Translations, Histories, Enlightenments

William Robertson in Germany, 1760-1795

L. Kontler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137371720
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Historian and minister William Robertson was a central Scottish Enlightenment figure whose influence reached well beyond the boundaries of the British Isles. In this reception study of Robertson's work, Laszlo Kontler shows how the reception of Robertson's major histories in Germany tests the limits of intellectual transfer through translation.

1

Politics, Literature, and Science: William Robertson and Historical Discourses in Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Germany

As proposed at the end of the Introduction, before any attempt to analyze the German reception of Robertson’s individual texts, it is indispensable to take a more general look at the various modes in which history was engaged in Robertson’s Scottish environment and in which it was practiced in contemporary Germany. It is from a comparative assessment of such variables that one might expect to arrive at the understanding of an apparent paradox. The German reception of Robertson, in regard to both its extent and immediacy—the volume of translations, of critical response, and reference—was, if anything, avid. Each of the four great histories appeared in, and was borrowed from, important academic libraries in Germany within a few months of publication. Each of them were equally promptly reviewed in German periodicals, and became swiftly translated into German, occasionally by several different hands simultaneously, and were republished and reedited in new versions over a period of several decades. The intensity of reception apparently contradicts the fact that it would be difficult to claim for Robertson a dramatic influence on the character of contemporary German historiography. This contradiction, however, makes the history of reception no less instructive.

In seeking to resolve this paradox, which is far from being exceptional in histories of reception, I propose to delve into the character of eighteenth-century historical writing in three different but interlocking forms: as political thought, as literary pursuit and aesthetic expression, and as a branch of knowledge with the emerging claim to the status of an academic discipline. These forms of appearance converged in Robertson’s histories, while each of them were equally relevant in the Scottish environment where those histories were produced and the German one in which they were appropriated. The paradox both arises from, and is explained by, the rather different substances that filled each of these forms of cultivating history in the two cases. In unraveling such complexities, I shall predominantly rely on “state-of-the-art” research on eighteenth-century Scottish, German, and European historiography. But the comparative perspective I adopt may refine our understanding of the broader subject of this book: the possibilities and the limits of communication and transfer across linguistic and cultural boundaries within the enlightened republic of letters. I shall start with a discussion of intellectual developments on the wider European and the Scottish scene relevant to the shaping of a historical sensibility shared by Robertson with many contemporaries, and then move on to consider some peculiar features of German historical scholarship.

Stages, conjectures, narratives: Scottish history and the science of man

To begin with, it is important to remember that a great deal of historical writing in eighteenth-century Scotland continued to be conceived in terms of the themes of virtue and corruption, familiar from the humanist historia magistra vitae tradition. Philosophical history—the exploration of war, politics, and the arcana imperii in the style of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, with a view to inculcating the principles of conduct best suited to the preservation of the public good¹—was alive and well, and formed part of Robertson’s own initiation into the profession. It has also been argued forcefully that in regard to its commitment to the teaching of moral precepts and its “obsession” with providential determinism, Enlightenment historical writing owes a great deal to traditions of Scottish scholarship established in the aftermath of the Calvinist reformation, perpetuating much of its humanist principles, vocabulary, and conceptual toolkit.²

However, the historical culture that informed Robertson’s oeuvre was marked by an attempt to understand these concepts (and make such traditions functional) against the background of new political, sociocultural, and international circumstances that emerged in Europe (which, in a well-known passage, he defined as “one great political system”)³ as the seventeenth century was fading into the eighteenth. The rise of the United Provinces, the Peace of Westphalia, the Glorious Revolution, and—certainly, in a very different way—even the revocation of the Edict of Nantes contributed to the ebbing away of religious and civil strife that had been almost the order of the day in Western European societies for the century and a half that followed the “protestation” of a part of the German estates at the imperial diet of Speyer in 1529. The peace settlement of Utrecht in 1713 seemed to have signaled the ultimate frustration of two centuries of attempts—by Holy Roman Emperors, but also Kings of Spain, and then of France—at reestablishing “universal monarchy” in Europe. Having resisted the dynastic ambition to exercise political and military control over extensive territories, the old continent came to be recognized as an assemblage of medium-sized states. In spite of the diversity of political, religious, and commercial interests that quite often threw them, individually or in coalitions, into armed conflict, they could be understood as constituting a neatly balanced system, even a “commonwealth” or “confederation” knit together by a strange blend of cooperation and emulation. In their conflicts as well as their conflict management practices, “jealousy of state” was being replaced by (or transformed into) “jealousy of trade” and political survival became dependent on success or failure in international markets. This was a development that gave rise to concerns, especially given that it seemed to contradict the enlightened topos about the inherently civilizing and pacifying potential of “sweet commerce” and material improvement.⁴ To further complicate the picture, some of these “imperial” (in the ancient sense of “sovereign”) states proved, and all of them were anxious to prove, themselves fitting cores of a type of empire well-suited to the times in being not continental and territorial, but overseas and commercial–colonial. All of this served to underline the significance of the economic realm for the social realities behind these historic developments, including the patterns of the production, consumption, circulation, and distribution of goods, and the agents of such processes, together with the cultural practices, habits, beliefs, and lifestyles peculiar to them.

Historical reflection in the eighteenth century could have hardly afforded not taking into account such conditions of emerging modernity. Even among these circumstances, neither history’s traditional concern with and for public life nor the consequent endeavor to derive normative judgment and moral purpose from narrative was abandoned. But its horizons became broadened to include, besides politics, a social narrative responding to new interests among the potential readership. In the focus of such interests were the histories of “learning, arts, commerce, and manners,” subjects that seemed “most useful and agreeable by themselves, or most suitable to their respective ways of life.”⁵ These interests indicate a preoccupation with specific modalities of social–civil life among the circumstances of modern refinement that were difficult to integrate into a traditional historical narration chiefly concerned with the chances and the hazards of vita activa. What was at stake was the self-image and self-esteem of a society, or rather its intellectually sophisticated and articulate members, who were increasingly aware of its indebtedness to commerce, together with the complex and invisible relations it created on the shifting boundaries between public and private life: relations which on the one hand set various kinds of limitations to the scope of political action, but at the same time also expanded that scope by redefining action deemed capable of generating civil virtue.

With respect to the civic sphere, commerce and the material well-being that it brought about was traditionally regarded as producing one of two dispositions, both of them conceived as forms of “corruption”: a decrease of commitment to the public weal and a propensity to expropriate civic institutions for private aggrandizement. Such threats did not cease to haunt public moralists, which historians continued to be throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. They nevertheless keenly realized that as an antidote to its role in the lapse of civic institutions, commerce in both the strict and the metaphorical sense—as the exchange of material goods in the market hall as well as that of ideas and sentiments in the coffee house or the assembly room—performed valuable civilizing functions. By enhancing men’s and women’s character as sociable and communicative creatures, “commerce” enabled them to promote each other’s well-being in a way that was different from, but not at all inferior to, participatory activism, and was better suited to the conditions of the eighteenth century. Given this awareness among some of its most outstanding practitioners, history began to drift away from its ultimately civic foundations, and its gaze began to incorporate the category of the social, a realm in which such interactions occurred. It did so by appropriating the perspective of what has become known as the enlightened “science of man.”

At the core of this vast intellectual enterprise was the Augustinian–Epicurean anthropology of Robertson’s fellow Edinburgh literati, Hume and Smith in the first place, who portrayed man as an essentially self-regarding and pleasure-seeking creature guided by interests and passions in his conduct and attitudes, and were challenged to ask fundamental questions about the apparent paradoxes of the relatively orderly and peaceful conditions they observed in the ever more complex societies of contemporary Europe.⁶ Their explanations for the abatement of the “violent passions” of man, conceived in the terms of moral psychology and political economy, pointed toward a refined understanding of the notion of “unsocial sociability” that seemed to govern the realities of commercial modernity. Ungesellige Geselligkeit was, of course, Kant’s later succinct formula for a whole paradigm of thought nearly two centuries old by his time.⁷ It was first bred by the painful experience of religious and civil strife in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but was eminently capable of application to more stable social situations, the chief regulative mechanism of which was commerce, depending on emulation as well as accommodation.

Methodologically, this inquiry into the human and the social constituted itself as a counterpart of seventeenth-century natural philosophy as cultivated by the members of the Royal Society, in the sense that as “empiricists and experimentalists,” its practitioners disavowed the precepts of Aristotelian metaphysics and logic and presumed to arrive at first principles from the observed “facts” of nature—which in the case of the study of politics and society would be human nature. Building on skepticism and stoicism as well as historical and natural jurisprudence, thinkers in the paradigm of “unsocial sociability” conceived of men and women as interest-driven and sensual creatures, motivated by fear and suspicion, vanity or greed, but still—even as a result—inclined to behave in a sociable manner. Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and Samuel Pufendorf portrayed humans as refraining from causing “wanton injury” while competing for mere subsistence because this would have authorized others (or the sovereign, instituted precisely for this purpose) to resort even to violent retaliation in order to maintain mutual security.⁸ Besides and beyond the safety of life and limb, the Port Royal Jansenist Pierre Nicole also discovered in vanity a fundamental type of self-regarding motivation. Nicole suggested that for the sake of obtaining the recognition of their fellows, self-loving men were inclined to conform to virtuous codes of conduct. Montesquieu molded this idea into a comprehensive theory of monarchical government, the cement or “principle” of which was the quest for “honor” on the part of an ambitious aristocracy, and thus explored a distinctively historical dimension of “unsocial sociability” as an active force in shaping European modernity in a broad comparative perspective. The paradoxical divorce of the selfish motivation of an act from its potentially charitable effects was most openly stated in Bernard Mandeville’s formula about “private vices, publick benefits.”⁹ The notion of the quest for material wealth through satisfying the daily needs of others (an “unintended consequence”) then became the cornerstone of Smith’s observations on the lack of “benevolence” among the primary motives of the butcher and the baker in serving their customers—but also including the idea of the “impartial spectator,” which would evoke the desire, even in the butcher or the baker, not only to earn praise, but also to be “praiseworthy.”¹⁰

In the sophisticated intellectual stances, summarized in an unduly synoptic fashion above, it is possible to detect a style of thinking that also informed eighteenth-century secularist, stadialist–materialist types of historical causality. For indeed, the theories that they put forward, and the realities that these theories meant to interpret, also called for a spacious analysis of the historical dynamics leading to the emergence of the modern commercial societies they analyzed. The perspective that they offered allowed a notion of the past as a series of continuities from which the present has unfolded, and it was by tracing this unfolding that the study of history could contribute to the science of man. Campaigns and battles, treaties and edicts, transgressions and assassinations, had hitherto been chiefly regarded to be the main substance of history as a chronological succession of events understood as exempla, and often also as providing a pedigree or justification for the present. Now they came to be viewed as dependent on and arising from processes of material and cultural progress or decline, as well as the operations of the mind, in which the role of human agency was a far more complicated matter to assess than in essentially political histories of virtue and corruption. On the one hand, the contexts in which action was taking place required an ever more complex effort at exploration and explanation, to the extent that such contexts began to form, to a very great extent, the substance of history itself. On the other hand, even as the constitutive elements of contexts, the histories of agents commonly regarded as lacking the capacity for “action” in the traditional (political) sense—primitive communities, women, and “private persons” in general—became discussed by authors with ever-increasing frequency.

The outcome was twofold. We tend to celebrate conjectural history, the theoretically stringent, materialistic study of the “great movements” of history through “stages,” defined in terms of the dominant “mode of subsistence” toward “refinement,” as the great contribution of Enlightenment historical thought and the practice of historical writing.¹¹ At the same time, such macro-sociological pursuits were in permanent dialogue with the quasi-biographical representation of the immediate environment of individual lives and the forces that shaped them. The success of the one enterprise, stadial history, depended on the consistency of methodological principles and their applicatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Politics, Literature, and Science: William Robertson and Historical Discourses in Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Germany
• 2  Time and Progress, Time as Progress: History by Way of Enlightened Preaching
• 3  A Different View of the Progress of Society in Europe
• 4  Scottish Histories and German Identities
• 5  Maps of Mankind
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index