Call for Papers: ‘Altertumswissenschaft and Historicism‘
Senate House, London
Wednesday 26th – Friday 28th February 2025
Conference Organiser
Aaron Turner (Knapp Foundation/Royal Holloway, University of London)
Confirmed Participants
Jonas Grethlein (University of Heidelberg)
Katherine Harloe (Institute of Classical Studies)
Alexandra Lianeri (University of Thessaloniki)
Neville Morley (University of Exeter)
Glenn Most (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)
Daniel Whistler (Royal Holloway, University of London)
In 1921, Ulrich Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf proudly declared, “we have at last passed the farther limit of the 19th century, in which the conquest of the ancient world by science was completed” (1998 [1921], p.47). For Wilamowitz, the potential of Altertumswissenschaft –the unity of classical studies initiated by Winckelmann, Gesner, Heyne, and Wolf (among others) in the 18th Century – had finally been fulfilled. In the same year, Ernst Troeltsch gravely declared “a crisis of historicism”, wherein the word Historismus had become a “dirty word…a discharge of all kinds of complaints against historical burdens, complicated historical thinking and historical education that weakens the power of reasoning” (1922 [1921], p.572-73). For Troeltsch, the events of the First World War had eroded the fundamental historicist notion of an “intellectual progress”, which had produced a “suffering humanity”, while at the same time the principles of historicism were themselves under attack for relativising human values. Despite their (apparently) contrasting fortunes in 1921, historicism and Altertumswissenschaft emerged out of the same ground and their development out of the 18th and throughout the 19th Centuries was deeply collaborative. This conference explores the fundamental connections in the rise of Altertumswissenschaft and historicism in the 18th Century and their development in the first half of the 19th Century.
For both classical studies and history, the compulsion for independence in the 19th Century was driven in part by their liberation from the impulses of rational philosophy in the 18th Century. Wilamowitz places Winckelmann at the beginning of the tradition of classical studies and it was through Winckelmann that aesthetics was emancipated from the rationalist philosophical tradition that emerged in Descartes and Leibniz and expanded through Wolff and Baumgarten. At the same time, the integrity of historical studies was challenged by the proliferation of historical pyrrhonism that emerged out of Cartesian scepticism. Consequently, it was through the methodology underlying Winckelmann’s approach to ancient art that an understanding of a recreative intuition for historical knowledge became possible for German historians in the 18th Century. In particular, Justus Möser, whose work had a profound effect in shaping the development of historicism in Germany, was deeply swayed by Winckelmann’s critique of modernity and rationalism.
Both Winckelmann and Möser exercised a considerable influence over the direction of classical and historical studies at Göttingen, where theology and philosophy took a back seat and historical and literary disciplines predominated. It was here that Gesner made the first attempt to unify the divergent branches of classical studies for the purpose of conceptualising ancient culture as a distinct system. Gesner’s successor, Heyne, a strong advocate of Winckelmann’s classicism, took the next crucial step forward and opened the door for a new hermeneutical tradition of classical philology grounded in Winckelmann’s aesthetics and Ernesti’s use of linguistics for factual interpretation. At the same time, Möser’s historicism became entrenched in the work of the Göttingen historians, Spittler, Pütter, Gatterer, and, most significantly, Schlözer. Arguably, it was through the 18th Century triumvirate of Winckelmann, Möser, and Schlözer that the limits of French and British Enlightenment history could be overcome and the individuality of peoples of past epochs could be elucidated.
In the early 19th Century, Wolf arrived in Berlin and set about systematising classical studies, coining the term Altertumswissenschaft in the process. Strongly influenced by his interactions with von Humboldt, Wolf established the goal of classical philology as the philosophical understanding of “the moral side of humanity” (1833 [1807], p.11). In turn, through Wolf, von Humboldt learned to ground individuality in the unity of language and nationality. Through the aesthetic standpoint of Winckelmann (and later Schlegel), the progress of philology under the direction of Gesner, Heyne, Schlegel, and Wolf, and the historicism of von Humboldt and Herder, the groundwork for a new and decisive hermeneutics was laid and Schleiermacher would be its executor. It was in Schleiermacher’s scientific hermeneutics that the emerging ‘historical school’ of Berlin, whose members included Savigny, Niebuhr, and Eichhorn, grounded itself and sought to emancipate history from the shackles of German Idealism.
After Ranke’s arrival in Berlin in 1825 and following Hegel’s unsuccessful application to join the Academy of Sciences, the stage was set for a reawakening of historical consciousness. Ranke’s critical method, which became the foundation of this new historicism, was deeply inspired by Niebuhr’s philological advances. Following in the footsteps of Wolf, Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte (1811) opposed the materialistic historiographies of Voltaire, Schlözer, and Gibbon and grounded historical criticism in the sources. At the same time, two of Wolf’s students, Boeckh and Bekker, grew to prominence in Berlin, which had by now replaced Göttingen as the central hub of both historical and classical studies in Germany. Boeckh, a student of both Wolf and Schleiermacher, had the most significant impact in both fields. For Boeckh, philology elucidates “the knowledge of what has been produced by the human spirit” (1877, p.10). Boeckh carried Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics forward, which became the basis for the next phase of historicism initiated through Droysen’s Grundriß der Historik (1868). Following the collapse of German Idealism in the 1840s, the rise of positivism under the direction of Mill and Comte reignited the debate between history and science and Droysen was the first major historical thinker to confront the rising tide of positivism.
The emerging conflict between historicism and positivism signalled the end of this close connection between classical and historical studies that, in many ways, remains severed today. The aim of this conference, therefore, is to explore this relationship between Altertumswissenschaft and historicism from their emergence against the dominant strands of naturalism and rationalism in the 18th Century to the progress of their development in the 19th Century until their eventual estrangement. Today, engagement between classical studies and the philosophy of history is practically non-existent. The ever-increasing and unrelenting specialisation within these disciplines has created a void in a discourse that until the middle of the 19th Century was essential to the survival of both. By retreading the ground that enabled classical and historical studies to emerge in the first place, perhaps a more fruitful discourse might be possible for the future.
If you are interested in presenting a paper that addresses in any way the the core theme of the conference, please send an abstract (350-500 words for presentations lasting 30 minutes) to aaron.turner@knappfoundation.ac.uk by August 30th 2024. Notifications will be sent out by the end of September.
This conference is supported by the Knapp Foundation and the Humanities and Arts Research Institute (HARI).