The Crisis of Liberalism and the Emergence of Cultural Science, 1848-1862

Abstract

Abstract A host of factors converged in the third quarter of the nineteenth century to shake the dominance of the liberal theoretical pattern over German social science and to shape the evolution of the cultural sciences. This chapter and chapter 4 will show that the conjuncture of these factors-intellectual as well as economic, political and social–was stimulated to a large extent by the crisis of political liberalism that started around the time of the 1848 revolution and continued, in cycles, well into the period of the Bismarckian Reich. Although significant continuities linked the phases of the liberal crisis, it is convenient to divide the phenomenon into two periods: one that encompasses the revolution itself, the subsequent liberal eclipse and renaissance in the 1850s, and the first stages of the Prussian constitutional conflict; the other that lasts from the early 1860s until about 1885, including the unification of Germany, Bismarck’s attempt to co-opt the liberals and their division over the appropriate response, the erosion of their voting base, and their further division over such issues as tariffs, social policy and imperialism. The present chapter deals with the first period; chapter 4 with the second period.