Few of the liberal historians of the Vormärz advocated a parliamentary monarchy as it already existed in Great Britain. Historians, such as Dahlmann and Droysen, who played a significant role in 1848 in the “classical liberal” caucus of the Frankfurt National Assembly, rather sought to preserve the prerogatives of a constitutional monarchy and a bureaucracy which consulted representative institutions without being entirely bound by them and respected civil liberties without necessarily guaranteeing them in writing. We may leave open the question whether parliamentary government was already foredoomed to failure in Germany in 1848 or in Prussia in 1862. The incipient industrialization of Germany and the largely illusionary fear of plebeian revolt, occasioned by the revolutions of 1792, 1830, and 1848 in France and by the isolated incidents of industrial unrest in Germany in the 1840’s, undoubtedly contributed to the hesitation of middle-class liberals to resort to revolutionary violence. The riots in Frankfurt in 1848, after the Malmo Armistice, had underlined the extent to which the German liberals believed that they were forced to rely upon Prussian arms as a bulwark against the radical left. The events in Bohemia, Posen, and Schleswig made clear the dependence of the liberals on Prussian and Austrian arms in order to fulfill their national aims. The defeat of the Prussian liberals by Bismarck, between 1862 and 1867, led to a reconciliation of large segments of middle-class liberalism with the monarchy, which now fulfilled the economic, national, and many of the political aspirations of the Prussian liberals.
On the surface, the ideals of 1813, the constitutional, national Rechtsstaat with representative institutions, had been achieved. “The Bismarckian synthesis, as consolidated after 1871,” Hans Rosenberg observes, “brought peace, great national prestige, and an almost spectacular long-term upswing of material growth, highly competent and honest public administration, with a profound respect for law and order, a substantial measure of personal rights, civil liberties, and social security, and a flourishing intellectual and artistic life to the German people.”32 Among the Prussian-oriented historians only relatively few observers, such as Hermann Baumgarten and Theodor Mommsen, began to perceive the tenuous character of liberal and popular institutions in a society where political power in an age of industrialism rested in the hands of an elite committed to seignioral, militaristic, bureaucratic, and authoritarian traditions. As Theodor Mommsen correctly saw, the authoritarian structure of the German state, its incomplete parliamentarization, its attachment to military and aristocratic values of obedience, prevented the emergence of a spirit of political responsibility among the German people at a time when the emergence of mass political movements within the constitutional framework of the Bismarckian state made such responsible citizenship increasingly necessary. In contrast to Western and Northern European countries, Germany preserved the political influence and social prestige of the landed and military aristocracy during a period when industrialization, with its concommitant social effects, had proceeded much further than in Western countries such as France. Historicism doubtlessly maintained itself in a form relatively unchanged from its classical foundations partly because important aspects of the institutional framework from which it had arisen and which it had served to defend remained relatively unchanged.
The failure of German historical theory to adopt itself to changing social-intellectual realities reflected the institutional basis of the historical profession itself. From the late eighteenth century on, historical scholarship in Germany was centered at the universities. In Europe and the United States, this generally became the case only later in the nineteenth century. The historian, as has often been pointed out, was an employee of the state, a Staatsbeamter. It is questionable, however, whether this status restricted his opportunities to express himself. On the contrary, as a severe critic of the German historicist tradition and of the Prussian state, Eckart Kehr, has recognized, his status as a civil servant in fact gave the university professor a high degree of protection against political pressures.33 Indeed, until Bismarck’s compromise with the liberals in 1867, the historians in the national tradition mostly were in opposition to the status quo.
It is perhaps more important for an understanding of the historians’ failure to re-examine their historiographical practices and political conceptions that the historians considered themselves a part of the Bildungsbürgertum, the bourgeoisie of culture and education. For the most part they identified themselves with the aspirations of this class.34 Thus, in 1848, they shared the desire for liberalization and national unification, but also the fear of social upheaval which might result from a radical challenge to the established order. Although, with few exceptions, they opposed Bismarck’s highhanded policies during the Prussian constitutional crisis from 1862 to 1867, they were able to accept the compromise with Bismarck in 1867, and to see their liberal and national aspirations largely fulfilled in the German Empire.
Highly decisive for the relative lack of development of German historiographical theory was the manner in which the academic profession was recruited. No basic reform of the German university system had taken place since the establishment of the University of Berlin in 1810. Only in very recent years have there been attempts at such reforms, which have so far had very limited success. The academic profession remained a closed caste. The Ordinarius retained not only an extremely high degree of control over the teaching and research activities of his subordinates, but in concert with his colleagues was able to restrict admission to the profession. The painful process of Habituation, by which a candidate to be admitted to university teaching had to be adopted by an Ordinarius under whose direction he composed his Habilitationsschrift35 effectively, especially after 1871, restricted the admission of historians whose outlook or background did not conform with the academic establishment. The men who broke with basic tenets of the historicist faith, such as Karl Lamprecht, or became deeply skeptical of it, as did Friedrich Meinecke in his later years, generally did so only after they themselves had become Or dinar ien. Revisionists, as in the case of Erich Eyck, either were not professional historians or, like Arthur Rosenberg, were admitted to university teaching (to a Dozentur) early in life. For the most part they were never called to a chair or saw their careers blocked, as in the case of Veit Valentin. The system of recruitment has remained essentially intact since 1945.36 The historicist faith itself has, however, come under critical examination. The creation of new chairs, especially in areas marginal to history, such as political science and contemporary history (Zeitgeschichte), and freer from the intellectual and ideological traditions of the German historical profession, has for the first time enabled larger numbers of historians critical of the classical national tradition of historiography to pursue university careers.
It is therefore not surprising that the theoretical assumptions rooted in German idealistic philosophy, upon which historicism rested, continued to play a role in German political historiography long after these theories had been abandoned or at least seriously questioned by philosophers and cultural scientists. The hold of classical historicist notions on philosophy and the social sciences (as we shall see in Chapter VI) had been effectively challenged before World War I. The cataclysmic events of the twentieth century were required to end the almost exclusive domination by classical historicism over German academic historiography (see chapter VIII). As a political theory, historicism, in rejecting the rationalistic conception of reality inherent in natural law philosophy, had not rejected political liberty. Rather, it assumed that liberal demands for individual liberties, popular participation, and juridical security could be attained within the framework of the traditional, authoritarian Obrigkeitsstaat. As a philosophic theory of value, historicism maintained a similar compromise between apparent opposites. It rejected the possibility of rational ethics, of rights and values not bound to a specific historical situation but derived from the structure of human nature common to all men. Nevertheless, the theory of value of classical German historicism differed profoundly from the expressions of later advocates of philosophical irrationalism. These political decisionists of the 1920’s