67 Ranke, cited in Iggers, The German Conception of History, 80.
68 Krieger, “Elements of Early Historicism,” 12.
69 Ranke, cited in “Elements of Early History,” 13.
70 See Rudolf Vierhaus, “Historiography Between Science and Art,” in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, 61–9.
71 Krieger, “Elements of Early Historicism,” 1.
72 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 284.
73 Ernst Schulin, “Universal History and National History,” in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, 70–81.
74 Toews, Becoming Historical, 388.
75 Iggers, The German Conception of History, 70.
76 Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, 139.
77 Wittkau, Historismus, 13.
78 Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, 50.
79 On the phrase “historical sense” see Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition: “The term became a catch phrase of the nineteenth century and the historical age” (216n). It signified “awareness of historical change and how the identity of a people depends on its specified place in history” (244). “Historical sense is the recognition that everything changes in history, that everything perishes and nothing lasts forever” (210).
80 Wilhelm von Humboldt, “On the Historian’s Task,” History and Theory 6 (1967), 57–71.
81 Peter Hanns Reill, “Science and the Construction of the Cultural Sciences in Late Enlightenment Germany: The Case of Wilhelm von Humboldt,” History and Theory 33 (1994), 345–66, citing 356.
82 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (NY: Zone, 2007), 55–115.
83 Humboldt, “On the Historian’s Task,” 57.
84 Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Joseph Rouse, Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996); Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
85 Humboldt, “On the Historian’s Task,” 58.
86 Frank Ankersmit has labeled this “the most fruitful concept that has ever been developed in the history of historical theory” (Ankersmit, “Historicism,” 154) Still, he thinks it needs to be reconstructed as a linguistic artifice of historical representation, not an actual developmental form in the past itself. See his Narrative Logic (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1983).
87 Humboldt, “On the Historian’s Task,” 64–70.
88 See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Frank Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
89 Karl Mannheim, “Historismus,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft (1924), cited in Oexle, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeichen des Historimus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 47.
90 Oexle, “‘Historismus’: Überlegungen zur Geschichte des Phänomens und des Begriffs,” in Oexle, Geschichtswissenschaft, 41.
91 Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, 137.
92 Allan Megill, “Why was there a Crisis of Historicism?” 419. The dissertation is: Thomas Howard, Historicist Thought in the Shadow of Theology (PhD Diss., University of Virginia, 1996). Megill refers (“Why was there a Crisis of Historicism?” 423n) to Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Geschichtsreligion—Wissenschaft als Arbeit—Objektivität. Der Historismus in neuer Sicht,” Historische Zeitschrift 252 (1991), 1–32.
93 Indeed, Troeltsch had conceptualized the issue, if not baptized it with its famous soubriquet, already in the first years of the twentieth century, in his reflection on the prior century, Das neunzehnte Jahrhundert (1902), as Oexle notes, Geschichtswissenschaft, 58.
94 Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Geschichtsreligion—Wissenschaft als Arbeit—Objektivität. Der Historismus in neuer Sicht,” 2–7.
95 Troeltsch, “Die Krisis des Historismus,” 573.
96 Hardtwig, “Geschichtsreligion,” 9–15. Hardtwig refers to Gustav Schmidt and Jörn Rüsen eds., Gelehrtenpolitik und politische Kultur in Deutschland 1830-1930 (Bochum, 1986), but the argument was made earlier in Fritz Ringer’s classic, The Decline of the German Mandarins (Wesleyan: Wesleyan University Press, 1969). Iggers makes the same social-historical connection: “Historicism…was closely tied to the political and social outlook of a class, the academic Bildungsbürgertum…[and] provided a theoretical foundation for the established political and social structure of nineteenth-century Prussia and Germany” (Iggers, The German Conception of History, 17; and see 24). See Ulrich Muhlack, “Bildung zwischen Neuhumanismus und Historismus,” in W. Conze, K. Kocka, R. Koselleck, and M. Rainer Lepsius eds., Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985–92), vol. 2, 80–105; Jürgen Kocka, “Bildungsbürgertum: Gesellschaftliche Formation oder Historikerkonstrukt?” in ibid., vol. 4, 9–20. See also Georg Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmuster (Frankfurt: Insel, 1994). Christian Emden notes: “German philologists [found] their prestige within the university system was increasingly threatened by the technocratic demands of the modern nation state.” (Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, 99.) Within the university itself, the rise of the natural sciences exerted a parallel pressure. The tension between the faculties “began to emerge already in the 1840s, 1840 gained prominence during the 1870s and 1880s, 1880 and continued to be of central importance at the beginning of the twentieth century” (Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, 59).
97 Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (1874). See Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, 142.
98 Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, 147–8. On Burckhardt, see Wolfgang Hardtwig, Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Alteuropa und moderner Welt: Jacob Burckhardt in seiner Zeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1974); Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); John Hinde, Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000); Jörn Rüsen, “Jacob Burckhardt: Political Standpoint and Historical Insight on the Border of Postmodernism,” History and Theory 24 (1985), 235–46.
99 Felix Gilbert, “Ranke as the Teacher of Jacob Burckhardt,” in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, 82–8.
100 Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, 159.
101 The text of Burckhardt’s lectures forms the basis for his Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, which has been translated into English as Force and Freedom (NY: Pantheon, 1943).
102 Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, 150–64.
103 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (reprinted in Nietzsche, ed. J. Richardson and B. Leiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 341–59). Emden is quite clear about his favorable view of Foucault and about his interpretive aim of linking the second untimely meditation to the genealogical works of Nietzsche from the 1880s.
104 Daston and Galison write of a substantial shift in the conception of objectivity in the later nineteenth century, driven by the experimental and exact sciences (Objectivity, 115–90).
105 See Auguste Comte and positivism: the essential writings, ed. Gertrude Lenzer (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions, 1998). See the thoughtful response of John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865; London: Kegan Paul, 1907). For the Germans, Mill and Comte seemed more of a mind than in tension.
106 Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London: Parker, 1857), which Beiser characterizes as “something of a positivist manifesto” (German Historicist Tradition, 312).
107 J. G. Droysen, “Die Erhebung der Geschichte zum Rang einer Wissenschaft,” Historische Zeitschrift 9 (1863), 1–22.
108 Droysen, Historik, historical-critical edition by Peter Leyh (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977). See: Oexle, Gesc
hichtswissenschaft, 33; Hayden White, “Historik by Johann Gustav Droysen,” History and Theory 19 (1980), 73–93; Jörn Rüsen, Begriffene Geschichte: Genesis und Begründung der Geschichtstheorie J. G. Droysens (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1969).
109 On its illustrative value for the German disciplinary practice of history, see Theodor Schieder, “Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft im Spiegel der Historischen Zeitschrift,” Historische Zeitschrift 189 (1959), 1–104.
110 This routinization of disciplinary history into a “normal science” is notable not only in the practices of the German professional historical community of the later nineteenth century but also in the admiration and emulation of that set of practices and attitudes abroad, notably in the United States, where it came to be taken for “scientific history,” and Ranke canonized as the “founder” of disciplinary history. Iggers writes of “the type of unreflective, professional history-writing which marked not only American historiography at the end of the century, but had already manifested itself in many German historical and legal studies.” (Iggers, The German Conception of History, 64.) See Dorothy Ross, “On the Misunderstanding of Ranke and the Origins of the Historical Profession in America,” in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, 154–69, and see also Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: the “objectivity question” and the American historical profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
111 See Dilthey’s works of intellectual and cultural history, preeminently his Leben Schleiermachers, his Jugendgeschichte Hegels, and his great essays on the Reformation and the Enlightenment. See also his works of literary criticism, above all, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (tr., Poetry and Experience [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985]).
112 Dilthey coined the phrase in Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt (Gesammelte Schriften vol. 7, 191–2). See Holborn, “Wilhelm Dilthey and the Critique of Historical Reason,” Journal of the History of Ideas 11 (1953), 93–116; and Michael Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
113 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 323.
114 Rudolf Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
115 Dilthey, “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” New Literary History 3 (1972), 229–44.
116 Makkreel, Dilthey, 247–72.
117 Here, I find myself in sympathy with Frank Ankersmit’s impatient rejoinder about relativism and historicism: “Relativism is of interest only to those who will or cannot cho[o]se between positivism and historicism” (Ankersmit, “Historicism,” 144n).
118 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 366, 377.
119 Windelband, “Kritische oder genetische Methode?” (1883).
120 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 385, 379.
121 Windelband, “Rectorial Address, Strassburg 1894.”
122 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 394, referring to Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge (New York: Liveright, 1938).
123 The German Historicist Tradition, 432, 398.
124 Rickert, as summarized by Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 435.
125 See the discussion in Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 253–308.
126 See Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact-Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard Univeritys Press, 2002), 19–23.
127 Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 366.
128 Hardtwig, “Geschichtsreligion,” 13.
129 Eckart Kehr, Der Primat der Innenpolitik (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965).
130 See Carlo Antoni, From History to Sociology (London: Routledge, 1998).
131 Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1964); From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958).
132 Oexle, Geschichtswissenschaft, 59. See Hintze, “Troeltsch und die Probleme des Historismus,” (1927; reprinted in Hintze, Soziologie und Geschichte, vol. 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964), 323–73).
133 Weber, “Science as a Vocation” (1918). It is striking how many scholars—from both the German and the Anglophone traditions—believe that Weber brought the “crisis of historicism” to a consistent resolution. See Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 511–67, for the latest such reconstruction. There is no space here to take this question up; it does not belong to a nineteenth-century investigation, in any event. But I cannot find Weber to have done more than to affirm and even reify what Nietzsche discerned, and his notion of a “value-free” science seems to me much like Kant’s transcendental philosophy, to which it is often likened and in part genetically linked: it substituted a more esoteric dualism for a cruder one, without making the dualism any the less insuperable. Even Emden writes of “Wissenschaft as a coherent and value-neutral practice of examination that subscribes to a relentless realism” as “enabl[ing] us to see beyond the pathos of the beliefs, opinions, and cultural commonplaces…of modernity” (Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, 172). But I am not convinced this Weberian (Nietzschean?) ideal actually does enable us to “see beyond” anything.
CHAPTER 40
IDEOLOGY
MICHAEL N. FORSTER
40.1 INTRODUCTION
AMONG Karl Marx’s central theoretical contributions, several have with the passage of time turned out to be false, or at least profoundly inadequate. His labor theory of value in Capital (1867–94) is one example.1 His materialist or economic theory of history is another, albeit more equivocal one.2 For although it remains a huge achievement of Marx’s to have drawn attention to the importance of economic factors, especially socio-economic class divisions and conflicts, as causes in history, his attempt virtually to reduce historical explanation to such factors amounts to a massive one-sidedness and distortion; as the history of the past hundred years or so alone has amply shown, such additional factors as nationality (think of the First and Second World Wars), race/ethnicity (think of the Holocaust or the civil rights movement in the USA), religion (think of the recent history of the Middle East), language (think of the extraordinary stability of the Transatlantic Alliance between the USA and Great Britain), and gender (think of the large part this has had in changing American society since the Second World War) also play vitally important roles as causes in history, roles no doubt intimately interconnected with, but by no means reducible to, those of underlying economic factors.
Many commentators would also reject another of Marx’s central theoretical contributions: his theory of ideology.3 However, it seems to me that this is a mistake. For it appears to me that his theory of ideology constitutes a very powerful critical explanation of much in human thought and practice, that it is not vulnerable to the objections that are commonly leveled against it, and that instead of elimination it really deserves extension. Accordingly, in this chapter I shall begin by describing the original genesis of the theory, in a way that is also intended to clarify its character and to exhibit its power; I shall then answer some of the objections that have commonly been raised against it; then, finally, I shall indicate some of the extensions that it invites.
40.2 THE ORIGINS OF MARX’S THEORY
In a sentence that (albeit without yet using the word) concisely encapsulates the original genesis of his theory of ideology, Marx already writes in 1843–4 in the Introduction to Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “For Germany the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism,” adding that “the basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.”4
Let us consider each half of the key sentence just quoted in turn, beginning with its statement that “the criticism of religion has been essentially completed.”
The criticism of religion that Marx is referring to here as having already been essentially completed before him is a critique of religion (mainly of Christianity) that had been developed
by Hegel, Feuerbach, and Bauer.
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) Marx attributes to the “Unhappy Consciousness” section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) the two key insights that the God of Christianity is (1) an illusion and (2) man’s self-alienation, that is, a projection of man’s own most important qualities and potentials away from himself and onto an illusory being: sections such as that on the “Unhappy Consciousness” “contain the critical elements—though still in an alienated form—of whole spheres such as religion”; Hegel recognizes that “religion [i.e. God]…etc. are mental entities,” that “religion [i.e. God]…etc. are only the alienated actuality of human objectification, of man’s essential capacities.”5
There are excellent textual grounds for this reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Hegel writes there that the Unhappy Consciousness of Christianity “is the gazing of one self-consciousness into another, and itself is both…But it is not yet aware…that it is the unity of both,”6 and that it takes God “to be the essential being” and itself “to be the unessential” and “is conscious only of its own nothingness.”7
Marx argues further in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts that after Hegel Feuerbach’s main achievement had simply been to extract this Hegelian critique of Christianity already developed in the “Unhappy Consciousness” section of the Phenomenology from out of its “alienated form”—that is, the still religious framework of Hegel’s fundamental principle, Absolute Spirit—8 thus giving in “critical form”—that is, in a purely atheistic form—what “is still uncritical with Hegel”—that is, still religious.9
Marx is again right about this. Thus the two Hegelian insights in question do indeed reappear, almost unchanged except for the elimination of the Hegelian context of Absolute Spirit, as the central doctrines of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), where we read for example: “The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or…the human nature purified…made objective—i.e. contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being”;10 “As what is positive in the conception of the divine being can only be human, the conception of man…can only be negative. To enrich God, man must become poor, that God may be all, man must be nothing”;11 so that, for instance, “Man…denies his own knowledge that he may place [it] in God…Religion…denies goodness as a quality of human nature, but on the other hand, God is only good.”12
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 149