The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 353 suff~-iently rare to make this book and, hopefully, its companion volume, a valued addition to their number. F. M. BAm~,~D University of Western Ontario The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present. By Georg G. Iggers. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1968. Pp. xii+363. $10) One cannot wholeheartedly consent to the author's opinion that the "great" social revolutions of the twentieth century in Mexico, China. Russia, and Cuba can be viewed as part of a continuing struggle of the masses for emancipation from the irrationalities of the past. For those revolutions were engendered "from above" (p. 21) by groups of intellectuals rather than by the masses, as the new present turned out to be more irrational than the preceding past. But Iggers pictures studiously and colorfully the panorama of German historical ideas. The German national tradition of historiography had its beginnings in the reaction against the Enlightenment and the French Revolution of 1789. This historiography rejected the rationalistic theory of natural law as universally valid and held that all human values must be understood within the context of the historical flux. The German historical school maintained that in its concern with the particular, it fulfilled a philosophical as well as a scientific function, because it saw in the historical fact a phenomenal reflection of transhistorical truth and regarded the concrete mores, values, and policies of existing institutions as expressions of a higher morality. With the collapse of this metaphysics of identity, German historicism was forced to draw nihilistic conclusions. It showed understanding for the role of the irrational, the spontaneous, and the unique in history, but it underestimated the elements of rationality and regularity. Iggers, therefore, concludes that in posing questions of a theoretical character regarding the nature of man, society, and historical change, historiography must escape the abstract speculations of the classical phiIosophers of history and seek to integrate the critical apparatus of the historical school and its respect for fact and diversity with methods suited to the empirical, comparative study of human institutions. The book under review traces a long and twisted road: the transformation of German historical thought from Herder's cosmopolitan culture-oriented nationalism to the state-centered exclusive nationalism of the wars of liberation, the theoretical foundations of German historicism by Wilhelm yon Humboldt and Leopold yon Ranke, the high point of historical optimism (Prussian School), the crisis of historicism (Cohen, Dilthey, Windelband, Rickert, Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke), and the impact of the two world wars and the totalitarianism on German historical thought. The historiographical creativeness is, indeed, not excelled by the philosophical endeavor. Iggers' diligent investigation shows that three sets of ideas occupy the central role in the theoretical position of the German national tradition of historiography: 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. And this thought provided a theoretical foundation for the established political and social structure of nineteenth-century Prussia and Germany. The situation is not much different nowadays. In Eastern Germany, historiography became a function of a new authoritarian state 354 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY based upon very differentideological foundations. In Western Germany, democratically as well as conservativdy oricnted historians were obliged by the new constellation of realitiesto identify German politicalinterests with those of the Western democracies. According to the author, the fatal weakness of classical German historicism rested in itsaristocraticbias, its melhodological t~nesidedness, and its philosophy of value. He admits, however, that the classical German historians assumed rightly that freedom is meaningful only within an institutionalframework. Let us hope that the threatening anarchy will not engulf the historicalinstitutionsso that the traditional freedom can be preserved. Wc share the deep belief of the early representatives of the German historicist tradition that this is a moral world, that man possesses worth and dignity, and that an objective understanding of history and reality is possible. The book is especially recommended to all those who believe that the core of historieist outlook lies in the assumption that there is...