the politics of intellectual history in twentieth-century europe

Reviewing so much more than Professor Wegele’s Deutsche Historiographie in the first edition of the English Historical Review of 1886, in what has since become a justly famous essay, Lord Acton critically evaluated various German ‘schools’ of history in the nineteenth century. Of course, although Acton was the most cosmopolitan of scholars, the fact that the first edition of what would quickly become the premier English historical periodical should be so concerned with the state of German scholarship suggests something more than passing historiographical interest. For at root, Acton’s discussions of these schools of history were underpinned by an account of the political implications of different versions of historical enquiry. Indeed, he even suggested — in what had by 1886 already become a standard trope of political discourse — that although German ‘historical writing was old’, strictly ‘historical thinking was new in Germany when it sprang from the shock of the French Revolution’.1 In conclusion, as well as fulfilling his aim to outline the ways in which these schools ‘break new ground and add to the notion and the work of history’, the general tenor of the essay offered nothing less than a full-blown evocation of the historical spirit of the age: The tendency of the nineteenth century German to subject all things to the government of intelligible law, and to prefer the simplicity of resistless cause to the confused conflict of free wills, the tendency which Savigny defined and the comparative linguists encouraged, was completed in his own way by Hegel.2