Meinecke has almost a Hegelian ring. Leibniz, Gottfried Arnold, Voltaire, and Edmund Burke all are reduced to steppingstones in the process by which European consciousness reaches its fulfillment in Goethe’s idea of individuality. It is also striking that Meinecke, who so emphatically stressed the interrelatedness of thought and life, so completely isolated the history of ideas from the historical and social settings in which these ideas arose and operated. So thoroughly disillusioned with the course of German politics since World War I, Meinecke now interpreted historicism as a purely cultural movement devoid of political implications. The transition of historical thought from eighteenth-century European forms (traced by Meinecke in The Origins of Historicism) to the peculiarly German tradition of political thought (which he had already described almost thirty years earlier in Cosmopolitanism and Nation State)⁷ remained tenuous and unclear.

Carlo Antoni has given a much more comprehensive and differentiated picture of the interrelation of ideas, institutions, and political forces in eighteenth-century historical thought.⁸ There was no one form of historicism, Antoni maintains, but a variety of historicisms “all profoundly different in accordance with the national traditions to which they belonged” and the political aspirations they sought to fulfill.⁹ In Great Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, and also in Germany, there arose in the eighteenth century a new interest in the past. There was a peculiarly modern attitude toward history, absent in classic, medieval, and Renaissance thought, “regarding the positive value of history understood as human progress in its immanent, worldly, and secular reality.”¹⁰ What distinguished this new outlook from major Enlightenment patterns of thought was its rejection of a mechanistic world view; its belief that history, far from being a collection of abuses and superstitions, was itself the key to the understanding of man as a social and political being. In this sense, Antoni believed, Giambattista Vico and Edmund Burke, as well as Justus Moser and Johann Gottfried Herder, stood in the historicist tradition. Inherent in this emphasis upon an organic continuity between past and present was the rejection of the attempts by Enlightenment despotism or the French Revolution to reconstruct government and society along bureaucratic centralistic lines, disregarding the diversity of traditional institutions. But the conflict between the modern state, enlightened conceptions of liberty, and traditional institutions was obviously much less severe in Great Britain than on the Continent. It distinguished the conservatism of Burke, who recognized the elements of change and progress in historical institutions, from the reactionary glorification of the medieval or even the primitive Germanic past among certain Swiss and German thinkers.¹¹

A great deal of social and political thought in the nineteenth century recognized that man could only be understood in terms of his historical existence.¹² What distinguished the German tradition of history with which we are dealing so radically from other expressions of historicism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was its emphasis upon the uniqueness and irrationality of values transmitted by history. At the heart of this emphasis is what Meinecke has called the concept of individuality.

However, the concept of individuality, which Meinecke considers to be so central to historicism, seems to be far less broadly European and have more peculiarly German roots than Meinecke suggests. Ernst Troeltsch has pointed at the peculiar twist which Luther gave to the theory of natural law. Subsequently, this turn, according to Troeltsch, profoundly distinguished Lutheran from Catholic and Calvinist ethics. In the place of a concept of a rational law of Nature, Luther substituted an irrational law of Nature. Luther argued in accordance with St. Paul’s admonition that “there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.” Every state represented the will of God, and thus required the complete obedience of the Christian in all matters temporal. Reason therefore expressed itself not in abstract moral commandments, but in historical institutions. The positive authorities were the concrete manifestations of natural law. Luther’s political and social ethics are thus conservative.¹³ His concept of society lacked any real concern with change.

A much more dynamic theory of individuality appears in the monadology of Leibniz in whom Meinecke sees one of the important sources of historicism. In the place of the Newtonian concept of Nature as a mechanism with interchangeable parts, governed by abstract laws reducible to mathematical formulae, Leibniz presented the vision of a cosmos filled with self-contained units, monads, each unique, deriving its energy from within and developing in accordance with its own inner laws of change, yet in harmony with the whole.

The sharp distinction between reason and unreason drawn by Descartes disappears for Leibniz. “Not only through the lumen naturale of reason but also through instinct” we find innate truths.¹⁴ Similarly, the sharp line drawn in French and English thought, between the sciences and the humanities lessens. The term Wissenschaft as used since Leibniz encompasses a much broader scope than the French or English term “science.” Leibniz’s plan for scientific academies provided not only for the study of nature, but for the liberal arts as well.¹⁵ In Germany Leibniz’s ideas, systematized and popularized by his disciple Christian von Wolff—a man now almost forgotten but for several decades the dominant philosophical figure in Germany—left their impact upon the intellectual climate of the German Enlightenment. This also held true of the anti-intellectualism of the Pietist revival. Gottfried Arnold and Johann Georg Hamann stressed the interrelation of reason and passion, and Hamann saw in history “the cyphers, hidden signs” and “hieroglyphs” of God.¹⁶ A similar faith that divine wisdom expressed itself in the unique institutions of history was to be seen in the traditionalism of Justus Moser. Nevertheless, these were only isolated elements of a theory of history. It was Herder who, in Also a Philosophy of History, first offered an extensive presentation of historicist principles in Germany in an extreme form from which he retreated in his later works.¹⁷

Basic to Herder’s position are two concepts which remain fundamental to the entire affirmative tradition of German historicism with which we are dealing. The first of these concepts involves the idea of individuality. Herder, in contrast to natural law philosophy assumes that all values and all cognitions are historic and individual. “In a certain sense, every human perfection is national, secular, and most closely considered, individual.”¹⁸ History, he insists, is constant movement. Nevertheless, within the flux of history, there are certain centers with at least relative stability: the nations. They possess a morphology; they are alive; they grow. They are not rational in character, but dynamic and vital; things in themselves, not means. It is the historian’s task to understand them. Nations have the characteristics of persons: they have a spirit and they have a life span. They are not a collection of individuals, but are organisms.¹⁹

This concept of individuality involves a theory of value and knowledge, and contains at least certain implications for political theory. It assumes that there are no universally valid values, that ethics cannot be based upon precepts of reason or upon the assumption of a common human nature. Rather, all values come out of the spirit of nations. Herder, as a matter of fact, not only protested against the application of the standards of the Enlightenment to other civilizations or ages but, in contrast to later nineteenth-century writers, warned against a Europocentric approach to history.²⁰ His concept of the nation as the source of all truth implied that there were no objective criteria of truth. Again, this was an extreme position which he modified later, but it was inherent in the historicist position. Strictly speaking, there could be no objective approach to history, Herder insisted. Not only could man not transcend the process of history, but insofar as history was an organic stream, it had to be approached by methods other than those of what Herder called the “mechanistic” spirit of modern philosophy.²¹ Reason could not understand life, but only create lifeless concepts. Verbal description could not re-create living reality. History could only be understood through empathy.²² Indeed, the borderline between truth and error, good and evil, became a very difficult one to draw. Herder wondered whether there was such a thing as prejudice. He held that what we call prejudice, and what may be only the expression of the national spirit at an early stage of its development, may “be good … because it makes the nation happy and gives it cohesion.” Conversely, objectivity and rationality may be signs of national disintegration, of “disease” and “intimation of death.”²³ Although, in the area of politics, Herder shared the demands of his contemporaries for a liberalization of the state and greeted the coming of the French Revolution with sympathetic interest,²⁴ his view of history certainly undermined the theoretical basis upon which the tradition of classic liberalism was based. Herder’s theories of truth and value were incompatible with the philosophy of natural law or the theory of the social contract.²⁵

The second central concept of Herder’s philosophy of history was that history was a benevolent process, an idea which was basic to all affirmative historicist traditions with which we are presently concerned. German historians in this century have tended to stress that historicism involved the negation of the idea of progress. This was true only to the extent that the historicist position denied that there was any unilinear advance in history or that history developed according to a scheme. In another sense, however, German historicism was much more optimistic about the meaningfulness of history than were even adherents of the classical idea of progress. Theories of progress may assume either that human advancement is inevitable and that the process of history is determined in an upward direction (Hegel, Saint-Simon, Marx, Comte), or that man can be perfected, that progress is possible if man applies rationality to human institutions. Either position, particularly the second (the two positions do not necessarily exclude each other) implies that there is irrationality in the existing world; that there is a conflict between the world as it should be, and one day may be, and the world as it is. In this sense, the idea of progress still adheres to the tradition of natural law. German historicism on the other hand, assumes that all that has grown naturally or historically is good. “Every nation has its center of happiness within it.”²⁶ History is the source of real value.

To be sure, there are the seeds of relativism in this concept, for it assumes that all knowledge and all values are related to concrete cultural and historical settings. Such a supposition could lead to the anarchy of values.²⁷ The historicism of Herder rests upon the firm belief that there is a divine purpose in history, that “Providence guides the path of development onward.”²⁸ All of Nature and of history reflect God. Herder compares history to a stream rushing to the ocean or to a growing tree. History is indeed meaningful, the “scene of a guiding intention on earth, although we do not perceive this ultimate purpose at once.²⁹ Basically, mankind is still one, according to Herder. However, the meaning of history is not found in the direction of events toward a rational end, but in the multiplicity of ways in which the human mind expresses itself in the diversity of nations.

Truth, value, and beauty are not one, but many. They are found only in history and manifest themselves only in the national spirit. True poetry and true art for Herder are thus always national and historical. He set to work to compile and translate his great anthologies of folk poetry. For him, as for much of nineteenth-century Germany, history became the cornerstone of true culture. Implied in this concept is the assumption that all meaningful philosophy must become history of philosophy, and all theology the history of theology.

In Also a Philosophy of History, Herder had laid the foundations for a historicism which spread far beyond the German boundaries. Herder’s theory directly contributed to the reawakening of historical interest. His writings were translated into the Slavic languages, as well as into French and English. His ideas merged with the broad stream of Romantic philosophy to challenge Enlightenment doctrines throughout Europe; yet historicist doctrine by no means had been fully developed. Herder had presented the most coherent theory of historicism, but several important concepts that later played a significant role in the German historical tradition of the nineteenth century were still missing in his writings or had not been fully developed by him.

Moreover, historicism was by no means the dominant intellectual attitude in Germany in the late eighteenth century; nor was it the sole challenger of the Enlightenment faith in human rationality. We have already cited the strong currents of pietism and traditionalism. Important in the transition from natural law doctrine to historicism were two trends of thought which in many ways were still committed to Enlightenment ideals, but nevertheless contributed to the modification and completion of historicist doctrine. These were the Humanitätsideal which further defined the idea of the individual, and German idealistic philosophy which elaborated upon the idea of identity, a central element in historicist faith. The Humanitätsideal is difficult to define because it is so intimately interwoven with the personalities of the small group of eminent, creative thinkers who gave it expression: Goethe, Herder, Winckelmann, Schiller, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, each of whom left a different and personal imprint.³⁰ It derives a good deal of its original inspiration from Winckelmann’s studies of classical Greek art and from Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity, written in his more mature years.

These writers agree with the Enlightenment that there is a common humanity, a certain nobility and dignity present in seed form in all men. “The purpose of our existence,” Herder comments, “is to develop this incipient element of humanity (Humanität) fully within us.… Our ability to reason is to be developed to reason; our finer senses are to be cultivated for art; our instincts are to achieve genuine freedom and beauty; our energies are to be turned to the love of man.”³¹ Still, if the Enlightenment stresses the common characteristics of man and his rationality, the Humanitätsideal stresses the diversity of man and the interrelation of all aspects of his personality, of rationality and irrationality, into a harmonious whole. Every individual is different, and the task incumbent upon each one is to develop his own unique personality to the fullest.³² Hence the idealization of the Greeks. “Mankind as a whole,” writes Wilhelm von Humboldt, “exists only in the never attainable totality of all individualities that come into existence one after another.”³³ Peculiarly absent from the group’s admiration of the Greeks, however, is an appreciation of the great value which the Greeks had placed on politics. Freedom for these German thinkers was, first of all, an inner, spiritual matter rather than a political concept, as it was for much of Enlightenment thought. For Goethe and Humboldt the individual person constitutes the prime unit of which humanity is composed; for Herder the nations, too, possess the characteristics of individuality to a greater extent than individual persons. Nevertheless, Herder’s concept of nationality assumes a basic equality of worth among all nations as contributors to the richness of the human spirit. In this sense, he is cosmopolitan in spirit no less than Goethe.

The concept of individuality contained within the Humanitätsideal differs from Enlightenment theories of the individual in still another important way, particularly from those ideas which had been developed by associationist psychology (e.g., Locke, Condillac, Hume, and others) or utilitarianism (Bentham, James Mill). For Wilhelm von Humboldt the individual is not found in the empirical person we perceive, but in the higher idea he represents. The purpose of man’s life is thus emphatically not “happiness,” but rather the fulfillment of this idea. Wilhelm von Humboldt argues against state action in behalf of the welfare of the citizens since such action misunderstands the “dignity of man.”³⁴ Kant similarly had written in his Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Viewpoint that Nature is not concerned with man’s “living well,” but only with his “living in dignity.”³⁵ The rejection of “happiness” as an end of life was common to the whole tradition of historicist thought from Humboldt and Ranke to Meinecke. “Eudaemonism” became a pejorative term by which German historians tried to dissociate their own idealistic position from most of English and French historical thought.³⁶ In the concept of the individual as the expression of an idea lies the link between the theory that every individual possesses “individuality” and that each collective group, too, is an “individuality.” Groups and individuals share in the expression of ideas. It was therefore not very difficult for Humboldt, who at first had recognized that only individual persons possess the characteristics of individuality, to admit this applies to states and nations as well.

The Enlightenment concept of natural law underwent further revision in German philosophic discussion after Kant. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all accepted the theory of the basic uniqueness of individuals and nations in history. At the same time, they also accepted the Enlightenment faith in a rational universe. They attempted to solve this dilemma by seeing in reason not an abstract norm divorced from abstract reality, but rather something immanent within reality. Kant had already suggested in the Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Viewpoint that reason was operative in history. He had assumed that “all the natural potentialities of any creature are destined to develop once fully and to the end for which they are intended,”³⁷ and that the history of the world similarly saw the steady growth of rationality. Hegel had described history as the development by which the rational idea immanent in the world takes on concrete form.³⁸ But the actors in this process are the individuals whom Hegel terms “the Peoples.”³⁹ Each people, in developing its own unique character, simultaneously plays its role in the world process. Although Hegel’s conception of progress thus brings individuality into harmony with the overall process, it nevertheless significantly violates the historicist theory of the radical autonomy of the individual. In the Hegelian system, the individual becomes a means within a larger process. Historicism, however, stresses that the spontaneity of the individual must be preserved. His growth cannot be forced into a scheme.

Nevertheless, an important aspect of the German Idealist view of history as a rational process is incorporated into historicist thought. Humboldt acknowledges that collective groups, too, possess the characteristics of individuality, as he steadily moves from the position of the Humanitätsideal to that of historicism. He believes that although every individuality and its idea are radically unique, they directly form part of a divine design in a “mysterious” way which we cannot perceive.⁴⁰ “World history,” he wrote in 1825, “is unthinkable without a cosmic plan governing it.”⁴¹ Similarly, Ranke sees in the state an entity “real-and-spiritual-at-once (real-geistig).” With Hegel he is convinced that, in pursuing its own power-political interests, the state acts in accordance with a higher order that governs the world. As he has Friedrich say in the Political Dialogue: “But seriously, you will be able to name few significant wars for which it could not be proved that genuine moral energy achieved the final victory.”⁴²

However, the most important factor in the transition from an Enlightenment to an historicist outlook was doubtless the impact of political events upon the German intellect between 1792 and 1815. The educated German public, with few exceptions, had hailed the French Revolution. The tremendous disappointment which had set in in Germany after the revolution reached its terroristic phase, led to a widespread re-examination of natural law doctrine. The reaction against the ideology of the revolution was intensified by the Napoleonic domination of Germany. This strengthened national feeling, and in the public mind identified Enlightenment values with a hated French culture. German opinion, for the most part, did not want a restoration of prerevolutionary political and social conditions. The defeat of Prussia in 1806 initiated a period of extensive reforms in that kingdom. But reformers, such as Baron von Stein, Hardenberg, and Humboldt, searched for liberal institutions peculiarly suited to German traditions.

In three important ways the German attitude toward history changed in these years:

1. The Enlightenment faith in universally applicable ethical and political values, which had been already challenged before the Revolution, was now completely shattered. Except for a few isolated thinkers who like the Freiburg historian Carl Rotteck remained faithful to the principles of 1789, German educated opinion now agreed that all values and rights were of historic and national origin and that alien institutions could not be transplanted to German soil. Moreover, they saw in history, rather than in abstract rationality, the key to all truth and value. Within this broad consensus there were, of course, many nuances from traditionalists like Savigny and Haller who emphasized the extreme diversity and spontaneity in history to German Idealist philosophers such as Fichte and Hegel who viewed history as a rational process.

2. The concept of the nation had changed fundamentally.⁴³ Herder’s nationalism was still cosmopolitan in spirit. Each nation contributes to the richness of human life. Nationalism links the nations to each other rather than separates them. Herder optimistically believes that the nationalization of political life contributes to international peace. “Cabinets may betray each other.… But fatherlands will not move against each other. They will rest peacefully by each other’s side and stand by each other like members of a family. Fatherlands at war with each other would be the worst barbarism of the human language.”⁴⁴ In 1806, Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation could distinguish the Germans as an original nation that, unlike others (e.g., the French), had not lost touch with the original genius transmitted through its speech. The French had then become a superficial nation, who, as Humboldt wrote in 1814, lacked “the striving for the divine.”⁴⁵ Nationalism no longer united, it divided. In Ernst Moritz Arndt’s poetic definition of the war winter of 1812-1813, the German fatherland was to be found “where every Frenchman is called foe, and every German is called friend.”⁴⁶

3. Finally, the state occupies a very different role. Herder wrote in 1784 that it is “inconceivable that man is made for the state.” He considered the state an artificial institution, and held it to be generally detrimental to human happiness.⁴⁷ Humboldt argued for the limitation of state powers in very similar terms in 1792. The activities which mattered, he wrote, were carried on by civil society. The state, which he and Herder held to be a mechanical device without real ties to society, restricted the free development of the individual wherever it exceeded its minimum function of preserving order. Along with Herder or Schiller, he viewed Germany as a cultural rather than a political nation. But by 1813 he came to identify “nation, people and state.”⁴⁸ Similarly, Fichte who wrote in 1794 that “the aim of all government” is “to make government superfluous,”⁴⁹ by 1800 in his The Closed Commercial State⁵⁰ bestowed extensive economic functions on the state. In his Addresses to the German Nation of 1806, he raised the state to the role of the moral and religious educator of the German nation.⁵¹ Moreover, the state was increasingly viewed in power-political terms. Humboldt did so in his famous “Memorandum on a German Constitution” of 1813. Fichte, in his Machiavelli essay of 1807, warned that in the relation between states “there is neither law nor right except the right of the stronger.” This condition placed the prince, who was responsible for the interests of the people, “in a higher ethical order whose material substance is contained in the words, ‘Salus et decus populi suprema lex esto.’ “⁵²

This assumption implies that, in following its own interests, the state acts not only in accordance with a higher morality than that represented by private morality, but also in harmony with the basic purpose of history. In its most extreme form, this theory of the identity of raison d’état and cosmic plan probably appears in Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1820). “Each nation as an existing individuality is guided by its particular principles,” Hegel writes, “and only as a particular individuality can each national spirit win objectivity and self-consciousness; but the fortunes and deeds of States in their relation to one another reveal the dialectic of the finite nature of these spirits. Out of this dialectic rises the universal Spirit, pronouncing its judgments,” the highest judgment, “for the history of the World is the world’s court of justice.”⁵³ This conception that the struggles of the individual nations are part of a cosmic, rational dialectic violates historicist principles. Nevertheless, even Ranke, who rejected any schematization of history, accepted the idea that generally the victors in a conflict represent the morally superior nation.

Historicism, in the course of the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, had thus not only increased its hold upon the educated public, but also had changed its character. An aesthetic, culturally oriented approach to nationality increasingly gave place to the ideal of the national state. The concept of individuality, which Goethe and Humboldt still applied to the uniqueness of persons, now primarily referred to collective groups. The historical optimism of Herder, which saw a hidden meaning in the flow of history, had been fortified by an even more optimistic idea of identity: the assumption that states, in pursuing their own power-political interests, act in accord with a higher morality. A third idea, absent in earlier historicism, now occupies a central place in historicist doctrine: the concept of the primacy of the state in the nation and in society. In the course of Wars of Liberation and even more so after 1815, the political interests of the nation were increasingly identified with the power-political interests of the Prussian state. Together, these three concepts were to provide the foundations for the theoretical assumptions of much of German historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.