How to be a historian

Scholarly personae in historical studies, 1800–2000

Herman Paul

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526132802
• eBook ISBN: 9781526132826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This volume offers a stimulating new perspective on the history of historical studies. Through the prism of 'scholarly personae', it explores why historians care about attitudes or dispositions that they consider necessary for studying the past, yet often disagree about what virtues, skills, or competencies are most important. More specifically, the volume explains why models of virtue known as 'personae' have always been contested, yet also can prove remarkably stable, especially with regard to their race, class, and gender assumptions. Covering historical studies across Europe, North America, Africa, and East Asia, How to be a historian will appeal not only to historians of historiography, but to all historians who occasionally wonder: What kind of a historian do I want to be?

CHAPTER 1

The contested persona of the historian: on the origins of a permanent conflict

Ian Hunter

Introduction

In the 1820s, the universities of Protestant Germany witnessed an unprecedented conflict over the nature of historical writing and what it meant to be a historian. That this conflict remains as unresolved today as it did when the first academic salvoes were fired is one of its several remarkable features. Standing on one side of this conflict, the source-critical empirical historiography of Leopold von Ranke and his school reached back into seventeenth-century ecclesiastical history and eighteenth-century constitutional history. From these sources the Ranke school borrowed historical topoi, objectifying methods and a detached intellectual outlook. Emerging in opposition to Rankean empirical historiography, the dialectical philosophical history of G. W. F. Hegel and his followers was no older than the Kantian philosophical revolution of the 1790s, even if its roots lay in the history of Protestant metaphysics. Hegelian philosophical history attacked empirical historiography from an unprecedented vantage point. It viewed history as a process in which human reason or a ‘world spirit’ struggled to become conscious of itself by treating the ‘positive’ or ‘empirical’ institutions of church and state as the ‘estranged’ forms of the spirit itself, thereby promising the latter’s emancipation through the dialectical overcoming of this estrangement.

This chapter provides an account of the conflict between Rankean empirical history and Hegelian philosophical history by approaching them as radically opposed and mutually hostile intellectual cultures, from which issued two completely different ways of modelling the intellectual comportment or persona of the historian. In approaching the conflict in this way, the author pays homage to an unsurpassed study from the 1920s, by the German-Jewish historian Ernst Simon.¹

Cultural and political context

To the extent that they were focused in history writing, then the conflicts surrounding Hegel and his followers at Berlin University in the 1820s were sharpened by a clash between two radically opposed historical outlooks and comportments of the historian. On one hand, Leopold von Ranke and his students viewed history as a technical discipline for providing an ‘impartial’ account of past events – centrally the events of German ecclesiastical and political-constitutional history – by using source-critical methods to validate and contextualize the documentary records of these events. On the other hand, Hegel and his followers viewed history as a philosophical discipline for providing a hermeneutic interpretation of world history. This was achieved by using the dialectical exercise to view institutions and events as symbols of the degree to which reason or spirit had retrieved self-consciousness and freedom from its own estranged forms.² Before describing the Berlin academic conflicts in more detail, and in order to come to terms with their extraordinary depth and vehemence, it is necessary to sketch the circumstances of German cultural and political history from which they emerged.

As far as the long-term circumstances are concerned, Rankean empirical and Hegelian philosophical historiographies may be regarded as the tips of large cultural-political icebergs, carried and shaped by historical currents that were fundamentally religious and political. If Rankean history-writing was a document-based empirical account of German constitutional and ecclesiastical history, that was in part because German constitutional and ecclesiastical institutions themselves operated through the generation and interpretation of documents. But it was also because the disciplines of constitutional and ecclesiastical history had developed methods for viewing these documents as records of purely human activities – of war- and peace-making, of religious rivalry and reform – rather than as expressions of transcendental justice or religious truth. By excluding irreconcilably opposed theologies and philosophies from their negotiation and administration, the public law treaties that formed the pillars of the German constitution – the Treaty of Augsburg of 1555 and the Westphalian treaties of 1648 – made the suspension of theological and philosophical ‘foundations’ into a condition of the juridification of religious and political conflict. Since the objective of this juridification was not to rationalize or secularize the confessional religions, but to preserve them from internecine destruction by recognizing and entrenching them in a multi-confessional religious constitution, the resulting constitutional order wore a distinctive Janus face: it consisted of a relativistic (and in this limited sense) ‘secular’ juridical framework, inside which plural religions were free to teach their confessions as absolute truths.³

By excluding theological and philosophical truths from the constitutional framework, the disciplines and institutions of public law gave rise to a remarkable, unintended consequence. They permitted the development of an empirical, documentary, constitutional historiography, in which the constitution was historicized through the trail of treaty documents, regardless of political-philosophical or natural-law norms.⁴ In its turn, the development of this document-based empirical method permitted constitutional historiography to intersect with empirical ecclesiastical history and biblical criticism. For, in developing the methods of humanist erudition, these latter disciplines had also suspended theological and metaphysical truths in order to view the documents deposited by the church and its theologians ‘impartially’; that is, regardless of their claims to transcendent truth, as records of purely human activities, interests and motives.⁵ In this way, erudite or scholarly ecclesiastical history had developed a view of the imperial churches as a plurality of historical institutions teaching rival absolute truths, which directly intersected the public-law constitutional view of them. From these developments emerged a remarkable historical nexus between the methods and outlook of constitutional and ecclesiastical historiographies and those of Ranke’s source-critical, empirical historiography. If the former historiographies tracked their objects by following the documentary trails deposited by the institutions of public and church law, then Ranke synthesized these historiographies and their documentary records at a more abstract level, using them to write a history of the ‘German nation’ and its search for a proper state-form.

While they were intertwined with those from which Rankean empirical historiography had emerged, the lineages of religious, philosophical and political history that issued in Hegelian philosophical historiography assumed a very different and finally oppositional form. After Lutheran fideism had excluded it from Protestant universities during the sixteenth century, the academic metaphysics that would eventually issue in Kantian and Hegelian philosophies returned at the beginning of the seventeenth. This was principally in order to supply a philosophical explication and defence of the official Lutheran confession – the Formula of Concord of 1577 – against its Calvinist and Catholic rivals.⁶ It was at this point that the double-sided philosophical anthropology that would pass into Kantian and Hegelian philosophies was first elaborated. This occurred initially in accounts of the relation between the two natures of Christ – his immaterial, active, divine intellectual nature, and his corporeal, passive, human sensibility – which showed how spiritual being could be present in humanity and in the Eucharistic host.⁷ In defending the absolute truth of a particular religious doctrine, academic metaphysics of this kind operated under the umbrella of the Janus-faced Augsburg-Westphalian constitution, the role of which was to provide legal protection for a plurality of such truths. Yet such academic metaphysics was fundamentally hostile to this relativistic constitutional framework, insisting that the realization of the kingdom of God on earth requires that the constitutional order itself be grounded in univocal metaphysical truth.⁸ In transposing the relation between the divine intellect and the human sensibility to the interior of the philosophical subject, Kantian metaphysics was no less hostile to the relativistic and pluralistic religious constitution than its confessional predecessors.⁹ Not only did Kant insist that the legitimacy of the religious constitution depended on it being founded in the consensus of ‘rational beings’ – rather than in peace treaties between rival religious blocs – but he also declared that the constitutionally protected confessional religions were themselves destined to be displaced by a ‘pure religion of reason’ suited to mankind’s rational maturity.¹⁰

Despite its historicization of Kantian metaphysics, Hegelian philosophy was extra-constitutional in the same manner. Hegel thus argued that the Janus-faced constitutional separation of church and state was a fracturing of the spirit that would be overcome through the dialectical development of a ‘moral state’.¹¹ He further prophesied that the plurality of ‘positive’ constitutional religions would be replaced by a speculative, philosophical religion that reconciled the human and the divine in the course of the spirit’s transition to full freedom and self-consciousness.¹² In this way, Hegel transposed the metaphysics of the divided self into a philosophical hermeneutics. This permitted Germany’s historical religious constitution to be interpreted as symbol of a retarded stage in the spirit’s progress towards historical self-consciousness. Hegel’s philosophical history thus operated outside the disciplines of constitutional and ecclesiastical history that had allowed the Rankean historian to offer empirical accounts of church and constitution on the evidence of their documentary records. Instead, operating on the basis of an absolutely true metaphysical anthropology and cosmology, the Hegelian philosophical historian viewed church and state only as external symbols of an inner conflict between an abstract consciousness and its estranged concrete forms. From this dialectical method emerged a comportment or persona focused on achieving a specific kind of inner spiritual reconciliation, and the prophetic insight into the ‘meaning’ of history that resulted from this.

Thus, the conflict between Rankeans and Hegelians that broke out at the University of Berlin in the 1820s was not between the empiricist and idealist sides of the ‘subject of history’ – that is just a tale told by Hegelians – but was between two radically opposed intellectual conducts and ways of intellectual life. One of these had been formed through the integration of the erudite disciplines of constitutional and ecclesiastical history into the source-critical, ‘impartial’ methods of the Rankean empirical historian. The other had arisen from the integration of a specialized dialectical exercise in spiritual self-problematization and self-transformation into the hermeneutic-prophetic comportment of the Hegelian philosophical historian.

Cultural and political conflict at the University of Berlin

The latent conflict between constitutional religious pluralism and extra-constitutional Protestant rationalism had surfaced in several controversies at the end of the eighteenth century, most notably in those associated with the Prussian Religious Edict of 1788 and the associated attempt by the Prussian government to censor Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason.¹³ It did so again in the battle between empirical-contextual and philosophical-hermeneutic historians that erupted at the Prussian University of Berlin during the 1820s and 1830s. When Ranke arrived at the university in 1825 he was immediately drawn into a conflict between two mutually hostile factions: the ‘historians’ under the leadership of the Protestant theologian Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher, assisted by the legal historian Friedrich von Savigny, and the ‘philosophers’, led by Hegel himself, who was at the zenith of his fame and influence.¹⁴ In addition to Savigny and Schleiermacher, Ranke’s immediate network consisted of the source-critical historians Barthold Niebuhr, Karl Gottlob Zumpt and Karl Lachmann, the philologist Johann Albrecht Eichhorn and the historian of philosophy Heinrich Ritter: a network embodying the configuration of pietistic, philological and historicist disciplines that informed Ranke’s historiographic ethos and practice. Hegel’s faction included the philosophical historians Heinrich Leo and Bruno Bauer, the Hegelian theologian Philipp Marheineke, the philosophical jurist Eduard Gans and a farther-flung array of Protestant rationalist theologians, including Karl Daub and Hermann Hinrichs at Heidelberg.

The Schleiermacher network was not formed on the basis of a shared method, theory or ideology but on cultural-political affinities between Schleiermacher’s defence of confessional Protestantism against its tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction. Scholarly personae: what they are and why they matter
• 1 The contested persona of the historian: on the origins of a permanent conflict
• 2 Ranke vs Schlosser: pairs of personae in nineteenth-century German historiography
• 3 Fixing genius: the Romantic man of letters in the university era
• 4 Generational continuities and composite personae: French historiography from the 1870s to the 1950s
• 5 Pasha and his historic harem: Edward A. Freeman, Edith Thompson and the gendered personae of late-Victorian historians
• 6 Interpretative and investigative: the emergence and characteristics of modern scholarly personae in China, 1900–30
• 7 Coalescence and conflict: historians and their personae in the Portuguese New State
• 8 The emergence of the English Marxist historian’s scholarly persona: the English Revolution debate of 1940–41
• 9 Of communism, compromise and Central Europe: the scholarly persona under authoritarianism
• 10 What is an African historian? Negotiating scholarly personae in UNESCO’s General History of Africa
• 11 The finitude of personae: Bryce Lyon, François Louis Ganshof and the biography of Pirenne
• Index