Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

SCIENCESimon,* and its most formidable contemporary theorist Karl Marxregarded his theory primarily as a tool for changing the world.The creation of history as an academic subject is perhaps the leastimportant aspect of this historization of the social sciences. It is truethat an epidemic of history-writing overwhelmed Europe in the firsthalf of the nineteenth century. Rarely have more men set down tomake sense of their world by writing many-volumed accounts of itspast, incidentally often for the first time: Karamzin in Russia (1818-24),Geijer in Sweden (1832-6), Palacky in Bohemia (1836-67) are thefounding fathers of their respective countries' historiography. In Francethe urge to understand the present through the past was particularlystrong, and there the Revolution itself soon became the subject ofintensive and partisan study by Thiers (1823, 1^s), Mignet (1824),Buonarroti (1828), Lamartine (1847) and the great Jules Michelet(1847-53). It was an heroic period of historiography, but little of thework of Guizot, Augustin Thierry and Michelet in France, of the DaneNiebuhr and the Swiss Sismondi, of Hallam, Lingard and Carlyle inBritain, and of innumerable German professors, now survives except ashistorical document, as literature or occasionally as the record of genius.The most lasting results of this historical awakening were in the fieldof documentation and historical technique. To collect the relics of thepast, written or unwritten, became a universal passion. Perhaps inpart it was an attempt to safeguard it against the steam-poweredattacks of the present, though nationalism was probably its most importantstimulus: in hitherto unawakened nations the historian, thelexicographer and the folksong collector were often the very foundersof national consciousness. And so the French set up their Ecole desCharles (1821), the English a Public Record Office (1838), the Germansbegan to publish the Monumenta Germaniae Historiae (1826), while thedoctrine that history must be based on the scrupulous evaluation ofprimary records was laid down by the prolific Leopold von Ranke(1795-1886). Meanwhile, as we have seen (cf. chapter 14), the linguistsand folklorists produced the fundamental dictionaries of theirlanguages and collections of their peoples' oral traditions.The injection of history into the social sciences had its most immediateeffects in law, where Friedrich Karl von Savigny founded thehistorical school of jurisprudence (1815), in the study of theology,where the application of historical criteria—notably in D. F. Strauss'sLeben Jesu (1835)—horrified the fundamentalists, but especially in awholly new science, philology. This also developed primarily in Gcr-* Though Saint-Simon's ideas are, as we have seen, not easily classifiable, it seems pedanticto abandon the established practice of calling him a Utopian socialist.285