Edward Gibbon, oil painting by Henry Walton, 1774; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London
Gibbon’s great work gives no elaborate account of the causes of the decline and fall—because the causes, he thought, were obvious. Borrowing an image from physics, he wrote:
the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of enquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.
The Enlightenment has been condemned as “unhistorical.” It did lack sympathy, and thus full understanding, of some cultures and periods. Hume’s view that human nature was essentially the same in the Roman Empire and in 18th-century Britain now seems wrong. No technical advances in historiography were made by the philosophes. On the other hand, history was widely read, and the brilliant writing of Voltaire and Gibbon helped to create something like a mass public for historical works. Finally, the Enlightenment expanded the historical world, in principle at least, almost to the limits recognized today—and it never shrank again. Romantic historiography
Nevertheless, it is hard to see how historiography could have developed further within the limits established by the Enlightenment worldview. A second generation of philosophes, especially the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were already testing those limits in the later 18th century; but the most potent challenge to them came from Germany, now finally assuming its full place in the intellectual life of Europe. The period 1770–1830 witnessed the activity of an astonishing constellation of German thinkers, poets, and eventually historians, of whom Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich von Schiller, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel are only the best known. Johann Gottfried von Herder
Perhaps even more influential than these figures, however, was Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803). Herder was a polymath—as much a theologian, philosopher, anthropologist, or literary critic as a theorist of history. His Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit (1784–91; Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man) anticipated Darwin in its claim that all organic life is connected and evolving progressively toward human beings, the highest form of life.
Johann Gottfried von Herder, detail of an oil painting by Gerhard von Kügelgen, 1808; in the Library of Tartu State University, Estonia.Courtesy of the Library of Tartu State University
Herder held a tripartite view of historical development and was interested in what he conceived as the spirit of cultures. He posited an age of primitive human poets whose consciousness was distilled in epics. An age of prose followed as humans became mature, but it was only in the “ripe” age—inevitably metaphorically associated with senescence—that language became precise enough to be suitable for philosophical reflection.
The same preoccupation with language underlies Herder’s thoughts about culture—or Volk, as he called it. Within a culture’s language, he wrote, “dwell its entire world of tradition, history, religion, principles of existence: its whole heart and soul.” The language of a Volk is created in its youth or poetic age; afterward it is relatively resistant to changes imposed from the outside. Herder resisted the notion that any age or Volk is inferior to any other.
It is not hard to detect a German declaration of independence in these views. “Germany,” after all, was a cultural but not a political unity. The exaltation of all cultures as equal and the admiration for “primitive” humans stood in contrast to French cultural chauvinism and the grading of people according to how closely they reached the Enlightenment standard of rationality. Furthermore, Herder turned the interests of historians away from political and diplomatic history and toward social, cultural, and intellectual history.
Even more profoundly, Herder elevated the historical imagination to supreme importance. This did not mean that he favoured fantasy, the invention of speeches, or other deliberate falsifications. But he thought that the spiritual development of a people cannot be discerned by purely rational processes. The ways in which the art of a people, for example, is related to its economic or social institutions has to be grasped in an act of insight. An impressionistic thinker, Herder sensed the aspects of the Enlightenment that his generation found unsatisfying. He is generally regarded as the father of Romanticism. Giambattista Vico
During the Romantic movements, thinkers reevaluated past thought and looked for what might be usable in it. This process led to the discovery by the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) of the eccentric Scienza nuova (1725; “New Science”) of the Neapolitan professor of rhetoric Giambattista Vico (1688–1744). Much of the Scienza nuova deals with problems in the history of Roman law (which had preoccupied 16th- and 17th-century scholars), but it also proposes a new methodology for history, a scheme of how it develops, and a reformulation of the providential theory.
In opposition to the philosophy of Descartes, Vico argued that only history can produce certainty. According to Vico, humans can have knowledge of “the world of nations” because they created it, but only God can know the natural world. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes had equated verum (“truth”) and factum (“the made”), but Vico made this a fundamental principle of historiography, one that he hoped would make it the queen of the sciences.
One problem for Vico, which he says took him many years of effort to solve, was that of the nature of primitive mentality. In opposition to “the conceit of scholars”—the assumption that primitive humans must have had worldviews and mental processes like those of the Enlightenment—Vico held that the authors of the Iliad, the ancient Greek poem attributed to Homer, were individuals of powerful imaginations who could express themselves only through poetic metaphors. Among these metaphors was Zeus, the god who throws down thunderbolts, and his equivalent in every other gentile culture. This age of gods was succeeded by an age of heroes and finally by an age of men, whose characteristic expression was prose and whose inevitable trope was irony. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Vico and Herder worked toward a conception of “spirit of the times” and “spirit of the people,” both of which were incorporated into Hegel’s enormously ambitious philosophy of history. Hegel’s thought eludes easy summation, and its premises are not intuitively obvious. As an absolute idealist, he held that only ideas are real (in Hegel’s famous phrase, “the real is rational”). Ideas develop by contradiction, or by implying their opposites, since establishing what a concept is involves determining what it is not. Thus, pure being implies not-being; but since it is pure being, it is not anything in particular, and hence it is also a kind of nothingness. From the ideas of pure being and nothingness the idea of becoming is inevitably generated. This is one example of what is usually called (though seldom by Hegel) dialectic. The Idea, or Spirit, for Hegel must realize itself by being incarnated in the world—in inorganic, animal, and vegetable life because they obey natural laws, and in human history because “World history in general is the development of Spirit in Time, just as Nature is the development of the Idea in Space.”