Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954)Author(s): Philip J. WolfsonReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Oct., 1956), pp. 511-525Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2707785 .Accessed: 23/10/2012 08:55

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FRIEDRICH MEINECKE (1862-1954) BY PHILIP J. WOLFSON

The annals of the social sciences are crowded with broad interpre- tive theses on the cultural unity of the West, and the concept of a common Western civilization has become implanted as a virtually un- challenged premise in our thinking concerning the problems of in- tellectual cross-fertilization, especially as these affect levels of under- standing between the old world and the new. When one considers the disconcerting variations in national mores and attitudes that persist, despite marvelous advances in the technology of communica- tions, this notion is rather a comforting one, and those who expound upon it with richness and insight may expect the reward of an ex- tensive audience. It is the ability to paint the large canvas that, after all, has marked the greater historians since the time of Herodotus. Particularly in our own times, when researchers in the humanities grope painstakingly for scientific standards, a Toynbee appearing to gaze serenely across an infinite, but to him intelligible universe properly commands awe, admiration, and an assured reader- ship. Then, too, a broad overview combines readily with a clear and confident thesis. Toynbee, for one, insistently erudite as he is, does not permit his facts to overshadow his conclusions; if some detail threatens to disturb the regular surface of his panorama, it may find itself subordinated. Against such grand assurance, criticism of details comes perilously near to carping; one can only wonder whether universal history is approachable by any other method than standing firm on top of it, let it heave where it will.

Of course this sort of firmness, so conducive to the didacticism that a certain type of mind demands from the historian, should not simply be shrugged away as beneath consideration. The past as lesson has its value, especially in troubled times. Yet the pathways of history, as students and their professors know, are never so smooth and assured. And to those concerned not merely with the size of the historical canvas but with the proportions of its details, some other approach to understanding than that of the pattern-makers might be desirable. In this context, the case of Friedrich Meinecke offers an enlightening example of how a genuine concern with the rich variety of human experience may produce a bolder, fuller, more vital picture of universality.

By the time of his death on February 6, 1954, at the age of 91, Meinecke was a celebrity among historians in his native country and to some extent throughout Western Europe. In the United States, however, his reputation has been somewhat obscure. He was first accorded recognition as dean of German historians through an invita-

511

512 PHILIP J. WOLFSON

tion to speak at the Harvard tercentenary exercises in 1936, then through his election to honorary membership in the American His- torical Association in 1948-the second German scholar to be thus honored since Leopold von Ranke was nominated to charter member- ship by the organization's founders in 1884. In the last years of his life, Meinecke achieved some renown as a symbol of survival; having outlived the Nazi regime and experienced its political and military consequences, he became first rector of the Free University of Berlin, which had been established in the U.S. sector of the city as an ex- pression of the will to maintain the free spirit of inquiry against totalitarian assaults. (The old University of Berlin, where Meinecke had lectured for fourteen years until his academic retirement in 1928, is under Communist administration in the Soviet sector.)

Meanwhile, the life and works that form the essential background to this symbol of survival have remained unfamiliar to Americans, and his significance as historical thinker remains substantially un- communicated to us. Fragments of his work have found their way into English translation, including his last book, Die deutsche Katastrophe (1946),1 which is notable chiefly for its courageous at- tempt to rewind the spool of German national history that had come so horribly undone. But none of his major books or essays, repre- senting nearly half a century of mature and often brilliant scholar- ship, is available in English (his pioneering work on the rise of German national consciousness in the nineteenth century, Welt- biirgertum und Nationalstaat, first published in 1908, has gone through seven German editions). Some of these works have mean- while become standard references for the intellectual history of modern Europe, but evaluation of Meinecke's ideas lags far behind.2

1 Wiesbaden, 1946; the American version, translated by Sidney B. Fay, is entitled The German Catastrophe (Cambridge, Mass., 1950).

2 To date, such investigation in this country consists of the writer's unpublished doctoral dissertation, Friedrich Meinecke: A Study in German Historiography (Chicago, 1951, typewritten and microfilmed), plus scattered articles more or less critical of Meinecke, like Eugene N. Anderson's " Meinecke's Ideengeschichte and the Crisis in Historical Thinking," in Medieval and Historiographical Essays in Honor of James Westfall Thompson, ed. E. N. Anderson and James L. Cate (Chicago, 1938); Charles A. Beard and Alfred Vagts, "Currents of Thought in Historiogra- phy," American Historical Review, XLII (April, 1937); and Oscar J. Hammen, "German Historians and the Advent of the National Socialist State," Journal of Modern History, XIII (June, 1941). Louis L. Snyder presents a thoroughly mis- leading picture of Meinecke's political attitudes in his German Nationalism: The Tragedy of a People (Harrisburg, Pa., 1952), 255ff. A highly competent and exten- sive analysis of the theoretical problems involved in Meinecke's historical thought is presented in Walther Hofer, Geschichtsschreibung und Weltanschauung (Munich, 1950).

FRIEDRICH MEINECKE (1862-1954) 513 The lack of interest by the generality of American scholars in

Meinecke's historical thinking is somewhat surprising in view of our frequent tendency to take our theoretical cue from the Germans. But, this aside, Meinecke's philosophy of historical writing might have interest for us, since it affirms a deep and resilient faith in the worth of the individual-the same philosophy that lies at the heart of our most cherished national values, and that surely qualifies as a common denominator of Western cultural ideals. Then, too, such acquaintance might serve our growing need as professional historians more or less afloat in a sea of social scientists to establish sound practical justification for our endeavors; 3 for Meinecke provides us with a fascinating and intrinsically consistent argument for the validity of the historian's task, and does so not by resorting to grand schemata but by delving from within-in short, by letting history speak for itself as an approach to life.

Meinecke's historical philosophy is best approached through his unique standing as heir to the great tradition of nineteenth-century German historiography, or, more specifically, to its dominant strain -the movement of historical idealism called historische Ideenlehre.4 This movement began with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the distinguished Prussian scientist, educator and statesman (1767-1835), who repre- sents a bridge between the speculative rationalism that dominated German thought in the eighteenth century and the wave of romanticism that initiated the swift ascendancy of modern historical scholarship in Germany. Paradoxically, the flowering of German historical science, which so directly and deeply influenced the study of history in the United States, continues to be identified here with modern advances in the mechanical techniques of research and criticism-thus our tendency to relate the principles of historical method to Ranke's sadly overworked and misinterpreted dictum on writing history "as it actually was " (wie es eigentlich gewesen), or to treatises like Ernst Bernheim's substantial (and substantially un- read) Lehrbuch der historischen Methode, published in 1889.

Certainly the fundamentals of objective methodology were in- herited in large measure from the German universities; but this

3 An especially sensible and reassuringly urbane treatment of this problem is pro- vided by Louis Gottschalk's presidential address before the American Historical Association on December 29, 1953; it is printed in the American Historical Review for January 1954.

4 The term refers to a belief in the creative or determining power of spiritual (ideal) components in material events; see T. H. von Laue, Leopold Ranke: The Formative Years (Princeton, N. J., 1950), 146.

514 PHILIP J. WOLFSON

material legacy was merely the shell for intellectual impulses that were not at all "scientific " or "objective" as we understand these terms today. On the contrary, these impulses were highly subjective, even charged with emotion; they expressed a reorientation of ethical and intellectual ideals away from the rigid mold of systematic science, into which the body of knowledge had been poured by the philos- ophers of the Enlightenment. This reorientation was based upon the concept of affinity with the organic principle in nature-a favorite analogy of German romantic thought. The tremendous energy ex- pended in collecting and classifying materials, and the concomitant evolution of consistent technical and professional standards, did not suffice to stifle this preoccupation with supra-factual problems; nearly every noted historian in Germany's pre-unification era identified the stream of history with some higher purpose and en- deavored to evoke its essence in his work. In the longer perspective of historiographical currents, this identity of attitude overshadows the spectacularly successful campaign waged after the middle of the century by the so-called "national-political school " of Johann Gustav Droysen, Heinrich von Sybel, and Heinrich von Treitschke,5 against the spirit of Rankean detachment, in the interest of rallying the German people to support the idea of unification under Prussian leadership. The dispute touched off at least one lifelong enmity (Droysen's toward Ranke), muddied the contemporary understand- ing of the German past, and exerted a distorting influence upon the perspective of succeeding generations of German historians; but its effects did not penetrate to underlying beliefs about the nature and purpose of the historical process. All were agreed that history is an ethically directed force linking mankind with divine origins, that the highest function of the historian is to seek out and intuitively recreate the image of "the human individual in his spiritual evolution." 6 This justification of historical writing as a contribution to the con- tinuity of a higher ethic is the distinctive feature of German idealistic historiography; it accurately describes the fundamental piety with which the most distinguished representatives of this scholarly line

6 See G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1913), 130-55.

6 The quotation is from von Sybel, the highly practical "expert" research direc- tor; he goes on to say, " The core of a human personality does not permit definition like the chemical formula of a synthetic compound; it may be grasped only through the perceptive imagination, in short by a method wholly analogous to that of the artist .... There has never lived a great historian who was [satisfied to be] a stu- dent of critical method, without also being a great creative artist" (Vortrage und Abhandlungen [Munich, 1897], 302f.).

FRIEDRICH MEINECKE (1862-1954) 515

approached their professional tasks. Beginning with Humboldt, who theorized from the standpoint of

amateur historian and philosopher,7 and continuing through two generations of leading thinkers from Ranke to Wilhelm Dilthey and the neo-Kantian logicians, singularity-the intrinsic quality of the individual in all its manifestations-was identified as the basic de- velopmental principle of the historical process; as Humboldt con- ceived it, a constant awakening toward fulfilment, each "moment" in history embodying the struggle of idea to "win existence in reality" through the intuitive perception (seelische Einfiihlung) of the historian.8 This concept provided the foundation for a thorough- going criticism of the systematic and apocalyptic tradition of his- torical writing, and its gradual replacement by an approach founded upon empirical analysis of historical phenomena in their individual development and mutual interaction. Gradually German histori- ography began to liberate itself from visions of the Hegelian type. Generalizing and systematizing techniques, ordinarily inseparable from the task of extending knowledge over uncharted areas of history, were imperceptibly undermined as the standards of research. The central effort became to capture the existential uniqueness within historical events and to penetrate the motivations of the human per- son, the symbol and paradigm of historical individuality. This in- sistence on evaluating ideas and their impact upon the evolving pattern of causality represents the concrete element of historical idealism that Meinecke carried with him into our less harmonious age: a faith in history and historical study as "creative," possessed of the power to supplant philosophy as the " universal discipline," as an approach to the comprehensive understanding of man.

By nature and upbringing, as well as by the accidents of academic and professional association, Meinecke was strongly predisposed to share the attitudes of the historical idealists. In a modest volume of memoirs, compiled as an octogenarian, Meinecke recalls his child- hood as the son of the Royal Postal Director in Salzwedel (ancient capital of the Altmark in the heart of Brandenburg-Prussia) and his later boyhood in suburban Berlin. The gentle and well-mannered household, whose leisure hours were taken up with music and poetry, had a lasting effect on the boy's personality. Afflicted with a stutter

7 Droysen referred to him as "the Bacon of historical science "; see Historik. Vorlesungen iiber Enzyklopadie und Methodologie der Geschichte, hrsg. R. Hubner (Munich, 1937), 324.

8 Humboldt, " Ueber die Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers," Abhandlungen iber Geschichte und Politik, hrsg. L. B. Firster (Berlin, 1869), 13.

516 PHILIP J. WOLFSON

and consequently inclined to painful shyness, he responded with in- tensity to the pleasures of the lonely; he read avidly, "devouring" the romantic novels of Marryat and Scott, and saturated his senses in wandering through meadow or wooded park. His intellectual curiosity, and the first signs of literary talent, developed in the atmos- phere of a sensitive and withdrawn adolescence; impelled by a half- formed urge toward self-expression, he found himself attracted to the study of history as a means of "discovering the world in its ideal form." 9 Soon after entering the University of Berlin in 1883, he was introduced in impressive fashion to the doctrines of the idealist his- torians through Droysen's famous course in methodology.10 The intensity of Droysen's manner and attitude, so well attuned to the suppressed fires of the young Meinecke's own personality, literally enraptured him; he felt himself being initiated, not so much into the skills of his craft as into " the comprehension of things historically vital... essential to understanding ... the world as it is." 1

Meinecke in his turn soon attracted the attention of Droysen and his associates. Under the guidance of a brilliant young Dozent, Reinhold Koser,12 he completed his first independent research studies and took his doctorate cum laude in 1886; thereafter, Koser was in- strumental in helping to place Meinecke in the Prussian state archives, directed at the time by von Sybel, one of the most influential figures in the program of government-sponsored historical research. Meinecke's association with Sybel led him almost simultaneously to uncover a lifelong historical interest and a major facet of his pro- fessional career. In 1893, though barely thirty years of age, he was appointed editor of the Historische Zeitschrift-the quarterly of his- torical research and criticism which Sybel had founded in 1859 as an expression of German nationalism, and which Meinecke subsequently built over a period of forty years into one of the world's foremost academic journals (he was forced to resign under Nazi pressure in 1935). Having meanwhile become interested in the military and diplomatic history of the Napoleonic era, Meinecke was assigned by Sybel to develop new sources into a biography of Field Marshal Hermann von Boyen, a leader in the Prussian reform movement of the early nineteenth century.13

9 Erlebtes, 1862-1901 (Leipzig, 1941), 81. 10 The course was then being given for the last time; it had begun in 1857, 25 years before. 11 Erlebtes, 86.

12 Koser (1852-1914) was successively director of the Prussian state archives and historiographer of Prussia; in both offices he had been preceded by Sybel. 13 The biography eventually appeared in two volumes; the first, covering the years 1771-1814, was published in 1896, and the second, covering 1814-1848, in

FRIEDRICH MEINECKE (1862-1954) 517

The ascetic morality and dedication of such men as this soldier- reformer introduced Meinecke to an ideological atmosphere that be- came, as he describes it, his "spiritual home." '1 Immersing himself in the political and philosophical cross-currents of that turbulent era in German history, he developed an almost tactile sensitivity to the subtleties of their interaction and their varied impact on the course of events. Under the influence of his half-worshipful regard for men like Droysen and Sybel, Meinecke was affected early in his career by the magnetism of the decisive personality in history, and none of his works is free of the tendency to focus a broad evaluation upon the role of a single, "representative" individual.?' Nevertheless his analytic eye probed deeper than this, to catch the fine modulations within the amorphous stream of values and aspirations expressed in the thought and action of the men who carried forward the national idea. Combining warm sympathy for his subject's ideals with a delicate and perceptive clarity of style, Meinecke's biography of Boyen was widely commended as an artistic as well as scholarly success. Moreover, Boyen's concept of the citizen in arms, with its strong overtones of loyalty and unity, appealed directly to the con- temporary sense of national pride in the founding of the Empire, as well as to the concern for ethical values that marbled, if they did not shape, the image of imperial Germany.

The dilemmas implicit in the merger of a political idea, expressed in the objective of unification and power prestige, with a moral ideal centering about the concept of enlightened balance between respon- sible government and civic loyalty, have been fully recognized and portrayed among the basic determinants of Germany's development subsequent to 1871. But in the first decades of the Empire, they were rarely perceived as such; and Meinecke's characteristic approach to historical interpretation-his Ideengeschichte, or 'history of ideas-- matured under the influence of heady optimism, which was reflected at its best in the work that firmly established him in the front rank of German historians. Yet Weltbiirgertum und Nationalstaat, which traces and celebrates the triumph of unification, is far from being a ritual offering to the spirit of the Bismarckian Reich-although the book has been accurately characterized as the peak expression of Meinecke's intense interest in the Prussian past, to which he devoted half a lifetime of study. Rather it is a revelation of intuitive sym- pathy on the part of the historian for each complex strand in the web 1899-both at Stuttgart. 4 Erlebtes, 35.

15 Staat und Persdnlichkeit (Berlin, 1933), 52.

518 PHILIP J. WOLFSON

of ideas involved in the rise of German nationalism. This ability to appreciate the intrinsic variability of idea-currents, to perceive and follow the lines of force they generate as these are expressed in sub- sequent events long after the original impulse has subsided, goes far to explain the peculiar delicacy and balance of Meinecke's evalua- tions. Always the interaction between idea-impulse and material conjuncture in the historical process is treated warily, counteracting any automatic identification of the influence of an idea with its con- crete emergence as a describable cause. Thus Meinecke's insight into the principle of singularity is kept free of the beclouding urge to estab- lish convenient patterns-to determine and to justify the significance of an event by plastering it along the slopes of some historic trend. Here Meinecke overcomes a basic fallacy in the outlook of the idealist school, so well exemplified in his teacher Droysen's Hegelian charac- terization of history as " theodicy "-a kind of inevitable progression toward man's fulfilment, in which evil or retrogressive elements play the foil to the triumph of the Good.l6

This skepticism concerning the validity of generalizations based upon the external (hence artificial) congruence of events represents an increasingly significant element in Meinecke's thought. His effort to recreate history more richly through appreciation of its nuances led him to insist upon giving full weight to each component element in the causal conjuncture, and upon that premise to develop a dual- istic picture of historical dynamics, which may be summed up in his own favorite terms: "polarity" and "interaction." 17 This concept of reciprocal rhythms in the historical process might be regarded as a form of bulwark against the chaos of relativism implied by a fixation on the principle of individual potentiality and growth. But just as Meinecke's supple receptivity of intellect argues against any type of fixation, so does it preclude his accepting any bulwark as permanent.

The maturation of his political insight coincided with the onset of a tragic phase in German history; the " golden cloud " of ideal aspira- tions that had seemed to hang over Bismarck's Germany was begin- ning noticeably to tarnish by the end of the century. Signs of brutal- ization could be perceived in German culture, and an inner cleavage was opening in German politics and society. Again and again, as Meinecke sought to develop a harmonious and comprehensible picture of the German past and present, he was forced to re-examine his most basic preconceptions. "Alles fliesst; gib mir den Punkt, wo ich stehen kann "-"All is flux; show me where I may stand "-is a

16 See Droysen's essay on " Theologie der Geschichte," reprinted in the Hiibner edition of Historik, 369-85.

7 Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich, 1936), 262.

FRIEDRICH MEINECKE (1862-1954) 519

phrase that recurs significantly in his writing during the early decades of the new century. Eventually he was confronted directly with the "night-side" of history,18 when the hope of a genuine social unity aroused by the mass response of the German population to the call to arms in 1914 was corrupted by the shift in German war aims and finally smashed by military defeat and revolution.

Unlike so many of his colleagues, Meinecke refused to regard these developments as uniformly disastrous and unacceptable. Though oppressed by nostalgia for the world irretrievably lost behind the battlefields,19 he approached the new era in a positive spirit of co- operation. Even while expressing regret that the Weimar system lacked the stable element of monarchical rule, he developed a con- vincing argument for the view that Germans must accept and nurture their republican institutions,20 and even in retrospect refused to join in the disdain or denigration of the Republic that was quite general among members of his class.21 But in his own mind and heart, Meinecke was often overcome by pessimism and depression. This turmoil expressed itself characteristically as a challenge to his own idealistic assumptions concerning the nature of the historical process. The melancholy implications apparent in his prewar studies on the era of Prussian liberation and the rise of German nationalism as- sumed a more definite and deeper tone; his conception of an ideal synthesis-or, to employ his own expressive figure, a "symbiosis" of causal entities, appeared ready to disintegrate into an irreconcilable confusion of antagonistic elements, thus robbing the causal chain of its dynamic necessity and threatening to negate any certainty of productive interaction between idea-forces and the patterns of material causality. He remained convinced of a qualitative culmina- tion in this process and the possibility of drawing it forth, of recreat- ing the phenomenon of mutually dissonant elements combining in a new synthesis (Humboldt's principle of the "condition at every instant wholly new"). But this synergistic property of historical dynamics, arising out of singularity and the potentiality of independ-

1s Aphorismen und Skizzen zur Geschichte (Leipzig, 1942), 42f., 174. 19 He has referred in glowing terms to his years as professor of modern history at the universities of Strasbourg and Freiburg, 1901-1914.

20 See his collection of essays, Nach der Revolution. Geschichtliche Betracht- ungen iber unsere Lage (Munich, 1919). His arguments against partisan bitterness are especially clear from the structure of a proposal he submitted to the commission that drafted the Weimar constitution; they are contained in the article, " Verfassung und Verwaltung der deutschen Republik," Neue Rundschau, XXX (1919), 1-16.

21 See Die deutsche Katastrophe, passim.

520 PHILIP J. WOLFSON

ent regeneration of historical forms, contained also the potentiality of an uncontrollable splintering into self-contradiction and utter aimlessness.22

The logical difficulties of the idealistic affirmation that the chain of causality is meaningless until penetrated and infused by idea- impulses, had already become clear to Meinecke before the turn of the century, when he associated himself with the philosophers Wil- helm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert against the challenge of posi- tivist thought, in making an absolute distinction between the methods of history and those of science.23 In Meinecke's view, these difficul- ties could be resolved only within the domain of an essentially in- calculable factor-the "free X" of the human personality.24 The moral issue posed by this conclusion-namely, the struggle of the personality to realize its creative possibilities within the enclosing framework of state and society-forms the philosophical focus for the studies of the early postwar years. In this period, Meinecke's self- clarifying urge toward fuller appreciation and elucidation of perma- nent elements in history-or, in his terms, of "value " as distinct from "causality "-was challenged by a political and social environ- ment ominous with the symptoms of moral retrogression.

In 1924, Meinecke published the second work in his major trilogy of studies devoted to the theme of interaction between dominant political ideas in modern European history and their cultural environ- ment. Die Idee der Staatsraison in der neueren Geschichte (1924), a study of the evolution of the Machiavellian concept of government in its influence on the development of the modern nation-state, serves also as a penetrating self-analysis of Meinecke's dualistic conception of historical dynamics, ranging far into the tragic implications of irreconcilability as an alternative to symbiosis, and illuminating to an unprecedented depth the problem, as he saw it, of the basic conflict between freedom and necessity in the Burckhardtian sense, as it applied directly to the moral issues raised in the course of Germany's progress toward the status of leading power on the continent. Yet Meinecke's awareness of pressures toward frustration as well as toward fulfilment of cultural ideas-unmistakably indicated and even emphasized much earlier, in what Hofer refers to as his " optimistic "

22 See Staat und Personlichkeit, 37. 23 The conflict between Meinecke and his associates on the one hand, and Karl Lamprecht, spokesman of the positivist historiography, on the other, is discussed in an article in preparation by the present writer.

24 See Historische Zeitschrift, LXXVII (1896), 263f.

FRIEDRICH MEINECKE (1862-1954) 521

period 2--must be characterized not in terms of its undertow of pes- simism but as a background for indefatigable and courageous opti- mism. It is at this stage, in full consciousness of dark impurities in the stream of history and particularly in the German past, that Meinecke's will to refine the universal ideals from the dross of their surroundings is strongest, and his intention to revive and live by history most evident. Following Humboldt once again,26 he sees the amoral power entity, the modern nation-state, as a constricting in- fluence upon the individual, but at the same time as an historic tool in the advancement of culture, whose potentialities for sustaining and developing the highest human values may yet overcome its anti- civilizing characteristics and conquer over the dark and bloody chapters in its evolution.

The theme of the state as cultural potential and channel of in- dividual development-whose significance as a challenge and as a warning for Weimar Germany was recognized only later by Meinecke's contemporaries-was set forth more explicitly and also more broadly in his first collection of essays on historical philosophy, Staat und Personlichkeit (which made its appearance, ironically enough, in the year of Hitler's accession to power). The two leading essays of this collection-" Personlichkeit und geschichtliche Welt" (1918) and "Kausalitaiten und Werte in der Geschichte" (1928)-provide the best expression of the temper of Meinecke's thought in the post- war period in his concern with the triad politics-history-philosophy, and illustrate his gradual but definite turn to the riddle of the his- torical process itself as the dominant interest of his later years. The spirit of this undertaking may be characterized as a quest within the phenomena of human history for an ideal germ-plasm capable of transcending its physical and temporal environment and conquering the inexorability of change.

For the "old masters" of the idealist school, the logical impasse implied in the conclusion that an historical particular is in some sense independent of its context was bridged by simple orthodoxy; they believed the historical " moment" to be a literal manifestation of divinity, and insight into its character equivalent to a reunion with

25 Hofer (op. cit.) develops the thesis that 1918 marks a fundamental break in Meinecke's outlook, a watershed between an "optimistic" and a "pessimistic" phase; against this it may be pointed out that elements of both are distinctly emphasized in almost every one of Meinecke's books. Hofer subsequently in his volume delineates a "third phase" wherein Meinecke's faith in the principle of historicism leads him toward a new synthesis (ibid., pp. 224f.). Again there is strong evidence against any formal periodization of Meinecke's development.

26See "Wilhelm von Humboldt und der deutsche Staat" (1920), reprinted in Staat und Personlichkeit, esp. 81; also in the same volume, see 47ff.

522 PHILIP J. WOLFSON

God. But Meinecke could not accept such prior certainties; in a secular age, history's endless flux must be forced to yield meaning in entirely human terms, not from above but from within:

. . . wherever there is individuality, there also is growth. Individuality is not completion, not something definitely and finally established, but an active transmutation of inner formative forces-of which one, though not the sole factor, is the conscious will.27 Yet meaning ("value ") may still be suppressed and buried within the causal context of history. Against this pressure of the historical mass, Meinecke postulates the autonomy of " idea " within the chain of events-or, in the ethical context of his thought, the dynamism of the human personality struggling toward realization. This autonomy is the spiritual link that Meinecke hopes to forge, so that the core of the historical fact, possessed of a culture-building impulse, may sur- vive the oblivion of its causal context.

What then is implied by this concept of autonomy? First, the material sequence of causality is distinguished by an inner nexus of superior force. The collective context-represented by the historian's term "trend" or the sociologist's term "pattern "--is seen as an artifice, a reflex of the human need for system, the human desire to impose connected form upon the essentially atomistic reality. Second, the assumption of an extrinsic unity or grand continuity in history represents simply an externally derived impression of actuality, in some sense foreign to its true nature. Actuality is seen instead as a dynamic pulsation, kept in motion by an infinity of conjunctures in time and space-an impenetrable web of causal impacts under con- tinuous but incalculably variable stress. If each particle is "in- effable,"28 nevertheless each strand may hold its structure for no more than a moment-though perhaps forever. Third, it follows that a sequential principle based on change is one that admits no true necessity, no finality, no absolute triumph over the chaotic. Only in the form of the human will-the sole divinity (" deion")29 of Meinecke's secular universe-can historical mass possess both direc- tion and energy; and the human will is condemned to struggle in- cessantly for self-possession against the dark and irrational forces

27 Aphorismen und Skizzen, etc., 31. 28 The term is derived from Goethe, one of Meinecke's " polestars " in the arts; on the title page of Meinecke's last major work, Die Entstehung des Histrismus, the quotation appears: " Habe ich Dir das Wort 'Individuum est ineffabile' woraus ich eine Welt ableite, schon geschrieben? "--Goethe to Lavater, 1780. Exactly as with Goethe, the " ineffability " of the individual forms a major article of Meinecke's faith. 29 Aphorismen und Skizzen, etc., 156.

FRIEDRICH MEINECKE (1862-1954) 523 within itself and in the world about it.

In the eruptive force of the individual personality, as it tears free of and transforms its material environment, Meinecke sought to establish the basis for resolving his dualistic picture of the historical universe. For the picture of an infinite network of accident is both logically and intuitively penetrable at its core. Lacking necessity, its nature is summed up in its potentialities; since these are untram- meled by any absolute directional pressure, they may develop either toward a good or toward all evil fruition. But the regenerative power of the idea, as it moves through and beyond the causal sequence, demonstrates the possibility of unlimited growth. And as the arche- type of ideological force, the human will becomes the only true catalyst in a labile universe. The translation of conscious experience into creative activity-the process of building cultural values- corresponds to perpetuation of the life force; as Meinecke puts it, the means to " win the image of ... humanity from the historic essence of mankind." 30 Though achieved in the midst of flux, and vulner- able to its attrition, the symbiosis of value with causality is no less productive for its impermanence, no less significant for its dissolution into new problems, new riddles, new dilemmas.

For the quality of incompleteness, as Meinecke concludes, is itself an essential element of creativity and growth; and this conclusion reflects Meinecke's personality as faithfully as it does his thought, expressing (as one of his close associates has written)31 an unquench- able youthfulness of spirit, ever receptive to the new without reject- ing the old. The entire constellation of Meinecke's experience bore in upon him the realization that history moves upon shifting sands; the more he strove to identify himself with the human, and more particularly, the German past, the faster it fell away beneath him. Thus his faith in history as the study of the creative demanded a penetration well beyond descriptive depths, and corresponded ever more intimately with his own habit of self-questioning. His life ended, so to speak, on a questioning note. He had lived to see one of history's most insidiously evil tyrannies cast off, at the price of military and political catastrophe for the nation; and though this might seem to deny the very basis of the ideals he had discerned in Prusso-Germany's national origins, he refused to discard the possi- bility that the corruption too might have been bred in the bone, and wondered how far back one must really go to recapture purity. Thus

30 Staat und Personlichkeit, 26, 101. S Ludwig Dehio, in the Historische Zeitschrift, CLXXVII (1954), 226; Dehio

became the editor of the HZ when it resumed publication in 1945.

524 PHILIP J. WOLFSON

he died doubting the past and uncertain of the future, speculating indeed whether Ranke, his apostle of the harmonious universe, should not be displaced as a fount of historical wisdom by Burckhardt, who was preoccupied with the self-destructiveness of human civilization.82

But Meinecke did not really need to go farther than his own heart and mind for reassurance. For his Ideengeschichte is no mere chronicle of ideas or of their evolution, but the literal expression of a conviction that ideals are indestructible channels by which the mind may conquer fatalism and despair. Only rarely are explicit defini- tions of the Ideengeschichte to be found in his works; one of these stands out also as a self-portrait:

The history of ideas must be treated primarily as an essential, indispen- sable component of universal history. It presents that which the thinking being has created out of his own experience, how he has made it spiritually his own, what ideal consequences he has drawn therefrom-in short, to a degree the reflection of historical essence in minds that are concentrated upon the essentials of life itself. For this reason [such ideas] are no mere silhouettes or colorless abstractions, but the lifeblood of actuality, absorbed into the bloodstream of men whose mission it is to express the essence of their times. The ideology of a significant thinker, grown from the experi- ence of his times, is like a drop of attar of roses, won from the perfume of hundreds of flowers. Through the translation of experience into idea, the human being liberates himself from the burden of his past and creates the forces that shape his life anew. Ideas are the highest peaks that mankind can attain, in which observant intelligence and creative potentiality unite in a common fulfilment. For their own sake, as well as for the sake of their impact, they are worthy of study in the frame of universal history. A his- tory of ideas, Herder said, would provide a key to the history of action. The ideas which guide historical life do not arise solely in the spiritual workshop of great thinkers; they have a broader and deeper origin. But they condense in these workshops; they assume in them for the first time the form which influences the continuation of things and the actions of men.33 For Meinecke, this was a pathway to the comprehension of the living, and for us it provides the key to his genuinely " ineffable " optimism, whose warmth and penetration again and again suffused the waste- lands of the past with vitality. To quote him once more, it depends upon the character of the observant thinker whether this overwhelming drama [i.e., the dynamic oscillation of historical forces] is to signify truth or chaos, faith or despair ... whether it is to result in an indifferent rela-

32 The essay, "Ranke und Burckhardt," originally an address in 1948 before the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, is printed in Hans Kohn (ed.), German History: Some New German Views (London, 1954), 141-56.

33 Die Idee der Staatsrdson, 25f.

FRIEDRICH MEINECKE (1862-1954) 525

tivism or in a devout loyalty to an idea [that] despite its imminent decline ... never wholly sinks from sight, but works itself out transfigured [auf- gehoben] from that moment forward.34

In such a context, the historian himself may become an epic hero, the seeker after the human soul and champion of humanity in its struggle toward fulfilment. For Meinecke, history could never be simply an intellectual fascination; it had to be above all an affirma- tion of the spirit and the will, a liberation from the "oppressive weight of physical law." 5 In his quest for meaning beneath the surface pattern of objective causality, Meinecke carries forward the great tradition of rebellion against the encasing categories of the scientific method as applied to the entirety of knowledge. As a realistic substitute for dogma and superstition, as an empirical ap- proach to more than ephemeral wisdom-even as a secular religion, such as it is to Meinecke-history may offer richness and understand- ing without binding itself to the delusion of a perfect objectivity, and find its justification simply in affirming the moral absolute that free- dom is the indestructible kernel of the past.

Washington, D. C. 34 Die Entstehung des Historimus, 325. 35 Staat und Persanlichkeit, 7. The late Italian philosopher-historian, Benedetto

Croce, was especially struck by the implications of a " creative irrationalism " in the works of Meinecke and others like Johan Huizinga; the subject is discussed in an article now in preparation by the present writer.

Article Contentsp. 511p. 512p. 513p. 514p. 515p. 516p. 517p. 518p. 519p. 520p. 521p. 522p. 523p. 524p. 525

Issue Table of ContentsJournal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Oct., 1956), pp. 443-568Volume Information [pp. 567 - 568]Popular Anticlericalism in the Puritan Revolution [pp. 443 - 470]The Jesuit Figurists and Eighteenth-Century Religious Thought [pp. 471 - 485]David Hume and Scientific Theism [pp. 486 - 497]Paul Carus: A Case-Study of Philosophy on the Frontier [pp. 498 - 510]Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954) [pp. 511 - 525]Religious Conflicts in the Conquest of Mexico [pp. 526 - 539]Samuel Stanhope Smith: Enlightened Conservative [pp. 540 - 552]DiscussionHesiod's Five Ages [pp. 553 - 554]

ReviewBaird's Ishmael [pp. 555 - 560]

Books Received [pp. 561 - 566]Announcement [p. 566]Erratum: "History for Utopia: Saint-Simon and the Idea of Progress" [p. 568]Acknowledgements [p. 568]