The Renaissance Background of Historicism

Abstract

In the past generation the history of historiography began to rise above the mere listing of authors and works and to address itself to its chief topic, the development of the historical-mindedness peculiar to our culture. Seeking the origins of this historicism, Friedrich Meinecke, in his Entstehung des Historismus (1936), asserted that Historicism is only the application to history of the new life principles conquered by the great German movement from Leibniz to Goethe's death.' Meinecke defined historicism as an essentially modern attitude, a philosophy, a way of looking at man and the world which did not exist before the eighteenth century.2 This catastrophic theory, which posits a great intellectual divide at Leibniz's generation, seems less than satisfactory to students of the history of historiography, who cannot help asking, among other things, whether the peculiar historical-mindedness of our culture really owes nothing to traditions anterior to Leibniz's lifetime, and whether Meinecke was not simply mistaken when he thought he was discovering intellectual revolutions in the historical thought of the eighteenth century. A good case in point is Meinecke's treatment of Voltaire, in whose work he saw the beginnings of historical relativism. Before Voltaire's time, in Meinecke's view, historians had remained under the spell of their sources. They were forced to reproduce passively most of the historical tradition handed down to them: One thought that the historian, if only he resisted passion and partisanship and loved truth, could become the smooth mirror of historical truth and reality.3