From Historicism, The Idea Of Progress To Postmodern Revisionist History

From Historicism, The Idea of Progress to Postmodern Revisionist History

Almost two centuries before Postmodern leftists gained control over the great chair of the humanities, especially history, the seeds were being laid for historicism. Theories of historicism have agreed in emphasizing the uniqueness of historical events. A distinct contrast is Karl Popper's definition of historicism in his book, The Poverty of Historicism. (Boston, 1959), p. 3. "It will be enough if I say here that I mean by 'historicism' an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their aim and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the 'rhythms' or "patterns' of the laws or trends' that underlie the evolution of history." (see the sharp criticism of Popper by Hans Meyerhoff in The Philosophy of History in Our Times (NY, 1956), p. 29. For an excellent attempt to define "Historicism" and its many conflicting meanings, see Dwight E. Lee and Robert N. Beck, "The Meaning of Historicism", American Historical Review, LIX (1953-1954): 568-577.

Historicism itself developed in late 18th century Germany. The Enlightenment that flourished in France and Britain came late to Germany. Its impact became visible after mid 19th century (see my paper and syllabus, "The Enlightenment"). The philosophies of the German Enlightenment, the Aufklarer, were not swept away in the waves of enthusiasms for 'enlightened' ways. The achievements of the French philosopher did not soon impact German thought. The key to the distinctive German Enlightenment is its high regard for tradition. French tradition was treated with contempt in Germany. German Aufklarer were dismayed by the scorn for revealed religion evident in the writing of Voltaire and his contemporaries. They found that French and Scottish philosophical history paid too little attention to the details of the past (see especially G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1952), p. 9; and Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in The History of Ideas (London, 1976); perhaps the greatest precursor of historicism was an early 18th century Florentine professor of rhetoric, Giambattista Vico); P. H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and The Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, CA, 1975).

The religious contribution came briefly from pietism. Pietism laid much stress on personal religion that verged on mysticism. Pietism contrasted reason with spiritual illumination. Wisdom (Sophia) and Reason had access only to logical distinction. Sophia is the power of God. A twin influence produced historicism-pietism and antiquarianism (tradition). The Germans, Gatterer once remarked, were people exactly suited to the products of learned footnotes (Herbert Butterfield. Man and His Past: A Study of History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge. 1955), p. 38). German concern for historiography becomes visible in the number of historical periodicals which rose from 3 in 1700 to 131 in 1790 (Butterfield, p. 39). Two further contributors to the rise of historicism were Idealism and Romanticism. Germany's great protagonist of philosophical idealism was Immanuel Kant. Both Idealism and Romanticism were reaction against the Enlightenment. Kant rejected the view that knowledge is passively assimilated by the human mind. This was to turn against the sensationalism of David Hume (Butterfield, p. US). The mind is active in the acquisition of knowledge. Ideas (categories) are essential for understanding the world. Therefore, it is Idealism. This is a radical break with Enlightenment Empiricism! Idealism became the strongest concept in German philosophy after the publication of Kant's mature views in 1780. Hegel's philosophy can best be understood as a response to that of Kant. Kant's constructivism opens Pandora's Box of relativistic radical contextualization and ultimately postmodern Revisionism in science, history, etc. Idealism was the characteristic intellectual expression at the turn of the 19th century while Romanticism was the characteristic cultural expression of the epoch. Romanticism was a reaction against 18th century norms. Nature had been conceived as an intricate structure of cause and effect passively awaiting dissection by human reason. Now nature was seen as an organic whole that actively influences human beings. For Wordsworth nature was the "muse, the guide, the guardian of my heart and soul of all my moral being." (Wordsworth from Tintern Abbev. Lyrical Ballads. 1798, lines 1 l0ff, ed. R L. Brett and A.R. Jones (London, 1963), p. 116.)

Nature fulfilled the role of God. Its stress on the role of ideas was widely diffused and became axiomatic in historicist thought. History is concerned with ideas. It is not about pure ideas, but about a really whole development that is subject to ideas (Idealism). This view of nature was propounded by Wilhelm von Humboldt, the architect of the Prussian education system, in a lecture "On The Historian's Talk" delivered before the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1821. The trend of ideas he explained constitutes historical truth. The history of ideas (Geitesgeschichte) became deeply entranced in German historical tradition. Philosophical idealism had a marked impact on the theory and practice of history. The divine was thought to be everything, or to be more precise, in everything. Romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge in England discerned the divine in the natural world of crags and seascapes, flowers and storms. Their poetry was meant to distill the mystical spiritual experience of those who lived in awareness of the "Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe" (M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolutions in Romantic Literature (London 1971), p. 68). Romanticism was charged with a sense of the divine abroad in the world.

Historicism was a factor within the romantic tide that swept Germany. Goethe, the greatest of German romantics, is quite reasonably treated in the best known German study of the subject as the climax of the rise of historicism (Friedrich Meinecke, Historicism: Use of A New Historical Outlook (1932), translated by I.E. Anderson (London, 1973), pp. 373-495). Goethe shared romantic values—the feeling that the world is impregnated with the divine. Therefore man shares nature with God and history. Ranke illustrates this well in an essay that he wrote "On the Character of Historical Science". "It is not necessary for us to prove at length that the eternal dwells in the individual. This is the religious foundation on which our efforts rest. We believe that there is nothing without God and nothing lives except through God." (Ranke, Theory and Practice, p. 38). All forms of historicism affirm that God works in all "histories" not merely the special history of Israel and Christianity. The pluralism of religious customs give evidence of the manifold wisdom of God. The Germans, French and English all produced learned treatise based in the developments of the aufklarer. These tomes fused hard and fast rational categories and rhetoric to good effect. As historians began to write—on aufklarer principles, they integrated the research method of philosophy with generalizing method of philosophy—as Vico had done in Italy and Gibbon did in England (see especially The New Science of Giambattista Fico. ed. Max H. Fisch and Thomas G. Bergin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948); A.D. Monigliano, "Gibbon's contribution to Historical Method" Studies in Historiography (London, 1966).

The Gottingen quest for detail emphasized the need to ensure the accuracy of what was written as history. The Gottingen School sought to represent the widespread desire for accuracy that began in the later Middle Ages. Critical standards were employed primarily in philology and genealogy, to the editing of texts. The 18th century German Enlightenment did not produce any monument of historical scholarship equivalent to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire or Niebuhr's History of Rome. The history of ideas, Geistesgeschichte, became deeply entrenched in German historical tradition. Philosophical ideals had a marked impact on the theory and practice of history.

All the Aiifklarer were responsible for developing another feature of romantic thought, a stress on organic development. Like Vico, they were eager to reject a mechanistic worldview. Wolfian atomistic reductionism was on the wane. According to the Aufklarer every event is related to another. Nature was interconnected to every event in history. Herder's rambling work Reflections on The Philosophy of The History of Mankind (1784-1791) fully expressed the spirit of German Romanticism. Herder's pluralism thesis is his chief contribution. This thesis finds ubiquitous voices in postmodern revisionism. All cultures have their own values that cannot justly be compared with the values of other cultures (see especially Berlin, Vico and Herder, p. 153). This cultural relativism thesis is the diametric opposite of the "inevitably of progress" thesis. Progress can only occur within a given nation and cannot be measured on any single or external scale. Each notion contains the "ideal of its own perfection, wholly independent of all comparison with those of others." (p. 206). This is precisely the postmodern revisionist thesis!!

The seeds of historicism during the Napoleonic Wars were scattered and historians turned from repairing the materials of history to historiography proper. Perhaps the singly most influential work of the period was the History of Rome (1811) by Reinhold Niebuhr, who blended the fragmentary sources for early Roman history—law codes, inscriptions, poetry, ballad, literature, i.e. Livy’s influence, into a coherent story of a perennial struggle for power between patricians and plebeians. Niebuhr's work was a tour de force, replacing the classical accounts of brief phases of republican history. Niebuhr utilized the standard historicist thesis that poetry and myth express the inner spirit of a nation. He also assumed (following Vico) that all nations go through similar cycles of development. This development finds postmodern fruition in revisionist history. Through Niebuhr the idea of historicism spread beyond Germany. In England a group of scholars with an Oxford background, the so-called "Liberal Anglicans," read Niebuhr avidly. Of this group the best known is Thomas Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby and subsequently Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. Niebuhr molded all his thought (Thomas Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History (London, 1845). His inaugural lecture at Oxford is a manifesto of historicist views. Modern history, he argued, is the study of national personality, which is a product of race, language, institutions and religion and persists down the ages (T. Arnold, ibid., p. 25). (See especially Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 1952) and P.W. Day, Thomas Arnold and The Philosophy of Vico (Aukland, New Zealand, 1964), p. 55). The chief influence of historicism in Britain was not a historian but a novelist, Sir Walter Scott. It was Scott who fired the imagination of Macaulay. The Romantic in British historiography was to be found in its literary expression rather than its intellectual assumption (on Macaulay see Sir Earnest Barker, Age and Youth, pp. 25Iff). Niebuhr influenced Leopold von Ranke. Ranke is surely the example of value-free objectivity. His dictum that the historian must concern himself only with "what actually happened" has become the most common of commonplaces on historical thought. This is actually a distortion of Ranke's view as his phrase "wie es eigentlick gewesen" contains an adverb "eigentlick", which certainly means "actually" in 20th century German usage. In Ranke's own 19th century usage it usually meant "essentially," -"what essentially happened." (Ranke, Theory and Practice, p. xix; editor G. Iggers, Bobbs-Merrill: Indianapolis, 1973) Instead of objectivity, Ranke was expressing the classical historicist belief that institutions enable the historian to divine the essence of the past (note that we are on the way to Marx's "the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844." The phrase "the materialist conception of history" was first used by Engels in 1859 (Z.A. Jordon, The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism: A Philosophical and Sociological Analysis (London, 1967) p 37n). Ranke's influence was dwindling and a new influence was entering the historical arena, an appreciation of positivist history exemplified by Buckle, yet reaffirmed the central historicist claim that the methods of nature science cannot be applied to history (see especially Igger's German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to The Present (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968, revised edition 1983. It contains comprehensive study of historicist mainstream).

At the turn of the 20th century, Marx Weber was preoccupied with positivism yet making a distinctive methodological separation between the sciences of man and the physical sciences. The German tradition of historicism was being diluted under Hitler's tyranny in the 1930's. (See esp. Monigliano's "Historicism and Contemporary Thought," Studies in Historiography, p. 227.) In the 1900's many German historians were still defending a method that justified their country's past role in the international arena. Fritz Fisher claimed that Germany must bear the responsibility of the outbreak of World War I (J.A. Moses, The Policies of Illusion: The Fisher Controversy in German Historiography (London. 1975). Wilhelm Dilthey, a Berlin professor who died in 1911, exerted a strong posthumous influence. His lasting contribution was to elaborate the historicist notion of intention. History is to be separated from the physical sciences by different methods. The laws of physics cannot grasp the particular features of any instance of human behavior, charged as it is with intention. Human intention can only be intuited.

Dilthey introduced hermeneutics as a bridge between physics and psychology. Dilthey utilized Schleiermacher's principles for interpreting the Bible and recognized that they could be applied to any documents (R.E. Palmer, Hermeneutics and Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer (Evanston, IL; Northwestern University, 1969), pp. 94ff.). Persons, like historical events, can be studied and understood only by seeing them in relation to one another. At this point we can perceive Dilthey's doctrine of the Hermeneutical circle1: a part must be understood through its setting in the whole; the whole must be understood through recognizing the significance of its parts. Interpretation is therefore a process of allowing part and whole to interact in the mind (H.P. Rickman, ed., W. Dilthey: Selected Writings (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 9ff.). The historicist thesis' influence expands far beyond history. Historicism, fused with Hegelianism, Vico contributed to the greatest intellectual achievement of Italy-the historical philosophy of Benedetto Croce (A.D. Monigliano, "Reconsidering B. Croce 1866-1952”) Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography B. Croce. History: Its Theory and Practice (editor Douglas Ainslie (NY: Russell and Russell, 1960). In Germany the historicists stress on the corporate personality of the nation formed the foundation of Hitler's "volkisch", Philosophy of life (Michael Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (Cambridge, 1939), p. 201).