Kenneth Bourne, D. Cameron Watt, Michael Partridge, Paul Preston. British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print. Bethesda: University Press of America, 2003. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-83648-7.
Reviewed by Brian Ladd (Department of History, University at Albany)
Published on H-German (September, 2005)
Becoming Conservative
A new awareness of historical change emerged in the early nineteenth century, in particular among German Romantics. This is an old story among intellectual historians, but the difficulty in grasping the nature of the new way of thinking, along with its importance for so many strands of modern thought, justifies continued attention. Among very recent books that present one version or another of the story are Peter Fritzsche's Stranded in the Present, which marshals a smorgasbord of evidence to support fascinating but sweeping claims about the emergence of a modern sense of estrangement from the past; and Theodore Ziolkowski's Clio the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany, which uses deft biographical sketches to link the lives and works of influential scholars.[1]
Despite the obvious thematic overlap, John Edward Toews's new book covers almost none of the same ground. Although it is long and ambitious, the book is very narrowly focused on a particular way of thinking about history. Whereas many works place the ideas of Hegel at the center of the German approach to historical thinking, Toews's book is about opponents of Hegel's philosophy. The nature of this "Historical School's" hostility to Hegel and the "Hegelian school" remains largely outside his story. What becomes clear is that these men were struggling to reconcile recent insights into the historical unfolding of national and individual identities, on the one hand, with orthodox Protestant Christianity as well as royal or paternal authority, on the other.
Toews's story does have a particular setting. The outside force that brought together a diverse set of thinkers was the accession of Frederick William IV to the Prussian throne in 1840. The king was a man of ideas--a dreamer, in the eyes of his detractors--who saw philosophical and theological renovation as among his most important tasks as a ruler. He had developed many intellectual contacts during his years as crown prince, and as king he set out to place the minds he most respected into university chairs and other influential positions in Berlin. Among these scholars were many who took very seriously their beliefs that their intellectual endeavors might guide the future course of German society or the Prussian state.
No grand philosophical or political synthesis emerged from the king's efforts, so in one sense Toews's is a story of failure. But Toews believes that the intellectual confluences of the era framed fundamental questions that have lingered through the modern era. Toews describes his aim this way: "to re-create the paths that led individuals operating in different areas of culture to the particular perspective they possessed in 1840 and which made their affiliation in a common project possible, even though this affiliation may have been ephemeral and in some cases grounded at least partly in misrecognition" (p. xviii).
The king and the intellectual institutions of Berlin (especially the university) brought together these intellectuals, but their interactions are not the subject of the book. This is a work of old-fashioned intellectual history in the sense that it is almost entirely an exegesis of the writings of individual intellectuals, their published works as well as their published correspondence. Toews offers some historiographical judgments in his footnotes, but his text is entirely devoted to his own interpretations of his primary sources.
Many of the older members of this cohort are best known for work they did a generation earlier, amid the ferment of the Napoleonic era. These were also the formative years of most of the younger men examined here. Toews, however, is interested in what developed in the following decades, as many of these men embraced more conservative views in politics and theology: more authoritarian beliefs ("paternal" rather than "fraternal") as well as more theologically orthodox ones, shifting "from immanent to transcendent models of religious and philosophical faith" (p. xx).
Framing the book are a "philosophical prologue" and an "antiphilosophical epilogue." The subject of the former is the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, whom Frederick William lured to the University of Berlin in 1841. Everyone, it seems, including the king and Schelling themselves, expected the philosopher's lectures to offer a kind of official ruling philosophy as well as a counterpoint to the still influential views of his late predecessor, Hegel. Schelling declared that Hegel's narrowly rationalistic system left no room for human beings to understand the meaning of their existence, a task that required recourse to a theology grounded in the historical development of the human spirit. But Schelling seems to have lacked Hegel's talent for philosophical synthesis. The excitement of his arrival soon gave way to disillusionment, not least Schelling's own growing pessimism and his subsequent withdrawal from his public role.
The rest of the book does not follow Schelling's agenda as he would have understood it; that is, Toews does not focus on the discipline of philosophy, but rather on specialists in a wide variety of other disciplines who were grappling with similar questions about how history might inform individual character, political authority, and the understanding of divine truth. The book is not biographical, however, except to the extent that Toews traces subtle changes in the beliefs of individual thinkers. Nor does Toews venture many direct comparisons between the views of the individuals he examines in separate chapters. He even invites readers to read the chapters out of sequence.
Part 1 is the section of the book most anchored in cultural politics, although the title "Historicism in Power" expresses a hope of the time more than any reality. The first chapter looks at the king's own "vision of cultural reformation." Toews is not interested in judging the success of Frederick William's policies, but he wants to show that the regime's aspirations were modern rather than reactionary: "The official policy of the state was not simply to maintain order and repress subversion, but to actively nurture a Christian-German historical consciousness grounded in the 'historical' principle" (p. 21). The next chapter elaborates on official views by looking at the ways the thinking of the king's adviser, Christian Bunsen, changed in the generation between the Napoleonic era and Frederick William's ascension to the throne. In Toews's telling, the transition is one from a revolutionary ideal of fraternity to a new patriarchy that, however, maintains the hopes for individual fulfillment under the protection of legitimate authority.
The second part of the book reaches the farthest afield, with its chapters on Karl Friedrich Schinkel's architecture and Felix Mendelssohn's music. Drawing on Schinkel's written sentiments but mainly on the evidence of his designs themselves, Toews presents his famous experiments with historical forms as attempts to build a community that bound together liberated individuals. He then performs a comparable exegesis on Mendelssohn's musical compositions--again, at great length and a high level of abstraction.
The first chapter in part 3, on the historical school of law, focuses primarily on the transformation of Friedrich Karl von Savigny's views between 1815 and 1840, as he moved toward a firm belief in the necessity of both religious belief and state power to anchor the historically evolved understanding of law for which he is famous. Thus his views converged with the other figure treated here, his even more conservative colleague Friedrich Julius Stahl. This material is followed by a chapter on Jacob Grimm, perhaps the most biographical and hence the most readable in the book. Although Grimm (along with his brother Wilhelm) famously found in language and mythology the traces of a vanished cultural unity, Toews portrays a Grimm also groping toward the possibility that language could cement national unity in the present.
While Grimm looked to the unity of the linguistic nation, Leopold von Ranke, subject of the next chapter, is best known for writing histories in which states--and ultimately Prussia--were the building blocks of historical development. Toews does not wish to defend Ranke against the well-known charge that his claims to present history objectively are belied by his tendency to take the side of history's winners, but he argues that for Ranke's contemporaries, "his narrative presented a lesson of obligation and choice. Historical knowledge of how the self was constituted as an historical subject, a knowledge of itself as 'object,' was a necessary condition for becoming truly historical. But one needed to risk oneself, on the basis of personal belief in a transcendent reality, in order to become a constituting historical subject, and thus actualize the father's will in the world" (p. 418).
Most readers will need considerable patience to unpack the learning that undergirds sentences like these. They hint at Toews's central contention. In addition to identifying a paternalist view of politics and a shift from immanent or pantheistic to more orthodox theology, Toews is interested in the ways these men tried to avoid letting their recognition of the power of history push them into a fatalistic acceptance of their lack of agency--this position was their crucial objection to Hegelianism--but rather sought an understanding of how changing historical circumstances gave them the opportunity to serve God and to participate in legitimately constituted authority on earth.
In lieu of a conclusion, Toews offers an "antiphilosophical epilogue" focusing on Marx and Kierkegaard, young outsiders to the ruminations of the older thinkers. The fact that their studies in Berlin were crucial to the individual development of both Marx and Kierkegaard goes unmentioned. However, Toews suggests that the parallels between these two men's ideas offer the best evidence of the significance of the material he has examined: "Was it merely a coincidence that two path-breaking, historically resonant, and prophetic conceptions of what it meant to live human existence in the form of historical selfhood--those of Marx and Kierkegaard--emerged, at least in part, as critical responses to this wide-ranging attempt to construct a cultural politics for historicizing identity in Berlin during the early 1840s?" (p. xvi). Toews pairs these two men's writings from the 1840s to underscore his belief that the era framed the modern understanding of historically produced identity: "From the early nineteenth century to the present, the reciprocal tensions within a self experienced as both product and producer, however wide the oscillations from one pole to the other, have continued to define what it means to be a historical self" (p. 439). Marx and Kierkegaard, he contends, offer us complementary halves of an analysis of what this means: "While Marx developed in increasingly rigorous detail his analysis of the capitalist mode of production and the forms of social intercourse that arose from it, Kierkegaard remained vague and cryptic in his analysis of the 'external' historical conditions that might drive the reflective ego and its 'aesthetic' mode of existence to the turning point of absolute despair. While Marx remained vague and cryptic concerning the structure of the revolutionary act that would bring about the actualization of historical selfhood and refused to elaborate on the precise nature of the state of collective self-making that would emerge from this act, or how it could be sustained as a way of life, Kierkegaard became increasingly specific and prolix in his description of the structure of the act of becoming historical and of the ways in which historical self-identity might be grounded and sustained" (p. 433).
This book will be essential reading for intellectual historians of the period and for students of the men to whom the individual chapters are devoted. Others may find it a daunting read. Toews makes no compromises for the reader, assuming a level of comfort with the language of idealist philosophy. He generalizes very cautiously, and he never tries to distill the book down to a pithy argument. Perhaps some reviewer can manage to do so. Not this one.
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Citation:
Brian Ladd. Review of Bourne, Kenneth; Watt, D. Cameron; Partridge, Michael; Preston, Paul, British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10860
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