The Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism in German Thought

Abstract

A WELL-KNOWN FEATURE of the European Enlightenment was its renascent interest in classical antiquity. In Germany it was precisely the more sophisticated study of Greek and Roman culture which took place in the eighteenth century that resulted in the revolutionary changes in the Western view of history which continue to shape historical and political formulations on both sides of the Atlantic. The philosophical view of history which was thus produced two centuries ago is called historicism.' In German, the term, Historismus, of which is a translation, was popularized after 1839 by romantic liberals like Rudolf von Haym, and accepted by conservative German historians to describe their basic assumption that individual events have to be seen in the context of a wider, universal historical and the facts of history explained in terms of fundamental concepts, such as that of the development of the modem state, or of freedom. As an attitude which dominated more than one discipline in nineteenthcentury Germany, it assumed that the true study of any discipline (linguistics, economics, literature) had to be historical in its orientation. By assuming development, however, all thinkers who adopted a historical frame of reference for their work did not also necessarily assume progress. The Germans in particular assumed the validity of eternal ideas which, in some metaphysical or theological sense, manifest themselves in all ages. Though rooted in the German Enlightenment's revival of Platonic idealism, historicism was equally the product of the eighteenth century's juristic interest in the Roman law traditions of the Holy Roman Empire, and of Germany's Augustinian theological heritage. It also merged almost imperceptibly with the slowly developing nationalism