Volume 33
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
Peter Heehs, "Myth, History, and Theory," History and Theory 33, no. 1 (1994), 1-19.
Myth and history are generally considered antithetical modes of explanation. Writers of each tend to distrust the data of the other. Many historians of the modern period see their task as one of removing all trace of myth from the historical record. Many students of myth consider history to have less explanatory power than traditional narratives. Since the Greeks, logos (word as demonstrable truth) has been opposed to mythos (word as authoritative pronouncement). In more general terms myth may be defined as any set of unexamined assumptions. Some modern historians have become aware that much so-called factual history is interfused with such assumptions. What we call history is at best mythistory. Some even suggest that there can be no real distinction between the discourses of myth and history, between fact and fiction. The Agastya-Aurobindo narrative is an example of a account based on factual materials that gradually became transformed into fiction. It is accepted by some as historical truth; however when its development is studied critically, one can see that successive narrators "euphemistically" transformed its constituent propositions. The Ramjanmabhumi narrative (at the center of sectarian conflict in India) took form in much the same way. It is not possible to accept these legends as historical truth, though there is no reason why they could not be used as the basis of artistic creations. To avoid conflict by attempting to keep myth and history entirely separate may not be possible because the two interpenetrate. The most fruitful approach to the problem might be to work towards a dialectical resolution.
Grant Hardy, "Can an Ancient Chinese Historian Contribute to Modern Western Theory? The Multiple Narratives of Ssu-Ma Ch'ien," History and Theory 33, no. 1 (1994), 20-38.
Ssu-ma Ch'ien's (145?-86? B.C.) hih chi (Historical Records) is one of the most influential of Chinese histories, but its organization reflects a historiography quite different from that of traditional Western history. Ssu-ma divided his account of the past into five overlapping sections: basic annals (of dynasties and emperors), chronological tables, treatises, hereditary houses (on the feudal lords), and biographies. One result of this fragmented arrangement is that stories may be told more than once, from different perspectives, and these accounts may not be entirely consistent. From a Western perspective this would seem to indicate a certain disregard for the truth, but in many hih chi passages Ssu-ma Ch'ien demonstrates a passionate concern for accuracy. In this article I examine in detail one typical set of multiple narrations--the five versions of Wei Pao's defection in c. 205 B.C.--and argue that in some ways Ssu-ma's conflicting accounts reflect the past more accurately than the unified narrative we expect from Western histories. Although Ssu-ma's methods might seem amenable to the constructivist theories of Louis Mink and Hayden White, in the end this type of analysis is inadequate to explain a work which is rooted in a non-Western tradition of historiography. Ssu-ma Ch'ien's own conception of history recognized the limitations of historians and evidence, held out the possibility of multiple interpretations, and focused on moral insight. It is a mix unfamiliar to Westerners, but it does provide a coherent picture of Ssu-ma Ch'ien's historical methodology, and it may serve as an interesting example for modern historians who seek to escape traditional modes of historical writing.
Allan Megill, "Jorn Rusen's Theory of Historiography between Modernism and Rhetoric of Inquiry," History and Theory 33, no. 1 (1994), 39-60.
Jörn Rüsen is the preeminent German practitioner of "historics," or theory of historiography. Unlike his closest American counterpart, Hayden White, Rüsen places particular emphasis on the historical discipline. The emphasis is embodied in Rüsen's notion of the "disciplinary matrix" of historiography, which embraces five "factors": the cognitive interest of human beings in having an orientation in time; theories or "leading views" concerning the experiences of the past; empirical research methods; forms of representation; and the function of offering orientation to society. Rüsen's account of the disciplinary matrix will remind some readers of the "hermeneutic circle." But Rüsen is far closer to Jürgen Habermas than to Martin Heidegger or Hans-Georg Gadamer, for, like Habermas, he emphasizes the authoritative role of universal rational science. The essay argues that Rüsen's notion of the disciplinary matrix is an important contribution to the understanding of historiography. Combined with his parallel conception of differing "paradigms" of historiography, it helps us to make sense of the history of (German) historiography, and is useful for analyzing and commenting on present-day historiography. The essay also argues for a greater degree of pluralism than seems assumed in Rüsen's view. It suggests that in an age of diversity the rhetorical conception of "topic"--which provides questions to be asked rather than answers--is of special use, and it reinterprets Rüsen's disciplinary matrix in a topical direction. Rüsen rightly suggests that historics has a unifying function. The essay suggests that, given social diversity, only such reflective theory can unite the varied body of historiography. This is one of the reasons why historiographical theory is important now.
John O'Neill, "Two Body Criticism: A Genealogy of the Postmodern Anti-Aesthetic" (A Review Essay of Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine), History and Theory 33, no. 1 (1994), 61-78.
Barbara Maria Stafford's Body Criticism (1992) is analyzed for its reliance upon monstrous bodies as the source of an alternative to the art history of the Enlightenment. A counterculture of the flesh caught in its own vision of skin diseases, bumps, and medical pathologies is painstakingly reproduced as the official opposition to reason's body. The art establishment is required to admit engravers, cartoonists, kaleidoscopists, and phrenologists. Critical questions are raised regarding Stafford's use of iconology and genealogy, as well as a critical difference over the question of the revolutionary status of the postmodern aesthetic traced from the camera obscura to virtual reality perception.
REVIEW ESSAYS
John A. Armstrong on Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity by Liah Greenfeld, History and Theory 33, no. 1 (1994), 79-95.
Patrick H. Hutton on History and Memory by Jacques Le Goff, Steven Rendall, and Elizabeth Claman and Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust by Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jeffrey Mehlman, History and Theory 33, no. 1 (1994), 95-107.
Katherine Fierlbeck on Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions by Pauline Marie Rosenau, History and Theory 33, no. 1 (1994), 107-113.
Johan van der Zande on Geschichtswissenschaft im Humanismus und in der Aufklärung: Die Vorgeschichte des Historismus by Ulrich Muhlack, History and Theory 33, no. 1 (1994), 113-121.
ARTICLES
FORUM: REPRESENTING THE HOLOCAUST
Hans Kellner, "’Never Again’ is Now," History and Theory 33, no. 2 (1994), 127-144.The Holocaust puts ethical constraints upon representation because the elements of the representation are inadequate to what is represented. Yet, because we are a historical society, the Holocaust must become historical for its memory to survive. Berel Lang and Hayden White have separately suggested that a special kind of representation may suit the special nature of this event. They see the key to preserving the "responsible," "proper" representations of the Holocaust in maintaining a restricted discourse before it. Something must be silenced, and each of them conceives of that something as a form of language use. Martin Jay and others believe that the methods of critical history will protect the memory of the Holocaust. The critical dynamism of the profession, however, is driven by professionalism itself. Proximate truth results from constant historical revision. Rewards exist to keep the structure moving. It is the dynamism of the structure, its strength, however, that should undermine any confidence one might place in it of maintaining the memory of any event whatever. It is not that the system of modern research and institutional verification does not work. It works all too well, producing an endless supply of competing, verifiable accounts, the significance of which is always in question. If the modern historical profession cannot well serve any memorializing function, nor sustain a stable referent, and if there is no particular form of writing that naturally suits the sort of event exemplified by the Holocaust, then we must conclude that there is no escape from the risks of representation, no limit that will guarantee any witness. The work must be recommenced within a changing discourse, always differently. And so, with all its paradoxes, "'Never Again' is Now."
Wulf Kansteiner, "From Exception to Exemplum: The New Approach to Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’," History and Theory 33, no. 2 (1994), 145-171.The former consensus stipulating the singularity and incomprehensibility of Nazism and the "Final Solution" has been challenged in recent years from two perspectives. Microhistorical works and studies of poststructuralist orientation have emphasized the normal and ordinary aspects that link Nazism and the Holocaust to the postwar period. Both approaches differ in their understanding of the concept of historical truth, but together they stress the need for close-range, contextualist methods for studying the emergence of the "Final Solution" and the development of its representation and memorialization since 1945. This paradigmatic change in the perception of Nazism from an exceptional to an exemplary event apparent in recent scholarship in the United States follows similar developments in Germany. In both countries the rejection of the concept of singularity and the use of contextualist methods developed as a result of a more general generational transformation. Younger scholars born after World War II seek to integrate Nazism within its wider historical context and use knowledge about Nazism and the "Final Solution" as a key to better understanding of the modern era and contemporary societies, a project hitherto discouraged by the notion of Nazism's exceptionality.
Robert Braun, "The Holocaust and Problems of Historical Representation," History and Theory 33, no. 2 (1994), 172-197.This essay examines different viewpoints taken by historians and theorists in three important debates about the Holocaust and the Nazi past in Germany. Analysis shows that the content and form of historical judgment, the limits of historical narratives, and the referential connections between "facts," "representation," and "truth" are more problematic than historians and social theorists taking part in these debates would like to believe. Examples show that attempts to represent past "reality" are closely related to the politically and socially significant interplay between individual and communal search for legitimation, and the legitimation of the past by the authority of the present. A hidden similarity--the fundamental belief in the ability of representation to capture past "reality" and thus its universal validity--appears amid the seemingly antithetical opinions and theoretical assumptions in these debates. Even in cases of historical phenomena as morally, politically, and intellectually challenging as the Holocaust, understanding historical representation in the framework of the self-referentiality of historical texts, and accepting the propositional nature of historical writing, is crucial.
Andrew Beards, "Reversing Historical Skepticism: Bernard Lonergan on the Writing of History," History and Theory 33, no. 2 (1994), 198-219.The widespread influence of skeptical and relativist philosophies has led to an abandonment of empiricist accounts of objectivity in historical investigation. Can one do justice to the historical conditionedness of the historian without totally denying objectivity in historical judgments? This article introduces Bernard Lonergan's answer to this question. Lonergan contends that one can avoid both the Scylla of naive empiricism, fostering the myth of some simple backward gaze at the facts of the past, and the Charybdis of total relativism. He proposes a form of perspectivism which, he believes, does justice both to the belief of the majority of working historians that they are gradually increasing our knowledge of the past, and to the points brought out by writers on historiography, such as the "metahistorians," concerning the impossibility of ascending to some god's-eye view of the historical process. Lonergan's perspectivist position is built upon a prior philosophical account of cognition and epistemology, which I outline here. I will then move on to some immediate concerns of working historians, such as value judgments in history, the relationship of historical data to the facts the historian claims to know, and the criteria of selection used by the community of historians. In treating these issues I will highlight some of the areas of convergence and divergence between Lonergan's work and that of other philosophers and historians who have written on historiography.
REVIEW ESSAYS
George Huppert on Les Autorités Invisibles by Lucie Varga and Peter Schöttler, History and Theory 33, no. 2 (1994), 220-230.
J. L. Gorman on Testimony: A Philosophical Study by C. A. J. Coady, History and Theory 33, no. 2 (1994), 230-241.
Jerrold Seigel on Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? by Lutz Niethammer, Dirk van Laak, and Patrick Camiller, History and Theory 33, no. 2 (1994), 241-249.
D. A. Jeremy Telman on Theoretiker der Deutschen Aufklärungshistorie by Horst Walter Blanke, Dirk Fleischer; Historik und Didaktik: Das Problem der Distribution Historiographisch Erzeugten Wissens in der Deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft von der Spataufklarung bis zum Fruhhistorismus (1765-1830) by Hans-Jurgen Pandel; and Historiographiegeschichte als Historik by Horst Walter Blanke, History and Theory 33, no. 2 (1994), 249-265.
ARTICLES
Carolyn J. Dean, "The Productive Hypothesis: Foucault, Gender, and the History of Sexuality,” History and Theory 33, no. 3 (1994), 271-296.
This article addresses Michel Foucault's challenge to historians by historicizing his work on the history of sexuality. First, it summarizes recent scholarly literature about sexuality by historians and literary critics in order to clarify the theoretical and historical groundwork that has thus far been laid. It also places interdisciplinary scholarship in a framework historians will find meaningful. Second, the author argues that Foucault's work is the product of crises in male subjectivity originating after the Great War. In so doing, she seeks to explain the absence of gender as a category of analysis in his own work, as well as his inability to account for the historical processes through which sexuality is produced.
FORUM: BETWEEN OBJECTIVISM AND SKEPTICISM
Chris Lorenz, "Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality: A Plea for ‘Internal Realism,’” History and Theory 33, no. 3 (1994), 297-327.In this article I argue that it is the task of philosophy of history to elucidate the practice of history. Therefore philosophy of history must stick to the analysis of the debates of historians and neither literary theory nor aesthetics can function as "models: for philosophy of history. This is so because historians present reconstructions of a past reality on the basis of factual research and discuss these reconstructions primarily in terms of factual adequacy. The fact that these discussions seldom lead to a consensus constitutes a basic feature of "doing history" to be analyzed by its philosophy. An analysis of the "Historikerstreit" leads, first, to the observation that traditional objectivism and relativism can not account for the fact that historians do debate at all. Second, it leads to the observation that according to most historians judgements of value are supposed to fall outside the scope of rational debate. This conviction is traced back to deeprooted but outdated conceptions of rationality. To get beyond objectivism and relativism "internal realism" is proposed and connected to the notion of practical identity. The fact-value distinction is re-analyzed in this framework of "internal realism" and put to work in the "Historikerstreit". Third, it is argued that the theory of "speechacts" and the notion of "horizon of expectation" can be connected to "internal realism" in order to give a more adequate elucidation of the normative aspects of historiography. Fourth, and along the way, I maintain that historians can profit from "internal realism" because the scope of their discussion would be widened so as to include the traditionally implicit normative issues involved.
Mark Bevir, "Objectivity in History,” History and Theory 33, no. 3 (1994), 328-344.Many philosophers have rejected the possibility of objective historical knowledge on the grounds that there is no given past against which to judge rival interpretations. Their reasons for doing so are valid. But this does not demonstrate that we must give up the concept of historical objectivity as such. The purpose of this paper is to define a concept of objectivity based on criteria of comparison, not on a given past. Objective interpretations are those which best meet rational criteria of accuracy, comprehensiveness, consistency, progressiveness, fruitfulness, and openness. Finally, the nature of our being in the world is shown to give us a good reason to regard such objective interpretations as moving towards truth understood as a regulative ideal.
Peter Hanns Reill, "Science and the Construction of the Cultural Sciences in Late Enlightenment Germany: The Case of Wilhelm von Humboldt,” History and Theory 33, no. 3 (1994), 345-366.One of the master narratives in the history of the cultural sciences recounts how the modern Geisteswissenschaften were constructed in opposition to Enlightenment "scientism." It is assumed that a radical split between natural science and the descriptive historical sciences occurred, enabling the cultural sciences to develop their own unique methods, epistemology, and explanatory procedures. In this article I analyze Wilhelm von Humboldt's concepts of history and linguistics as a test case to question this master narrative, arguing that Humboldt consciously constructed his version of historical and linguistic science upon a model of science formulated in and by Enlightenment thinkers. This model, which I call Enlightenment vitalism, was designed to mediate between early eighteenth-century mechanism and animism. Its central features included; 1) the transformation of method founded upon "controlled empiricism"; 2) a redefinition of matter in which reciprocal interaction replaced simple aggregation; 3) the reintroduction of the concept of active forces in nature along with the concept of purposeful direction; 4) the development of an epistemology emphasizing the centrality of Anschauung and "divination"; 5) the formulation of a harmonic vision of reality and explanation that questioned the basic assumptions underpinning binary systems of logic and explanation. In order to show how Humboldt employed this model, I concentrate upon two interrelated issues: his conception of the relationship between nature and human culture and the epistemology and content of his explanatory procedures. I attempt to demonstrate that Humboldt assumed a basic analogy between living matter (organization) and human culture. This analogy served as the foundation upon which he constructed his definitions of history and linguistics. I interpret Humboldt's epistemological principles as expressions of those evolved by Enlightened vitalism and argue that his Ideenlehre must be understood within the context of Enlightenment vitalism's definition of active vital forces. In short, I argue that Humboldt, rather than leading an attack against Enlightenment scientism, developed the Enlightenment project of creating a science of humanity (science de l'homme) to its highest degree.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Merlin Donald on The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines by Bruce Mazlish, History and Theory 33, no. 3 (1994), 367-374.
Annette Aronowicz on Progress and the Quest for Meaning: A Philosophical and Historical Inquiry by John Andrew Bernstein, History and Theory 33, no. 3 (1994), 375-382.
R. A. McNeal on Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher by Gregory Vlastos, History and Theory 33, no. 3 (1994), 382-394.
Georg G. Iggers on Volksgeschichte: Methodische Innovationen und Völkische Ideologisierung in der Deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft 1918-1945 by Willi Oberkrome, History and Theory 33, no. 3 (1994), 395-400.
Proof and Persuasion in History
EDITED BY ANTHONY GRAFTON AND SUZANNE L. MARCHAND
Anthony T. Grafton and Suzanne L. Marchand, “Introductory Note," History and Theory, Beiheft 33 (1994), 1.
Anthony Grafton and Suzanne Marchand, “Proof and Persuasion in History: A Preface," History and Theory, Beiheft 33 (1994), 3-4.
Maurice Olender, “Europe, or How to Escape Babel," History and Theory, Beiheft 33 (1994), 5-25.
Since William Jones announced the kinship of Sanskrit and the European languages, a massive body of scholarship has illuminated the development of the so-called "Indo-European" language group. This new historical philology has enormous technical achievements to its credit. But almost from the start, it became entangled with prejudices and myths--with efforts to recreate not only the lost language, but also the lost--and superior--civilization of the Indo-European ancestors. This drive to determine the identity and nature of the first language of humanity was deeply rooted in both near eastern and western traditions. The Bible described the perfect, transparent language of Adam and followed its degeneration, caused by human sin, into the multiple, opaque languages of later nations. The three sons of Noah became, for Jewish and early Christian writers, the founders of three distinct human groups. By the sixth and seventh centuries, historians began to magnify the deeds of certain later peoples, such as the Scythians and Goths, and to connect them with the biblical genealogy of languages and races. And in the Renaissance, speculative historical etymology took root and flourished, as national pride led European intellectuals to assert that their own modern languages--for example, Flemish--either could be identified with the original one or offered the closest surviving approximation to it. Japheth, Noah's favorite son and the forefather of the Europeans, emerged as the hero who had preserved the original language in its purity. A new history of the European languages developed, one which traced them back to the language of the barbarian Scythians and emphasized the connections between Persian and European languages. It came to seem implausible that the European languages derived from Hebrew. By the eighteenth century, in short, all the preconditions were present for a discovery that the ancestors of the Europeans, like the common ancestor of their languages, had been independent of Semitic influence. A modern scholarly thesis whose political and intellectual consequences are still working themselves out reveals the continuing impact of a millennial tradition of speculation about language and history.
Josine H. Blok, “Quests for a Scientific Mythology: F. Creuzer and K. O. Müller on History and Myth," History and Theory, Beiheft 33 (1994), 26-52.
Classical scholarship played a vital role in the intellectual concerns of early nineteenth-century Germany. Situated at the crossroads of religion, history, and explorations of the development of the human mind, Greek mythology in particular was expected to shed light on the origins of civilization. In the search for the true nature of myth, the hermeneutic problems involved in historical understanding were intensified. As myth was held to be of a different nature than rationality, to read the sources was to look for a completely different referent of the texts than was the case in historical reconstruction. In the quests for a scientific mythology, K. O. Müller (1797-1840) was often regarded as an opponent of F. Creuzer (1771-1858). Yet an analysis of their published work and of their private documents shows that they had much in common, a fact they both appreciated. In particular they held similar, deeply Romantic views on the religious origin of culture, in Müller's case inspired by Pietism, in Creuzer's by neo-Platonism. Creuzer's influence is revealed in Müller's Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (1825) and more specifically in his interpretation of the Amazons as worshippers of sexuality in Die Dorier (1824). Nevertheless, Müller differed from Creuzer in his views on the relationship of myth to history. Myth was not the reflection of a universal religion, sustained by a priestly class (as Creuzer had claimed), but the outcome of the encounter between the mental endowment of a people and local, historical circumstances. In the case of the Amazons, however, Müller assessed the connection of myth to history in defiance of his own theory, guided by his views on gender difference and on sexual morality.
Anthony Grafton, “The Footnote from De Thou to Ranke," History and Theory, Beiheft 33 (1994), 53-76.
Footnotes seem to rank among the most colorless and uninteresting features of historical practice. In fact, however, footnoting practices have varied widely, over time and across space, between individuals and among national disciplinary communities. Little clarity has prevailed in the discussion of the purpose footnotes serve; even less attention has been devoted to the development they have undergone. This essay sketches the history of the footnote in the Western historical tradition. Drawing on classic work by A. D. Momigliano, H. Butterfield, and others, it shows that critical research into and argument about sources have long formed part of the historical tradition. Classical political historians could not insert much explicit reflection about the use of sources into their work without violating the rhetorical rules they accepted. But their histories, as the case of de Thou shows, often rested on careful critical work. And the many historians who did not provide instructive narratives of war and high politics, but rather, accounts of local history or religious institutions, discussed their sources, and sometimes quoted them extensively. These varied traditions were only integrated, however, by the invention of the footnote in its modern form, which made it possible to combine a high literary narrative with erudite investigations. The footnote in its modern form seems to have been devised in the seventeenth century, as part of an effort to counter skepticism about the possiblity of attaining knowledge about the past. It was used to great intellectual and literary effect in the eighteenth century, when individuals as different as Gibbon and Möser made the foundations of their texts into elaborate mosaics of erudite research and ironic reflection. Ranke did not invent, but dramatized, the historical footnote. He made the research that produced it as vital to the historian's culture and as central to the historian's achievement as the high style that had distinguished pragmatic exemplar history of the traditional kind. The historical footnote emerges not as a simple trademark guaranteeing quality nor as a uniform piece of scholarly technology, but rather as the product of long collective struggles and individual efforts to devise a visibly critical form of historical writing.
David Wootton, “Narrative, Irony, and Faith in Gibbon's Decline and Fall," History and Theory, Beiheft 33 (1994), 77-105.
This article is divided into three sections. The first argues that the significance of David Hume's History of England as an inspiration for Gibbon's Decline and Fall has been underestimated, and that Momigliano's famous account of Gibbon's originality needs to be adapted to take account of the fact that Gibbon was, in effect, a disciple of Hume. Hume and Gibbon, I argue, shaped our modern understanding of "history" by producing narratives rather than annals, encyclopedias, or commentaries. Moreover, they made history primarily the study of the remote past, not the recent past. In order to test my claim that "histories" had generally been quite different in character from those written by Hume and Gibbon, I survey the histories of the early church available to Gibbon. Of Gibbon's critics, East Apthorp, I suggest, is most alert to the novelty of his enterprise. The second section analyzes the argument of chapter fifteen of the Decline and Fall, the first chapter on Christianity. I argue that Gibbon deliberately assembles all the arguments against belief in Christianity that were current (or that one may presume were current) in the first century. But I also argue that Gibbon intends the alert reader to notice that ancient arguments against Christianity and modern ones largely overlap, so that he is at the same time offering a conspectus of eighteenth-century arguments against religious faith. At one point only do the modern arguments differ from the ancient ones, and that is in the attitude to miracles expressed in Conyers Middleton's Free Enquiry and Hume's essay "Of Miracles." The last section criticizes David Womersley's claim that the attitude to religion expressed in the later books of the Decline and Fall is significantly different from that in the first. I argue that Gibbon is throughout a more subtle historian of faith than is generally recognized (more subtle, certainly, than Hume), and that this is because Gibbon himself had once been a Catholic convert.
Suzanne L. Marchand, “The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski," History and Theory, Beiheft 33 (1994), 106-130.
This essay argues that in overlooking the assault on the autonomy, unity, and tenacity of the classical world (and especially Rome) underway in Europe after 1880, historians have failed to appreciate an important element of historiographical reorientation at the fin de siècle. This second "revolution" in humanistic scholarship challenged the conviction of the educated elite that European culture was rooted exclusively in classical antiquity in part by introducing as evidence non-textual forms of evidence; the testimony of artifacts allowed writers to reach beyond romantic-nationalist histories toward the identification of cultural areas, defined by morphological similarities, and to disrupt the traditional categories of the civilized and the barbaric. The essay focuses on a relatively obscure Austrian art historian, Josef Strzygowski, whose insistence upon Europe's dependence on Oriental forms and upon the superior historical value of material, over textual, evidence provided critics of philologically-based humanism with two important argumentative avenues. Strzygowski also represents a para-academic type, whose rise to power and prestige contributed to the so-called "decline of the German mandarins." In sketching his career, the essay attempts to show how this "decline" is bound up with the waning institutional and popular status of Renaissance humanism--and a corresponding rise of biologistic Germanophilia--in the two intellectual milieux Strzygowski inhabited (Germany and Austria). A final section suggests that this antihumanist crusade contributed not only to the articulation of racist historiography, but also to the eventual transference of politico-moral legitimacy to a non-elitist, anthropological definition of culture.
Cover image: Freedom Tower, New York City, by Jesse Echevarria (5 February 2018)