We must supplement this “existential” crisis of historicism with an “epistemological” one that carried the discourse back even more fundamentally into the domain of philosophy. By the second half of the nineteenth century the question was no longer about the disciplinary establishment of the various fields of humanistic inquiry in the German university, for they had succeeded eminently in that endeavor and become the envy of the rest of the Western world. Rather, a new sense of epistemological quandary arose, associated with the rise of positivism as the claim to hegemony of an ostensibly unitary “scientific method” propagated by the natural sciences. The humanistic disciplines were certainly established and professional, but now the issue was: could they really be regarded as “scientific?”104 Even in Germany, Auguste Comte’s conception of the stages of the maturation of human knowledge had powerful traction, and the notion that it was necessary to advance from the “metaphysical” to the “positive” stage in the studies of man, to what he baptized as “sociology,” seemed to entail that these studies, too, should seek general laws that accounted for their distinctive subject matters.105 The prominent English historian, H. T. Buckle, proclaimed this the true mission of a scientific history in the opening chapters of his History of Civilization in England, a work that was received as a hostile challenge by the established historical profession in Germany.106 In the long and defensive review essay he composed in response to Buckle, Johann Gustav Droysen saw himself speaking on behalf of his entire profession in Germany in disavowing Buckle’s program as the only means towards “The Elevation of History to the Rank of Science [Die Erhebung der Geschichte zum Rang einer Wissenschaft],” as he tellingly titled his essay.107
Droysen was the foremost German theoretician of the methodology of historical research in the nineteenth century, though his Historik was hardly noted at the time or even later. He has only become the object of intensive study more recently in the efforts to ground the “scientific” or at least “disciplinary” method of history for current practice. Droysen had already taken a decidedly revisionist stance towards the denizens of the profession in Germany, led by Niebuhr and Ranke, whose self-presentation as a “critical school” of history he found naive and inept. In striving to set the discipline of history on more secure epistemological and methodological footing, he devoted himself to systematic theory, which he termed Historik, starting in 1857.108 He would continue to elaborate his approach through the balance of his career, but he found very little response among his colleagues, who were complacently pursuing archival source-criticism and narrative reportage along the lines propounded in Ranke’s institutionally decisive Historisches Seminar. This routinization (and complacency) of disciplinary history is clear in the key journal of the profession in Germany, Heinrich von Sybel’s Historische Zeitschrift, which has run continuously from its founding in 1859 to this day.109 It was also characteristic of the American reception of Ranke and his school of “scientific” history leading up to the establishment of the American Historical Association.110
It was not Droysen but rather Wilhelm Dilthey who became the leading figure articulating the historicist response to positivism in late-nineteenth-century Germany. Notably, Dilthey was by disciplinary training a philosopher, but his interests and achievements in the practice of intellectual and cultural history establish him as one of the great masters of hermeneutic-historical practice, as well.111 It is, however, as the epistemologist of history that he established his crucial presence in his epoch. His goal was, in explicit emulation of Immanuel Kant, to undertake a “critique of historical reason.”112 As Frederick Beiser puts it, “It is with Dilthey that the historicist and the neo-Kantian traditions first converge,” and that convergence came to “dominate the historicist tradition until its close in the 1920s.”113 Dilthey, even more than Droysen, saw himself confronted with the positivist philosophy of science and its hegemonic claims upon the studies of man. It was not the practitioner Buckle so much, as with Droysen, but rather the philosophers of this approach—Comte and Mill from abroad, and Helmholtz and Wundt in Germany itself—who drew Dilthey toward a comprehensive effort to defend the autonomy of hermeneutic historicism.114 He was an avid student of Friedrich Schleiermacher and perceived clearly the centrality of hermeneutical methods for the pursuit of humanistic inquiry.115 But beyond even this, Dilthey wished to insist upon the distinctiveness of the matter at hand in such inquiries, namely lived experience [Erlebnis]. While there were many elements in the construction of such experience, what Dilthey insisted was that general laws along the lines pursued by the natural sciences could never capture what was unique and essential about that experience, namely, to understand it from the perspective of the first person, an actor’s own beliefs and values. Thus, he insisted, appropriate inquiries endeavoring to reconstruct that experience could only be interpretive, and their goal would always entail recognizing individuality and its holistic fusion of cognition, volition, and feeling.116 In characterizing the humanities as Geisteswissenschaften and later in stressing the centrality of life as a creative force in the constitution of individual agency, its external expressions, and the intersubjective communities which both situated and embodied them, Dilthey came to be charged with “irrationalism” and Lebensphilosophie, the preferred term of disparagement by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century professional, “rigorous” philosophers. Even more, he came to be chastised for a lack of epistemological and especially normative determinacy: failure to contain the demon of “relativism,” to secure the “objectivity” of historical knowledge.117
In just this measure, neo-Kantianism appropriated historicism; philosophy seized upon and took charge of the disciplinary claims of history. As Frederick Beiser has noted, the “marriage of neo-Kantianism and historicism was paradoxical, even bizarre.” Indeed, many neo-Kantians only used the term “historicism” as disparagement, associating it with relativism, the abandonment of universal warrant for cognitive claims or ethical values. Dilthey was a philosopher who cared about the practices of cultural history. Windelband was a historian of philosophy who was primarily concerned to uphold the integrity of philosophy, which entailed keeping history in its place. “For Windelband, to historicize reason is to relativize reason, to undermine the universal and necessary validity of its fundamental principle.”118 His pioneering essay of 1883, “Kritische oder genetische Methode?” appeared in the same year as Dilthey’s Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, and was intended as a direct challenge to it.119 His thesis was that Dilthey improperly blurred quid facti? with quid juris? issues. For Windelband there was no way to establish validity from factuality, for “validity stands above the realm of history.” The point is that, “if historicism were true, there would be no point or value to philosophy at all,” hence it was indispensable to vindicate the standpoint of universal reason. But that meant simply that the neo-Kantians repudiated the fundamental insight that launched historicism. “In making their sharp separation between the critical and the genetic, the normative and the historical, the neo-Kantians had failed to heed the fundamental lesson of the historical school: that what appears to be given and eternal to us now is the result of history.”120
Windelband famously discriminated the “nomothetic” approach of the natural sciences from the “idiographic” approach of the cultural sciences in terms of goals of inquiry and methods of approach.121 But in the measure that this undercut any explanatory ambitions of history, it seems to be falling back to Aristotle’s disparaging hierarchization of ways of knowing. Moreover, it leaves still in dispute just how the cultural sciences were to achieve valid knowledge, that is, was this merely cognitio historica reasserted? In what sense was this a rescue operation for the scientific status of history and in what sense was this a reconquest of history by philosophy via epistemology? What Windelband began, his student Heinrich Rickert carried through systematically. Beiser notes that historians writing about the historicist tradition are not taken with Rickert, but for himself, “of
all the thinkers who discussed the issues raised by historicism, Rickert was easily the most subtle, systematic and sophisticated.” Beiser is happy to find his verdict seconded by another philosopher with an interest in nineteenth-century historical thought, Maurice Mandelbaum.122 What they are responding to, here, is simply the assertion of disciplinary hegemony of philosophy over history via the question of epistemological foundations. “It is in Rickert’s critique of Dilthey that we find the most powerful defense of transcendental philosophy against historicism.” It was Rickert’s fundamental concern to “defend the autonomy and integrity of theoretical reason.”123 In this cause he was quite willing to consign the realm of ethical values to voluntarism, and equally the claims regarding the historical contingency of cognition to inconsequence. He insisted, as Beiser summarizes, that “Historicism arose from the presumptuous effort of historians to make a philosophy of history, which should really be nothing more than an empirical science.” No claims of a merely empirical order could bear upon the transcendental integrity of reason: it existed for Rickert in what Beiser reconstructs as a “third realm” of the “irreal” which could be captured neither by ontological nor by ethical conceptualization, but always already foregrounded these.124
The parallels between Rickert’s position and those of the Vienna Circle are striking.125 The separation of facts from values served to enshrine universal and valid theoretical reason at the expense of opening a wide berth for ethical voluntarism and devaluing any empirical evidence of reason’s contingency as insufficiently warranted and question-begging “in principle.”126 Thus philosophy escaped its great crisis of the late nineteenth century by wrapping itself in logical “rigor,” in transcendental reasoning, and it abandoned historicism to its fate of “crisis”—revealing their “marriage” to be a “fragile, combustible union” indeed!127
Within the field of historical research, the demand came to be articulated that the experience and the orientation of wider social groups needed to be taken into account, and historical inquiry should incorporate social and economic issues. This was the essence of the so-called “Methodological Controversy” spawned by Karl Lamprecht in 1896.128 What Hardtwig clearly discerns is that the ferocity of the academic-historical reaction to Lamprecht signaled fear not of Lamprecht personally but of the force that loomed behind his criticism, namely Marxism. A pioneering German social historian, Eckart Kehr, alleged the profession could see no difference between social history and socialist history until well into the twentieth century.129 Until that point, academic historians—and the wider mandarin academic elite—could simply consider Marx an agitator, not really worthy of intellectual attention. But as industrialization and urbanization advanced relentlessly across the nineteenth century, this was proving ultimately impossible to uphold. The emergence of German academic “sociology” in Georg Simmel and Max Weber marked the ultimate recognition by this academic elite that the metaphysical–methodological contradictions within historicism were not to be resolved on its terms, but would need a thoroughly different matrix of context and method.130
Max Weber had made this his concern in methodological essays starting at the turn of the century and culminating in his 1918 address, Science as a Vocation.131 If Troeltsch wanted to find a way out of the crisis of historicism, Weber, as the historian Otto Hintze noted in his perceptive review of Troeltsch’s great work, had already established that this was impossible.132 One was left with a radical disjunction between what science (empirical research in the widest sense) could do and what humans needed to organize their lives. Science could be of no help; value was simply a matter of personal choice, and the upshot was a pluralism across time and space that Weber not for nothing put in the metaphorical form of a “war of the gods.”133 The prospect was not to overcome Nietzsche’s diagnosis but to live with it, if one could. The crucial concomitant was that expertise could no longer claim a privileged status in orienting the wider community to the world: pluralism was not simply cognitive but social. The result was a “decline” which would not only be disastrous for the “German mandarins” and their polity, but would also bring about a combined internal and external crisis of the authority of disciplinary knowledge in modernity whose “postmodern” aftermath has characterized our own epoch.
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1 Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (1967; 2nd, rev. ed., Wesleyan: Wesleyan University Press, 1983, 4), put it simply: “Historicism has too many meanings to be useful as a term without careful delimitation.” See also Iggers, “The Dissolution of German Historism,” in Ideas in History: Essays Presented to Louis Gottschalk, ed. Richard Herr and Harold Parker (Durham, NC, 1965), 288–329; and “Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995), 129–52. For another effort at determination, see Frank Ankersmit, “Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis,” History and Theory 34 (1995), 143–61, with Iggers’s comment and Ankersmit’s rejoinder, “Historicism,” 162–7 and 168–73. For more on this disputed term, see Rolf Gruner, “Historism: Its Rise and Decline,” Clio 8 (1978), 25–39; Rudolf Makkreel, “Traditional Historicism, Contemporary Interpretations of Historicity, and the History of Philosophy,” New Literary History 21 (1990), 977–91; and Jonathan Rée, “The Vanity of Historicism,” New Literary History 22 (1991), 961–83.
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 147
