What Is History For? by Arthur Alfaix Assis

Author:Arthur Alfaix Assis [Assis, Arthur Alfaix]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Historiography, Europe, Germany, Modern, 19th Century
ISBN: 9781782382492
Google: PTZPAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2014-01-01T01:06:32+00:00

The Aftermath of the Revolutions

Droysen’s identification with the time of the German wars of liberation was not only a matter of academic and political interest. Born in 1808 as a son of a military chaplain, he related his earliest personal recollections to the war he experienced, and to the military environment in which he grew up. It is reasonable to suppose that this environment and those war events exerted a decisive influence over the shaping of his personality, and thus also over the main traits of his historical interpretation of the age of the revolution.88 Providing sufficient evidence to support this argument is no easy task, however. Anyway, as already mentioned, Droysen not only cherished personal memories from certain late events he connected to the ‘wars of freedom’, but also regarded these wars as a turning point in both the history and the collective memory of his time. For him, the age of the revolution precisely marked the outset of the temporal order he recognized as his present: it had triggered the historical dynamics that, in his perception, was still characterizing his own contemporary epoch.89 Granted, Droysen was aware that both the post-1814 restoration and the waves of political reaction that spread throughout Western Europe thereafter had reversed most of the revolutions’ achievements. But he was firmly convinced that these were just minor incidents taking place on the surface of history, for the age of the revolution had introduced an un-resettable modification in the core of historical life. ‘Historical development’s will’ – as he put it in 1847 – was not on the conservative side. Droysen was therefore confident that ‘false alternatives’ like ‘either revolution or reaction’, or ‘either popular sovereignty or legitimacy’, would still be overcome.90

Actually, for Droysen the most effective heritage bequeathed by the ‘wars of freedom’ was an extension of the scope of application of the idea of freedom. As I am attempting to show, in Droysen’s account, the idea of freedom is a Western cultural asset with a long history. It emerged among the classical Greek civilization and underwent further major developments, especially within the contexts of Hellenism, Christianization and the Protestant Reformation. Droysen supposed, however, that the ‘wars of freedom’ had led to a qualitative change in the history of freedom, and therefore, following Hegel, he opposed the ancient to the modern notion of freedom. For Droysen, European medieval and early modern social orders constituted either a reversal or, at best, a continuation of the already limited freedom standards set by the ancient Greeks. He would concede that the Protestant Reformation had been a step towards advancing these standards, but it was circumscribed to the religious realm. Consequently, the crucial turn to modern freedom remained, according to him, in the ‘wars of freedom’.

This explains why Droysen could consider the revolutions as a world-historical leap forward, whilst simultaneously despising most of the ‘awful agitations’ that he perceived as characteristic of the revolutionary years. In a deep sense, the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolution and the

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