The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  2 Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (1944; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  3 On the shift from “historism” to “historicism” as the translation of the German Historismus, see Dwight Lee and Robert Beck, “The Meaning of ‘Historicism,’” American Historical Review 59 (1954), 568–77, esp. 568n. These authors identify especially the 1944 work, Friedrich Engel-Janosi, The Growth of German Historicism (Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science 62:2 [1944]), as particularly significant for the ascendancy of “historicism” as the authentic Anglophone term (Lee and Beck, “Meaning of Historicism”, 569n). Also pertinent, here, is the intervention of Benedetto Croce’s Italian version, storicismo, especially as promulgated in English in his widely read History as the Story of Liberty (NY: W.W. Norton, 1941), as Lee and Beck point out (“Meaning of ‘Historicism,’” 572).

  4 This is the thrust of Herbert Schnädelbach’s excellent Geschichtsphilosophie nach Hegel: Die Probleme des Historismus (Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1974). The overt opposition to Hegel’s “speculative” philosophy of history was central to the self-conception of the entire German nineteenth-century movement of Historismus, yet, ironically, by the end of the century there was a decided convergence upon formulations that had powerful resonances of Hegelianism. The key figure who maintained a somewhat Hegelian orientation throughout the heyday of the movement in the mid-nineteenth century was Johann Gustav Droysen. The two senses of “historicism” are strikingly present in his theoretical conception of Historik. For the most careful study, see Christoph Bauer, “Das Geheimnis aller Bewegung ist ihr Zweck“: Geschichtsphilosophie bei Hegel und Droysen (Hamburg: Meiner, 2001). It is striking how regularly Marx is omitted from the accounts of German historicism. He was, of course, not a member of the professional history guild, and he resided in Britain, not Germany, but the omission is more telling than these excuses allow. The dread of the socialist movement, and with it of urban-industrial modernity, lurked pervasively in the “mandarin” mindset of the second half of the German nineteenth century, and Marx’s model of historical development was all-too-obtrusively present and alarming for them.

  5 Thus Ernst Troeltsch opens his epoch-making essay, “Die Krisis des Historismus” (1922), with the observation: “The term ‘Historicism’ is in today’s linguistic usage in the first place a term of disparagement [Scheltwort]” (Troeltsch, “Die Krisis des Historismus,” Die neue Rundschau 33 (1922), 572–90, citing 572). This point is also made at the outset of Annette Wittkau, Historismus: Zur Geschichte des Begriffs und des Problems (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), 11. For a sense of the consolidation of the term, see Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Traditionsbruch und Erinnerung: Zur Entstehung des Historismusbegriffs,” in “Geschichte allein ist zeitgemäss”: Historismus in Deutschland, ed. Michael Brix and Monika Steinhauer (Lahn-Giessen: Anabas, 1978), 17–27, citing 17.

  6 Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Tübingen: Mohr, 1922); Karl Mannheim, “Historismus,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 52 (1924), 1–60; Karl Heussi, Die Krise des Historismus (Tübingen: Mohr, 1932); Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936; Eng. tr., Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972]).

  7 An important intervention was Charles Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). See the very insightful review of this work by Allan Megill, “Why was there a Crisis of Historicism?” History and Theory 36 (1997), 416–29. The recent and comprehensive work of Frederick Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), is shaped by this perspective, even if his narrative concludes with Max Weber and does not take up Troeltsch et al. explicitly. The older, path-breaking work in this vein, George Iggers, The German Conception of History, is the locus classicus of this view.

  8 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 2, citing Troeltsch, Der Historimus und seine Probleme (1922; Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, 102).

  9 Troeltsch, “Die Krisis des Historismus,” see Oexle, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeichen des Historismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 58.

  10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (1874); Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883); Georg Simmel, Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1892); Wilhelm Windelband, “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft,” (tr., “Rectorial Address, Strassburg, 1894,” in History and Theory 19 (1980), 169–85), Heinrich Rickert, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft (1898; Tübingen: Mohr, 1921)).

  11 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 8. Beiser, himself, has a more differentiated sense of Hegel’s philosophy of history; see his “Hegel’s Historicism,” in Beiser ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 270–300.

  12 For a recent reconstruction, see Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004). A powerful theoretical formulation of this shift is Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). Another is Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (NY: Vintage, 1973).

  13 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), Preface, 13. See Peter Koslowski ed., The Discovery of Historicity in German Idealism and Historicism (Berlin: Springer, 2005).

  14 See Georg Iggers, “Nationalism and Historiography, 1789–1996: The German Example in Historical Perspective,” in S. Berger, M. Donovan and K. Passmore eds., Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1999), 15–29; John Breuilly, “The National Idea in Modern German History,” in M. Fulbrook and J. Breuilly eds., German History since 1800 (London: Arnold, 1997), 556–84.

  15 Friedrich Meinecke famously addressed this transition in his classic Cosmopolitanism and the National State (1908; Eng. tr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

  16 On Prussia’s mission in Germany, see Stefan Berger, “Prussia in History and Historiograhy from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries,” in Philip Dwyer ed., The Rise of Prussia, 1700–1830 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 27–44; and Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Von Preußens Aufgabe in Deutschland zu Deutschlands Aufgabe in der Welt,” Historische Zeitschrift 231 (1980), 265–324.

  17 See Laurence Dickey, “Philosophizing about History in the Nineteenth Century: Zusammenhang and the ‘Progressive Method’ in German Historical Scholarship,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790–1870), ed. Allen Wood and Songsuk Susan Hahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 793–816.

  18 Without embracing his valuations, this periodization parallels that of Georg von Below’s classic work of 1916: Die deutsche Geschichtsschreibung von den Befreiungskriegen bis zu unsern Tagen: Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsauffassung (1916; 2nd ed., Munich and Berlin: Olbenbourg, 1924).

  19 I invoke Meinecke’s last, repentant consideration of the course of Germany history, from the ruins of 1945: The German Catastrophe (1946; Eng. tr., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950). That crise de conscience is the tacit occasion for Iggers’s teleological reconstruction of historicism and its crisis in Germany. It has also led to a lot of later German historical reflection on the “unmasterable” or “shattered” past.

  20 Here, I find myself very much in company with Frank Ankersmit, “Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis,” and Aviezer Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), both of whom see historicism, correctly in my view, as authentically central to the disciplinary practices of current history.

  21 Oexle, Geschichtswissenschaft, 26.

  22 Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936; Eng. tr., Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972])
.

  23 Oexle, Geschichtswissenschaft, 30–1; 63–5.

  24 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 6.

  25 Friedrich Jaeger and Jörn Rüsen, Geschichte des Historismus: Eine Einführung (Munich: Beck, 1992); Otto Oexle and Jörn Rüsen eds., Historismus in den Kulturwissenschaften (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996); H. W. Blanke and Jörn Rüsen eds., Von der Aufklärung zum Historismus: Zum Strukturwandel des historischen Denkens (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1984).

  26 See Galison and Stump eds., The Disunity of Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). On many of these issues from a post-positivist vantage, see my A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

  27 Oexle, Geschichtswissenschaft, 32. For this notion of research, see Beiträge zur Entwicklung der Wissenschaftstheorie im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. A. Diemer (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1968).

  28 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 12ff. For this juxtaposition of historicism to Enlightenment, see Rüsen, “Von der Aufklärung zum Historismus: Eine strukturgenetische Theorie,” in Rüsen, Konfigurationen des Historismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 29–94, and H. W. Blancke, D. Fleischer, and J. Rüsen, “Historik als akademische Praxis: Eine Dokumentation der geschichts-theoretischen Vorlesungen an deutschsprachigen Universitäten von 1750 bis 1900,” Dilthey Jahrbuch 1 (1983), 182–255.

  29 See Arno Seifert, Cognitio historica: Die Geschichte als Namengeberin der frühneuzeitlichen Empirie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1976).

  30 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 15.

  31 See Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). See, more generally, the philosophical naturalist critique of a priori philosophy in Philip Kitcher, “The Naturalists Return,” Philosophical Review 101 (1992), 53–114.

  32 See Koslowski ed., The Discovery of Historicity in German Idealism and Historicism. And see Ulrich Schneider, Philosophie und Universität: Die Historisierung der Vernunft im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Meiner, 1999).

  33 There is an interminable row between the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy over the issue of ultimate authority, but the twist is that this is a very philosophical way of putting things. If the issue is phrased “in principle” philosophy has already preempted the question. If it is merely historical, then it seems utterly privative and pointless to even speak of ultimate authority.

  34 Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 139.

  35 See Theodore Ziolkowski, Clio, the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004) and John Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  36 As in the talismanic title, Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, ed. G. Iggers and J. Powell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990).

  37 Cited in Ziolkowski, Clio, the Romantic Muse, 124.

  38 Savigny, Geschichte des Römischen Rechts im Mittelalter (2nd ed.: Tübingen: Mohr, 1834–61).

  39 It is noteworthy that the Historical School of Law features not at all in Iggers’s narrowly disciplinary but also teleological reconstruction of German historicism.

  40 Ziolkowski had demonstrated compellingly that all the leaders of the faculties at the University of Berlin traced their intellectual orientation to the explosion of Frühromantik in Jena around 1800. He also demonstrates the powerful reception of Herder’s earlier sense of historicism in that movement. Savigny was an eminent instance. (Ziolkowski, Clio, the Romantic Muse, 114–15.)

  41 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 219. On this background in Savigny, see Joachim Rückert, Idealismus, Jurisprudenz und Politik bei Friedrich Carl von Savigny (Ebelsbach: Gremer, 1984) and James Whitman, The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era: Historical Vision and Legal Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

  42 Toews, Becoming Historical, 293–4; 215.

  43 Niebuhr, Römische Geschichte (Berlin: Reimer, 1853). G. P. Gooch calls Niebuhr “the first commanding figure in modern historiography” (Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1913), 14). Ranke clearly regarded him as a model.

  44 “Schleiermacher’s successful combination of religion and hermeneutics was in many ways responsible for a secularized history of theological doctrine,” and this consolidated the link between philology and history that formed the coherence of the various disciplines into a more generic historicist orientation. (Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, 139.) See also Ziolkowski, Clio, the Romantic Muse, 74–97.

  45 On Hegel and his philosophy of history, see my essay, “Philosophy of History: The German Tradition from Herder to Marx,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790–1870), 817–65.

  46 The key notion that made natural law objectionable was its conception of a timeless and universal set of standards from which and against which all positive systems of law could be explained and evaluated. As Savigny believed, the science of jurisprudence should concern itself with “what the law is, not what it ought to be” (Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 229). Still more, positive law actually arose not from some transcendent (or even transcendental) principle a priori, but rather from the cultural strivings of communities, or nations.

  47 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 224.

  48 “Savigny was convinced that he had participated in an authentic national awakening, a solidarity of feeling and purpose” (Toews, Becoming Historical, 296).

  49 Thibaut und Savigny: Ihre Programmatischen Schriften, ed. H. Hattenauer (Munich: Vahlen, 2002). There is a good summary of the Kodifikationsstreit in Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 233–7.

  50 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 237.

  51 The phrase comes from Toews, Becoming Historical, 285. See Savigny, Vom Beruf unsrer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (reprint: Hildesheim: Olms, 1967).

  52 Eichhorn and Savigny, “Über den Zweck unserer Zeitschrift,” Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft 1 (1815), 1–17: “History is…the only way to a true knowledge of our own condition” (4).

  53 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 233, 228, notes that Savigny’s goal was “to raise jurisprudence to the status of a…science in its own right, independent of the guidelines of other disciplines.” That independence targeted philosophy primarily (the pervasive presence of Kantianism), but it did not necessarily mean estrangement from theology, especially not the sort of theology that Schleiermacher was instituting at Berlin.

  54 Toews, Becoming Historical, 286, citing from Savigny’s System, vol. 1, 17. The term Bildungstrieb manifests the profound connection with notions of organic development central to the emergent life sciences in Germany at the close of the eighteenth century, as crystallized in this term by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and then disseminated throughout early Romantic discourse. See Peter Hanns Reill, “History and the Life Sciences in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, 21–35.

  55 Ernst Simon, “Ranke und Hegel” (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1928 = Beiheft der Historischen Zeitschrift 15).

  56 Ranke to Bernsdorff, cited in Krieger, “Elements of Early Historicism: Experience, Theory, and History in Ranke,” History and Theory 14, Beiheft 14: Essays on Historicism (1975), 1–14, citing 2. See Krieger’s important monograph, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). See Toews, Becoming Historical, Part I: “Historicism in Power: 1840 and the Historicist Turn in Prussian Cultural Politics,” 17–114; and 378ff.

  57 Toews, Becoming Historical, 372n. For this background, see Carl Hinrichs, Ranke und die Geschichtstheologie der Goethezeit (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1954). See also, Theodore von Laue, Leopold Ranke: the Form
ative Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950).

  58 On the debate with Leo see Iggers, The German Conception of History, 67–8.

  59 Toews, Becoming Historical, 379.

  60 Iggers, The German Conception of History, 90–123.

  61 The first of Ranke’s phrases is from the preface to his first book of 1824 (reprinted in Ranke, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 33/34 (Leipzig, 1874), vii); the second is from his Englische Geschichte (1860), vol. 2, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 15 (Leipzig, 1877), 103.

  62 Ranke, Über die Epochen der neueren Geschichte (1854), his lectures for the King of Bavaria.

  63 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 255.

  64 Rudolf Vierhaus, “Rankes Begriff der historischen Objektivität,” in Objektivität und Parteilichkeit in der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. Reinhard Koselleck et al. (Munich: DTV, 1977), 63–76.

  65 Iggers, German Conception of History, 79. Beiser notes that most secondary interpreters have taken Ranke’s sense of Hegel as accurate, which is quite problematic (Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 261n).

  66 See Ranke’s collected theoretical writings: The Theory and Practice of History, ed. G. Iggers and K. von Moltke (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973).