The German Genius

“happiness,” but the fulfillment of his potentialities. 1
    The most important element in the change from an Enlightenment to a historicist outlook was the chain of political catastrophes and recoveries acting on the German intellect between 1792 and 1815. To begin with, the educated middle class in Germany had by and large welcomed the French Revolution. But a profound unease settled in after the Terror, leading to widespread doubts about the doctrine of natural law. This was intensified by the Napoleonic occupation, reinforcing nationalistic feeling and identifying Enlightenment values with the detested French culture. The reforms stimulated by these events changed German attitudes toward history in three ways. 2
    One, the Enlightenment belief in universal political values was shattered. German opinion now took the view that all values were of historical and national origin and that foreign institutions and ideas could not be transplanted unchanged onto German soil. History, not abstract (French) rationality, was the key. Two, the concept of the nation was transformed. Herder had been reasonably cosmopolitan, seeing a richness to life in the way nations differed. By the time of Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation ( Addresses to the German Nation ) in 1806, however, Germans were presented as a unique and original nation that, unlike the French, had not lost touch with its original genius. The French were now regarded as a “superficial nation” who, as Humboldt put it, lacked “the striving for the divine.” Three, the role of the state was also transformed. Herder dismissed states as artificial entities, “detrimental” to human contentment. But after him, the state was more and more seen in power-political terms. In an 1807 essay on Machiavelli, Fichte argued that in regard to the dealings between states, “there is neither law nor right except the right of the stronger.” Fichte, and Ranke after him, developed the view that “might is right.” * 3
    The new attitude was nowhere more in evidence than with Wilhelm von Humboldt, who argued that there is indeed a purpose to world history: “The ends of life cannot be abstract, we must leave creativity to lead where it will…There is no higher purpose, no super-pattern.” 4 Again, this is not an exceptional thing to say now, but in the world between doubt and Darwin it was radical and, to many, dangerous.
    For Humboldt, as we have seen, the highest ethical good is to be found in Bildung , the development of the individuality and uniqueness of each man or woman. 5 It is a view with profound consequences. On this account, political, cultural, and historical understanding is quite different from physical nature. “Lifeless” nature may be understood by means of abstraction, and the mathematical regularity of its behavior, whereas real living forces can be known only through the energies they express, reflecting their inner nature. Without doubt some uniformities do exist in man’s nature—“Without them, no statistics would be possible.” But the existence of free creativity makes historical prediction impossible. Research becomes important precisely because it is itself creative. And since history is nothing but a mass of individual wills, history must be an “exact, impartial, critical examination of events.” 6
    As a result, says George Iggers, Germany’s historians shared a particular concept of history throughout modern times. “With much more justification than in France, Britain or the United States, we may speak of one main tradition of German historiography.” This centered on the character of political power, the conflict of the great powers, and a marked emphasis on diplomatic documents, with a consequent neglect of social and economic history and of sociological methods and statistics.
    Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, and other German historians have recognized that historicism broke free from the 2,000-year domination of the theory of natural law, with its understanding of the universe as consisting of “timeless, absolutely valid truths which correspond to the rational order dominant throughout the universe.” 7 This was replaced by a conception of the fullness and diversity of man’s historical experience. “This recognition, Meinecke believes, constituted Germany’s greatest contribution to Western thought since the Reformation and ‘the highest stage in the understanding of things human attained by man.’”