Dissertation Fellow 2003-04
Bradford Whitener (History)
University of Virginia
Varieties of Historical Consciousness in Modern Germany:
Ranke, Döllinger, and Marx
This dissertation project is an investigation into how modern conceptions
of history developed in the nineteenth century. I focus on three
thinkers, the canonical founder of professional historiography Leopold
von Ranke, the important Catholic Church historian Ignaz von Döllinger,
and Karl Marx. I find a correlation between their conceptions of
history and two underlying ontologies: a naturalist conception finding
an eternal, ordered, rational substrate in the world, and a voluntarist
conception taking everything back to a creating will. I find that
the modern conceptions of history reflected in the writings of these
three thinkers all draw on the logics implicit in these two ontologies.
My investigation of Ranke shows how his attempt to maintain both
ontologies simultaneously engendered contradictions that he could
not resolve. In short, he wanted to maintain a version of humanism,
which emphasized man, while at the same time he sought to articulate
the underlying meaning of history, which emphasized God's purpose
for man. I find Döllinger's conception of history to be more
consistently dependent on the voluntarist ontology. While many of
Döllinger's critics have sought to connect his "Liberal
Catholicism" to Protestant influences, I find the more plausible
connection to be Döllinger's dependence on the voluntarist
ontology implicit in Catholic theological traditions. Marx's conception
of history is a creative blending of both naturalist and voluntarist
ontologies, now advanced within the context of purely secular conceptions
of progress and liberation. In short, Marx's confidence in a rational
process in history stems from the naturalist ontology; his confidence
that history's development is progressive stems from the voluntarist
ontology.
While each thinker's conception of history draws on these naturalist
and voluntarist ontologies in different ways, collectively they
help us to understand the broader movement toward secular thinking
occurring in the nineteenth century. My research attempts to understand
how these deep-rooted ontological assumptions shape and limit historical
conceptualization in the modern world.
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