Nationalism, Historicism, Crisis

In the nineteenth century the general trend was away from grand comparative stadial theories and towards particularist accounts. The dominant historical rationale of the age was History as Identity, specifically national Identity. The first section of this chapter addresses the political context of so much historical thought across the Continent, with the French Revolution and its aftershocks prominent. The second section focuses on the main trends of the influential German historiography. At the same time, there were challenges to the prevailing German model of historiography even in its heyday: challenges in the 1860s are examined in the third section. Given the grand fluctuations in German political fortunes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the accompanying turmoil in historical philosophy, Germany also features quite heavily in most of the remaining sections of the chapter. Here we examine how the particularizing, relativizing, tendency of a brand of historical thought turned in upon itself from around 1870, as some of the certainties of the nation-through-history were undermined by the effects of modernization and world conflict, and the social function of the historian became the subject of renewed debate. One upshot was a series of manifestos for scholarly neutrality, and a proceduralist emphasis on History as Methodology alone. As the German model of national History was weakened in the first half of the twentieth century, more space was created for competing methodologies within Germany too. The final section of this chapter considers some of those new alternatives.