by Peter Watson
Engels’s erudition is perhaps insufficiently appreciated now. He had a wider range of interests than Marx, spoke and wrote English and French as well as he did German and as well as Marx, and was eventually able to speak Greek, Latin, and some Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.* He wore his learning lightly but it stood him in good stead, in that he predicted that Wilhelm II, grandson of Wilhelm I, would commit many blunders and prove catastrophic for Germany. He was not blind to the fact that the English working classes had enjoyed increased prosperity, although unequally, as a result of the British Empire, and he thought that explained why there had been so little socialism in England since Owenism. He thought that with the decline of empire and the abolition of the English monopoly, together with the rise of American commercial success, the English working class would lose its privileged position and socialism would reemerge. As with so much else, he was right.59
Engels was hardly less interesting than Marx, and there has always been a debate as to who was first with the main ideas they jointly evolved. With Engels surviving Marx by more than a decade, and editing the second and third volume of Das Kapital after Marx died, it is perhaps no surprise that J. D. Hunley, in a recent critique, makes a powerful case for saying that there was in fact very little difference between Marx and Engels in their materialistic understanding of history, economics, and politics, that the “Principles of Communism,” which Engels wrote, is hardly different from the Communist Manifesto, which they both produced, though the latter is slightly more radical.60 Engels, Hunley says, may have been marginally less enthusiastic for the revolutionary cause than Marx, though this could have had more to do with the fact that Engels lived longer, surviving to see the gathering strength of the Social Democrats in Germany. In the preface to the English translation of the first volume of Das Kapital, both Engels and Marx took the view that in England revolutionary changes might occur by peaceful and legal means, and both agreed that this was preferable. But Engels, no less than Marx, was convinced that in some countries force would be necessary.61
Both Engels and Marx retained a form of Hegelianism to the end, believing that history was the result of impersonal forces, yet shaped by men. Engels went on record as saying specifically that it was “laughable” to explain everything in history in terms of economic factors. “History, to an extent, rests on the unconscious of all concerned….”62
Marx’s comment on Darwin’s Origin of Species was perhaps revealing: “This is the book that contains the natural historical foundation for our view.” Note the use of the word “our.” But there is little evidence to suggest that Engels’s contributions to at least the first volume of Das Kapital were more financial and critical than substantive. Volumes two and three were different matters, because of the messy nature of Marx’s manuscripts. We don’t know what additions Engels did make but historians are agreed there is no evidence of any intent to deceive. Tristram Hunt, in his 2009 biography of Engels, says that “Marx’s bulldog” tried to enfold him in a “scientific turn,” that the bulldog was “mezmerized” by the scientific advances of the nineteenth century and sought to position their socialism within this context. Maybe so, but their collaboration was always one of mutual respect, a decisive factor in making that collaboration “the most significant intellectual partnership of all time.”63
12.
German Historicism: “A Unique Event in the History of Ideas”
Thanks to Johann Herder, history became the basis of all culture. Development and evolution became central to all understanding. This is Herder, in Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity). “The purpose of our existence…is to develop this incipient element of humanity fully within us…Our ability to reason is to be developed…our finer senses are to be cultivated…the task incumbent upon each one is to develop his own unique personality to the fullest.” Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all argued in favor of the basic uniqueness of individuals and nations in history. For them, as for Wilhelm von Humboldt, the purpose of man’s life becomes emphatically not “happiness,” but the fulfillment of his potentialities.1
The most important element in the change from an Enlightenment to a historicist outlook was the chain of political catastrophes and recoveries acting on the German intellect between 1792 and 1815. To begin with, the educated middle class in Germany had by and large welcomed the French Revolution. But a profound unease settled in after the Terror, leading to widespread doubts about the doctrine of natural law. This was intensified by the Napoleonic occupation, reinforcing nationalistic feeling and identifying Enlightenment values with the detested French culture. The reforms stimulated by these events changed German attitudes toward history in three ways.2
One, the Enlightenment belief in universal political values was shattered. German opinion now took the view that all values were of historical and national origin and that foreign institutions and ideas could not be transplanted unchanged onto German soil. History, not abstract (French) rationality, was the key. Two, the concept of the nation was transformed. Herder had been reasonably cosmopolitan, seeing a richness to life in the way nations differed. By the time of Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation) in 1806, however, Germans were presented as a unique and original nation that, unlike the French, had not lost touch with its original genius. The French were now regarded as a “superficial nation” who, as Humboldt put it, lacked “the striving for the divine.” Three, the role of the state was also transformed. Herder dismissed states as artificial entities, “detrimental” to human contentment. But after him, the state was more and more seen in power-political terms. In an 1807 essay on Machiavelli, Fichte argued that in regard to the dealings between states, “there is neither law nor right except the right of the stronger.” Fichte, and Ranke after him, developed the view that “might is right.”*3
The new attitude was nowhere more in evidence than with Wilhelm von Humboldt, who argued that there is indeed a purpose to world history: “The ends of life cannot be abstract, we must leave creativity to lead where it will…There is no higher purpose, no super-pattern.”4 Again, this is not an exceptional thing to say now, but in the world between doubt and Darwin it was radical and, to many, dangerous.
For Humboldt, as we have seen, the highest ethical good is to be found in Bildung, the development of the individuality and uniqueness of each man or woman.5 It is a view with profound consequences. On this account, political, cultural, and historical understanding is quite different from physical nature. “Lifeless” nature may be understood by means of abstraction, and the mathematical regularity of its behavior, whereas real living forces can be known only through the energies they express, reflecting their inner nature. Without doubt some uniformities do exist in man’s nature—“Without them, no statistics would be possible.” But the existence of free creativity makes historical prediction impossible. Research becomes important precisely because it is itself creative. And since history is nothing but a mass of individual wills, history must be an “exact, impartial, critical examination of events.”6
As a result, says George Iggers, Germany’s historians shared a particular concept of history throughout modern times. “With much more justification than in France, Britain or the United States, we may speak of one main tradition of German historiography.” This centered on the character of political power, the conflict of the great powers, and a marked emphasis on diplomatic documents, with a consequent neglect of social and economic history and of sociological methods and statistics.
Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, and other German historians have recognized that historicism broke free from the 2,000-year domination of the theory of natural law, with its understanding of the universe as consisting of “timeless, absolutely valid truths which correspond to the rational order dominant throughout the universe.”7 This was replaced by a conception 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.’” Moreover, according to Iggers’s interpretation, Troeltsch and Meinecke maintained that (non-German) European thought remained committed to natural law throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. This difference, he says, helped lay the basis for the “deep divergence” in cultural and political development observed between Germany and “Western Europe” after the French Revolution. Another Sonderweg.8
“AN EPOCH IN THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN INTELLIGENCE”
The German historians also stimulated change in more practical ways. Consider first something we take for granted now: access to archives, and the freedom to publish whatever is discovered there.9 G. P. Gooch reminds us this was by no means always true and that the first scholar of heroic consequence in modern historiography, the man who improved its standing to the status of an independent discipline and who inspired many later historians, was Barthold Niebuhr (1776–1831). The “rather mawkish” son of the noted Danish traveler and explorer Carsten Niebuhr, he was introduced to the great classics of other civilizations by his father. He pursued law and philosophy at Kiel but he also studied history and knew as early as nineteen what he wanted to be: “If my name is to live, it will be as an historian and publicist, as a classicist and philologist.”10 He spent time in Denmark and Berlin, in public administration, but in 1810 he was offered a professorship at the University of Berlin, and it was there that he began his mammoth work on Rome. In the middle of the fighting he published two volumes of a book that we now recognize as inaugurating the systematic study of Roman history. Niebuhr always claimed that his time in public administration had provided him with an understanding of history that “no previous historian” had experienced and gave him a perspective that, he said, showed that history is more an account “of institutions than of events, of classes than of individuals, of customs than of lawgivers.” This was a crucial shift in emphasis but not his only one, his other achievement being to identify the sources of early Roman history and assess their credibility. He had thoroughly assimilated Wolf’s methods and results in the Prolegomena ad Homerum, which convinced him that the history of early Rome could be found in a critical examination of its literature. Goethe was impressed and so was Thomas Babington Macaulay in Britain, who declared Niebuhr’s book(s) on Rome “an epoch in the history of European intelligence.”11
LAW AS AN ACHIEVEMENT OF CIVILIZATION
In the German context, an important aspect of this developing historical consciousness occurred in the realm of law. Two Berlin professors were crucial in showing how laws were not “God given,” as many people thought, but had evolved. Karl Friedrich Eichhorn studied law, political science (Staatswissenschaft), and history at Göttingen. His original intention was to be a practicing lawyer, but after being offered a chair at Frankfurt an der Oder, he turned to research and writing. The first volume of his Deutsche Staats-und Rechtsgeschichte (History of German Law and Institutions) appeared in 1808 when he was twenty-seven, and it earned him an invitation to Berlin.
Eichhorn’s aim was to show that state and public law was “the product of all the factors that influence the life of a nation.” He described the links between legal ideas and institutions, showing how both had evolved. In doing so, he helped generate a spirit of nationality, but in Berlin he became identified with the view that law—like art and philosophy—is one of the defining achievements of a great civilization.
Friedrich Carl von Savigny was a lifelong friend of Eichhorn’s. Also educated at Göttingen, he published a work on certain aspects of the Roman Law of Possession in 1803 and the following year set out on a prolonged tour through the libraries of Europe. These travels provided him with a unique experience and self-confidence, so much so that when, in the wake of Napoleon’s victories, there was a call for a French-style German-wide code of law, Savigny effectively opposed the idea. Now a professor at Berlin, he forcefully argued instead that law had to grow, by custom and usage, that any code “imposed” on a people would necessarily be arbitrary and do more harm than good. This view was underlined in his Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter (History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages), the first volume of which was published in 1815, where he traced the survival of Roman law in the institutions and local customs of the towns, showing how that law had survived and even proliferated under the German “barbarians.” His point was that Roman law was older than German law, that it had grown through use, interpreted by experienced jurists.
In the same decade that saw the earliest works of Niebuhr, Savigny, and Eichhorn, Jacob Grimm founded the science of Teutonic origins.12 Born in Hesse in 1785, Grimm studied law at the University of Marburg, where Savigny’s lectures awakened in him an interest in history; it was in Savigny’s library that Grimm first encountered early German literature, which he took to be an “uncultivated field.” When Savigny made his tour of the libraries of Paris, Grimm accompanied him and began to collect his own material. This gave him the idea of collecting German sagas and fairy tales.
The first volume of Kinder-und Hausmärchen, written with the help of his brother Wilhelm, appeared in 1812 and made them famous. “More than any other part of the Romantic output, the Märchen became part of the life of the German nation.”13 The Grimms believed that the earliest history of all peoples was the folk sagas and that history had neglected them because they contained no “facts.” Jacob was one of those who believed that, to the contrary, sagas contain more historical substance than anyone thought. He likened medieval literature to medieval cathedrals, the “anonymous expression of the soul of a people.” In his Deutsche Mythologie, where he added oral history to written stories, he described a world of swan maidens, pixies, kobolds, elves, dwarfs, and giants, all retreating as Christianity spread across Europe.14
The most enduring aspect of this scholarly nationalism occurred when several German historians got together to establish a proper German history, for which they determined that a complete record of the archives and sources was needed. In 1819, led by Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein and several other professors at Berlin, the Gesellschaft für Deutschlands ältere Geschichtskunde (Society for the Study of Early German History) was founded at Frankfurt and a journal, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, established. When Georg Heinrich Pertz, the editor and director, retired half a century later, no fewer than twenty-five “stately” folios had been published. Again, this achievement was so seminal that we take it for granted now.15 Around the Monumenta other works of German history reflected and encouraged the emerging nationalism: Heinrich Luden’s Geschichte des teutschen Volkes (History of the German People; twelve volumes, 1825–37), Johannes Voigt’s Geschichte Preussens (History of Prussia; nine volumes, 1827–39), Johann Friedrich Böhmer’s Fontes Rerum Germanicarum (1843). Then came Ranke.
“THE GREATEST HISTORICAL WRITER OF MODERN TIMES”
Leopold von Ranke, according to G. P. Gooch in his book on German historians, “was beyond comparison the greatest historical writer of modern times, not only because he founded the scientific study of materials and possessed in an unrivalled degree a judicial temper, but because his powers of work and length of life enabled him to produce a larger number of first-rate works than any other writer. It was he who made German [historical] scholarship supreme in Europe; and no one has ever approximated so closely to the ideal historian.”16
Ranke studied theology and philology at Leipzig, where he read the Old Testament in Hebrew. He was not, as should now be clear, the first to use critical methods but, says Gooch, he, more than anyone, popularized them “and showed what could be done with them.” He made his mark with his first book, Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514) in 1824, when he was twenty-nine. But it was really his appendix, “Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber” (In Crit
icism of Modern Historians), that became famous and, if anything, was regarded as more important than the main text.17 In this appendix, Ranke applied Niebuhr’s critical principles to modern sources.
Ranke also became famous for his “discovery” of archives. This, as we can now see, is something of an exaggeration. Several other people were using the archives at the same time as, or even before, Ranke, but here too it was his use of the materials that caught the eye. In Berlin he encountered several volumes of the reports of the Venetian ambassadors from the second quarter of the sixteenth century—the very zenith of Venetian power. His crucial insight was to see that these reports told a very different story from that revealed in the memoirs of the day, written by the leading players themselves or by observers of one kind or another, all of whom had their own axes to grind and therefore gave but a partial view of affairs.
These “objective” ambassadorial reports had a profound influence on Ranke and determined the kind of history he wrote. Sources were crucial but, for Ranke, his most important task was the “great, comprehensive narrative.” He agreed with Humboldt that the historian “proceeds like a poet, who after having grasped the material has to create it anew, drawing on his own powers.” 18 This is still the modern approach.
