Here are some highlights from this 2012 book by Frederic Beiser:
* …, historicism undermined the perennial search in Western philosophy to find transcendent justifications for social, political and moral values, i.e., the endeavor to give these values some universal and necessary validity, some support or sanction outside or beyond their own specific social and cultural context. Such justifications could be straightforwardly religious viz., divine providence or supernatural revelation; but they could also be thoroughly secular, viz., natural law or human reason. In either case, historicism questioned their validity.
The historical significance of historicism is best measured by its break with the Enlightenment, which had dominated European intellectual life during the eighteenth century. The star of historicism rose as that of the Enlightenment fell. Although historicism grew out of the Enlightenment, some aspects of its program, if taken to their limits, undermined crucial ideals and assumptions of the Enlightenment. True to the legacy of the Enlightenment, historicism demanded that we extend the domain of reason, i.e., that we find a sufficient reason for everything that happens. Its contribution to extending the empire of reason would be to illuminate the historical world as the new natural philosophy had explained the natural world. But this program eventually undermined the Enlightenment’s attempt to provide rational or universal principles of morality, politics and religion. The more we examine the causes of and reasons for human beliefs and practices, the more we discover that their purpose and meaning is conditioned by their specific historical and cultural context, the less we should be inclined to universalize those beliefs and practices. It now becomes difficult, if not impossible, to provide a universal justification of moral, political and religious beliefs and practices, as if they had a purpose, meaning and validity beyond one’s own culture. Thus the rational defense of moral, political and religious beliefs, one of the central aspirations of the Enlightenment, proved illusory.
From the perspective of historicism, then, the general problem with the Enlightenment is that it remained, in spite of itself, too deeply indebted to the legacy of the Middle Ages which it pretended to overcome. The theology of the Middle Ages had always required a transcendent sanction for social, political and moral values. Although the Enlightenment removed the religious trappings of such a transcendent sanction, it continued to seek it in more worldly terms, whether that was natural law, the social contract, a universal human reason, or a constant human nature. All these concepts seemed to promise a validity beyond the flux of history, a sanction transcending the concrete context of culture, politics and society.
All the thinkers of the Enlightenment—the French philosophes, the GermanAufklärer or the English free‐thinkers— wanted to find some eternal and universal Archimedean standpoint by which they could judge all specific societies, states and cultures. One of the most profound implications of historicism is that there can be no such standpoint.
* If historicism was indebted to the Enlightenment in some respects, it was opposed to it in others. The problem is to be precise, specifying the exact respects in which historicism both continued and broke with the Enlightenment. Here we identify three fundamental points of discontinuity.
A characteristic doctrine of the Enlightenment was individualism or atomism, i.e., the thesis that the individual is self‐ sufficient and has a fixed identity apart from its specific social and historical context. This thesis appears constantly in the social contract doctrines prevalent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It reflects the widespread belief, voiced by Rousseau and Hume among others, that there is a permanent human nature, i.e., that people are one and the same throughout history. This individualism or atomism has been traced to another characteristic tenet of the Enlightenment: its belief that the proper procedure of science consists in analysis, the dissection of a phenomenon into its constituent parts.23 This method, which had been used with such success in the natural sciences, was made into a model for the study of society and state.
It is striking that almost all thinkers in the historicist tradition, beginning with Möser and Herder in the eighteenth century and ending with Simmel and Weber in the nineteenth, questioned this individualism. They insisted instead that human identity is not fixed but plastic, that it is not constant but changing, and that it depends on one’s distinct place in society and history. It is necessary to oppose, therefore, the individualism or atomism of the Enlightenment with the holism of the historicist tradition. Rather than seeing the whole as reducible to its individual members, each of which exists independently, historicism insists that the whole is prior to its parts and the very condition of their existence and identity.
Another defining article of faith of the Enlightenment was its belief in natural law, i.e., that there are universal moral standards that apply to all cultures and epochs. These standards were regarded as “natural” because they are based upon a universal human nature, or the ends of nature itself, and because they do not rest on the positive laws and traditions established in a specific state. The natural law tradition assumed, therefore, either that there is a uniform human nature throughout the flux of history, or that there is a universal human reason to sanction the same moral values for all epochs and cultures.
It is telling that the leading nineteenth‐century historicists—Ranke, Droysen, Savigny, Dilthey and Simmel—self‐ consciously and explicitly rejected the natural law tradition. While this tradition was still alive in some respects in Herder, Möser and Humboldt, who all use the idiom of natural law, they were also very critical of it. All thinkers in the historicist tradition held that the doctrine of natural law had illegitimately universalized the values of eighteenth‐century Europe as if they held for all epochs and cultures. To know the values of a culture or epoch, they argued, it is necessary to study it from within, to examine how these values have evolved from its history and circumstances. The more we examine values historically, the more we see that their purpose and meaning depends entirely on their specific context, on their precise role in a social‐historical whole. Since these contexts are unique and incommensurable, so are the values within them; it therefore becomes impossible to make generalizations about what values everyone ought to have, regardless of social and historical context.
Crucial to the Enlightenment’s attempt to rationalize the world was its program of political modernization, especially its efforts toward bureaucratic centralization and legal codification. The enlightened policies of Friedrich II in Prussia, of Joseph II in Austria, and of the revolutionary government in France, strived to create and impose a single uniform legal code valid for all cities, localities and regions within an empire; the old chaotic patchwork of local and regional customs and laws were to be abolished for the sake of a single rational constitution. These efforts at legal codification went hand‐in‐hand with political centralization, the attempt to govern and administer all parts of a country by a single ruler and bureaucracy. Local self‐government and regional autonomy were to be eradicated as relics of the medieval past.
The historicist tradition began as a resistance movement to this program. Against the Enlightenment’s attempt to create legal uniformity and central control, the early historicists (Möser, Herder, Savigny) defended the value of local autonomy and legal diversity. Against the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitanism, they stressed the value of having local roots, of belonging to a particular time and place. Thus the principle of individuality had not only an epistemological but also a moral and political meaning: that locality and nationality, as the very source of personal identity, is to be cherished and preserved at all costs. Later historicists (Droysen, Simmel and Weber) believed in the inevitability of the centralized national state; but they were not cosmopolitans and only widened the locus of belonging to include the entire nation.
Justus Möser and the Roots of Historicism
* What makes Möser so important as a cultural figure—what makes him transcend his age and place—is his profound awareness of a basic problem of modernity: the rise of rootlessness, the loss of belonging, the decline of attachment to time and place. Long before the romantics, Möser saw the need for, and the significance of, rootedness, belonging, attachment, feeling at home in the world. Hence the great importance of locality for him. This was the point behind his loving portraits of his hometown, his sympathetic account of the ancient Saxons in hisOsnabrückische Geschichte, his spirited defense of local liberties and traditions. Möser deplored that these values were being steadily eroded by the main forces of the modern world—by increasing technology, enlightenment, and political centralization. In this respect Möser, for all his love of the past, was far ahead of his time. The reaction to modernity that we find in Frühromantik in the late 1790s is already fully present in Möser in the 1750s.
What makes Möser the father of historicism is precisely his recognition of the importance of rootedness, attachment and belonging. These would become fundamental values for the whole historicist tradition; but their first formulation appears clearly in Möser, who spearheaded its reaction against modernity. It is these values that are behind Möser’s adoption of one fundamental and characteristic theme of historicism: the principle of individuality.10 The reason this principle became so important to him is precisely because it was the seat or locus of rootedness, attachment and belonging. What we are rooted in, attached to, or belong in, is per necessitatem unique and individual, this particular time and place. Hence the principle of individuality was for Möser the logical expression of, and sublimation for, his ideal of feeling at home in the world.
The historicist tradition began as a resistance movement to this program. Against the Enlightenment’s attempt to create legal uniformity and central control, the early historicists (Möser, Herder, Savigny) defended the value of local autonomy and legal diversity. Against the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitanism, they stressed the value of having local roots, of belonging to a particular time and place. Thus the principle of individuality had not only an epistemological but also a moral and political meaning: that locality and nationality, as the very source of personal identity, is to be cherished and preserved at all costs. Later historicists (Droysen, Simmel and Weber) believed in the inevitability of the centralized national state; but they were not cosmopolitans and only widened the locus of belonging to include the entire nation.
* Although Möser concedes to Epicurus that everyone has the right to pursue happiness, he denies that this also gives them the right to avoid duty and responsibility. Acceptance of one’s place in society, and participation in one’s role in political life, are essential constituents of happiness. The whole idea that we should retire from the social and political world sounds like so much sour grapes: because we think we did not get the recognition we deserve, we take our revenge by turning our back on the world and depriving it of our services (26–7)… . His ethical ideal combines Epicurean pleasure with stoic duty. Thus the highest good is realized when we find pleasure in doing our duties, when we enjoy fulfilling our social and political commitments (29). True happiness, Möser teaches, consists in contentment with one’s station and lot in life (34). There is no more tranquil and pleasant life, he writes, than to fulfill your vocation in a dignified manner (144).
This ethic takes on more concrete shape when we consider Möser’s specific guidelines for achieving the highest good. There are three such guidelines. First, we should realize that what makes us happy is not things themselves but the attitude we have toward them. So if we train our minds to have the right attitude, we can be as happy in a hut as in a palace (34–5). Second, we should accept our lot and stop whining. A person who is unsatisfied with his place in life would also be unsatisfied in all other places (321). We love to complain about things only because it flatters our vanity: it is our way of saying that we deserve so much better than what we have (121). Third, we should avoid chasing after honor, riches and power. These pursuits are doomed to frustration because there is no limit to these things: the more we get, the more we want to have. The secret of happiness is to learn to limit our desires to what we have within our power to achieve; and this means that we have to learn to control our imagination, which makes us restless by holding out the prospect of more honor, riches and power.
* Möser’s articles often preach the value of deception and illusion. He thinks not only that we should place limits on the attempt to know, but that we should also accept illusions even when we know that they are false. The happiness of most people comes from their allowing themselves to be deceived (31, 82, 149–51). What is the secret of marital happiness? It is what Möser calls “honest deception” (Ehrliche Verstellung), which happens when a couple practice mutual flattery. Each partner knows that he or she is not the most desirable person in the world; but they say that anyway, because it tickles their vanity (68). Deception is most important in politics, Möser thinks, because here we cannot survive if we are honest. How successful we are in the political world depends on how well we play “the art of deception” (109–11). Those who insist on taking the moral high ground in politics pay a great penalty: they step into their enemy’s minefield and get exploded along with all their moral honor.
* a favorite historicist theme: that one should not judge the customs and institutions of one country by those of another; before making such judgments, it is important to examine the history and context of local customs and institutions.
* if our present culture is the highest stage of human development, we can judge other ages and cultures according to the extent to which they have contributed toward our age and culture.
* Herder’s polemic against Enlightenment historiography involves a tangled knot of arguments, all of them directed against the Aufklärer’s tribunal of critique. Each strand of this polemic deserves unraveling. First, Herder points out that there is no single uniform standard of happiness that we could apply to all cultures (38–9).86 Human nature is not static and fixed but variable and plastic; it assumes different shapes according to time and place, so that what makes one people happy makes another miserable. Hence Herder writes in some celebrated lines: “each nation has the center of its happiness within itself, just as each ball has its own center of gravity” (39). He then warns against measuring one nation by the standards of another because “all comparison is problematic” (38).
Second, Herder, like Möser, contends that people become who they are from necessity, that they are formed by circumstances, so that it is pointless to judge them. Since “ought” implies “can”, and since people cannot be otherwise, we should not judge them by some ideal about what they ought to be. Hence Herder writes that we cannot expect the Biblical patriarchs to have the bravery of the Roman soldier because “…he [the patriarch] is what God, climate, time and stage of the world could form out of him, namely, a Patriarch!” (36). More generally, he contends: “…to a certain degree all perfection is national, generational and more specifically individual. One does not develop anything but what time, climate, need, world or fate gives the occasion” (35).
Third, Herder claims that we should not judge history by general moral standards, as if people could ever achieve complete perfection, for the simple reason that virtue and vice are complementary qualities.87 We cannot have a great virtue without great vice. For example, the ancient Romans showed the virtues of fortitude, persistence, loyalty; but the exercise of these very virtues often manifested itself in cruelty, harshness and bloodshed (37). Referring to the Romans, Herder writes: “The very machine that made possible the most extensive vices was also that which so elevated [their] virtues…Is humanity in general, under a single set of conditions, capable of pure perfection? Heights have valleys.” (37).
Fourth, Herder contends that we should not judge an early stage of human development by the criteria of a later stage. Just as we should not judge a child by the standards of an adult, so we should not judge primitive peoples by the standards of a more civilized age. Hence Herder takes to task Voltaire’s and Boulanger’s critique of the “despotism” of Biblical patriarchy on the grounds that it fails to consider the childlike condition of the first people; they were not ready to judge their rulers but required guidance from them as a child does from a parent.
* Savigny and the Historical School of Law
The official beginning of the historical school was the publication in 1815 of the first volume of theZeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft. The editors of the Zeitschrift were three professors from the law faculty at the newly founded University of Berlin: Friedrich Carl Savigny (1779–1861), Karl Friedrich Eichhorn (1781–1854) and Johann Friedrich Gößchen (1778–1837). Like true historians, they were very self‐conscious of their place in history, and set about defining it in the preface of their Zeitschrift.2 Their preface amounts to a manifesto of the historical school. To understand their movement, we do well to look at how the editors themselves define it in their manifesto.
Savigny, Eichhorn and Gößchen expressly called themselves “the historical school,” which they opposed to “the non‐ historical school,” or what was often called “the philosophical school.” Their account of the historical school consists in a threefold distinction between it and the non‐historical or philosophical school. (1) The non‐historical school holds that each generation has the power to create its world anew, whereas the historical school maintains that each generation finds its world given to it by history. (2) While the non‐historical school regards positive law as the arbitrary creation of legislative power, the historical school sees it as part of the entire way of life of a nation, the necessary result of its Volksgeist. (3) The non‐historical school sees the individual as independent and self‐ sufficient, having its identity apart from its place in society and history; the historical school, however, claims that the individual derives its identity entirely from its place in society and history.
* Like no one else before him, [Georg] Simmel saw the coming modern world, and he refused to prevent its coming by clinging to the past. He set sail on its stormy seas, uncertain of his destination, but knowing that there could be no return to the shore. He accepted the complexity and moral pluralism of modern society, and recognized that in his secular age the old absolutes of philosophy and religion could be no more. He came to this point because he was more of an historicist than any of his contemporaries and predecessors, ready to accept the relativity of all values and principles in the flux of history.
