EVELINA BARBASHINA HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

EVELINA BARBASHINA HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

The writing of history, and the reconceptualization of the idea of history itself, were central to the unfolding self-identity of the leading nineteenth-century nations. The sense of the emancipatory and character-building capacity that knowledge of the past might provide was inherited from the Enlightenment, and linked to the emerging profession of the intellectual. In this period were written many of the most important national histories of the modern era, often by political conservatives, such as FRANÇOIS GUIZOT’S History of Civilisation in France (4 vols, 1830), HEINRICH VON TREITSCHKE’S History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century (1879–96), William Stubbs’s The Constitutional History of England (1874–8) or Henry Hallam’s conservatively Whiggish Constitutional History of England (1827), but also by liberals, like George Bancroft (1800–91) in the USA (History of the United States, 10 vols, 1834–74). As earlier, popular history in particular often served nationalist aims, becoming increasingly jingoistic in the last decades of the century. The biography of great figures remained both

a scholarly and popular focus of historical interest; US historiography commences with Jared Sparks’s editing of Washington’s works in 12 volumes (1833–7). The growth of literacy helped to make history a widely popular subject for the first time. And though some, like Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) in Germany, and BENEDETTO CROCE (1866–1952) in Italy, denied that history could rise to an equivalent level of generality as natural science, this was for historians in particular the great age of ‘scientific history’, in which laws could be discovered and methods applied that would bring certainty and even predictability to historical study. Academic and pro fessional history, while obsessed with the unique qualities of the age, endeavoured increasingly to earn for the subject the coveted legitimacy attached to the natural sciences, and with it the right to claim universal application and validity based upon an established uniformity of human experience and an agreed interpretation of what ‘evidence’ was suitable for generalization.

The institutionalization and professionalization of history in both the public and academic realms that mark the century had a great impact on its conceptualization, notably through the confrontation with theology by the application of historical methods to the study of religion, especially by examining the life of Jesus and through biblical criticism. By the end of the century, the study of historical method had been greatly systematised; see, e.g., for France, the Introduction to the Study of History of Charles

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 268

V.Langlois and Charles Seignobos (1898), or for Britain, Edward Freeman, Methods of Historical Study (1886). A few individuals, notably LEOPOLD VON RANKE (1795– 1886) in Germany, who wrote extended studies of Prussian, French and British history, were able to exert a profound influence as teachers upon the creation of academic history; of considerable academic influence in Britain was LORD ACTON (1834–1902), who insisted that history had ‘to be critical, to be colourless, to be new’.

By the beginning of the period, notable attempts had already been made to integrate national histories into a secular scheme of human evolution generally, notably by Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803; Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit, 1784–91) and the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94; Esquisse d’un tableau des progress

de l’esprit humain, 1795). By 1900 disciplinary subdivision had established economic, social, intellectual, political, legal, comparative and technological histories, amongst others. ‘Modern history’ as such had come fully into its right, for instance in the work of JULES MICHELET (1798–1874), whose Chronological Table of Modern History appeared in 1825. All of the major interpretations of history in the period acknowledge the centrality of commercial and industrial developments, and their fundamental redefinition of many of the parameters of human life. European historians tend to focus also on the nature and effects of the French Revolution, with THOMAS CARLYLE (1795–1881) its greatest historian in English. This article will survey the chief trends in the period, focusing particularly on Britain, France and Germany. It will examine theories of history as such, rather than advances in particular forms of evidence, such as philology, archaeology and palaeontology, the opening and cataloguing of archives, or reappraisals of the problems of bias or objectivity, and in reference to theories of the modern period, rather than medieval or classical scholarship.