JULES MICHELET

1
JULES MICHELET

• Self-conscious disciple of Vico
• Used unconventional sources to development
  portraits of everyday life in the past
• Folklore, songs, poetry, architecture
• Wrote History of France
• 6 volumes
• Identified with common people but also celebrated
  the emergence of a sense of nationhood

2
FRANÇOIS GUIZOT

• Wrote History of Civilization in France
• 1830
• Expressed patriotic and romantic nationalism
• Parlayed fame from this book to become first
  minister under King Louis Philippe

3
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

• Wrote History of England
• Established history as a branch of great
  literature
• Articulated version of what became the Whig
  Interpretation of history
• Treated the history of England as synonymous with
  the emergence of liberty
• The history of England is emphatically the
  history of progress. It is the history of
  constant movement of a great society towards
  perfection

4
GOTTFRIED HERDER

• Wrote Toward a Philosophy of History of Man
• Portrayed history as an evolutionary process
• What existed in the present and what would come
  about in the future rested on what had been done
  in the past
• Demolished Enlightenment habit of disparaging the
  past
• First thinker to recognize that there are
  differences between different kinds of men and
  that human nature is not uniform but diversified
• Anticipated modern view that people have no fixed
  nature but instead are whatever their historical
  experience makes them

5
IMMANUEL KANT

• Wrote An Idea for a Universal History from a
  Cosmopolitan Point of View
• Rejected Herders emphasis on human
  dissimilarities and proposed instead to regard
  the unfolding of history as the realization of a
  hidden plan of nature by which all the
  capacities implanted by her in mankind can be
  fully developed
• Concentrated on uniformity
• History was a process by which humankind became
  rational and thereby fulfilled its fundamental
  nature

6
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

• Main book was Philosophy of History
• Compilation of his lectures published after his
  death
• Goal was to make the entirety of the human past
  comprehensible
• Saw history as the manifestation of divine will
  in time
• Wanted to provide an intellectual system that
  would explain the ways of God in the world he had
  created

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HEGELS SYSTEM

• Saw history as a logical and orderly process
• A manifestation of divine will in time
• Reason and freedom would gradually encompass the
  entire world
• Wanted to provide an intellectual system that
  would explain the ways of God in the world he had
  created
• Experienced reality existed first as an abstract
  ideal and was later made actual in the world
  through the unfolding of divine will over time

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DIALECTIC I

• The mechanism of change which brings about the
  realization of divine will proceeds according to
  the dialectic
• And the human mind could understand this process
  by thinking the same way as this process operated
• All things give rise to their opposites in
  Hegels world of pure thought

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DIALECTIC II

• Thesis (original idea)
• Antithesis (counterproposition)
• Synthesis (compromise idea between the two
  previous extremes)
• Everything generates dialectic tensions (ideas,
  nations, social groups, and institutions) that
  are ultimately resolved through the formation of
  new syntheses
• The dialectic therefore explains how change took
  place over time

10
PROGRESS

• The march of history produced changing levels of
  consciousness among human beings
• Human nature undergoes alterations as a result of
  new forms of experience and awareness
• All of which produced new dialectic processes
• People became more rational and free due to the
  dialectic process

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MAIN POINTS I

• The unfolding of history gradually reveals Gods
  plan for humanity
• The ultimate goal of this plan is total
  rationality and freedom for human beings
• Human beings therefore become more rational and
  more free as history progresses

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MAIN POINTS II

• The motor which drives history towards its
  ultimate goal of complete rationality and freedom
  is the dialectic
• The dialectic works on a number of levels at the
  same time but what it does is posit a thesis,
  which in turn generates an antithesis. The
  tension between these two opposites ultimately
  results in the creation of a synthesis (a
  compromise between the two) which then becomes a
  new thesis, thereby starting the entire process
  over again

13
MAIN POINTS III

• Each new synthesis/thesis is an improvement over
  the thesis which preceded it and therefore the
  process always results in progress
• To understand how and why history moves, the
  historian must understand the dialectic and also
  must think in a dialectic fashion

14
HEGELS LEGACY

• Even though he shared Kants inclination to
  emphasize the emergent rationality among humans,
  he sided with Herder in his comprehension of
  human nature as malleable and never fixed or
  final
• Existed in an eternal condition of becoming
• Therefore different humans in different times and
  places had different natures
• Favored Herders holistic conception of the past
  in which each phase maintained integrity as a
  prerequisite to whatever followed
• Historians must study the past ages in their own
  terms because each made an important contribution
  to the dialectical process which would ultimately
  result in the final realization of Gods plan for
  humankind

15
GERMAN HISTORICISM

• Affirmed the need for particular methodological
  means to understand the meaning of the past
• Pointed to the diversity of human experience and
  claimed that different peoples quite literally
  viewed the world differently
• To understand the past, scholars had to enter the
  mental universe of past actors empathetically and
  reconstruct their picture of reality
• A historian must place himself inside the heads
  of past actors in order to understand their
  actions

16
LEOPOLD VON RANKE

• Wanted to describe historical events as they
  really were
• Transformed history into a modern, academic
  discipline
• University-based
• Archive-centered
• Professional
• In that leading proponents underwent extensive
  postgraduate training

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VON RANKES WORK

• Wrote over 60 books
• Emergence of the European states after the
  Reformation was his great subject
• Tried to achieve balance and objectivity
• His works retain credibility today because of his
  comprehensive research and scholar disengagement
• His weakness was that his work was largely
  descriptive in nature, with little analysis