German Thoroughness in Baltimore: Epistemic Virtues and National Stereotypes

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning interest in “epistemic virtues” as a prism for historical study of the sciences and the humanities. Although most of the literature is still confined to single fields or local cases, the potential of comparing scholars across the academic spectrum from an epistemic virtues point of view has already been recognized. Yet as soon as historians embark on such a project, they face a potential complication. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, language of virtue was often imbued with nationalist meaning. Scholars habitually appealed to stereotypical images of “French lucidity,” “German profoundness,” and “American enterprise.” Without, of course, endorsing such nationalist rhetoric, this article argues that nationalized virtues are useful material for comparative histories of the sciences and the humanities, given that they served as commonplaces on which scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds could draw. Consequently, commonplaces could do what discipline-specific idioms could not: enabling transdisciplinary conversations about the marks of a good scholar. Phrases like “German thoroughness,” the use of which this article examines for the case of Johns Hopkins University in the first three decades of its existence (1876–1906), offer historians a unique opportunity for tracing epistemic virtues across disciplinary boundaries.