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Perhaps one of Europe's more remarkable achievements has been the creation of a flourishing bourgeois civilization that has never been free from the most penetrating bourgeois criticism. “Épater le bourgeois” was a great pastime of the last century and the sport still seems to be alive. Ibsen'sPillars of Society, published in 1877, was a radical analysis of the moral pretensions and the moral burden of bourgeois society. The pillars of that society were rotten; the life of the protagonist was a lie violating his own nature and that of his fellowmen. It is as if Ibsen had written a dramatic commentary on theCommunist Manifestowithout indulging in the comforting hope that a social revolution would create a new man in a newly virtuous society. In the play, salvation came through an improbable act of contrition and self-purgation; at his most revolutionary, Ibsen thought that the feminine slamming of doors sufficed for human improvement.

[Karl Marx (1813–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) are not usually remembered as historians—the standard works on historiography barely mention them—and yet they were not only practicing historians but their dialectical materialistic conception of history was the core of their system and had a profound impact on subsequent historical thought and writing. For Marx himself the formulation of historical materialism in the mid-1840’s represented the link between his earlier philosophical interest and his later concern with the economic structure and the political development of capitalistic society. The German Ideology (written by Marx and Engels in 1846, published in its entirety only in 1932), from which the following selection is taken, contained the first exposition of historical materialism: “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” The modes of production and the social relations to which they give rise determine the consciousness of men, the ideological superstructure of society Both in short historical studies of the 1848 Revolution—Marx’s The Class Struggles in France (1850) and Engels’ Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (1852)—and in several studies on remoter periods—Engels’ The Peasant War in Germany (1850)—Marx and Engels sought to analyze particular historical events in light of their historical system.

[The only son of an impoverished printer whom Napoleon had persecuted, Jules Michelet (1798–1874) became the foremost historian of the French people. His historical works were highly personal creations, combining an immediate sympathy with the past—aroused first by his childhood visits to the Lenoir National Museum—a broad philosophical interest, a scrupulous attention to neglected primary sources, a rich, poetic style, and an ardent patriotism which led him to personify the object of his love, France, and to glorify equally, in his first works at least, each period of its history. In 1824 Michelet discovered by chance and immediately translated Vico’s Scienza Nuova which gave philosophic sanction to his spontaneous belief that the people, and not only its leaders or its institutions, shaped history. An enthusiastic teacher, he published in 1827 a Precis d’histoire moderne, a brief, but highly original, essay on the unity of modern history, which until 1850 guided historical instruction in French schools. After a History of Rome, Michelet wrote the first six volumes of his History of France (1833–1843; eleven other, less judicious volumes, 1855–1867); eleven other, less judicious volumes, 1855–1867); these early volumes depicted in a series of tableaux the unfolding life of the French people, its physical environment, its spirit and its heroes, and ended with the poignant portrait of Saint Joan.

[As a historian, critic, teacher, Jacques Barzun (b. 1907) has had a marked influence on contemporary academic life, and especially on the teaching of the humanistic disciplines. In his works on European and American culture, past and present, he has come to define a genre of cultural history which comprehends the history of thought and society and yet is distinct from the more exclusive field of intellectual history and the all-embracing efforts of the cultural anthropologists. In his studies of nineteenth century culture, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (1937), Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941), Romanticism and the Modern Ego (1943), Berlioz and the Romantic Century (2 vols. 1950; Rev. Ed. Berlioz and His Century, 1956) and most lately in his Energies of Art (1956) he has defined the unity of the Romantic Age and reaffirmed its creative role in Western culture. The following essay appears here for the first time.]

[Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), jurist, epigrapher, and historian, made incomparable contributions to the study of Roman history. Universally acclaimed for his History of Rome (3 vols., 1854–1856 plus a fifth volume on the Roman Provinces from Augustus to Diocletian 1885)1 his more specialized work included a history of Roman coinage (1860) and a monumental treatise on Roman Public Law (Romisches Staatsrecht, 3 vols., 1871–1876). He originated, supervised, and contributed to the Corpus inscriptionum Latinorum, a collection of all the known Roman inscriptions. The bibliography of his own works listed 1,500 items. Mommsen’s History exceeded in scope and scholarship anything that had been done before: using a variety of sources, including inscriptions, laws, and coins, he reconstructed the history of the Roman Republic from its origins to the reign of Caesar. Mommsen’s History was a literary masterpiece as well, and in 1902 he received the Nobel Prize. His frequent allusions in this work to the contemporary scene—to Junkers, journalists, and proletariat, for example—and his undisguised admiration of Caesar whom he depicted as a democratic leader, attested his intense involvement in German politics, his hope for a liberal Germany.

[Augustin Thierry (1795–1856) epitomized the romantic historiography of the first half of the nineteenth century. After brief periods as secretary to Saint-Simon and as freelance journalist, Thierry turned to history, publishing his first historical writings as letters in a newspaper. Drawn to his subject by a passion for liberty and guided by a fine sense of detail and development, he became, next to Guizot, the leading French historian of the time. His narrative style reflected the influence of his two masters, Chateaubriand and Sir Walter Scott. In 1826 he published the History of the Norman Conquest of England and in 1840 the Recits des Temps Merovingiens. In these works he introduced his major historical interests: the racial antagonisms between conqueror and conquered, the rise of the communes in France, and the growth of the Third Estate. Although he had become blind in 1826, he was appointed by Guizot to direct the projected Recueil des Monuments Inedits de L’Histoire du Tiers Etat, and before his death he completed his own work on the history of the Third Estate in France.

[Throughout his long life Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954), the best-known German historian of the twentieth century, tried to deepen and strengthen the Ranke tradition, even as the crises of his country and his discipline threatened that tradition. A student in Droysen’s course in historical method and an early admirer of Dilthey, Meinecke sought to broaden historicism by bringing it closer to the philosophical revival of the late nineteenth century. After several years as an archivist, Meinecke became co-editor of the Historische Zeitschrift in 1894, and in 1902 received his first full-time academic appointment at the University of Strasbourg. In his most important historical works Weltburgertum and Nationalstaat (1908) and Die Idee der Staatsrason in der neueren Geschichte (1924), he broke with the prevailing genre of political and institutional history and, by analyzing the historically most important ideas of the leading statesmen and political thinkers, reinterpreted several epochs of modern history. This Ideengeschichte has in turn been criticized for being narrowly ‘intellectualistic and neglectful of the general historic conditions of society.

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[John Bagnell Bury (1861–1927) was a classical philologist before he became a historian, and his works on the late Roman period and the Byzantine Empire were characterized by high competence in both fields. At the age of 28 he wrote A History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene 395 a.d. to 800 a.d. (2 vols. 1889), which was generally regarded as a remarkably mature contribution to the literature. Given his own interests and inclinations, Bury was ideally fitted to undertake the definitive edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (7 vols. 1896–1900). He also served as editor of the Cambridge Ancient History. In his early years he was concerned with philosophy, especially with Hegel, and he developed a lasting interest in the philosophical problems of historical study; in 1902, when he succeeded Lord Acton as the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, he delivered an Inaugural Lecture on “The Science of History,” reprinted below, which epitomized the historicist tradition in England. Bury’s strong rationalistic beliefs, akin in some ways to Gibbon’s, inspired his two short works on The History of Freedom of Thought (1913) and The Idea of Progress (1920). During and after the First World War he grew skeptical about the possibility of establishing historical causality and in his last writings stressed the role of contingency, of mere chance, in history.]

[J. Huizinga (1872–1945) belonged to that remarkable group of Dutch, Belgian, and Swiss historians—Jakob Burckhardt, Henri Pirenne, Pieter Geyl, and Werner Kaegi—who have contributed so much to the development of history, especially cultural history. By his own account a highly unconventional historian—he had studied linguistics and was known first as a student of Sanskrit—Huizinga had been attracted to history by his aesthetic pleasure in viewing the past, by his exceptional empathy for it. He was appointed professor of history at Groningen in 1905, and called to the University of Leyden ten years later. Like Burckhardt, he was able to capture a moment’s impression in masterly pencil sketches and wrote history in a similarly precise, yet impressionistic manner. In his greatest work, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919), Huizinga, with an intuitive grasp of the spirit of late medieval art and popular culture, portrays that period not as the seedtime of the Renaissance but as a period of decay and decline. In his Erasmus (1923) he attained an equally sure sense of the inner life of the great humanist and compatriot.

[George Macaulay Trevelyan (b. 1876), the grand-nephew of Macaulay, has done more than any other living English writer to restore history to its earlier station as a literary art which instructs and entertains the general public and professionals alike. As a student at Trinity College in Cambridge, Trevelyan was told by the then Regius Professor of Modern History, Sir John Seeley, that Macaulay and Carlyle were charlatans, and this awakened in him an abiding suspicion of “scientific” historians. A prolific writer, his works—from his dissertation on England in the Age of Wycliffe (1899) to his History of England (1926) and his several works on Garibaldi—are mostly literary, narrative histories with a marked bent for social history. He supplemented his research by direct observation, traversing on foot a good part of England and Italy, and retracing in this way Garibaldi’s campaign of 1860. The following essay was originally written as a polemical answer to J. B. Bury’s The Science of History (see preceding selection) and published in December, 1903, in the Independent Review. After Bury’s death, Trevelyan reprinted it, omitting all mention of Bury, as the leading essay in the volume Clio, A Muse (1913), from which the following, somewhat shortened, selection has been taken.]

(Although there had been occasional historians, A. H. L. Heeren, for example, or P. E. Levasseur or Thorold Rogers, who had dealt with the economic factors in history, the separate discipline of economic history did not gain institutional recognition until the end of the nineteenth century. It was not till 1892 that Harvard University appointed the English scholar, William James Ashley, to a chair in economic history, the first to have been established anywhere. After the turn of the century, with the growing availability of economic and demographic statistics and with the increasing awareness of the decisive influence of economic developments upon society, the study of economic history developed rapidly, particularly in France, England, and the United States.

[Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) is the father as well as the master of modern historical scholarship. Called the “Nestor of Historians,” his fame rested not only on his massive output of scholarship—over sixty volumes—but on his formulation of the historical method, his conception of the unity of European history, and his mastery of nearly the whole of modern European history. Trained originally in philology, which he taught for several years, Ranke turned to history in the 1820’s and was called to the University of Berlin in 1824. There he originated the historical seminar, which instructed advanced students in Quellenkritik, the critical study of the sources. Travelling widely in Europe, he discovered many of the archival sources for the history of modern states. History, he taught, should be written only from eyewitness reports and from the “purest, most immediate documents.” While training two generations of historians at Berlin, he published his best known works, among them, The History of the Popes (1834–1836) and German History in the Time of the Reformation (1839–1843).

[The work of Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) opened a new era in American historiography. Familiar with European and ancient history, and influenced by the German historians, especially A. H. L. Heeren, Turner nevertheless demanded that American history must be studied as an outgrowth of the distinct American experience, moulded more by the frontier of the West than the continuing link with the Old World. Having become dissatisfied with the traditional political historiography, he sought in his writings and his influential teaching to grasp the significance, to find the inner springs of this American experience. He taught first at the University of Wisconsin and in 1910 accepted a chair at Harvard. His essay on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” appeared in 1893, and the Rise of the New West in 1906.

[By the mid-nineteenth century history had ceased to be a branch of literature and had become an academic discipline. Impressed by the example of the natural sciences, historians, especially in Germany, asserted that their craft too had become a science, and established an elaborate machinery of scholarship. Professional journals were founded in a format that has remained essentially unchanged to the present day, and the study of history in the Universities, a rarity at the end of the eighteenth century, became commonplace. At the same time the link between history and contemporary politics remained close, and it is no accident that the German and French historical reviews were begun at moments of great national stirrings.

[Voltaire (1694–1778) rightly thought himself a pioneer of a new type of history. Rebelling against the prevailing ideals and forms of historiography—against supernatural history, narrow political or biographical chronicles, and the uncritical acceptance of ancient historians—he proposed and produced a secular and naturalistic history which would depict the life and spirit of peoples, their art, science and politics. His two masterpieces, The Age of Louis XIV (1752)1 and the Essay on the Manners and Customs of Nations (1757), deal in a philosophical, interpretative manner with universal history, including not only some of the previously neglected aspects of western society but the progress of non-European peoples as well.

[Both the Soviet and the German totalitarian regimes destroyed the freedom of historical inquiry by imposing political restrictions upon research and prescribing in minute detail a politically acceptable version of the past. History became a political weapon, the historian a warrior at “the historical front.” In the Soviet Union this inherent feature of totalitarianism became entangled with the Marxian legacy and its claims to have discovered the objective laws of historical development.

[Statesman and scholar, Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831) had an influence second to none on the rise of historical scholarship. Inspired by his father, the famous traveller, Carsten Niebuhr, and by the Romantic writers of his day, Niebuhr turned early to a study of antiquity and had mastered twenty languages before he reached his thirtieth year. He began his career in the civil service of his native Denmark, entering the Prussian service just before the disaster of 1806. He became an important member of the Prussian reform movement, and in 1810 was appointed a lecturer at the newly founded University of Berlin. From 1816 to 1823 Prussian ambassador to the Vatican, he spent his last years at the University of Bonn. He was an exceptional man, of whom Dilthey said: “No young man should enter a university without having morally elevated himself by contemplating the figure of this great scholar.”

[Insisting that “Patriotism is a virtue and history a science, and the two should not be confounded,” N. D. Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889) broke with the earlier traditions of French historiography and sought to foster the scientific study of history in France. In his teaching, first at Strasbourg and, after the defeat of 1870, in Paris, he called for a proper historical method, which would emphasize the scrupulous study of original texts and cultivate a historical sense which would see the past in its uniqueness and not as a backward projection of the present. His best known work, The Ancient City (1864) reinterpreted the life of Greek and Roman cities by analyzing the relations of religious beliefs to political and economic institutions. In his monumental Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France (6 vols., 1875–1892) he described the historic origins of medieval France without becoming a partisan in the old controversy concerning the relative importance and merit of Latin versus Germanic influences on the development of France.

[By the end of the last century historians were swamped by the monographic output of their colleagues and by the work of scholars in related fields—sociology, anthropology, psychology, and economics. The individual historian no longer had the command of all of history, or even of that substantial part which his forbears had possessed as a matter of course. The historian, like other specialists too, was in danger of knowing more and more about less and less. To combat these dangers efforts were made to find new syntheses, both by bringing together several specialists in one collaborative effort and by combining several disciplines to arrive at a broader view of the whole.

[James Harvey Robinson (1863–1936) spent his lifetime battling against the conventional history taught in American schools, and sought to replace it with “The New History.” Trained both in this country and in Germany in the exacting methods of nineteenth century historiography, Robinson became dissatisfied with its exclusively political, constitutional, and military emphasis. After writing an orthodox doctoral dissertation on the German Bundesrath, he edited and translated a series of original sources in European history. A highly effective teacher at Pennsylvania and Columbia Universities, he introduced a novel course on the History of the Intellectual Class of Europe and inspired some of his graduate students—among them Lynn Thorndike, C. J. H. Hayes, Preserved Smith, and James T. Shotwell—to embark on a study of intellectual history. But his greatest influence came through his many, widely-used textbooks, beginning with An Introduction to the History of Western Europe (2 vols. 1902–1903). These high school and college texts stressed the intellectual and social trends of a particular age, and were designed to be more popular in their appeal than the older political chronicles.

[Although most historians of the mid-nineteenth century considered history a science if it attempted to reconstruct the past according to verified, original sources, some historians, especially those that had come under the sway of Positivist philosophy, thought history had to discover the general laws of human development. Among the latter historians none was more popular or perceptive than Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862), a self-educated historian who had neither studied nor taught at a University.

[Every page of Sir Lewis Namier’s (1888–1960) work bears the distinct imprint of his bold, analytical mind, his slightly sardonic judgment, and his illuminating wit. While the style is immediately recognizable, the argument is never predictable, and Sir Lewis, born in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and recently knighted in England where he has lived and taught for many decades, has been a somewhat unconventional critic of past historians and contemporary Concerned with the relation of politics to culture, of men to ideas and institutions, his study of the members of George III’s first Parliament, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), fundamentally revised the traditional picture of eighteenth century English politics and by his use of hitherto neglected biographical details of minor political figures introduced a new way of analyzing political history. His shorter works on European diplomacy are also characterized by his meticulous attention to detail as well as by his exceptional grasp of the character of men and epochs. He is now one of the editors of the projected History of Parliament.

[Since 1945, there has been a marked revival of interest in social history. Responding to new directions in sociology and politics, historians have been particularly concerned with examining and reconstructing the life and aspirations of the neglected classes of earlier times. It could hardly be considered surprising that some of this history embodies or stimulates a neo-Marxist concern with the impact of changing material conditions on human consciousness and with the emergence of class struggles and revolutionary movements in history. This genre of history has been especially important in postwar France and England, and in the latter no work has been more widely hailed as a massive contribution to scholarship from a new perspective than The Making of the English Working Class (1963) by E. P. Thompson (b. 1924). To convey something of E. P. Thompson’s scope and method, a part of the Preface to his work and the concluding section of his final chapter on class consciousness are reprinted below.]

[The study of medieval history has long flourished in England, and R. W. Southern (b. 1912) has continued that tradition. Both heir and innovator, he has added new, empathetic insights to the study of the Middle Ages, often guided by his belief, stated in his best-known and beautifully wrought work, The Making of the Middle Ages (1953), that “the significant events are often the obscure ones, and the significant utterances are often those of men withdrawn from the world and speaking to a very few.” He has also been concerned with the changing character and function of history, as his Inaugural Lecture, delivered in 1961 and reprinted below, attests.

[Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) ranks among the most popular of nineteenth century literary historians. Learning from Sir Walter Scott to look upon the past as peopled by living men—“not abstractions … not diagrams and theorems; but men in buff coats and breeches, with color in their cheeks, with passions in their stomach and the idioms, features and vitalities of very men”—Carlyle sought to recapture the drama of the past. A stern moralist, his best known works, The French Revolution (1837), Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: With Elucidations (1845) and the History of Frederick II of Prussia (1858–1865) attested his originality of view as well as his political passion. In spite of his dictum that history is biography, Carlyle’s first history, subtitled a “History of Sansculottism,” was in effect an essay in social history, and his abiding concern with universal history transcended the strictly biographical, searching instead for the spiritual unity of an age. A vilifier of specialized “dry-as-dust” historians, he was in turn repudiated by them, and few historians, excepting his avowed disciple and later biographer J. A. Froude, acknowledged Carlyle as a member, much less a master of their craft.

[Thomas Babington Macaulay’s (1800–1859) gifts were perfectly attuned to the possibilities of his age. Ambitious, self-confident, and deeply patriotic, Macaulay moved with ease from the House of Commons, to the Supreme Council of India, and finally to the Cabinet. His History of England from the Accession of James II (5 vols. 1849–1861) brought him uncommon fame and rewards throughout the English-speaking world. For this history of the Glorious Revolution and the years immediately following he was admirably prepared by his extensive research, his remarkable memory, and his wide general reading. The enthusiastic reception of the History can be attributed to its tone of untroubled certainty about the merits of the age—the triumph of liberty and wealth in England and the triumph of England in the world—and to the utterly lucid style which Macaulay had wrought with great pains so that the pages would “read as if they had been spoken off, and may seem to flow as easily as table talk.” Later critics boggled at the shallow assurance of his judicial pronouncements on men and events, but only after the success of the novel “Whig interpretation” had become firmly established, a historical force itself.

[Some years ago when the University of Chicago set up separate divisions of the social sciences and the humanities, the historians, puzzled about their allegiance, decided to split, some going to one division, some to the other. While this kind of Solomon’s judgment is required of few historians, the uncertainty about the place of history among the social sciences is characteristic of the contemporary American scene. In the following selections two American historians deal with the problem in markedly different fashion.

[Versatile, prolific, and creatively unconventional, Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) had a great influence on the American historiography of this century. In his early years a student of European history—his first book The Industrial Revolution appeared in England in 1901—he maintained his interest in European thought after he shifted to American history. There he became a pioneer in the analysis of the economic roots of political behavior—and his works An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) and Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915) created a great, and on the whole salutary, stir among historians and laymen alike. Deeply concerned with the problems of the present, and devotedly democratic, Beard saw in history a means of democratic education, and his massive, highly successful survey, The Rise of American Civilization (2 vols. 1927, written with Mary R. Beard) opens with the characteristic sentence: “The history of a civilization, if intelligently conceived, may be an instrument of civilization.” Many of his forty-seven books enjoyed great popularity and it has been estimated that eleven million copies of them have been sold in various countries.

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