The German Genius

sin to arrive at its present stage of imperfection. “The immediate post-Adamite air had been cleaner and healthier, the earth richer and more fertile, the fruits and vegetables bigger, better and more nourishing.” That is why people lived longer and why, he said, the earth had more people in it before the Flood than at any time since. 8
    In this way, then, as Peter Hanns Reill has noted, the chronology of the Christian creation myth became “hermetically sealed off” from the remainder of historical analysis. 9 This allowed people to keep their faith, but it also allowed the development of historical understanding outside the biblical chronology. Although scholars might have disagreements about the actual course of history since biblical times, it was now accepted that, in the interim, there had been development, evolution (though not yet in a Darwinian sense), and that development was accessible to the diligent historian. “The rise of historicism is one of the great intellectual revolutions of the modern age.” 10
    Another intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century, with important implications for historians, was the triumph of Natural Law. This came about partly through the astronomical/physical/mathematical discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, and partly through the biological and anthropological discoveries in the New World, Africa, and elsewhere. Given the laws discovered by Newton and others, and the fact that “primitive” tribes in the newly discovered parts of the world lacked Christianity but still had religion and lived in civil societies, these patterns fostered the idea that there must be in human affairs fundamental regularities—laws—that existed much as gravity existed, only needing a Newton to uncover them. Natural Law was understood in this way “as the force that arranged things.” 11
    The meaning of the words “nature” and “natural” were not always obvious. For classical thinkers, unaware for the most part of “primitive peoples,” the natural state was life in a healthy civil society. Christians, on the other hand, always made a distinction between the state of nature (itself divided into the “pure state” of nature and the “state of fallen nature”) and the state of grace. Men such as Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius, however, attempted to redefine the idea of nature so as to arrive at a new explanation for the origin of things. Thomas Hobbes in particular concerned himself with the state of nature that existed before civil society. This too implies change, development, evolution. 12
    Reill identifies three German scholars in particular who all taught at Göttingen and all built on Hobbes and embraced Natural Law to explain the evolution of society. Johann David Michaelis (1717–91) conceived of primitive society as a collection of states so small they “resembled families.” 13 Ruled by elected judges, these small states were so uncorrupted that authority could be exercised in a simple “parental” manner. The experience of such peoples was expressed in their sacred poetry. Gottfried Achenwall (1719–72) said that ever-larger states were created “by contract” between smaller ones; the aim was to ensure maximum and mutual happiness. The agreements that made up the contract formed the basic constitution which shaped the character of the state. Achenwall’s colleague Johann Stephan Pütter (1725–1807) thought there were other types of social organization that came between the family and the state. He called these Gemeinde (a loose grouping of people) and Volk (a collection of families and/or Gemeinde ), which bodies he thought lacked sovereignty. None of this is totally satisfactory but it is the beginning of an explanation of the formation of civil society in developmental terms. August Ludwig von Schlözer (1735–1809) summed up the new thinking: “Since the beginning of the human race, a beginning we do not know and cannot rationally reconstruct, three basic types of social organisation have developed in succession: familial [ häusliche ] organisation, civil [ bürgerliche ] groups, and state-society [ Staatsgesellschaften ].” For him, the moment of state formation was the point separating history from prehistory. Here too the scriptural account of the Creation was sealed off. The biblical account was now held to apply solely to the Israelites, which allowed the Aufklärer to argue that the basic principle governing