Germanic Loyalty in Nineteenth-Century Historical Studies: A Multi-Layered Virtue

Abstract

This article seeks to advance historians’ understanding of epistemic virtues in the history of historiography. Drawing on a nineteenth-century case study, it argues that virtues were often multi-layered in the sense of being charged with multiple meanings. Loyalty (Treue) is a case in point: it was, to some extent, an epistemic virtue, but simultaneously also a political virtue with conservative overtones. Loyalty served as a key concept in an idealized image that nationalistic historians and literary scholars held of the ancient Germans. Moreover, as a civic virtue, loyalty was bound up with social codes that obliged students to be loyal to their teachers – which could lead to frictions if these teachers were associated with all too pronounced views of the discipline. On this basis, the article concludes that the phrase “epistemic virtues” should be used with caution. The adjective denotes an epistemic layer of meaning which can be distinguished but never separated from social, moral, and political layers of meaning.