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

I. Introduction

[ C H A P T E R i] Introduction IN few countries in modern times have professional historians been as consciously guided in their practice by a conception of history as in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. This was true under circumstances where, except for the Hitler years, historians were free of the intellectual regimentation which prevails in totalitarian regimes. With much more justification than in France, Britain, or the United States, we may speak of one main tradition of German historiography . This tradition, broad and varied in its manifestations, was given a degree of unity by its common roots in the philosophy of German Idealism. One of its founding fathers was Leopold von Ranke, but he was by no means the only one. Another, perhaps equally important in the translation of German Idealist philosophy for historical practice and of greater influence upon German historians in the mid-nineteenth century, was Wilhelm von Humboldt. What gave the tradition its distinguishing characteristics was not its critical analysis of documents, so closely associated with the name of Ranke. The critical method and the devotion to factual accuracy were not peculiar to Ranke or the nineteenth-century German historians . To an extent, they were developed by an earlier generation of historians, philologists, classicists, and Bible-scholars. Moreover, they were easily exported and adapted by historians in other countries who wrote under the impact of very different outlooks. The critical method became the common property of honest historical scholars 3 I 4 THE GERMAN CONCEPTION OF HISTORY everywhere. What distinguished the writings of the historians in the main tradition of German historiography was rather their basic theoretical convictions in regard to the nature of history and the character of political power. This historical faith determined historical practice as well as the problems that historians posed. For the most part it centered upon the conflict of the great powers and determined the methods they employed: their heavy emphasis on diplomatic documents to the neglect of social and economic history and of sociological methods and statistics. This faith also gave the works of these historians a political orientation, not in the narrow sense of party partisanship—for within the broad tradition we find conservatives, liberals, democrats, and socialists of every description—but in the central role they assigned to the state and in their confidence in its beneficial effects. There were, to be sure, important thinkers who were not part of this tradition, historians such as Jacob Burckhardt, Julius von Picker, Johann von Dollinger, Max Lehmann, and Franz Schnabel, and philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Other scholars, such as Lorenz von Stein and Karl Lamprecht, stood at the margins of this tradition in their attempts to discover great social and economic forces operative in history. Nevertheless, the basic philosophic assumptions upon which the tradition rested were accepted not only by the majority of German historians, but also by scholars in other disciplines. The philosophy and methodology of historicism permeated all the German humanistic and cultural sciences , so that linguistics, philology, economics, art, law, philosophy, and theology became historically oriented studies. Historicism has too many meanings to be useful as a term without careful delimitation.1 In Chapter II, we shall discuss the term at greater length. In this book, when we speak of historicism, we shall generally refer to the main tradition of German historiography and historical thought which has dominated historical writing, the cultural sciences, and political theory in Germany from Wilhelm von Humboldt and Leopold von Ranke until the recent past. It should nevertheless be emphasized that historicismas a movementof thought was not restricted to Germany, but that since the eighteenth century this historical outlook has dominated cultural thought in Europe generally .2 The core of the historicist outlook lies in the assumption that INTRODUCTION there is a fundamental difference between the phenomena of nature and those of history, which requires an approach in the social and cultural sciences fundamentally different from those of the natural sciences. Nature, it is held, is the scene of the eternally recurring, of phenomena themselves devoid of conscious purpose; history comprises unique and unduplicable human acts, filled with volition and intent. The world of man is in a state of incessant flux, although within it there are centers of stability (personalities, institutions, nations , epochs), each possessing an inner structure, a character, and each in constant metamorphosis in accord with its own internal principles...