The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (review)

362 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism. By Peter Hanns Reill. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Pp. x + 308. $18.00) Reill is concerned with German and Swiss historians and historically minded thinkers in some other fields during the half century from about 1740 to about 1790. Except for Pufendorf, who appears early as an example of one of the trends these thinkers were reacting against, the authors covered will be unfamiliar to most readers. Historians of theology may have heard of Mosheim and Semler, and literary critics and aestheticians may have heard of Bodmer. But there are no figures in eighteenth-century German historiography to compare with Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Vico; or with Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. Among philosophers, Woff's influence had passed by this time, Lessing is mentioned only in passing, and Kant and Herder are not treated. However, the comparative obscurity of the authors covered does not make the book any the less valuable. On the contrary, it is a heartening revelation to see how remarkably modern and sophisticated these journeymen historians were in their philosophy of history. If Reill provides an unusually narrow conception of the temporal span of the German Enlightenment, he is correspondingly broad in what he means by "historicism." At the beginning he identifies it with "the type of historical thought associated with the names of Ranke and/or Hegel" (p. 2). Beyond this he does not attempt to characterize it until his brief conclusion where he says that "historicism may be defined as a way of looking at the world 'whereby the truth, meaning or value of anything is to be found in history'" (p. 213). This corresponds to the definition offered by Maurice Mandelbaum in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but as Mandelbaum demonstrates, the term "historicism" has been used in a bewildering variety of ways. Historicists believe, says Reill, that knowledge of the human condition is acquired through history and that "historical understanding serves as a challenge to confront and transvalue the burden of the past" (p. 213). According to historicism, also, the Geisteswissenschaften require a different methodology from the natural sciences. One wonders just how much most of these figures were either committed to, or influenced by, such sweeping positions. In fact, Reill makes very little attempt to show an actual historical continuity between the thinkers of this period and historicists of the nineteenth and twentieth centures. What he has offered--and we should be most grateful for it--is a thoroughly documented account of how Enlightenment thinkers in the German-speaking domain discovered, came to grips with, and developed solutions to numerous problems in historical methodology and in the nature of historical explanation that must eventually be faced in any full-blooded attempt to deal with history, whatever one may believe about the role of history in the overall scheme of explanation. The details of the book are much too rich and complex to summarize. Borrowing from Paul Hazard, Reill first demonstrates a crisis of historical consciousness at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries exemplified by the inability of either the conservative Pufendorf or the radical church historian Gottfried Arnold to deal with historical process and change. Reil goes on to show the Enlightenment historians as dubious alike of the enormous seventeenth-century compilations of historical facts, the a priori rationalism of the Wolffians, and the apparent disregard of facts of the eighteenth-centuryFrench historians. He examines the interrelated influences of the rediscovery of Leibniz, with his emphasis on the self-developing individual related at every moment to all other individuals, and of the eighteenth-centuryGerman estheticians (Baumgarten, Mendelsohn, Sulzer), with their complex and sophisticated psychology and--reinforced by British influences--theiremphasis on the original genius, as well as their absorption of and critical reaction to Montesquieu and Hume. Perhaps the most interesting parts of the book for philosophers are the three chapters covering the role of causal explanation in history, critically analyzing the various overall explanatory BOOK REVIEWS 363 schemata, and confronting the problem of uniqueness. At various times through the book we see developments foreshadowing the doctrine of Verstehen. One must be grateful for the...