‘the rise of the historical consciousness’

© 2009 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Religion Compass 3/1 (2009): 86–98, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00132.x

‘The Rise of the Historical Consciousness’

Johannes C. Wolfart*Carleton University

Abstract‘The rise of the historical consciousness’ represents a grand narrative that is closelylinked to other meta-histories, especially modernization and secularization. Theidea that critical thought about history arose uniquely in a certain place (Europe,particularly Germany) and at a certain time (the Enlightenment of the eighteenthcentury) is widespread and powerful. As an ideology this notion, which is alsoknown as historicism, actually operates in two principal directions. First, it posesa direct challenge to other powerful epistemological systems of the West, especiallythose supporting the establishments of science and religion. Second, historicismis a key element in the imperialism, cultural and otherwise, by means of whichEuropean and American societies have dominated the rest of the world in thecapitalist age. Finally, this dual operation of historicism means not only that it hascome in for much criticism, especially in recent decades, but that such criticismhas come from both ends of the very wide spectrum in contemporary culturalpolitics. Rather confusingly, historicism remains both the darling and the bêtenoire of both ‘conservative’ theological apologists and ‘radical’ postcolonial critics.

Introduction

In a short essay on a vast topic, there is hardly room for disclaimers orself-disclosures. Let me begin, however, by stating that I am no expert inanything pertaining to consciousness, cognition, mind, and the like, his-torical or otherwise. I must further confess that I am reluctant indeed totackle any topic containing the phrase ‘the rise of ’. Yet, despite beingsomewhat put off by the topic when it was first proposed to me, I wasalso intrigued, especially by the fact that, apart from various warning bells,I also heard a familiar ring in ‘the rise of the historical consciousness’. Itoccurred to me, moreover, that the topic would probably resonate similarlywith a wide readership, since it is the business of editors of this journalto commission essays on significant topics, those which are of interest toa non-specialist audience.

On the question of why this topic should appeal to a broad audience,two things appear remarkable from the outset. The first is the unusualreflexivity of the phrase ‘the rise of the historical the consciousness’.Simply put, the ‘rise of ’ paradigm is indicative of historical consciousness;

© 2009 The Author Religion Compass 3/1 (2009): 86–98, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00132.xJournal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

The Rise of the Historical Consciousness 87

if historical consciousness did not exist, we would not be considering therise of anything. Thus, this topic requires an approach that is muchmore complex than consideration of other famous historical cases, forexample ‘The Rise of Nazism’. We shall consider this comparisonfurther, below.

The second remarkable thing is that there is probably a reason why myscholarly aversion to the ‘rise of ’ paradigm did not make me reject thecommission out of hand. In fact, it seems to me that I was responding tosome sort of ideological condition to which I was subject, a cultural habitof historicizing in a less-than-rigorous, un-self-critical fashion. In the famousterminology of Louis Althusser, I was being ‘hailed’ by something in thetopic. Of course it is this ideological condition that connects me to mostof my intended readership, very few of whom will likely be social historiansor have a specific interest in my field of expertise, Reformation Germanyand its historiography.

It is also one of two major reasons why an audience interested inreligion, religious studies, theology and the like should be interested inthis topic. The first of these, of course, is rather obvious: the relation ofreligious consciousness to historical consciousness has long been a topicof academic conversation. The second is rather less obvious: much ofwhat has been said about the relation of historical thought to religiousthought is framed in terms of a particular kind of historical development,is ‘historicized’ in the sense of the widespread ideological framing justsuggested. That is, people have long told and thus today widely recognizea number of stories of how, over time, religious consciousness and historicalconsciousness interacted. The most common such story is that historicalconsciousness ‘rose’ at the expense of the religious, which ‘declined’.Most, if not all, readers will recognized this as one of a class of similarnarratives commonly called ‘secularization’. It is a very powerful story,although it is highly problematic, especially from an historical point ofview. Nonetheless, it is powerful despite being un-historical, I wouldsuggest, because it is ‘historicist’. Such ‘historicism’ (which is what I shallcall historical consciousness henceforth) is actually more often than not,to echo Marxian language, false historical consciousness. It is also animportant part of what establishes and maintains the social institutions andsocial relations known collectively as the modern condition (Chakrabarty2000). So, when you add it all up, ‘the rise of the historical consciousness’should interest students of religion because it is one of the most powerfulorigins myths of modernity.

What is Historicism?

One might do well to recognize from the outset that there is no scholarlyconsensus on the precise meaning or definition of terms like ‘historicalconsciousness’ or ‘historicism’. In this case, the diversity of opinion goes

88 Johannes C. Wolfart


beyond normal academic hairsplitting because historicism has long beendeployed rhetorically by scholars, as a ‘fighting word’ or ‘Kampfbegriff ’(Lee & Beck 1954, p. 575). Nevertheless, some generalizations are possibleand will serve to orient the reader in preparation for consideration, below,of some of the divergent uses of the term by parties to various debates.As the term ‘consciousness’ implies, historicism can be considered a mentalor intellectual orientation, a way of thinking or epistemology. This is theview of the influential German historian of historical thinking, FriedrichMeinecke, who considered it a ‘Weltanschauung’ (Lee & Beck 1954, p. 571;Meinecke 1959). The historicist way of thinking is characterized by therecognition that things change over time and that this change is funda-mental or essential rather than superficial or apparent. For a historicist, toknow a subject presupposes knowledge of the history of that subject,which is to say, it requires the ability to place the defining or key attributesof a subject within a narrative framework, to tell a story of how a subjectcame to be the way it is. Furthermore, it is generally observed thathistoricist thinking prefers or privileges, as do most philosophical systems,its epistemology over others. Finally, historicists generally consider thisepistemology applicable to all subjects. According to John Lukacs (1968,p. 6), for example, ‘[t]here is no field of human action that may not beapproached, studied, described and understood through its history’. Amore recent but equally succinct definition is that of Sheila Greeve Davaney(2006, p. 9), who identifies historicism with the ‘recognition that humanslive in and out of history’. One may take the phrase ‘out of history’ toindicate not that history is sometimes operative and sometimes not – asin the phrase ‘time out of time’ – but that humans, in addition to beingsubject to historical forces, are creative agents in relation to their historicalpredicaments, and in particular are intellectually engaged with or consciousof their historicity.

At this point it should be clear, then, why the meaning of historicismcan in no way be restricted to a terse definitional statement. Indeed, it isclear that scholars are actually much more exercised with the implicationsof historicism than they are with the moment of awakening historicalconsciousness itself. Thus many attempts to define historicism attendimmediately to one or another implication of historical consciousness. Forexample, Thomas Albert Howard (2000, p. 1) defines historicism as‘heightened sensitivity to history and to the “constructed” character ofone’s ideas and beliefs’. The implications here are linked so closely tohistoricism itself that they are hard to distinguish, especially for the con-temporary reader used to hearing about the constructed nature of justabout everything. Indeed, scholars from an age before the postmodernturn were somewhat more explicit about the status of this key implicationof the notion that subjects are shaped by the processes of their past,processes that we may cast as narratives. For example, Hans Peter Reill(1975, p. 214) identified not one but two features that constituted what



he called ‘the historicist mentality: the concept of development and theidea of individuality’. He thus identified as a key feature of historicism itsdefinition (in the strict sense of delimitation) from thought that positedeternal and universal human identities and conditions, especially rationalistones. The distinction is presented most starkly in John Lukacs’s (1968, p. 7)juxtaposition of historical and scientific thought: ‘while science [. . .] dealsprincipally with what is typical and what is routine, history deals primarily(though not exclusively) with what is unique and what is exceptional’. Insum, historical consciousness or historicism is widely understood not justin terms of its perception of matters in terms of narratives pertaining totheir origins, developments, evolutions, degenerations, etc., but also interms of the radical specificity or uniqueness of those narratives. History,as the saying (sometimes) goes, does not repeat itself. As a consequence,historicism can today be described almost exclusively in terms of its impli-cations, as if it had absolutely nothing to do with the past, narratives ofthe past, history, etc., at all. For example, Kathryn Tanner (Davaney 2006,p. vii) calls historicism ‘the recognition of the conditioned, located,particular, and relative character of all human thought and experience,including the religious’. Obviously, what we have here is actually anapproach to the implication of the implications of historicism. That is,Tanner is concerned with what things like particularity (as opposed touniversalism) and relativism (as opposed to absolutism) might mean forreligion. Actually, the answer should be reasonably obvious, at least for acertain conception of religion that depends on the authority it commands.But before turning to religion we might first consider what the historicistimplication that things happen in particular times and locales, and thatuniversality is nonsense (i.e. that nothing can happen everywhere all thetime and still be considered to be ‘happening’), might mean for historiciststhemselves. That is, we might consider the question: if everything, includingevery idea, is shaped by a history, what is the history of the idea thateverything is shaped by a history?

Historical (and Not-so-historical) Takes on Historicism

The formulation of our own topic may be taken as emblematic of aparticular scholarly approach to historical consciousness or historicism,one that is itself predominantly historicist. But current literature suggeststhat there are at least three more-or-less distinct concepts correspondingto the term historicism, at least one of which is actually predominantlyphilosophical. Obviously, it is important to clarify the distinctions betweenthe three most common uses of the term before one tries to make senseof the debates surrounding the term. This is the case all the more so sinceonly one of the three concepts is actually reflexively historicist, which isto say that it actually posits ‘the rise of the historical consciousness’ in aparticular time and place.



The philosopher Karl Popper’s (b.1902, d. 1994) use of the term, whilehighly influential in some circles, is also somewhat idiosyncratic, andactually bears little on our discussion of historical consciousness. What Popperappears to have meant by historicism is the tendency to view history notas a human interpretation of the past, but as a quasi-natural force. Thiswas linked, in Popper’s view, to a pretense at scientific method on the partof historians, including the attempt to formulate predictive laws of history.Such historicism Popper denounced as pernicious pseudo-science anddangerous esotericism. Tellingly, his collected essays on the topic werededicated to the memory of ‘. . . of the countless men and women . . . whofell victims to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws ofHistorical Destiny’ (Popper 1957; also Lee & Beck 1954).

Like Popper, the Italian historian-philosopher Benedetto Croce (b.1866,d.1952) has been extremely popular and influential, at least periodically,in the English-speaking academy, especially in America. His most influ-ential work on historiography appeared in book form first in Germanduring the First World War, and shortly after the war in English via Italian(Croce 1915, 1921). Like Popper, Croce considered historicism as a phil-osophical orientation. Unlike Popper, however, Croce approved whole-heartedly of such historicism, which has meant that Croce has sometimesbeen identified as one of the fascists of Popper’s dedication. Indeed, Croceshared his historicism with many of his Italian colleagues, and has cometo stand for what some observers call a distinct historicist ‘tradition’, whoserelation to fascism remains a matter of debate (Roberts 2007, p. 16). Whatis clear, however, is that Croce cast history as a guide for moral action.Fostering historical consciousness was thus an ethical obligation, especiallyas such consciousness weighed against the supposedly amoral positivism,naturalism and futurism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.On the other hand, Croce’s approach to historical thought also rejectedphilosophies of transcendence. It has thus often been identified simply as‘neo-humanist’. Recently, David D. Roberts (2007, p. 21) has suggested thatit is this rejection of transcendence that differentiates Crocean historicismfrom the pseudo-historical neo-traditionalism of Italian fascism. It shouldalso distinguish Croce’s historical consciousness from other late nineteenth-century forms of aesthetic neo-traditionalism or revivalism, for examplein music or in architecture (for example, see Schorske 1998). Finally, thoughRoberts’ attempt at rehabilitation by itself is unlikely to return Croce tothe status he once enjoyed, we may yet witness a Croce revival based onhis notion of historicism or historical consciousness as a trans-historicaland universal human attribute. As Lee and Beck (1954, p. 572) point out,although Croce preferred the historical writing of his own age, he con-sidered historicism ‘a logical category and thus present in any age’. As willbe seen below, the battle lines have been drawn for a major debate onwhether historical consciousness is specifically, particularly historical in itsown right.



Which brings us back to the monumental history of historical con-sciousness of Friedrich Meinecke: the impact of this work in establishinghistorical consciousness as an historical phenomenon can hardly be over-estimated. It remains the basic point of departure for both historical andcurrent scholarship on historicism. For example, John Lukacs (1968, p.15) asserted that ‘historical consciousness ( like the remembered past) is initself an historical phenomenon’. Likewise, Sheila Grave Davaney (2006, p. 1)begins her narrative with the eighteenth century, when ‘thinking abouthistory was itself historicized’.

The reasons for the enduring success and influence of Meinecke aremanifold and complex, but among them, surely, must be reckoned thefact that his history both described and explained the rise of Europeanhistorical consciousness in indigenous terms, from its immediate precursormovements in what would now be called early modern Europe. In otherwords, Meinecke’s narrative is an evolutionary account of the uniquedevelopment of modern Western historical consciousness, one that is thusuniquely plausible in the modern West. It is hardly surprising therefore,that Meinecke’s basic conclusions remain common currency among manyscholars, including those inclined to criticism of other pieties or orthodoxies.For example, once again, Davaney (2006, p. 1) asserts that ‘[t]he rise ofhistoricism is part of the story of modern thought in the West’. And, onceagain, she is in close agreement with John Lukacs (1968, pp. 11, 24), whoclaimed that neither Middle Ages nor Renaissance possessed historicalconsciousness, properly speaking. Nor did non-European cultures, due toa fundamental difference in what he called ‘mentality’. For Peter HansReill (1975, p. 2), who described what he called ‘the rise of historicism’approximately one academic generation ago, the association of that risewith modernity was similarly uncontroversial: ‘[f ]or many scholars therecognition of the historicity of all things is the hallmark of modernthought . . .’ Only slightly more debatable, according to Reill, is that‘. . . the Enlightenment had a historical consciousness’. While his refinedchronology may thus distinguish Reill’s argument from that of Meinecke,his identification of a primary locus for the rise of historical consciousnessdoes not. For Reill it was practically a matter of common sense thathistorical consciousness not only originated, but was perfected in Germany.‘After all’, he wrote, ‘it is generally agreed that the historicist mentality reachedits most extensive development in Germany’ (Reill 1975, p. 2). Indeed,for Reill historical consciousness was so thoroughly identified with theGerman Enlightenment, or Aufklärung, that he considered it the key featuredistinguishing it from Anglo-Scottish or French variants of Enlightenment.A quarter century later, Thomas Howard (2000, p. 1) still agreed that histori-cism ‘. . . first developed among German scholars, in universities and academies,at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries’.

These days, insistence on the specifically German character of historicismprobably indicates something other than old-fashioned nationalism.



Rather, such specificity suggests that Howard has a very particular storyto tell about why or how historical consciousness arose when it did.Indeed, so did Friedrich Meinecke, who considered the rise of historicalconsciousness as a critical (and not coincidentally German) response toseventeenth-century rationalism, and especially to (not coincidentallyFrench) Cartesianism (Lee & Beck 1954, p. 571). This anti-rationalistview of historicism is clearly what attracted John Lukacs, a self-describedreactionary (his book remains in print in something called the ‘Library ofConservative Thought’), to Meinecke. Lukacs (1968, p. 19) apparentlyconsidered Decartes as the progenitor of all hyper-rationalisms and deter-minisms to which he was opposed, especially Marxism and Darwinism. Itis also likely why Lukacs was so careful to cast historicism as fully modernand properly Western: in his view it must be a fully legitimate alternativeto scientific thought.

By contrast, and as already mentioned, Hans Peter Reill emphasized theGerman origins of historicism. Yet he also gave particular credit to PaulHazard’s La Crise de la Conscience Europeénne (1935), rather than to Mei-necke. Following Hazard, Reill (1975, p. 9) posited a European intellectualand spiritual crisis in the decades at the turn of the seventeenth to theeighteenth centuries, one which resulted in a continent-wide ‘loss of self-evidence in the traditional beliefs concerning the relation of man, nature,society and God’. This epistemological crisis spawned various responses,including rationalism, empiricism and naturalism, philosophical idealismand historicism. Of course a ‘modern’ Christian thought also emerged inthe very complex wake of the crisis. Reill recognized that all of theseintellectual movements or systems were complex and far from clearlydefined, the one against the other. Nor did they simply follow each otherchronologically, like beads on a string, and they certainly did not followone from the other, in the mode of actions and reactions. Instead, Reill(1975, p. 43) observed, for example, that the early Aufklärung in particularwas marked by thought that was both historicist (i.e. relativistic, at leastin principle) as well as bent on demonstrating the absolute truth of theChristian message. As we shall see, intellectual history that observesmultiplicity, diversity and contradiction over normative unity continues tohold considerable attraction to contemporary academic theologians. Indeed,in what appears to be a most intriguing observation, Reill stated thathistorical consciousness itself contained a fundamental contradiction ortension. Historical consciousness hinged on the twin presence of whatReill (1975, p. 214) called ‘the concept of development and the idea ofindividuality’ and ‘[e]ach, when taken to its logical conclusion, excludesthe other’. Of course what Reill was talking about was what has mystifiedhigh school history students for generations as ‘continuity and change’.

Whether or not one sees historicism emerging historically as a reactionto rationalism, and whether one considers Reill’s observation a ‘profound’insight or simply a restated ‘fundamental’, it is the case that there is



something contradictory and unstable and, therefore, potentially radicalabout historicism. This is the point, it seems to me, of Linda GreeveDavaney’s presentation of historicism as a whole alternative tradition to acomplex of modern philosophies that include not only Cartesianism, butalso Galilean empiricism and the scientific universalism of the Anglo-FrenchEnlightenment. Following Jeffrey Stout (1981), she sees two competingtraditions emerging as a response to the catastrophic collapse of universalreligious authority in the wake of the Reformations of the sixteenthcentury. But whereas the traditions conventionally associated with theEnlightenment or the Age of Reason sought to re-establish or re-assertuniversal truth, members of her historicist tradition apparently got usedto the absence of a ‘grand scheme’, embracing instead the provisional truthsand historical relativism. As a major alternative to simply reasserting theauthority of absolute or total truth in the modern period, the fortunes ofhistoricism have waxed and waned periodically, over the course of modernity,as the sin to the cosine of various attempts at hegemonic, authoritarianor totalitarian assertion. Thus Davaney (2006, p. 19) points out, for example,that historicism flourished in the aftermath of the French RevolutionaryTerror.

This negative orientation of historical consciousness vis-à-vis universalclaims to authority also helps explain why the task of locating historicalconsciousness in relation to religious thought is often so perplexing. Ingrossly simplified terms: historicism can be seen as anti-religious, wherereligion claims universal authority. Yet, where religious voices are at oddswith non-religious claimants to universal authority, for example from thescientific or political sphere, religious discourse and historicism may beclosely allied. Finally, when a religious tradition or community is itselfdivided on questions of universal authority or ultimate truth, then historicismmay itself become a feature of religious debate, as it did in nineteenth-centuryGermany, or as it has in contemporary North America.

Historicism and Religion (Particularly Christianity)

Among the many writers who have availed themselves of ‘historicism’ or‘historical consciousness’ there are more than a few who cast it as anorientation that is fundamentally antagonistic to religion, and in particularto revealed religion and theology. Notwithstanding the traditions of his-torical narrative embodied in, say, the Christian tradition, there are indeedseveral reasons why one might consider historical consciousness to be a-theological. First of all, the notion that past events are themselves bothcauses and effects is at variance with schemes of providential or sacredhistory, where a deity is normally considered the primary agent. In sometheological worldviews, the disenchantment of even the most banal quo-tidian occurrences is considered nothing short of secularization. Secondlyand similarly, the so-called humanism of many historicists is not difficult



to cast as anti-religious, although one might point out that, (a) humanismmight just as well be considered antithetical to natural science, and that,(b) there is a long tradition of so-called Christian humanism, and thatfifteenth-century Italian or twentieth-century Anglo-American humanismis not typical. Thirdly, there certainly are notable historicists whose ownlife histories turn on a conversion away from normative religion or mainlinetradition. Benedetto Croce, whom we have already encountered, is a goodexample of such a self-described convert from religion to historicism. Butthe most common reason why historicism is considered anti-religious hasto do with the association of the term with two other terms whose relationto religion is commonly caricatured: ‘modernity’ and ‘the Enlightenment’.Of course ‘modernity’ is only irreligious from the most conservativestandpoint. Otherwise, Liberal Protestantism, or Reform Judaism, or Catholicsyndicalism is each a fine example of a movement that was both thoroughlymodern and fundamentally religious. Likewise, historical scholarship hasrecently started to concern itself with religion in (and not just before andafter) the Enlightenment. Thus the atheism of Hume or the deism ofVoltaire, for examples, both turn out to be highly exceptional. Indeed,such scholarship is rediscovering just how deeply imbued with religionthe enlightenment mainstream was (for an overview, see Sheehan2003).

Nevertheless, other contemporary scholarship continues to rely on thestraw man of secular and secularizing historicism. Thus Thomas A. Howard(2000, p. 4) imagines ‘modernity’s predominantly secular, historical [=historicist] elite culture’, and Kathryn Tanner (Davaney 2006, p. vii) intro-duces Sheila Greeve Davaney’s book with reference to the ‘challenges ofhistoricism’ for Christianity. And yet both Howard and Davaney are actu-ally quite clearly in pursuit of the religious origins – and in Davaney’scase, future – of historicism. That is, they are historicizing historicism inorder to re-establish certain theological positions, positions that probablynever really went away in any case. Put another way, it turns out that theidea that history has a history itself has a history, and that that history isreligious! Thus, for Howard (2000, p. 4), historicism ‘bears a complex andprofound relationship to its predecessor biblical-theological culture; thelatter has exercised extensive and often unrecognized influence on theformer’. And, one might add, that it continues to exercise such influence.Which is exactly the point of Davaney’s book: for her, the ambivalenceof historical consciousness towards theology has a definite beginning: ‘itis both an outcome and a rejection of the developments that commencedwith the Protestant Reformation’ (Davaney 2006, p. 1; emphasis added).But it has no end, which is to say that, on close inspection, historicalconsciousness appears to be a conversation that Western religion is currentlyhaving with itself. Which is not to say, or even to imply (as Davaneyappears to do), that history of historicism is in some fundamental wayconfessional, that it hinges on the differences and antagonisms that existed



between Catholic and Protestant, and that Protestants had a monopoly onhistoricism. Today, most historians of early modern Europe are quite confidentthat observations such as Reill’s (1975, p. 6) to the effect that ‘GermanCatholicism did not experience a parallel development [to Aufklärung]’,represent historiographical fiction rather than historical truth.

And yet, equally inadequate, today, is Lee’s and Beck’s (1954, p. 575)conclusion that ‘historicism, as one aspect of the intellectual reaction inthe twentieth century to positivism and naturalism, is truly the heir of theidealist-antirationalists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’.Idealist and anti-rationalist they may be, but these days certainly, historicistsare less likely to find themselves skirmishing with the ‘determinist’ and‘reductionist’ Marxists or Darwinists of yore, than they are to be squaredoff against what are commonly called – for all of the term’s shortcomings– fundamentalists. To put matters in bluntly historicist terms: theKulturkampf, the Cold War and the ‘culture wars’ are all different things,which is why I think Davaney appears to prefer Schleiermacher andTroeltsch over Herder, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Schleiermacher, inparticular, appears in Davaney’s account as the very epitome of the modern(postmodern?) liberal Christian, firmly committed to transcendent truthand yet more than just tolerant of diversity. Indeed, in her admiring view‘Schleiermacher sought to hold together a universalism and historicalparticularity, a common religious nature and distinctive human traditions’(Davaney 2006, p. 37). Davaney’s ultimate concern for eminently contem-porary problems is also why she works so hard to break out of thetraditional German-centered model of the rise of historicism and constructs,instead, an entire distinctly American historicist tradition, one which, inaddition to the usual suspects like William James and John Dewey, alsoincludes W.E.B. Dubois and Mordecai Kaplan.

Considerations re: Historicism (Apart from Religion)

Davaney’s suggestion that there exist two parallel histories of historicism,one in nineteenth-century Germany and one in early twentieth-centuryAmerica, raises many intriguing questions, two of which will be discussedbelow. But above all, it suggests why historicism should be of interest tothose who would not ordinarily have investment in the religious truth ofChristianity. Historicism is of immediate concern because it remains avery powerful ideological and critical resource. Such power can be botha boon and a curse. On the one hand, it is the case that people learn, inthe broadest sense, from historical criticism. Methodologically rigorousand theoretically sound historical criticism can stand against the power ofmyth, for example, and can thus become an instrument of social change.On the other hand, sound historical criticism can have a stabilizing effectagainst radically erratic pseudo-histories, such as those of the notoriousholocaust denier David Irving. Perhaps no recent historicism has been



more liberating or empowering, and hence socially significant, than theso-called ‘genealogical method’ of Michel Foucault.

But one can also point to what most contemporary observers wouldconsider troubling effects of the historicization of historical consciousness.I opened this essay by observing that ‘the rise of historical consciousness’and the ‘rise of Nazism’ were two very different formulations. And yet,they have some things in common too. As historicist conceptions, theyeach posit the located-ness of their subject. Thus the phrase ‘the rise ofNazism’ immediately sets the scene in Weimar Germany, a place (and time)to which Nazism is thus supposed uniquely to belong. Indeed, undercircumstance one may even read ‘the rise of Nazism’ as a position statementvis-à-vis the debate over the uniqueness of German right-wing ideologyand its murderous social manifestations, the so-called Historikerstreit.Nazism, alas, can happen anywhere at any time. The rise of Nazism onlyhappened in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

Similarly, the ‘Rise of the Historical Consciousness’ not only assertssingularity, it practically demands that historical consciousness be locatedsomewhere, generally in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany.But such historical ‘belonging’ can tip very easily into a more proprietarykind of ownership and thence, into out-and-out chauvinism. Thus, inaddition to Germany, many of the authors we have considered also referto something called ‘the West’. Most of them would be appalled, I think,to be accused of Eurocentrism or ethnocentrism (or, our times what theyare, any other centrism, including, possibly, heliocentrism). Even back in1963, when Hugh Trevor-Roper made his notorious statement to theeffect that sub-Saharan Africa had no history, he was greeted withacademic protests. Nevertheless, such opinion remained salonfähig for aremarkably long time. Towards the end of that tumultuous decade, forexample, John Lukacs (1968, pp. 22, 24) deemed ‘History a Western formof thought’ and purported to observe an ‘inadequacy of historianshipoutside the West’ which he put down both to poor source situations andto a different ‘mentality’. This last point he clarified in terms of a ‘religiousfatalism which, in turn, is involved with the insufficient maturity of theirhistorical thinking’ (Lukacs, p. 24). In other words, he considered all non-Western peoples to be primitive savages. Another 20 years on and DonaldE. Brown (1988, p. 1) opened his comparative study of what the socialorigins of historical consciousness with the words ‘[a]mong some literatepeoples historians have flourished; among other they have not. Whyshould this be so?’ Obviously, the central problematic of his book hingedvery much on the definition of ‘historian’.

Moreover, even among scholars who acknowledge a great variety,diversity and distribution of historical thinking across cultures, thereremains a strong strain of Eurocentrism in the stories they tell of theemerging awareness of historical thinking known as historical consciousness.While they may make histories just as we make histories, so the story goes,



only we now know that we are making histories. Our interpretation andcriticism of such histories thus continues to set us apart from them. SuchEurocentrism, which now should appear as inherent in the historicism of‘the rise of historical consciousness’, has recently been the subject of anexperimental collaborative examination led by the critic and cultural theoristJörn Rüsen. According to Rüsen (2002, p. 8), the central theme toemerge from the project is that ‘the specificity of Western historical thinkingcertainly cannot be tracked down in any easy and clear-cut manner’. So,it turns out, that one cannot tell the story of how one came to behistorical, at least not in the historical manner to which one has becomeaccustomed.

But does that mean that we are forced to retreat into a kind ofcompound relativism or radical indigenousness where every people (or,person) can tell only one history (their own) and, moreover, tell it subjectto circumscribed historical consciousness? Can Indians, for example, alonewrite Indian history? Furthermore, must they only write Indian historyand do so, moreover, only in an Indian way? Such questions have beenaddressed at great length by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000,2002), in addressing himself to what has become known as the postcolonialcritique of historicism. Given the many words Chakrabarty has writtenon this and related subjects, his answer to the question of whether onecan still possess historical consciousness without laying claim to a historyof the ‘rise of historical consciousness’ is remarkably succinct. After colo-nialism, says Chakrabarty, ‘[b]eing Westernized is one way of being Indian’(Chakrabarty 2002, p. 42). With that comes historical consciousness without‘the rise of the historical consciousness’.

Short Biography

Johannes C. Wolfart is a social historian of early modern Germany witha vested interest in the academic study of religion. He is the author ofReligion, Government and Political Culture in Early Modern Germany (Palgrave,2002) and a past editor of the journal Method and Theory in the Study ofReligion. His current research, which is funded by the Social Sciences andHumanities Research Council, explores vernacular historical writing inSouth Germany in the wake of the Reformation. Following doctoral andpost-doctoral studies in History at Cambridge and Princeton Universities, hewas an Assistant Professor in Religion at the University of Toronto and anAssociate Professor in Religion at the University of Manitoba. In 2007 he wasappointed to the College of the Humanities at Carleton University, Ottawa.

Note

* Correspondence address: Johannes C. Wolfart, College of the Humanities, Carleton University,1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 5B6. E-mail: [email protected].



Works Cited

Brown, DE, 1988, Hierarchy, History and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness,University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ.

Chakrabarty, D, 2000, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference,Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

——, 2002, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, University ofChicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Croce, B, 1915, Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Historiographie, Mohr, Tübingen, Germany.——, 1921, Theory & History of Historiography, Trans. Douglas Ainslie. George G. Harrap,

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