Droysen and the Prussian School of History

Robert Southard

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813188812
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia tedesca

The Prussian School of History first predicted and advocated, then celebrated and defended, the unification of Germany by Prussia. Experts in German historiography and the history of German liberalism have often complained about the lack of a book, in any language, that traces the origins and explains the ideas of this school of history. Here is that book.

Robert Southard finds that, for the Prussian School, history had an agenda. These historians generally expected history to complete its main tasks in their own time and country. The outcome of their politics was, really, an "end of history"—not a cessation to historical occurrences, but a cessation of onward historical movement because the historical process had already achieved its long-term, beneficent purposes.

Leading us through the intricacies of important but untranslated works of J. G. Droysen, Max Duncker, Rudolph Hayn, and Heinrich von Sybel, Southard demonstrates their belief that the historical sequence was a continual unfolding of God's plan. Indispensable for those interested in the history of German historical writing, this book also has major implications for understanding the history of political liberalism.

1

Droysen and the Problem of Freedom

The Prussian School took form because of the severe disappointments of the revolutionary years 1848–49, but those disappointments are intelligible only after studying the expectations that, after seeming triumph, failed badly. For the most part, that is, the mature ideas of the Prussian School were transmutations and recombinations of prerevolutionary ideas made when successive defeats and failures at last forced Droysen, Duncker, and Haym—along with, of course, many other liberal nationalists—to reexamine and, then, to reformulate beliefs that until recently had seemed unquestionable and irrefutable. These men went through a crisis that few others experienced, even those who subscribed to their political program, because they based their political outlook on an interpretation of history and they thought of Germany’s unification as a culminating act of world history. Therefore, their increasingly obvious inability during the revolution of 1848 to turn their expectations into reality was more than just a political failure. It was a calamity because it called into question the meaning they attributed to history. After this crisis, as before, they remained ideologues, devotees of a secular religion, but they became chastened ideologues, no longer bent on chasing the best at the expense of the good or even the relatively good. Sybel’s experience was somewhat different. Even before 1848, he was less certain about what the future held, less confident that the historical process was unstoppably beneficent. In consequence, he seems to have been less surprised and less shocked by events. To a certain degree, Droysen, Haym, and Duncker ended up where Sybel had always been—except that they did so with the intellectual assertiveness of the belatedly wise. They never quite overcame their prehistory.

That prehistory began in 1831, with Droysen’s first plans for open political advocacy. He had two projects in mind, although he failed to bring either to completion. First, and almost certainly with Ranke’s conservative Historical-Political Journal in mind, he proposed creating a “journal of political-historical content” that, in effect, would have been an ideological counter to Ranke’s publication. Because he wanted national unification and constitutional government of a sort, however, he did not have the backing of the Prussian government for his journal, as Ranke did for his. Second, Droysen considered publishing a political correspondence to make the same points. His model here was Paul Achatius Pfizer’s Correspondence of Two Germans (1831), the first work to propose, if only in a letter among letters, Germany’s unification by Prussia.¹ Droysen’s letters about these projects are useful as evidence for his already distinctive political views, but the fact that he considered becoming a publicist is unremarkable; his doing so is just one of many examples of the political excitement that briefly filled Germany after the 1830 July Revolution in France. Along with many other young, well-educated Germans, he hoped that the Restoration might end in the Germanies as well, though he also feared renewed invasion from revolutionary France. His projects are important for another reason. They were the first instances of the close linkage between his political advocacy in the present and his philological and historical research into the past.

They make sense only against the background of the research into ancient history and literature with which Droysen was then occupied. Droysen was an intellectual prodigy from the remote districts of the Hohenzollern monarchy. The son of a Prussian army chaplain in a small town in Pomerania, he studied on scholarships (and later on fees earned by tutoring the young Felix Mendelssohn, for whom he later wrote lyrics for some Lieder) at a local gymnasium and, later, the new but flourishing University of Berlin.² In his essay of application to the university, he wrote that “nothing is more wholesome or needful for the German spirit than fertilization with the Hellenic.”³ This was more than an ingratiating piety. He exerted himself in the study of classical philology, and in 1831, when he was considering active publicism, he was deeply engrossed in major research into ancient Greek history. He was twenty-three years old and had just finished his doctoral dissertation, “On the Kingdom of the Lagids under Ptolemaus VI Philometor.” He was already at work on his translations of Aeschylus’s tragedies, a beautiful rendering that long remained a standard German version, which he published along with historical commentaries the next year. This work was also a preliminary to his still famous History of Alexander the Great (1833), which, in turn, led to the first volume of History of Hellenism (1836). These works fundamentally altered the way in which historians viewed late Greek history: Droysen was the first to demonstrate persuasively that Greek history after the Macedonian conquest was more a record of new, constructive beginnings than of decay and decline.⁴ In these and other, less important works, Droysen offered an interpretation of ancient history in which he portrayed Hellenistic history as the poser of a problem of freedom still current in his own time and due for solution in his own country.

Droysen’s advocacy and inquiries were already functions one of the other. Considered by themselves, neither his studies of ancient Greece nor his planned ventures in publicism are fully understandable. Considered together, however, they show the outlines of the theoretical system that he applied, with some additions but no major deletions, in the first months of his activities in Frankfort in 1848. He acquired the main elements of this system during his formal studies at Berlin. Although Droysen spent most of his adult career as a historian, he began as a student of philology and, to a lesser extent, philosophy. There were, of course, no history students in Germany when he enrolled at Berlin in 1826. (Interestingly, Max Duncker, who finished his Berlin degree in 1834, was the first.) Nonetheless, history courses were a prominent part of the curriculum and were supposed to make moral citizens out of callow students. Droysen avoided all of them, whether taught by Friedrich Wilken (1777–1840), Friedrich von Raumer (1781–1873), or the already celebrated, but not yet ennobled, Leopold Ranke (1795–1886).⁵ Given his strong interest in ancient Greece, he did much of his work with the classical philologist August Boeckh (1785–1867). As Boeckh’s student, he not only perfected his knowledge of the corpus of Greek literature but also learned what was, in fact, a special approach to history.

Boeckh’s own teacher, Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), had pioneered this approach when, in the course of studying Homer’s epics, he became interested in Homer’s milieu and used philological techniques to reconstruct the past in order that he might read texts in context. What Wolf did for Homer and his age, Boeckh did for fifth-century Athenian literature in his book, The Political Economy of Athens.⁶ Boeckh taught Droysen that texts should suggest the questions to ask of history and that the answers should reveal the true significance of the texts. Text and context should illuminate each other. Droysen must have been impressed favorably with this approach, because he worked with Boeckh longer and more closely than did most of the latter’s students in the 1820s.⁷ The evidence for Boeckh’s influence is clear: Droysen’s History of Alexander the Great and History of Hellenism are philological in the enriched sense that Wolf and Boeckh gave the term.

Droysen acquired at Berlin a second, complementary but distinct, approach to history, namely, an insistent desire to relate age to age and to view history as a single process. Because Boeckh’s use of history was primarily contextual, a means to the greater end of reading texts correctly, he paid little attention to long-term change, which was, strictly speaking, irrelevant for his purposes. Later, in 1843, Droysen (who was then leaving ancient for modern history in any case) would fault philologists for doing as his teacher had done, for failing to note what distinguished one historical epoch from another.⁸ His interest in periodization and interconnection derived from, or at least was greatly strengthened by, his work under G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel was an immensely popular and influential lecturer when Droysen was a student, and Droysen showed more than the typical interest in his series of lectures. He heard Hegel’s lectures during every term of his studies and followed “Logic and Metaphysics,” “Aesthetics,” “History of Philosophy,” “History of the Spirit,” and “Philosophy of History” with enough attentiveness that Kuno Fischer used Droysen’s class notes in compiling the definitive edition of Hegel’s works at the turn of the century.⁹

The question of Hegel’s actual influence on Droysen, and Droysen’s generation, is vexed. On the one hand, the exact extent of Droysen’s indebtedness is impossible to establish because, though Droysen made occasional philosophical outbursts and had a wonderfully theoretical mind, he wrote history rather than systematic philosophy. He just did not comment in detail on the writings of Hegel or any other philosopher. Such commentary was not his metier. On the other hand, the importance of Hegel’s general influence on Droysen is obviously immense, because so much of Droysen’s conceptual vocabulary is Hegelian or, to coin a term, Hegelianoid—it resembles, but is not identical with, Hegel’s. There are two compelling reasons for offering this caution. First, bright, energetic minds like Droysen’s do not, normally, simply take over others’ ideas without amendment or, at least, creative misinterpretation. There no doubt are people who simply parrot metaphysical systems, but such monodimensional minds are unlikely to have achieved enough to attract historical attention. Second, Droysen himself, like many other Hegelian enthusiasts in that time and place, self-consciously parted philosophical and, more particularly, political company with Hegel.

Thus, within weeks of Hegel’s death in 1831, Droysen began to criticize Hegel, and German idealists in general, for close association with the hated Restoration and for insufficient attention to empirical fact.¹⁰ Interestingly, neither of these charges is justified: Hegel was extraordinarily well read in history and was no friend of political reaction. Granted, his public comments about Prussia were respectful, but professors were civil servants who could not be expected to savage their employer in public, and, anyway, the Prussia for which Hegel left Heidelberg in 1818 was still the Prussia of the Great Reforms of Stein, Hardenberg, and Humboldt. He came to Prussia, in part, because of its liberal reputation, and was privately critical when reaction gathered in the 1820s. It is true that Hegel defended suppression of the German nationalist fraternities, the Burschenschaften, after the 1819 Wartburgfest, but those fraternities were rabidly nationalist and anti-Semitic, and they enjoyed burning books.¹¹ To oppose them was to defend order and decency, not simple-mindedly to support the Restoration. Droysen is more likely to have picked up these criticisms by listening to other young intellectuals than through serious consideration of what Hegel was actually saying. By 1836, however, Droysen offered a more original and more penetrating criticism of Hegel for contradicting basic Christian dogmas.¹² Those criticisms will receive extended discussion a little later; right now, it is important to establish what, of a general nature, Droysen and his fellows did find attractive in Hegel’s philosophy.

First, there was Hegel’s insistence on the rationality, that is the necessity, of the state. Hegel advanced this point in his misleading aphorism, “What is rational is real and what is real is rational” (Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig).¹³ In so saying, Hegel meant to differ with Kant on the essential unobservability of the rational rather than to place whatever existed beyond moral challenge. For Kant, that is, the real thing, the Ding an sich, could be posited but not observed. Hegel, by contrast, believed that the rational was “actual” in the sense of the German adjective wirklich: active, present, observable. As early as 1821, however, a contemporary took him to mean whatever was rational actually existed, and, conversely, that whatever existed was rational, that is, had to exist.¹⁴ This is an example of creative misinterpretation, and on it rests both conservative and radical readings of Hegel. For conservatives, it seemed to mean that whatever existed was legitimate simply by virtue of existing, whereas for radicals it meant that violent change, if successful, was its own justification. Droysen would elaborate and specify this general notion into a theory of ongoing, purposive change.

To do so, he had only to borrow concepts from Hegel’s updating of the much older providential view of history, implicit in many of Hegel’s lectures but stated with greatest rhetorical force and vividness in his Philosophy of History. Hegel was quite explicit in insisting that the idea that “reason rules the world” was tightly linked to a “religious truth, namely that the world is not left to accident and external, accidental causes, but, on the contrary, a Providence (Vorsehung) rules the world.”¹⁵ This was real providence, for it looked to the “final goal” (Endzweck) of history, that is, “what God wants with the world” (was Gott mit der Welt will).¹⁶ Consequently, history was a “series of stages” (Stufengang) moving purposively toward the “consciousness of freedom” (Bewußtsein der Freiheit). Hegel acknowledged that this movement came at a cost, and—in a famous comparison—he described history as a “slaughterbench . . . upon which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and virtue of individuals are brought for sacrifice.”¹⁷ It is this vision of history—as providential, dynamic, and purposive—that Droysen found strongly attractive, even though philosophical technicalities did not always command his full attention and even though his view of Hegel was in part a matter of impression and misimpression.

It was attractive because, although Droysen disagreed, or thought he disagreed, with Hegel on politics, Hegel’s historical and political theory reassured Droysen that he was on the right and the winning side. Not only was historical life the theater in which God’s purposes were achieved, but this achievement was predictable, at least to some degree. That statement seems odd, because Hegel is notorious for believing that philosophy always arrived too late to affect action. Thus, in a famous statement in The Philosophy of Right, Hegel averred: “When philosophy paints her gray upon gray, the form of life has already grown old, and the gray in the gray cannot be rejuvenated but only recognized; the owl of Minerva takes flight only as dusk begins to fall.”¹⁸ This meant that philosophy can comprehend what is and what has been, not what will come to be. The fact that Hegel comprehended his own age, the age of the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789, meant, however, that his own age was about to pass away. By implication, therefore, Hegel himself was not entirely conservative.¹⁹ Droysen, like others in his generation, would go further and claim an ability to predict at least the near future in some detail. Here one sees the importance of Droysen’s essentially exaggerated charge that Hegel scanted empirical knowledge: supposedly, historical empiricism allowed Droysen to see into the future as the philosophical Hegel had been unable to do.

Finally, it is also fair to say that Hegel offered to Droysen and his generation a sort of emotional satisfaction that was essentially religious in character. Ronald Knox used the term enthusiasm to describe “a clique, and elite . . . who are trying to live a less worldly life than their neighbour...