‘A Centaur at the Edge of the Forest’: Jacob Burckhardt as Cultural Historian

Abstract

Jacob Burckhardt ranks as a founding father of modern cultural history. The almost anthropological focus on everyday practices, popular attitudes, and collective beliefs in The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy is generally considered as methodologically ground-breaking and profoundly at odds with the customary emphasis on ‘high politics’ and ‘great men’ in the works of his teachers and contemporaries, such as Leopold von Ranke. This chapter revises this view of Burckhardt’s cultural historical approach. It shows that he was not as unorthodox or pioneering in the context of 19th-century German-speaking historiography as it has been made out to be. The ideological factors that shaped Burckhardt’s concept of cultural history are also considered; it is argued that its markedly ‘synchronic’ or static orientation—much criticised—were determined by Burckhardt’s deep anxieties about the social and political corollaries of modernisation. These anxieties, paradoxically, account for both the conservative and the innovative aspects of his approach.