Historiography and the State: Bachofen, Burckhardt

In his Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (2000), Lionel Gossman observed how the French Revolution ‘and its Napoleonic aftermath – which included the dissolution, in 1806, of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, had the effect of focussing attention in Germany on ‘the state as the political expression of the culture of a human group and its means of defence against other cultures’. Citing the historian Leopold von Ranke’s 1833 essay ‘The Great Powers’, with its reference to ‘the fundamental, truly actual nationality that is expressed in the state’, Gossman noted how the new German awareness of the need for self-defence lay behind ‘Ranke’s explicit emphasis on the state and on foreign affairs as the core of his practice of history’.[i] Gossman approves Wolfgang Hardtwig’s argument that Ranke’s political faith in the state during the Restoration era (1815-30) and after was allied to his own confidence in history-writing, or that ‘his confidence in the objectivity of historical knowledge based on the critical evaluation and interpretation of sources’, as Gossman summarizes, was ‘related to his confidence in the reconciliation he believed had been effected by the Restoration’ (223, 514 n. 73). 

The philologist and native Baseler, Johann Jacob Bachofen – a former student of Ranke’s at the University of Berlin – shared his teacher’s faith in the state. Gossman writes of how, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Roman Law at the University of Basel on 7 May 1841, ‘On Natural Law and Historical Law’, for Bachofen ‘far from being an arbitrary convention, the state […] is “the embodiment of our better nature – […] a ‘brothering’ [‘Verbrüderung’] for the purpose of attaining the highest ends, a combining of our best energies in every field of science”’. (122, 127). Not ‘arbitrary’ but instead purposive and progressive, Bachofen’s state resembled Rankean history-writing too, in that the latter was a confidently evolutionary process. Indeed the aim of ‘the historical school of Ranke, [Friedrich Carl von] Savigny and [Jacob] Grimm’ is defined by Bachofen as being to ‘free the historical from the reproach of arbitrariness and lawlessness’. His lecture argued that it is the historical school which recognizes ‘in the finite a revelation of the infinite and in the earthly a gradual development toward perfection’ (127, quoting Bachofen).

For Bachofen, importantly, the preservation of the state was allied to the preservation of a sense of historical continuity afforded by history-writing. In an 1850 text on the ancient Roman state, he expressed the view that the history of Rome in particular could teach us, amidst our contemporary ‘confusion’, what ‘sustains the state and what precipitates its fall’. This was because (as Gossman summarizes) ‘the study of antiquity removes us […] from the pursuit of ephemeral, fragmentary, immediate satisfactions that Bachofen considers characteristic of democratic and revolutionary societies and restores a sense of the whole and the enduring’ (151, quoting Bachofen). For the other great Swiss historian Gossman focusses on in his book – the cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt – ‘it was a moral imperative,’ Gossman writes, ‘[…] to do everything one could, against all odds, to maintain a historical continuity that […] for him was to be found not so much externally in a divine plan as internally in man’s continued consciousness of and imaginative participation in the culture of the past’ (223).

The sense of historical continuity which Burckhardt was concerned to maintain related to his teacher Ranke’s attempt to reconcile revolution with conservatism in the form of the Prussian state. Gossman describes as an ‘endeavour [that] could hardly have failed to appeal to Burckhardt’, Ranke’s ‘intellectual enterprise’ to seek to establish – as Werner Kaegi has put it – ‘a Peace of Basel between the revolutionary and the conservative powers of his age’ (215). The Peace of Basel had been signed by France and Prussia in 1797 (512 n. 42), the year of Ranke’s birth – ‘that is to say […] the year of the first attempt to produce a new line of descent by bringing together a France transformed by the Revolution and a Prussian state that represented the conservative principle of the European world’ (Ranke’s words). Ranke’s attempt to reconcile revolution with conservatism is traced back by Gossman to what he calls ‘the ambition underlying Hegel’s philosophical program’: the reconciliation of ‘Revolution and historical continuity’. As Gossman states, this was an ambition ‘shared by many who did not accept all of Hegel’s solutions, by Ranke as well as by [Johann Gustav] Droysen or [August] Böckh’ (215, quoting Ranke) – and by Burckhardt too.   

The German Hegelian ambition of reconciling revolution and historical continuity corresponded to the desire ‘to justify the political results of the [French] Revolution by appealing to history and Providence’ (220) that, Gossman notes, characterized ‘liberal French historians of the Restoration’ such as Augustin Thierry or Jules Michelet. But crucially, in Gossman’s assessment, Burckhardt ‘never wholeheartedly embraced the optimistic faith of the Restoration and of some of his Berlin teachers in the providential course of historical development’ (219). For Restoration-era optimism, even a convinced sense of historical continuity, rested on a sense of the German nation-state as being particular and organic which, so Burckhardt would argue in a 13 June 1842 letter to his friend Gottfried Kinkel, had been decisively undermined by the French Revolution. ‘No Restoration, however well intended and however much it may have seemed to be the only solution, can disguise the fact that the nineteenth century began by making tabula rasa of all previously existing relations’, Burckhardt maintained: for him, as Gossman writes, ‘the entire European world had been shaken to the core by the Revolution’. Burckhardt explained how in his view the French Revolution had undermined both the state and ‘the historical ground’ (or Hegelian-Rankean historical optimism):

‘What we might call the historical ground has been dug away from under the feet of nearly all the peoples of Europe, including the Prussians. The spirit of radical negation that entered the state, the church, art, and life toward the end of the last century has filled every moderately animated mind with such a mountainous mass of objective awareness […] that a reestablishment of the old immaturity seems unthinkable. As art has lost its naivete [sic] and it has become possible to observe the styles of all the ages laid out objectively alongside each other, so it is with the state. The special interest people once took in the particularity of their own state has had to yield to a selective, self-conscious idealism.’

As Gossman points out, by questioning faith in the state, or in ‘Germany’s special character as a fully “organic,” traditional nation’, Burckhardt was questioning ‘the foundation stone of Ranke’s historical optimism’ (221, quoting Burckhardt). Yet Gossman also notes that it was specifically the later ‘events of the mid-1840s in Switzerland – the radical Freischaren [volunteers’ brigades march] against the canton of Lucerne, followed by the civil war or Sonderbundskrieg – and the outbreak of the 1848 Revolutions in the rest of Europe’, which would ‘make Burckhardt break decisively with the optimism of his Berlin teachers’ (128-29, 228). In the same way, ‘it was probably a combination of the personal humiliation and failure he suffered in the early 1840s and his shocked reaction to political developments in Switzerland and in Europe in the mid and late 1840s’ that, Gossman argues, ‘led Bachofen to take up a much less optimistic [i.e. liberal] and more rigidly conservative position than he had occupied in his youth’ (128). (Bachofen had had his career as a public academic squashed as a result of anti-elite attacks in the Basel liberal radical press (122)).

Gossman’s account of Bachofen’s and Burckhardt’s ongoing work as Basel-based historians into the 1850s and beyond shows how they nonetheless turned a questioning of ‘the idea of unity and continuity’ (229) – of faith in the particular, organic state and ‘the Rankean vision of history as an ordered and unified whole’ (228) – to use the writing of history to undermine the conservatism of German Grossstaat ideology. As Gossman observes, Baselers ‘tended to view their own German-ness and German-ness in general as a cultural rather than political phenomenon, and throughout the nineteenth century many were obsessed by the development of the new centralized nation-states’. He judges that Burckhardt’s practice of specifically cultural history ‘can be and was interpreted – and was, in part at least, intended’ as ‘a reaffirmation of the idea of Germany as a culture against the idea of Germany as a state’. Burckhardt’s history-writing stood as ‘a challenge on behalf of the smaller and weaker German-speaking communities to the political ambitions of Prussia’. The historian, Gossman emphasizes, continued to advance the vision of Germany as a culture ‘long after it had been repudiated by “Prussian” nationalist historians like [Heinrich von] Sybel and [Heinrich von] Treitschke (“Reichs-Treitschke,” as Burckhardt called him) in the 1860s and 1870s’ (75).       

Gossman also notes – albeit more in relation to the turn of the nineteenth-century – how ‘few political thinkers of the time were as concerned to limit the powers of the state as Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the leading figures in the neohumanist movement’ (75). Gossman’s underlining of the shaping of Basel historians by the neohumanist ideal of a classical education as an ‘internal appropriation of the creative spirit of antiquity’ (73), is illustrated by his remark that ‘the young Bachofen’s greatest debt’ was to his Latin teacher Franz Dorotheus Gerlach – ‘an ardent champion of neohumanism’ (116). It was exactly ‘the emphasis on culture rather than power, on the nation or Volk rather than the state’, Gossman stressed, which ‘made neohumanism especially welcome at Basel’ (74). For neohumanism represented ‘an educational and cultural ideal that was so well adapted to the ideas and interests of the post-Restoration liberal-conservative elite’, as well as to ‘their vision of themselves as free citizens of a small polis, rather than subjects of a monarch or cogs in a vast political or economic machine’ (76). Driving transformations of the nineteenth century – ‘the rise of popular democracy and the formation of mighty nation-states capable of mobilizing vast populations’ – were alike seen by the Basel historians as ‘a threat to the culture and political independence of their native city’ (97). The Basel neohumanist historical mentality thus pitched itself against the Prussian Grossstaat.

In terms of internal Swiss politics, Basel would in fact lose independence as a process of centralization triumphed: ‘by the mid-1870s’, Gossman writes, ‘the need to enhance and concentrate the power of the state was such that Basel itself, as an autonomous polity, was obliged to surrender most of its power to the centralized authority of the federal state in Bern’ (84-85). Burckhardt understood that, in addition, culture was seen within a modern state such as Germany as ‘an instrument of state power or a territory to be appropriated by the state’. But ‘the very weakness of the state in a small city-republic like Basel was an advantage from the point of view of the artist or intellectual’ (102-03: Gossman’s words). In their determination to pursue ‘long-established cultural objectives that are independent of any state’ (103), historians such as Bachofen and Burckhardt – Gossman maintains – adopted ‘the standpoint of the cultural historian or anthropologist rather than that of the political historian, and eschewing the forward-striving narrative form in which the latter’s historical optimism was enshrined’. Because, for Burckhardt, ‘resistance to “modernism” was a significant factor in the decision to pursue cultural history and the history of art rather than political history’, in his writing from the 1851 text The Age of Constantine the Great on ‘accumulations of synchronic tableaux’ would replace ‘the relentless forward surge of historical narrative’ (102). In this way a Basel historian could reject optimistic Grossstaat narratives of political continuity and progress.

12.2.23

This is my last post on this blog for the foreseeable future as I embark on a new study 

 

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[i] Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002; first publ. 2000), p. 253 (further references to Gossman’s book are given after quotations in my text).