Politiques de l'histoire. L'historicism comme premise et comme mythe (review)

This is an important book not only for a better understanding of the history of historicism within Germany, but also for a novel analysis of the foundations that enabled the emergence of Nazi totalitarianism. One of the central theses of this study is to state the incompatibility between a historical fidelity to factual/empirical reality and a totalitarian reign of terror, which presupposes precisely the propagandist manipulation of facts.

Barash gives an entirely innovative account of propaganda by examining its metaphysical preconditions. Through a careful analysis of various philosophical and literary texts he concludes that the disregard for factual/empirical reality presupposes a devaluation of embodied life's spiritual validity. But this book is important not only because of the significance of the philosophical discussion advanced in it. In addition to its timely reinterpretation of modern philosophy, this groundbreaking new study of the various links between politics and different perceptions of the historical past also offers a new reading of German intellectual history. Barash disentangles the writing and thought of Weimar classicism from confusion with the nationalism that was prevalent in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century.

Herder in particular has often been used as scapegoat for the nationalist and racist thought that shaped much of modern German social as well as intellectual history. Barash makes clear that the break with a universal understanding of human nature does not result from Herder's writing on particularity but rather emerges after the German unification of 1871 from Heinrich von Treitschke's warmongering nationalism, which went hand in hand with chauvinism and anti-Semitism: "Treitschke adopte un noveau ton, celui du nationalisme belliqueux, du chauvinisme et de l'antisémitisme qui trouve un echo parmi certains de ses cotemporains et présage les sombers temps à venire" (10). Barash's book consistently demonstrates that a certain perception of history gives rise to a concomitant political stance. He contrasts the Herderian tradition of historiography with Treitschke's new historical approach, which set the stage for the totalitarian and thus propaganda-based politics of Nazi Germany.

The first part of the book traces the subtle approach of Herder's philosophical and literary writings in the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Leopold von Ranke, and Friedrich von Gentz. This part closes with a contrast between Ranke's and Treitschke's historiography that clearly brings to light the ideological and scholarly radical break from a Herderian tradition of historical inquiry in the work of the latter.

The book's second part focusses on critical responses to the link between historio-graphical writing and totalitarian ideology in Treitschke-inspired research that intentionally advances a biased depiction of world history. This propagandist approach results from a radical departure from Herder's concern with the spiritual validity of all cultural and natural formations. The second part of the book thus opens with Hermann Heller's intriguing but often neglected analysis of fascism as the outcome of a political as well as spiritual crisis. In an important discussion Barash examines in what ways Heller differentiates the spiritual and the intellectual from abstract philosophical concepts. It emerges from this examination that Heller criticizes in fascist thinkers the indifference to particular forms of life, be they cultural or natural. Against the empty ideologies of fascism Heller reinstates the Herderian idea of the concrete universal.

In a similar way, Leo Strauss criticizes the metaphysical foundations of Carl Schmitt's chauvinistic decisionism. In a previous chapter that focusses on Schmitt, Barash de-lineates the difference between the twentieth-century jurisprudent, who became one of the legal architects of the Nazi race laws, and the seventeenth-century philosopher Hobbes. Whereas Hobbes bases his notion of sovereignty on natural law understood as the prevention of violence, Schmitt's decisionism is an empty ideology, emerging from the spiritual and political void that Hermann Heller analyzes as the cultural breeding place of fascism. The Schmittian sovereign decision does not originate...