Zeitgeist – How Ideas Travel

Politics, Culture and the Public in the Age of Revolution

Maike Oergel

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9783110630930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book investigates the emergence of the modern concept of zeitgeist, the notion of a pervasive contemporary coherence, in the late 18th century. It traces zeitgeist's descent from genius saeculi and investigates its association with public spirit and public opinion before surveying its prominence around the Wars of Liberation in Germany and during the politically restless 1820s in England. This trajectory shows that zeitgeist emerged from the 18th-century discourses about culture and the public functioning of social collectives. Under the impact of the French Revolution the term came to describe social processes of political and cultural challenge. Zeitgeist was discussed as a social dynamic in which emerging elites disseminate new ideas which find enough public approval to influence cultural and political behaviour and practice. These findings modify the view that zeitgeist eludes critical grasp and is mainly invoked for manipulative purposes by showing that the zeitgeist discussions around 1800 contributed to the formation of modern politics and capture key aspects of how ideas are disseminated within societies and across borders, providing a way of reading history horizontally.

1Johann Gottfried Herder – the “Inventor of Zeitgeist”?

The concept of zeitgeist describes an at once animating and permeating social force. It originates around the turn of the seventeenth century but was conceptually re-deployed in the late eighteenth century, so it can now appear as if the term we use today emerged in the ambit of the French Revolution. This is reinforced by the fact that in German the word Zeitgeist was at this time beginning to oust other forms denoting this concept, such as “Geist der Zeit(en)” [spirit of the time(s)] or “Genius des Zeitalters/der Zeit” [genius of the age/of time], and has remained current ever since. And to a large extent, this narrative of the emergence of the term (and concept) of zeitgeist at the end of the eighteenth century holds true. Yet three key aspects of the early seventeenth-century concept survived the terminological changes and established a continuity between the early seventeenth- and the late eighteenth-century understanding of zeitgeist: firstly, that the concept denotes social influences on human activity, secondly, that it is focused on culture, and thirdly that it is integral to constructing identities. The contextual background of zeitgeist was, and largely remained, the post-sixteenth-century secularisation process, the development of modern historical thinking, and the emergence of modern social collectives, such as the nation, the republic, and other constitutional entities.

1.1Herder’s work as a site of convergence

Much ink has recently been spilled as to whether the twenty-four-year-old Johann Gottfried Herder was the first to use the term “Zeitgeist” in 1769.5 While Herder did clearly not “invent” either the term or the concept, despite the many claims to the contrary,6 it is indisputable that his work is the site where different approaches to the concept, and a plethora of related terms, converge and develop. It will become clear in the following that when he uses the word “Zeitgeist” in 1769 he does so on the back of a host of contemporary and historical deployments of the concept and that he would not, in all probability, have considered himself particularly original.7

The recent discussions about Herder’s status in the history of zeitgeist have highlighted the fact that the concept of a “genius” or “spirit of the age”, which distinguishes periods from each other and which unifies one period and its contemporaries, the “Zeitgenossen”, in perceptible ways, is much older. It emerged in the early modern period, when historical time was no longer exclusively conceived as a single providential development but was coming to be regarded as a chain of distinct and fundamentally different eras. This development began with the notion of the Renaissance as the rebirth of antiquity after the intervening and different “Middles Ages”.8 A new term was coined in (neo-) Latin, the lingua franca of the educated early modern world, to name what makes a period distinctive: genius saeculi. This term was the linguistic and semantic basis from which a variety of vernacular terms were eventually derived. In German these were “Geist der Zeit(en)” [spirit of the time(s)], “Geist des Zeitalters” [spirit of the age], “Säkulargeist” [secular spirit/spirit of this world/age], “Genius der Zeit” and “Genius der Zeiten” [genius of the time and of the times] as well as “Zeitgeist”, French translated it as “l’esprit du siècle” and “l’esprit du tem(p)s”, Voltaire uses the latter frequently in his Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, and in English there appeared “spirit of the times” (Hurd and Percy) and “genius of the age” (Hume).

Genius saeculi emerged at the beginning of the seventeenth century, most prominently in the works of John Barclay (1582–1621) and Francis Bacon (1561–1626). The variety of terms derived from it suggests a large and fairly open semantic field well into the eighteenth century – Herder’s work features most of the German derivations (Kempter 1990–1991: 51–61). This semantic and linguistic breadth is due to two things: a wide-reaching, well established “genius”-discourse (in the sense of l’esprit/spirit/Geist) and the fact that the Latin word saeculum harbours a number of ambiguities, which it acquired during its long usage passing from Roman Latin into ecclesiastical Latin, before being recoded in Protestant Latin and secularised historiography. Saeculum can mean “century” or “age”. “Age” is the older meaning, rooted in the Roman usage of saeculum for the idea of “a lifetime” or generational cycle and the theological understanding of “ages of the world”. In Christian thinking and ecclesiastical Latin it assumed the meaning of “worldly”, in the sense of “this (mortal) life”, which is responsible for the modern meaning of “secular” and for the often pejorative deployment of “secular spirit”. When Protestant chronology needed to replace the reigns of popes with a more opportune measure, numeric centuries were adopted, a practice that was soon transferred into secular historiography. This is the reason for the double meaning of siècle in French (as well as in the other Romance languages), while English and German created new functional terms, century and Jahrhundert, which are differentiated from “age” and “Zeitalter” (Meumann 2012: 299–305). In the Latin saeculum, however, all educated early modern readers had access to the overlapping meanings of age and worldliness, which combined to a sense of human history and people’s places withinit.

The genius-discourse, under which I subsume the various usages of Geist, l’esprit, or spirit from the seventeenth century onwards, when Barclay and Bacon used these terms, reached a peak in the first half of the eighteenth century. Deriving its sense as an animating and dominating force from Christian metaphysics (Jung 2012: 322–323), “genius” or spirit informed the wide-ranging discussions of “culture” in their various national, legal, and intellectual manifestations, discussions which produced the many publications on “manners”. Helvetius’ De l’esprit (1758) and Voltaire’s Essay sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1756) are prominent examples of this, as is of course Montesquieu’s L’esprit des loix (1748). The idea that such culture, and its empirical manifestation in peoples’ activities, was subject to historical change and could be empirically observed in the present, or by diligent and imaginative historians in past ages, was never far from the surface.9 In fact a desire to improve the writing of history around 1600 initiated the rise of the idea of intellectual and cultural history, which was in turn responsible for the emergence of the modern understanding of “culture”. This understanding was based on the notion that culture, as a surrounding context, conditions human conceptions and behaviour, i.e. possesses the power to shape thinking and behaviour, as Erich Hassinger succinctly summarised in 1978.10 The full title of Voltaire’s Essay makes clear this link between history, (national) culture, and manners: Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principeaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’á Louis XIII.

The intertwining of spirit and history, via human cultural identities, is the basis for genius saeculi’s capacity to denote both synchronic and diachronic time, the specific age and the history of a nation or culture as a whole, which could then be allotted a place in general history. This accounts for the occasionally very long duration of an age, such as the “age of chivalry”, in which the spirit of chivalry ruled, or the “age of the Old Testament”. In their diachronic aspect “Geist der Zeit(en)”, “l’esprit du siècle” and “spirit of the times” resonate with the emerging grandeur of the historical process, which will eventually develop into the Hegelian Weltgeist, incidentally a term Herder used, with the same meaning, a decade before Hegel (Herder 1991 [1793]: 89).11 A focus on synchronic spirit, visibly animating a specific period, began to predominate towards the end of the eighteenth century, galvanised by the momentous events unfolding in France, although the notion of longer “ages” of coherence did not disappear. Both “Geist der Zeit(en)” and “Zeitgeist” inherit this dual capacity. Both aspects, diachronic and synchronic, have their roots in identity construction. As I will argue, this is already the case in Barclay.

Both time (Zeit) and spirit (Geist) share the features of impermanence, instability, and intangibility; their effects seem tangible, but they are not. They are never fixed and always open to challenge and contestation. They share these features with two other entities that rose to prominence in the eighteenth century and that are of key concern for zeitgeist: culture and the public sphere.

Both the diachronic and the synchronic dimensions of zeitgeist are essential for one of the key functions this concept fulfils: a diagnostics of the present, which is more often than not a critique. The practice of criticising one’s own times, by means of satire, alongside a diachronic panorama of different cultures, was modelled by Barclay. But in the minds of the mid- and late eighteenth-century thinkers another debate about culture and history provided a very similar model: the Querelle. Critiquing the current state of culture, and by extension of humanity, is a key trait of this cultural contestation. The position of the anciens contrasts the natural purity and vigour of Homeric times, or the mature artistic and intellectual perfection of the classical times, with an overrefined, decadent, under-achieving present, while the modern position exalts self-confident enlightened thinking that critiques the superseded nature of the past. Critiquing the present age informs the work of both Rousseau and Voltaire, it reached a fevered peak in the 1790s. The course of the revolution in France produced the need to explain the causes and the prospects of the Revolution, at this time the term “Zeitgeist” as we use it today burst onto the German discursive scene.

The deployment of genius saeculi and zeitgeist in both their positive and negative connotations ranging from satirical or earnest critique of the times to immanent world spirit is made possible by the instability of both spirit and time, especially in their relation to each other within this compound noun: connotations of worldliness (as opposed to religious eternity) clash with the notion of the historical immanence of a world-spirit; the historical process allows for both rise and decline, the present may inaugurate a better future or precipitate deterioration, it can result from progress or decline. Individuals, nations, and cultures are exposed to historical conditions, they may successfully or unsuccessfully try to mitigate or foster them. This tension between diachronic and synchronic dimensions lies at the heart of the zeitgeist concept.12 It has a corollary in a tension between cultural and political control and agency, as we shall see, which is less recognised, because much of the existing discussion has located zeitgeist in a historical discourse, without considering its place in identity discourses.13

The constructed cultural identities of collectives are key to understanding not just zeitgeist discussions, historical or otherwise, but also to understanding the functioning of the zeitgeist dynamic. These identities are the link between zeitgeist discussed in ongoing political and social contexts and zeitgeist as epochal historical identity constructed by historians who look back on past periods. Both kinds of zeitgeist share the same purpose, differentiation: they are constructed to differentiate historical or geographical identities, to claim progress or decline, establish cultural superiority or room for improvement.

Herder’s work illustrates these developments between the mid-eighteenth century and the 1790s. From the 1760s to the 1790s he uses the various linguistic and conceptual forms of genius saeculi (Kempter 1990–1991: 52–61), and in his writing both diachronic and synchronic strands converge: he discusses both historical and contemporary identities, always based on cultural identity. Beginning in 1767 in the second collection of Fragments, when speaking of translating oriental poetry into a contemporary context, he pairs up “Sekulargeist”, perhaps the closest possible calque of genius saeculi, with “Nationalgeist”, and uses “Genie unserer Zeit, Denkart und Sprache” [genius of our age, way of thinking and language] (Herder 1877: 274). A little further on one also finds “Geist eines Zeitalters” (discussing the pointlessness of imitating ancient Greek poetic forms) (1877: 314). Kempter also attests Herder’s use of “Geist des Jahrhunderts” as well as “Geschichtsgeist”, “Gott der Zeit”, and “Zeitgott” (1990–1991: 54–55). The latter group connotes the (divine) majesty of time and history and suggests an immanent world spirit. In line with the earlier observations regarding the use of “Jahrhundert” in the sense of “age” (saeculum), Herder speaks, in 1773, of “Jahrhundert des schönsten griechischen Geschmacks” [age of the most beautiful Grecian taste] (1891 [1773]: 638). In Herder’s thinking, especially in the 1760s and 1770s (and perhaps throughout his life), the synchronic focus on an age tended to illustrate diachronic progression; ages are phases in the course of history. Most of his texts that feature these terms are histories of aspects of human culture. These phases are often lengthy, frequently encompassing whole cultures. In 1774, for example, he calls chivalry (Rittersinn) the “Blüthe des Zeitgeistes” [the flower of the spirit of the age...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Johann Gottfried Herder – the “Inventor of Zeitgeist”?
• 2 The Making of Zeitgeist – Culture and Public Spirit between Enfranchisement and Control
• 3 The Public and Zeitgeist – Public Spirit and Public Opinion 1790–1800
• 4 Zeitgeist in Germany – Public Opinion, History, and the People in Franz Josias von Hendrich, Ernst Brandes, and Ernst Moritz Arndt
• 5 Zeitgeist in Britain – The Spirit of the Age and Social Reform in Julius Hare, William Hazlitt, Thomas Carlyle, and J. S. Mill
• 6 How Ideas Travel (in Theory): The Zeitgeist Dynamic
• 7 How an Idea Travels (in Practice) – A Case Study: The Germanic and the Gothic – The Life and Times of the “Northern” Identity of Liberty and Duty in Germany and Britain 1770–1870
• Works Cited
• Index