Historicism

A Travelling Concept

Herman Paul, Adriaan van Veldhuizen, Herman Paul, Adriaan van Veldhuizen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350121973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars, artists and politicians have accused each other of "historicism." But what exactly did this mean? Judging by existing scholarship, the answers varied enormously. Like many other "isms, " historicism could mean nearly everything, to the point of becoming meaningless. Yet the questions remain: What made generations of scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences worry about historicism? Why did even musicians and members of parliament warn against historicism? And what explains this remarkable career of the term across generations, fields, regions, and languages? Focusing on the "travels" that historicism made, this volume uses historicism as a prism for exploring connections between disciplines and intellectual traditions usually studied in isolation from each other. It shows how generations of sociologists, theologians, and historians tried to avoid pitfalls associated with historicism and explains why the term was heavily charged with emotions like anxiety, anger, and worry. While offering fresh interpretations of classic authors such as Friedrich Meinecke, Karl Löwith, and Leo Strauss, this volume highlights how historicism took on new meanings, connotations, and emotional baggage in the course of its travels through time and place.

Part One

Travels through time

1

Historicism through the lens of anti-historicism: The case of modern Jewish history

David N. Myers

Abstract

Crises of historicism, as instigated by philosophers and theologians, expose the underside of a methodological practice not often given to introspection. They also signal and emerge out of a larger historical moment marked by disruption and upheaval. This chapter explores three such moments from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, all of which are related to the enterprise of Jewish history. The first featured the renowned German-Jewish neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), who turned his attention to the approach of his one-time teacher, the historian Heinrich Graetz. The second involved Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), a former student of history who would become one of the most influential Jewish thinkers in Weimar Germany and who renounced his erstwhile scholarly practice. The third was inspired by an historian himself, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009), whose 1982 book Zakhor introduced a new degree of self-reflection into the field of Jewish studies.

Introduction

Over the past century and a half, historicism has played an important role, directly or indirectly, in some of the most interesting and consequential methodological debates in the human sciences. Indeed, it has travelled, even flitted promiscuously, across disciplines, entering the guarded precincts of, among other fields, history, philosophy, theology and economics.

A key to its ability to travel so widely has been its multivalence. Historicism, as many have noted, has had many different, even contradictory, meanings to different people – for example, to Ernst Troeltsch, Friedrich Meinecke and Karl Popper, three major theoreticians of the term in the twentieth century, each of whom operated with distinct understandings of what historicism offered or threatened.¹

In this regard, we notice another prominent feature of historicism over the course of its career – that it has journeyed back and forth between its status as a conceptual platform for constructive or even essential scholarly labour and its status as an intellectual bogeyman used as a term of opprobrium to denounce or castigate those at whom it is flung. Historicism, in the eyes of its critics, can be methodological primitivism, scepticism, relativism or some combination of all three. Its appearance can unsettle commonplace assumptions or guiding principles, prompting wider intellectual malaise or disorientation.

It is this spectre that brings us to the heart of the matter in this chapter: the opportunity to explore crises of historicism that periodically surfaced in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They arose with the aim of combating the methodological or existential threat that historicism itself was perceived to represent.

At the outset, it is important to bear in mind two points. First, crises of historicism are not cries in the wilderness reflecting the panic or outrage of a few isolated critics; they emerge out of historical moments rife with change and disruption, marked by a high degree of intellectual upheaval. The critique of historicism, in this sense, is but one arrow in the quiver of those who fear that the existing order is being undermined in a deeply threatening way.

And a related second observation: the alarm over a ‘crisis of historicism’ is usually sounded not by historians, but by non-historians fearful of its consequences. For example, philosophers have seen fit to decry historicism’s methodological imperiousness and flaccidity, often regarding the historical discipline as a second-order scholarly pursuit. So too have theologians. One scholar of the phenomenon, Thomas Howard, has aptly noted that the ‘crisis of historicism stemmed from and found its centre of gravity in explicitly theological problems’.² Indeed, theologians were chief among historicism’s critics, bemoaning its tendency to reduce inspired figures or texts to a narrow and decidedly mundane context – and thereby convert the sacred into the profane. But theologians such as D. F. Strauss and Albert Schweitzer were also among historicism’s most avid promoters – in the sense that historicism mandated an understanding of the evolution of an historical individuum in context. Indeed, one of the great modern battles among theologians was the ‘Historical Jesus’ controversy, which revolved around the question of whether Jesus could be understood in the context of first-century Palestine or only as the transcendent Christ of faith. In some cases, for example, Ernst Troeltsch, the battle waged within the same theologian, at once drawn to the contextualizing impulses of historicism yet repelled by its seeming relativizing impulses.

In this chapter, I would like to elaborate on and, in one case, complicate these two propositions. In doing so, I will identify three moments of crisis of historicism, each of which reflects a larger state of intellectual and political perplexity. These moments are drawn from the history of one of the most instructive barometers of change in modern European history, the Jews. By virtue of their liminal status – as ‘cognitive insiders’ and ‘social outsiders’ in Paul Mendes-Flohr’s well-known phrase – Jews both participated robustly in cultural and intellectual life in their host societies and encountered clear limits to their integration.³ This liminal status, as Mendes-Flohr and others have observed, inclined Jews towards artistic and scientific innovation – and conversely, rendered them susceptible to forces of reaction. And it is that status, at the front line between forces of innovation and reaction, that made them important actors in the battles over historicism from the last quarter of the nineteenth century up to the present.

Heinrich Graetz

The first case at hand pitted two of the most important figures in German-Jewish intellectual history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891) and the philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918). At its most basic level, this first crisis of historicism arose as a critique by a former student, Cohen, of a teacher, Graetz, as the student came to achieve intellectual maturity. At another level, it was a re-staging of the modern competition among the Geisteswissenschaften, pitting history against philosophy for the title of what the ancients called ‘the queen of the sciences’.⁴ Throughout the nineteenth century, there were intense efforts by advocates of the ‘human sciences’ to develop a proper scientific protocol independent of and on a par with that of the natural sciences. But there was also an intense debate within the various fields of the human sciences, with different disciplinary groups promoting the benefits of their respective discipline, and often insisting on their superiority over others. The result was not merely a popularity contest, but, by the end of the century, a sharpening of the methodological, hermeneutical and epistemological premises of the fields.⁵ Neo-Kantianism, particularly of the Southwest School in Germany, played a key role in pushing forward this conversation, proposing itself as an inclusive and holistic platform for defining the methodological protocol of the Geisteswissenschaften. And yet, as the famous debate between Wilhelm Windelband, a Southwest School representative, and Wilhelm Dilthey revealed, the project made for ‘a fragile, combustible union’. The Neo-Kantians, as Frederick Beiser has observed, wanted to aid history in fortifying its precarious foundations, but they also regarded it as a threat because of its relativizing and hegemonic impulses.⁶

For all of their belief in the prospect of achieving methodological clarity in the name of Wissenschaft, the broader cultural ambience in which Dilthey and Windelband dwelt was rife with tension, despair and pessimism. Indeed, the last quarter of the century was known tout court as the age of Kulturpessimissmus.⁷ The sequence of events in the early 1870s makes clear why. The victory in the Franco-Prussian war followed by German unification in 1871 produced a sense of intoxicating glory, only to be followed by precipitous economic collapse in Austria and Germany in 1873. The dizzying rise and fall of fortunes not only damaged German national honour, but lent a powerful sense that the forward march of history had been retarded.

Among those who captured the sense of ‘pessimism’ of the day was Wilhelm Marr (1819–1904), the German journalist who invented the term ‘antisemitism’. In describing what he saw as ‘the triumph of Jewishness over Germanness’ in an age of ‘cultural-historical bankruptcy’, Marr spoke of the dark shadow of ‘pessimism’ hovering over Germany.⁸ Of more direct relevance for this chapter is a far more notable cultural pessimist of the time, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ‘pessimism’ was far more nuanced and purposive than Marr’s. Indeed, Nietzsche’s ‘Dionysian pessimism’ was not merely a reflection on the stagnant and decrepit state of the world, but a realistic sense of ‘the constant processes of transformation and destruction that mark out the human condition’.⁹

The recurrent tension in Nietzsche between unsparing critique of the present – hence, pessimism – and the possibility of regeneration in the future (albeit through a dialectical process of destruction) animates his view of history. This is especially present in his well-known short essay, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben from 1874. With his inimitable acuity, Nietzsche criticized the over-abundance of historical data generated in his day, which led to an unfortunate condition: people knowing more and more about less and less. This was a disappointing abdication of history’s responsibility and potential: ‘What if, rather than remaining the life-promoting activity of a historical being, history is turned into the objective uncovering of mere facts by the disinterested scholar – facts to be left as they are found, to be contemplated without being assimilated into present being?’¹⁰ That was the state of affairs about which Nietzsche vented his irritation and pessimism. History harvested the chaff, but did not extract the wheat of the past. And yet, all was not lost. Nietzsche, with his conditional pessimism, held out the prospect, slim as it may be, that history – or more specifically, historical education – could be deployed to ‘serve life’, as the words of his sub-title suggest.

It is in this milieu – a pessimistic era marked by intense debates about the utility of history – that a young neo-Kantian philosopher named Hermann Cohen launched a volley at the well-known Jewish historian, Heinrich Graetz. Their exchange was an important and raw encapsulation of the disciplinary and temperamental differences between historians and philosophers in this period.

Graetz was a renowned scholar who, in 1854, had begun to publish what would become a monumental, eleven-volume history of the Jews, Geschichte der Juden. By the time that Cohen issued his first critique in 1880, Graetz had become the most famous and controversial Jewish historian of his day, a pioneer in terms of both the method and scale of his research, and a man whose passions and prejudices were rarely concealed. Graetz also happened to be Hermann Cohen’s teacher at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau, where Cohen went to study for the rabbinate in 1857 before leaving to embark on a career as a philosopher. During his time at Breslau, Cohen remembered, there ‘was stirring in me in those young years a kind of historical consciousness’. Graetz was apparently a major influence. Cohen recalled his teacher’s ‘interesting and lively presentation of the great men of our literature’. Moreover, he recalled that Graetz ‘elevated us to our spiritual heights’.¹¹

The passage of time obviously led to a change of heart. After leaving behind the rabbinical seminary, Cohen commenced studies in philosophy at the University of Breslau in 1861 before moving to the University of Berlin and then submitting his dissertation at Halle. In 1873, he was appointed as a Privatdozent at the University of Marburg, where he would spend the entirety of his academic career.¹² By 1880, he had a chair at Marburg and a reputation as a prominent Neo-Kantian philosopher of his day. In that year, Graetz came under attack from two sharply disparate sources: his former student, Cohen, on one hand, and the leading Prussian nationalist historian, Heinrich von Treitschke, on the other.

It was the most unusual pairing. Treitschke’s nationalism had taken a noxious turn in a tumultuous 1870s, expressing itself in increasingly xenophobic terms, with a particular focus on Jews. Cohen, for his part, was a proud and engaged Jew who readily fought against the scourge that was now known by Marr’s neologism, ‘antisemitism’. One of the catalysts for Treitschke’s descent into overt bigotry was his reading of the eleventh volume of Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden. Graetz’s passionate and sympathetic rendering of Jews (especially those whom he favoured) stood in contrast to what Treitschke saw as his anti-Christian bias and inadequate expression of German loyalty. Not only was Graetz guilty, but Jews at large, he lamented, held onto their insularity and exclusivity. In making this claim, Treitschke was hardly oblivious to the rising tide of anti-Jewish sentiment in German society. Rather than challenge it, he articulated great sympathy for those who stoked it. Jews were outliers who did not fit into the emergent German nation. Escalating the rhetorical temperature even further, he memorably declared, ‘the Jews are our misfortune’.¹³

Treitschke’s words in 1879–1880 triggered what came to be known as the Berlin Antisemitismusstreit, a wide-ranging public debate about the suitability of Jews in Germany. Hermann Cohen, as one of the most notable German-Jewish intellectuals of the day, jumped into the fray with an essay in 1880, ‘Ein Bekenntniss in der Judenfrage’. Not surprisingly, he criticized those who sought t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Biographical Notes
• Introduction: Historicism as a travelling concept Herman Paul and Adriaan van Veldhuizen
• Part 1: Travels through time
• Part 2: Travels through space
• Part 3: Travel companions
• Part 4: Travels beyond historicism
• Index
• Imprint