At the end of the 19th century, most professional historians – wherever they existed – deemed history to be a form of knowledge ruled by a method that bears no resemblance with those most commonly traceable in the natural sciences. The bulk of the historian’s task was then frequently regarded as being the application of procedures frequently referred to as ‘historical method’. In the context of such an emerging interest on historical methods and methodology, at least three textbooks stand out: (...) Johann Gustav Droysen’s Grundriss der Historik (Outline of the Theory of History), Ernst Bernheim’s Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (Handbook of Historical Method), and Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos’s Introduction aux études historiques (Introduction to the Study of History). These books were quite influential in Germany, France, and elsewhere, and they very much helped promote a general idea of historical method that would become relatively consensual among historians of many nationalities by the early 20th century. Such a relative agreement on historical method sponsored both the communication and the development of a sense of disciplinary identity among historians trained within different and sometimes conflicting national traditions. It was then partially extended, partially challenged, and surely made more complex when, from the 1920s on, social and economic historians became a good part of the historiographical establishment in many countries. -/- The three books by Droysen, Bernheim, and Langlois and Seignobos were already pieced together by Rolf Torstendahl, who studied them as a group of texts that, despite their differences, contributed to shape the developments outlined above. However, Torstendahl’s primary aim was to show how Droysen, Bernheim, and Seignobos all resorted to ‘method’ as a way to circumvent skepticism against the possibility of historical knowledge, rather than investigate the internal interrelationships between the three texts. In this chapter I follow precisely this latter, not yet taken, road, focusing on crucial cross-references between the Grundriss, the Lehrbuch, and the Introduction. I intend to show that, at a general level, the schemes of historical method found in these texts are largely convergent, and that this convergence is due to Bernheim’s reading of Droysen and to Langlois and Seignobos’s reading of Bernheim. I will attempt to do it through a regressive approach that starts with an analysis of the Introduction. Aspects of the editorial history and circulation of the three texts will also be briefly addressed, as a way to illustrate their special importance within the framework of early 20th century historical theory. Because my argument calls for a focus on the most general lines of Droysen’s, Bernheim’s, and Langlois and Seignobos’s schemes of historical method, I will, for the sake of consistency, refrain from analysing in-depth the complex epistemological and ontological arguments in which those schemes are nested. (shrink)

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Carl von Linné, Johann Christoph Gatterer, and Christian Wilhelm Büttner attempted to realize the old idea of deciphering the alphabet of the world, which Francis Bacon had raised as a general postulate of science. This article describes these attempts and their interrelations. Linné used the model of the alphabet to classify plants according to the characters of this fruiting body. Gatterer, one of the leading German historians during the Enlightenment, adopted the botanical method (...) of classification by genus and species to classify the history of scripts. He used the forms of the alphabetic characters to measure the age of manuscripts and to map the process of history as a genealogy of culture. Gatterer collaborated closely with Büttner, the first Göttingen professor of natural history. Büttner constructed a general alphabet of languages which connected the phonetics of language with the historically known alphabets. Early on, diplomatics and ethnography combined the natural order of natural history and the cultural order of the alphabet with the attempt to register development and to document development by the evolution of forms. Based on the shared model of the alphabet and on the common necessity to classify their empirical material, natural history and the description of culture were related attempts in the middle of the eighteenth century to comprehend the alphabetically organized nature and a naturally ordered culture. (shrink)

Droysen’s Grundriss der Historik is one of the most important nineteenth-century texts on history, historiography, and historical research. An English version of the work, published in 1893 as Outline of the Principles of History, is the translation reproduced here, with some glosses on the text. A more literal, and also more adequate, rendering of the title is Outline of the Theory of History. “History” in “theory of history” is more closely tied to Historie than to Geschichte—the two German words normally (...) used as equivalent to it. This is in keeping with Droysen’s predominant focus on history as a form of knowledge. However, as will be shown, Droysen’s theory is no pure epistemology, since it addresses not only methodical or representational issues attached to “history” but also material and normative ones. Contemporary and later commentators acknowledged Droysen’s reflections as synthesizing and elaborating the presuppositions of classical German historicism. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer Droysen was the “sharpest methodologist” of the nineteenth-century German “historical school,” whose theory of history had “groundbreaking significance” for the philosophy of the human sciences. As this suggests, the Outline is part of an inquiry on historical method that went far beyond the technicalities of historical research and deep into its epistemic, ontological, moral, political, and religious roots. Many of the Outline’s arguments tackle problems still important within early twenty-first century historical cultures. To a large extent, Droysen’s questions on history and historiography are still our questions. He explored aesthetical and representational issues pertaining to history writing and reception. He strongly contested the single-mindedness of many of his fellow historians about source criticism, calling attention to other important methodical operations in the process of historical knowledge, and to sources other than written, official texts. He insisted that research should be conducted according to a logic of questions and answers, a point now established as part of our methodological common sense. Furthermore, he argued that research questions are embedded in cultural and political dynamics, and accordingly that whatever historical objectivity is, it cannot presuppose the extinction of subjectivity. In Droysen’s Outline, knowledge of the past is depicted as an essentially interpretative way of cognition which is full of ethical potential for the present. By developing a hermeneutical approach that was very explicit about its ethical implications, Droysen illuminated—perhaps like no one else in his century—the enigmatic problem of the nature of the “historical.” . (shrink)