Two Types of Universal History: The Cases of E. A. Freeman and Max Weber

Abstract

By his life work William H. McNeill has demonstrated that universal history remains an essential expression of our twofold Jewish and Greek heritage. It may therefore not be inappropriate to offer him a contribution to the analysis of this intriguing product of the historical imagination. I shall try to examine two related, yet diversifying, trends in the writing of universal history during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to indicate some of their implications. As universal history cannot be total in the sense of including the totality of past events, we may start from the assumption that all it can do is to isolate types of events and to attribute a meaning to the replacement of one type by another type. A golden age may be followed by a silver age: the Assyrian Empire by the Persian Empire. Polytheism may be succeeded by monotheism, slavery by feudalism, sailing ships by steamers. The universal historian isolates and defines types of events and tries to make their appearance or disappearance meaningful. By giving more importance and therefore more attention to certain types of events than to others he will provide his own universal history with a characteristic line of development. So far, I believe, our definition of universal history may apply equally to Hesiod and to Daniel, to Bossuet, Marx, and Toynbee. But in the nineteenth century universal historians began to breach in one respect what had previously been the commonly accepted conventions of their literary genre. Far more than in previous centuries they recognized the possibility that their typology, rather than providing criteria for the description and classification of successive ages of mankind, would lead to the partition of mankind into several coexisting groups or races, each with its own permanent features. Consequently, the problem arose whether the members of one group or race, being conditioned in their mental equipment by the culture to which they belonged, were qualified to pass judgment on the members of another group or on other groups as such. Universal history as a history of coexisting human groups-that is, as a history of concurrent and competing permanent groups, each with its own permanent characteristics-seems to be a new feature of the nineteenth century. It is, therefore, no accident that toward the end of the same century doubts should multiply about the objective validity of judgments passed by members of one group on the ways of life of other groups. The eighteenth-century game of having the Europeans described and judged by imaginary Persians, Scythians, and American Indians was turned into the serious operation of