Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin
2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/gerhis/ghn060
ISSN1477-089X
Autores ResumoJohn Toews is one of the most formidable intellectual historians of his generation, and with Becoming Historical, he further solidifies his reputation as someone who will not be derailed from his historical task even by the most excruciatingly abstract of German philosophers. Indeed, he begins this book with one of the worst of the lot, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, a man convinced of his world-historic role and therefore capable of saying to his students that ‘I have helped you to recognize the highest things in their whole truth and particularity’ (p. 14). There are a number of people like that in this book, from Frederick William IV, whose monarchical self-esteem reached heliocentric proportions, to Leopold von Ranke, who never seemed to grow out of a youthful revelation that the ‘united spirits of past and present ages’ spoke directly to him (p. 394), to Friedrich Julius Stahl, who wrote thousands of pages of turgid prose to explain ‘that which is right must possess its existence … independently of its recognition among men and knowledge of the right must thus be something other than the knowledge of the existing laws’ (p. 308). And Stahl, naturally, knew ‘that which is right’.
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