“The Knife of Historical Relativism” – Dilthey, Troeltsch and the Crisis of Historicism around 1900

Henriikka Hannula, University of Vienna

The defining intellectual characteristic of 19th century Germany was historicism: a programme that aimed to justify history as an independent field of inquiry vis-à-vis the natural sciences on the one hand and the speculative philosophy of history (e.g. Hegel, Marx) on the other. Thus, it was closely tied to the development of history to an academic subject. In a broader sense, it also implied a stronger ontological claim that the socio-cultural reality is the result of historical becoming. It implied a total historicization of human life and culture. Towards the end of the century, however, many German intellectuals diagnosed historicism to be in crisis. They charged it with an anxiety-inducing scepticism and relativism about all values and worldviews. If everything is historically constructed, nothing universally true. I will concentrate mainly on two figures: philosopher and historian Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) and theologian and sociologist Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923). They framed the crisis of historicism as a philosophical/theoretical problem. I argue it should, however, be understood primarily as a reaction to the context of uncertainty around 1900 and the following two decades. The rapid social and cultural changes and the devastation of the war called for a radical redefinition of the past-present relationships. Historical relativism was suddenly experienced as a threat to the very foundations of the German culture. In the earlier decades, historicism had instead been used to defend the German cultural unity (and thus the political goal of German unification). I will discuss why and how the discourse around the so-called "crisis of historicism" became a focal point of German cultural and existential anxieties just before and after World War II. I will also briefly present Dilthey and Troeltsch's strategies to "overcome" the crisis of historicism while still subscribing to its essential insights: the fundamental historicity of human existence.

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 Presented in Session 195. Production of Social Problems