Beiheft 11
Enlightenment Historiography: Three German Studies
Cover image: lithograph of Friedrich Hegel lecturing to students, by Franz Kugler (1828), from Das Wissen des 20.Jahrhunderts, Bildungslexikon, Rheda, 1931.
+ GÜNTHER PFLUG, The Development of Historical Method in the Eighteenth Century, History and Theory 10 (December 1971), Bei. 11, 1-23.
The development starts with post-Cartesian skepticism, with Bayle's opposition of historical to logical certitude, his separation of being from thought, his reduction of systems to historical facts. Since factual analysis, incapable of comprehending what is generalizable in history, led nowhere, a more complex structure was needed. Voltaire, combining the factual with the systematic, used the supra-historical concept of bon sens as a tool of analysis. In causality, he conceived of the hypothesis of a common cause of phenomena, the espirit de temps, but had to derive it from the phenomena rather than the phenomena from it. Montesquieu's forward step was to take man himself as the supra-historical concept. While this separation of historical from human established lawlikeness for historical facticity, his deterministic theories proved too restrictive, and the uniqueness and the generality of historical facts remained too sharply divided. It was Turgot's conception of development (derived from Bossuet), his idea of progress (derived from scientific, moral, and economic thought), that finally put the concept of time itself into the sphere of the general, establishing law-likeness for the sequence of historical happenings.
+ PAUL SAKMANN, The Problems of Historical Method and of Philosophy of History in Voltaire, History and Theory 10 (December 1971), Bei. 11, 24-59.
Voltaire's reform program for history-writing emerges when his scattered utterances on method are collected under three headings: I. Details. Voltaire objects to tedious details, but characterizing detail can be used. There must be selection, and its criterion is significance to large-scale trends. II. Falsehoods. Most historians are to be distrusted. Falsehoods arise from relating very ancient or mythical elements, a matter Voltaire comprehends only superficially; also from partisanship, exaggerations, and traditions. Criteria of probability and for the evaluation of testimony are explained. III. The new history. Unlike crude, pedantic historiography of dynastic and political affairs, the new history must deal with leading ideas, cultural, ethnographic, and economic factors. Voltaire's universalism, his stress on humanity and mankind, is limited by his patriotic and monarchical bias and by polemical and stylistic concerns. - Other Voltairean observations are assembled under judgments on his predecessors (IV.); and under his evaluation of historical figures and events in ancient, medieval, and modern history (V.), marked by correct insights but also by occasional naivety and credulity.
+ RUDOLF UNGER, The Problem of Historical Objectivity: A Sketch of Its Development to the Time of Hegel, History and Theory 10 (December 1971), Bei. 11, 60-86.
The problem of historical objectivity repays study to counter the subjectivism of the neo-romantics and the arbitrary factual structures of recondite specialization. The ancients did not develop a theoretical distinction between objective and subjective in their conception of history. In the Renaissance, individualism impinged on the ancients' conception, but no philosophic view of historical objectivity evolved. The history-minded eighteenth century likewise failed to provide the necessary philosophical categories of historical understanding, though with Voltaire an approach- to them emerged. The solution to the problem came only with the Kantian and post-Kantian concern with the epistemological problems of transcendentalism, especially from Humboldt's notion of ideas as inner forms of historical manifestations. These tendencies found their summation in Hegel's philosophy of history. Among other Hegelian insights, the concept of the realization of a concrete, objective reason in our subjective understanding solved the problem of how philosophical, i.e., objectively true, knowledge of history is possible.