Romantic Historiography
• The Romantic Period:
– Reaction to Enlightenment focus on “reason and
science”
– as well as aristocratic social and political norms
– rejection of monarchy in favor of the “hero”
• Identified with the French Revolution and the
later reign of Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars
of conquest (so, 1789 and 1812-ish)
• For historiography, mostly focused on a belief in
the ability of the heroic individual to alter society
and determine the fate of an entire nation.
Romanticism, culturally
• Emphasized the importance of
– Imagination
– Feeling
– Strong emotion
• (trepidation, awe, and horror as aesthetic
experiences),
• Focus on the artist and the viewer of art as
the arbiter of art rather than the Academy
Inevitability and Fate
• Romantics had a strong belief in historical
and natural inevitability
– the fate of the nation
– the birthright of the nation
– “national character”
Joke about National Character
• In Heaven:
• The Swiss = bankers
• The Germans =
bureaucrats
• The Italians = lovers
• The English = policemen
• The French = cooks
• In Hell:
• The Swiss = lovers
• The Germans =
policemen
• The Italians =
bureaucrats
• The English = cooks
• The French = bankers
Romanticism and Nature
• Romanticism stressed holding nature in
awe
• Posited that humans who connected with
nature or the natural world (or “natural
fate”) would experience the sublime.
The Romantic Period in Historiography
• Struggle between two opposing forces:
• Rankean empiricism
– the only fact is that which can be observed and experienced by
the historian
– all facts are in primary documents
–
• Romantic Nationalism
– the state derives its political legitimacy as an organic
consequence of the unity of those it governs.
• language,
• race,
• culture,
• religion and
• customs of the "nation"
– reaction against dynastic or imperial hegemony
• which assessed the legitimacy of the state from the "top down"
• emanating from a monarch or other authority
• such as “Divine Right of Kings”
Rankean Empiricism
• Attempt to define history as a scientific
endeavor
– So in this way a hangover of Enlightenmentperiod valorization of scientific inquiry
• Deeply influenced even its opposition
tradition of Romantic Nationalism
– See in attempts to make theories about nation
(and race) “scientific”
Intellectual Origins of Romantic Nationalism
• Rousseau
– the concept of the Noble Savage = idea that
in all individuals (even “savage” ones) lie the
roots of the nation
• Johann Gottfried von Herder
– In 1784 argued that
• geography formed the natural economy of a
people
• customs and society would develop dependent on
what their natural environment favored.
Romantic Nationalism and Creating
Historical Ethnicities 1
• Attempts to create historical ethnic
cultures through folklore and history
• Folklore
– The Brothers Grimm collect tales thought to
be “authentically German”
– “Mother Goose” for England
– Pericault for France
– Washington Irving U.S.
Romantic Nationalism and Creating
Historical Ethnicities 2
• History
• Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of
– explaining what it means to be English
• Esp. in the context of the British Empire
– but also important as a politician
• Served on the Supreme Council of India
between 1834 and 1838
– ended education in Sanskrit and Arabic in Indian
schools
– created “Macaulay’s Children”
• people born of Indian ancestry who adopt Western Culture as
a lifestyle.
“Macaulay’s Children”
• Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education,” 1835:
• "It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt
to educate the body of the people. We must at present
do our best to form a class who may be interpreters
between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of
persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste,
in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we
may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the
country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science
borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render
them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to
the great mass of the population." 8
Romantic Nationalism and Creating
Historical Ethnicities
• History:
• Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and
the National State
– the development of national feelings in the
19th century.
Historical Origins of Romantic
Nationalism 1
• Napoleon’s Empire
– Romantics had embraced the French
Revolution in the beginning
• because it overthrew a Divine Right Monarch
• and because it was the uprising of the
romanticized people
– think of Delacroix’s depiction of “Liberty Leading the
People”
• and the continuation of a revolutionary moment
that started with the US
1840s
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix, Liberty
Historical Origins of Romantic
Nationalism
• Napoleon’s Empire
– But they then resisted Napoleon’s Imperial
system.
• A sense of self-determination
• and national consciousness
• that had enabled Revolutionary forces to defeat
aristocratic regimes in battle
• became rallying points for resistance against the
French Empire.
Romantic Nationalism and
Historiography
• Look at the reading list for today:
– Three of the four are Germans
• Immanuel Kant
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Karl Marx
• What’s up with Germany
Resistance to Napoleon’s system
• “Spiritual renewal” became a means to
engage in the struggle against Napoleon
– ex: Johann Gottlieb Fichte (disciple of Kant)
– coins word Volkstum (nationhood) as part of
this resistance to French hegemony9
Fichte’s "To the German Nation" (1806)
• expressed the unity of language and nation
– “The first, original, and truly natural boundaries of states are
beyond doubt their internal boundaries. Those who speak the
same language are joined to each other by a multitude of
invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art
begins; they understand each other and have the power of
continuing to make themselves understood more and more
clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an
inseparable whole.
– “Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself
in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in
every people each individual develops himself in accordance
with that common quality, as well as in accordance with his own
peculiar quality-then, and then only, does the manifestation of
divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be; and only a man
who either entirely lacks the notion of the rule of law and divine
order, or else is an obdurate enemy thereto, could take upon
himself to want to interfere with that law, which is the highest law
in the spiritual world!”
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
• Kant is a bridge
between the
Rationalist and
Empiricist traditions of
the 18th century.
– and decisively shaped
the Romantic and
German Idealist
philosophies of the
19th century.
– In part through the
idea of a “universal
history.”
Kant
• Kant argues that history is determined by
physical and chemical laws.
• The “Universal History” opens with the
assertion:
– “Whatever metaphysical theory may be
formed regarding the freedom of the will, it
holds equally true that the manifestation of the
will in human actions are determined, like all
other external events, by universal natural
laws.”
Kant, Fate, and Free Will
• Fate (or natural law) is stronger than individual free will:
– Free will seems to bear on such matters as marriages, births,
deaths, so we think they cannot be predicted in detail;
– BUT, Kant argues, “the annual statistics of great countries prove
that these events take place according to constant natural laws.”
• Thus, according to Kant:
– “Each [man], according to his own inclination, follows
his own purpose, often in opposition to others; yet
each individual and people, as if following some
guiding thread, go toward a natural but to each of
them unknown goal; all work toward furthering it, even
if they would set little store by it if they did know it.”
• Kant believes: nature will eventually bring forth a Kepler
or a Newton
history, thus giving us a “universal history”
Kant’s Universal History 1
• 1. All natural capacities of a creature are destined to
evolve completely to their natural end.
• 2. In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those
natural capacities which are directed to the use of his
reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in
the individual.
• 3. Nature has willed that man should, by himself,
produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical
ordering of his animal existence, and that he should
partake of no other happiness or perfection than that
which he himself, independently of instinct, has created
by his own reason.
• 4. The means employed by Nature to bring about the
development of all the capacities of men is their
antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the
cause of a lawful order among men.
Kant’s Universal History 2
• 5. The greatest problem for the human race, to the
solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement
of a universal civic society which administers law among
men.
• 6. This problem is the most difficult and the last to be
solved by mankind.
• 7. The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution
is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external
relation among states and cannot be solved without a
solution of the latter problem.
• 8. The history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as
the realization of Nature’s secret plan to bring forth a
perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which
the capacities of mankind can be fully developed, and
also bring forth that external relation among states which
is perfectly adequate to this end.10
Kant’s Universal History 3
• 9. A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history
according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic
union of the human race must be regarded as possible
and, indeed, as contributing to this end of Nature.
Kant as a bridge figure
• Kant was both an empiricist and an idealist
– As an empiricist, he demanded scientific
accuracy (the use of statistics, for instance,
and a reliance on documents)
– As an idealist he believed that a concept
could shift natural laws
• We can see things in a new way (revision of the
idea)
• His followers would embrace Romantic
Nationalism to make sense of history.
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