We have sought in the Introduction to distinguish a specific, predominantly German tradition of historiography and historical thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from broader currents of thought in Europe generally, which may have been described as forms of historicism. We shall not attempt to study the origins of historicism as a European phenomenon, but in this chapter shall restrict ourselves to the more modest task of following the transformation of German historical thought from the cosmopolitan culture-oriented nationalism of Herder in the late eighteenth century to the nationalistic and power-oriented assumptions of much of German historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
A history of the emergence of the historicist outlook in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European thought still needs to be written. Meinecke proposed something of the sort in The Origins of Historicism wherein he sought to trace the rise of historicism as a “general Western movement” which had its culmination in German thought. But Meinecke’s book is only marginally related to the emergence of a historical approach to cultural and social reality in the eighteenth century and his concept of historicism has relatively little to do with history. What Meinecke describes as the emergence of historicism, in the course of the eighteenth century, is rather the steady recognition of the limitations of intellect in the understanding of human reality. For Meinecke, the chief obstacle to historical understanding was the doctrine of natural law. Before the life quality of history in its individuality and spontaneity could be understood, the two-thousand-year-old hold of the Stoic-Christian natural law faith in a static, rational world order had to be broken. In its place the recognition had to be established that the human psyche (Seele) occupied the central point in history and that this psyche was “determined not by reason or understanding but by will.”5 Meinecke’s book thus becomes a hymn to the beneficient triumph of unreason in modern consciousness.
Ironically, Descartes stands at the beginning of Meinecke’s account of the emancipation of modern thought from a rational conception of reality. It was Descartes, Meinecke notes, who reoriented European philosophy from the analysis of the supposedly objective reality of the external world to the examination of human consciousness. The Enlightenment historians—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Gibbon, and Hume—through their universalistic interest, contributed to an understanding of the variety of human institutions; the Pietists, and the Pre-Romantics to an understanding of the intertwining of emotion and intellect; the traditionalists to an awareness of the extent to which there is reason in the apparent unreason of inherited institutions and ideas. The triumph of soul over intellect in Meinecke’s book does not, however, lead to the dissolution of knowledge and values, but rather to the Neo-Platonic conception that behind the apparent irrationality and turbulence of the historical world there stands a realm of great perennial ideas. These ideas are neither abstract nor universally valid, but embody the perennial essences of the fleeting individualities that comprise the historical world. They can be grasped only by the total soul, never by cold reason. The relativistic dilemmas of historicism are thus overcome for Meinecke, and historicism becomes the basis for the recognition of real truths and values. In Goethe, whose relation to history Meinecke recognizes as a very ambiguous one,6 Meinecke sees the culmination of historicist thought. It was Goethe who most fully perceived in each individuality not merely a set of fleeting phenomena, but a concrete manifestation of an individualized eternal idea. He understood that reason expresses itself never abstractly, but only within concrete, historical individuals.
There are several disturbing contradictions between Meinecke’s theoretical Assumptions in The Origins of Historicism and his application of these ideas. On the one hand, Meinecke argues that history is an open process, and every particular must be understood in terms of its own unique worth rather than as a part of a greater predetermined pattern. But the history of ideas presented by Meinecke has almost a Hegelian ring. Leibniz, Gottfried Arnold, Voltaire, and Edmund Burke all are reduced to steppingstones in the process by which European consciousness reaches its fulfillment in Goethe’s idea of individuality. It is also striking that Meinecke, who so emphatically stressed the interrelatedness of thought and life, so completely isolated the history of ideas from the historical and social settings in which these ideas arose and operated. So thoroughly disillusioned with the course of German politics since World War I, Meinecke now interpreted historicism as a purely cultural movement devoid of political implications. The transition of historical thought from eighteenth-century European forms (traced by Meinecke in The Origins of Historicism) to the peculiarly German tradition of political thought (which he had already described almost thirty years earlier in Cosmopolitanism and Nation State)7 remained tenuous and unclear.
Carlo Antoni has given a much more comprehensive and differentiated picture of the interrelation of ideas, institutions, and political forces in eighteenth-century historical thought.8 There was no one form of historicism, Antoni maintains, but a variety of historicisms “all profoundly different in accordance with the national traditions to which they belonged” and the political aspirations they sought to fulfill.9 In Great Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, and also in Germany, there arose in the eighteenth century a new interest in the past. There was a peculiarly modern attitude toward history, absent in classic, medieval, and Renaissance thought, “regarding the positive value of history understood as human progress in its immanent, worldly, and secular reality.”10 What distinguished this new outlook from major Enlightenment patterns of thought was its rejection of a mechanistic world view; its belief that history, far from being a collection of abuses and superstitions, was itself the key to the understanding of man as a social and political being. In this sense, Antoni believed, Giambattista Vico and Edmund Burke, as well as Justus Moser and Johann Gottfried Herder, stood in the historicist tradition. Inherent in this emphasis upon an organic continuity between past and present was the rejection of the attempts by Enlightenment despotism or the French Revolution to reconstruct government and society along bureaucratic centralistic lines, disregarding the diversity of traditional institutions. But the conflict between the modern state, enlightened conceptions of liberty, and traditional institutions was obviously much less severe in Great Britain than on the Continent. It distinguished the conservatism of Burke, who recognized the elements of change and progress in historical institutions, from the reactionary glorification of the medieval or even the primitive Germanic past among certain Swiss and German thinkers.11
A great deal of social and political thought in the nineteenth century recognized that man could only be understood in terms of his historical existence.12 What distinguished the German tradition of history with which we are dealing so radically from other expressions of historicism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was its emphasis upon the uniqueness and irrationality of values transmitted by history. At the heart of this emphasis is what Meinecke has called the concept of individuality.
However,