Abstract
As proposed at the end of the Introduction, before any attempt to analyze the German reception of Robertson’s individual texts, it is indispensable to take a more general look at the various modes in which history was engaged in Robertson’s Scottish environment and in which it was practiced in contemporary Germany. It is from a comparative assessment of such variables that one might expect to arrive at the understanding of an apparent paradox. The German reception of Robertson, in regard to both its extent and immediacy— the volume of translations, of critical response, and reference—was, if anything, avid. Each of the four great histories appeared in, and was borrowed from, important academic libraries in Germany within a few months of publication. Each of them were equally promptly reviewed in German periodicals, and became swiftly translated into German, occasionally by several different hands simultaneously, and were republished and reedited in new versions over a period of several decades. The intensity of reception apparently contradicts the fact that it would be difficult to claim for Robertson a dramatic influence on the character of contemporary German historiography. This contradiction, however, makes the history of reception no less instructive.
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Notes
The classic statements on Machiavelli and Guicciardini as “philosophical historians” are by Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965)
and John G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), chs. 7–8.
David Allan, Virtue, Learning, and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993)
see also Allan, “Protestantism, Presbyterianism and National Identity in Eighteenth-Century Scottish History,” in Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–1850, ed. Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 182–205.
William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V: With a View of the Progress of Society in Europe, From the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, 4 vols. (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1996 [reprint of the 1792 ed.]), I: x.
See Sheila Mason, “Montesquieu’s Vision of Europe and Its European Context,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 341 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996), 61–87
and especially Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
Robert Henry to Horace Walpole, March 3, 1783, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols., ed. W. S. Lewis et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 15: 169 (1952). Cited in Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5.
The “Augustinian-Epicurean understanding of man” is indeed the most prominent set of ideas inherited from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in the portrait of the Enlightenment as unfolding from John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
For a classic genealogy of the central notions of self-interest and self-love in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)
for a more recent one, Pierre Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
For important reconstructions, see Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
On Grotius and Hobbes, see Tuck, Philosophy and Government; and Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy; on Pufendorf, see Istvan Hont, “The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the ‘Four-Stages Theory,’” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 253–76
Fiammetta Palladini, Samuel Pufendorf discepolo di Hobbes (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996)
and Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. chs. 2 and 4.
Mandeville’s thought is contextualized within this trend in Edward Hundert, The Enlightenment’s ‘Fable’: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
See also the same author’s edition, including texts by Nicole and Pierre Bayle, of Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, ed. E. J. Hundert (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Roy H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), I: 26–7Bernard Mandeville
Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. David D. Raphael and Alec L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), III: 1–2, esp. 112, 117.
Cf. Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
The academic study of the social scientific embeddedness of eighteenth-century Scottish historiography began seriously with Roy Pascal, “Property and Society: The Scottish Historical School of the Eighteenth Century,” Modern Quarterly 2 (1938): 167–79
it became more pronounced in Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945)
it grew into a torrent with (and included critical assessments of) Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
“Conjectural history,” famously coined by Dugald Stewart in his retrospect to the golden age of the literati of Edinburgh, first appeared in the title of an article in Harro M. Höpfl, “From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 17 (1978): 19–40. The literature on the subject since then is endless.
Cf., also with a view to Robertson’s contribution, Frederick G. Whelan, “Robertson, Hume, and the Balance of Power,” Hume Studies 21/2 (1995): 315–32.
Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, especially vol. II: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
In a vast literature, see especially Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 1971)
Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic 1750–1900 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973)
Gerbi, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Peter J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)
Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)
Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000)
and Silvia Sebastiani, I limiti del progresso. Razza e genere nell’Illuminismo scozzese (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008), rev. Eng. ed., The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender and the Limits of Progress (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Frederick G. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1996)
Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2003)
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)
Guido Abbattista, “Empire, Liberty and the Rule of Difference: European Debates on British Colonialism in Asia at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 13/3 (2006): 473–98.
Hume to John Clephane, 1756?, The Letters of David Hume, ed. John Young Thomson Greig (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), I: 237.
Nicholas Phillipson, “Providence and Progress: An Introduction to the Historical Thought of William Robertson,” in Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. Stuart J. Brown, 55–73; Phillipson, Hume (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), chs. 2–3; O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, chs. 3–4; Colin Kidd, “The Ideological Significance of Robertson’s History of Scotland,” in Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. Brown, 92–121; Phillips, Society and Sentiment, esp. chs. 2, 5–6.
The standard account of the conflicting historical identity discourses in postUnion Scotland is Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Neal Hargraves, “Resentment and History in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Cromohs 14 (2009): 1–21, accessed July 14, 2010, www.cromohs.unifi.it/14_2009/hargraves_resentment.html.
Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment. See also, for a fine monographic study of a figure of the “outer circle” and the challenge he and his likes constituted to the new mainstream in William Zachs, Without Regard to Good Manners: A Biography of Gilbert Stuart 1743–1786 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992).
D. J. Womersley, “The Historical Writings of William Robertson,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986): 497–506
Neal Hargraves, “National History and ‘Philosophical’ History: Character and Narrative in William Robertson’s History of Scotland,” History of European Ideas 26 (2000): 19–33
Hargraves, “The ‘Progress of Ambition’: Character, Narrative, and Philosophy in the Works of William Robertson,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (2002): 261–82
Hargraves, “Enterprise, Adventure and Industry: The Formation of ‘Commercial Character’ in William Robertson’s History of America,” History of European Ideas 29 (2003): 33–54
Hargraves, “Beyond the Savage Character: Mexicans, Peruvians, and the ‘Imperfectly Civilized’ in William Robertson’s History of America,” in The Anthropology of the Enlightenment, ed. Larry Wolff and Marco Cipollini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 103–18.
Phillipson, “Providence and Progress,” esp. 68 ff.; see also in greater detail below in chapter 2. Besides providentialism, but closely related to the paradigm of stadialism, the centrality of “unintended consequences” to Robertson’s causal explanations has been argued in Daniele Francesconi, “William Robertson on Historical Causation and Unintended Consequences,” Storia della Storiografia 36 (1999): 55–80.
Mary Fearnley-Sander, “Philosophical History and the Scottish Reformation: William Robertson and the Knoxian Tradition,” Historical Journal 33 (1990): 323–38
Alexander Du Toit, “God Before Mammon? William Robertson, Episcopacy and the Church of England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 54 (2003): 671–90
Colin Kidd, “Subscription, the Scottish Enlightenment and the Moderate Interpretation of History,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55 (2004): 502–19.
Geoff Grundy, The Emulation of Nations: William Robertson and the International Order (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2005), 272–6.
Cf. Troy Bickham, Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), ch. 5, especially pp. 195–8.
While the Judicial Plan of 1772, which decided that India would be governed by Indian (not British) law, made it imperative for British East India Company officials to understand Indian law and the cultural traditions behind it, and triggered a remarkable range of relevant scholarship by a group of British “orientalists,” Hastings and his circle went too far in portraying themselves as “the inheritors of the Indian polity as refounded by Emperor Akbar” in the sixteenth century. For the relevance of these developments to Robertson’s work, see Stuart J. Brown, “William Robertson, Early Orientalism and the Historical Disquisition on India of 1791,” The Scottish Historical Review 88/2 (2009): 296.
For the background: Peter J. Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 1–44
John L. Brockington, “Warren Hastings and Orientalism,” in The Impeachment of Warren Hastings, ed. Geoffrey Carnall and Colin Nicholson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 91–108.
Jeffrey Smitten, “Impartiality in Robertson’s History of America,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 19 (1985): 56–77. It must be added that his own contemporaries appreciated Robertson’s impartiality in a less sophisticated sense, one in which Hume’s version of it was conceived. “[Y]ou have shewn that you can write on ticklish subjects with the utmost discretion, and on subjects of religious party with temper and impartiality,” wrote Horace Walpole upon reading the History of Scotland. Quoting Walpole, while also expressing his own admiration, Dugald Stewart somewhat toned it down with a simple explanation: “at this distance of time, it is difficult to conceive how prejudice and passion should enter into the discussion.” Dugald Stewart, Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith, L.L.D., of William Robertson, D.D, and of Thomas Reid, D.D. (Edinburgh: George Ramsay, 1811) 183, 195.
On the relationship between Robertson and Mackie, see Phillipson, “Providence and Progress,” 57–8. On Mackie, L. W. Sharp, “Charles Mackie, the First Professor of History at Edinburgh University,” Scottish Historical Review 41 (1962): 23–45.
Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws was published in 1748, while Hume’s Essays Moral and Political from 1741, in several, continually re-wrought editions (the third, “improved and expanded” edition also exactly in 1748). “Of National Characters” is one of these essays. As for Smith, he never published a text on jurisprudence in his lifetime: his lectures held on this subject (“on the third and fourth part of moral philosophy,” i.e., on justice and expediency) after his appointment as professor of logics and moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1751, have been reconstructed on the basis of lecture notes of his students by modern scholarship. See Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Previously, however, between 1748 and 1750, the young Smith also held a few public lectures in Edinburgh, allowing Robertson to borrow some of his views, perhaps literally so: Smith is said to have accused Robertson of having plagiarized the backbone of A View of the Progress of Society in Europe. Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 105–6.
Locke’s claim that “in the beginning all the World was America” is sometimes quoted to demonstrate the propensity inherent in seventeenth-century natural law to think in stadial terms, but the most articulate early statement of the “stages” theory (and the one that is regarded to have had the strongest impact on eighteenth-century social science) is associated with Pufendorf. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Pater Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 301; Hont, “The Language of Sociability and Commerce.”
Cf. Du Toit, “God Before Mammon?”; and Du Toit, “‘A Species of False Religion’: William Robertson, Catholic Relief and the Myth of Moderate Tolerance,” The Innes Review 52/2 (2001): 167–88.
For Robertson as the central figure in the “Moderate Party” within the Kirk and the moderates’ place in the Edinburgh Enlightenment, see Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
See also Ian D. L. Clark, “From Protest to Reaction: The Moderate Regime in the Church of Scotland, 1752–1805,” in Scotland in the Age of Improvement: Essays in Scottish History in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Rosalind Mitchison and Nicholas T. Phillipson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 200–24.
Cf. Thomas Ahnert, “Fortschrittsgeschichte und religiöse Aufklärung. William Robertson und die Deutung außereuropäischer Kulturen,” in Die Aufklärung und ihre Weltwirkung, ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), 101–22.
Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975)
Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chs. 1–3.
Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen um 1800, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Philippe Büttgen, and Michel Espagne (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008). For another comprehensive treatment of the subject within the extensive literature, see also Luigi Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae. Göttingen 1770–1820 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995).
Han F. Vermeulen, “Göttingen und die Völkerkunde. Ethnologie und Ethnographie in der deutschen Aufklärung, 1710–1815”; and Guillaume Garner, “Politische Ökonomie und Statistik an der Universität Göttingen (1760–1820),” in Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen, ed. Bödeker, Büttgen, and Espagne, 199–230, 371–92. On the latter subject, cf. also Keith Tribe, Governing Economy: The Transformation of German Economic Discourse, 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
August Ludwig Schlözer, Stats-Gelartheit. Zweiter Theil: Theorie der Statistik nebst Ideen über das Studium der Politik überhaupt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1804), 92.
Norbert Waszek, “Die Schottische Aufklärung in der Göttinger Wissenschaft vom Menschen,” in Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen, ed. Bödeker, Büttgen, and Espagne, 141. For a highly sophisticated study of the Scottish “natural history of mankind” and the German Menschheitsgeschichte within the context of the science of man and the Wissenschaft vom Menschen—and therefore, emphatically, not as a part of the history of historiography in the narrower sense but as a critical phase in the reconstruction of the entire contemporary landscape of knowledge—see Annette Meyer, Von der Wahrheit zur Wahrscheinlichkeit. Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in der schottischen und deutschen Aufklärung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008).
Jörn Garber, “Von der Menschengeschichte zur Kulturgeschichte. Zum geschich-tstheoretischen Kulturbegriff der deutschen Spätaufklärung,” in Spätabsolutismus und bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Studien zur deutschen Staats- und Gesellschaftstheorie im Übergang zur Moderne (Frankfurt: Keip Verlag, 1992), 409–33
Gérard Laudin, “Histoire de la civilization et histoire anthropologique. Adelung et la Culturgeschichte,” Le Texte et l’Idée 17 (2002): 59–78; Laudin, “Gatterer und Schlözer: Geschichte als ‘Wissenschaft vom Menschen’?,” in Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen, ed. Bödeker, Büttgen, and Espagne, 393–418.
See also Johan van der Zande, “Popular Philosophy and the History of Mankind in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Storia della Storiografia 22 (1992): 37–56. Geschichte der Menschheit is also a central theme in Michael Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)
most recently, see André de Melo Araújo, Weltgeschichte in Göttingen. Eine Studie über das spätaufklärerische universalhistorische Denken, 1756–1815 (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012), 9–14, 97–138. For a further discussion, see chapter 5.
Notker Hammerstein, Ius und Historie. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des historischen Denkens an deutschen Universitäten im späten 17. und im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973)
Hammerstein, “Reichshistorie,” in Aufklärung und Geschichte. Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Georg G. Iggers, and Jonathan B. Knudsen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 82–104.
Hans Erich Bödeker, “Landesgeschichtliche Erkenntnisinteressen der nordwestdeutschen Aufklärungshistorie,” Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 69 (1997): 247–79.
See Leonard Krieger, “Germany,” in National Consciousness, History, and Political Culture in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Orest Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 67–97.
The latest—magisterial—treatment of Gatterer as an embodiment of the endeavor of mid-eighteenth century historical science to establish itself as a worthy counterpart of the natural sciences by accommodating the standards of precision, system, method, and a holistic aura, is Martin Gierl, Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft. Johann Christoph Gatterer und die Historiographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Fromann-Holzboog, 2012).
J. C. Gatterer, “vom historischen Plan, und der darauf sich gründenden Zusammenfügung der Erzählungen,” in Allgemeine historische Bibliothek vom Mitglieder der königlichen Instituts des historischen Wissenschaften zu Göttingen 1/1 (1767), 26.
GAgS (January 27, 1766): 90–3, and (April 10–12, 1766): 340–8. Cf. Johan van der Zande, “August Ludwig Schlözer and the English Universal History,” in Historikerdialoge. Geschichte, Mythos und Gedächtnis im deutsch-britischen kulturellen Austausch 1750–2000, ed. Peter Schuman, Stefan Berger, and Peter Lambert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 137–56.
August Ludwig Schlözer, Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie (1772/73), ed. Horst Walter Blanke (Hagen: Margit Rottmann Medienverlag, 1990), 19, 34.
On the relevance of the “part versus whole” problem to historical thought and universal history, see Peter Hanns Reill, “Das Problem des Allgemeinen und des Besonderen im geschichtlichen Denken und in in den historiographischen Darstellungen des späten 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Teil und Ganzes: Zum Verhältnis von Einzel- und Gesamtanalyse in Geschichts- und Sozialwissenschaften, ed. Karl Acham and Winfried Schulze (Munich: DTV, 1990), 141–68; Jörn Garber, “Selbstreferenz und Objektivität: Organisationsmodelle von Mensch- und Weltgeschichte in der deutschen Spätaufklärung,” in Wissenschaft als kulturelle Praxis, ed. Bödeker, Reill, and Schlumbohm, 137–85.
On universal history, see further Hans Erich Bödeker, “The Debates about Universal History and National History around 1800: A Problem-Oriented Historical Attempt,” in Unity and Diversity in European Culture c. 1800, Proceedings of the British Academy, 134, ed. Tim Blanning and Hagen Schulze (Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy, 2006), 135–70.
The theoretical work of Martin Chladenius, in particular his Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft, worinnen der Grund zu einer neuen Einsicht in allen Arten der Gelahrtheit geleget wird (Leipzig, 1752) broke much new ground for Gatterer and Schlözer. For concise explorations of the theme, see Reinhart Koselleck, “Geschichte, Historie,” section V, in Gescichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexicon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1975), II: 647–78
Michael Gottlob, Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Aufklärung und Historismus. Johannes von Müller und Friedrich Christoph Schlosser (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1989), 27–48
Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Die Verwissenschaftlichung der Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Aufklärung und Historismus,” in Geschichtskultur und Wissenschaft (Munich: DTV, 1990), 58–91.
For humanism and Enlightenment as both belonging to the “prehistory of histori-cism,” see Ulrich Muhlack, Geschichtswissenschaft im Humanismus und Aufklärung. Die Vorgeschichte des Historismus (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991).
Horst Dreitzel, “Die Entwicklung der Historie zur Wissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 8/3 (1981): 257–84.
In general terms, see Georg G. Iggers, “The European Context of Eighteenth-Century German Historiography,” in Aufklärung und Geschichte, ed. Bödeker, Iggers, and Knudsen, 237; for details of similar assessments of, for example, Gibbon, see Wilfried Nippel, “Gibbon and German Historiography,” in British and German Historiography 1750–1950: Traditions, Perceptions, and Transfers, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Peter Wende (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 67–81.
Daniel Fulda, Wissenschaft aus Kunst. Die Entstehung der modernen deutschen Geschichtsschreibung 1760–1860 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), esp. pt. 2.D
Thomas Prüfer, Die Bildung der Geschichte. Friedrich Schiller und die Anfänge der modernen Geschichtswissenschaft (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002)
Maiken Umbach, Federalism and Enlightenment in Germany, 1740–1806 (London: Hambledon Press, 2000), 130–1.
For an evaluation of the Westphalian settlement and its long-term consequences in this sense, see John Gagliardo, Germany under the Old Regime 1600–1790 (London: Longman, 1991), chs. 7–8 and 22, here p. 363.
On Moser’s historical contribution, see Mack Walker, “Johann Jakob Moser,” in Aufklärung und Geschichte, ed. Bödeker, Iggers, and Knudsen, 105–18; more extensively, Walker, Johann Jakob Moser and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1981), esp. chs. 13–15, 29–31.
The standard treatment of Polizey in the German context is Hans Maier, Die ältere deutsche Staats- und Verwaltungslehre (Polizeiwissenschaft). Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Wissenschaft in Deutschland (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1966). A research project at the Max-Planck-Institut für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt has yielded many local and regional studies as well as a few more comprehensive volumes, including Policey im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Michael Stolleis, with Karl Härter and Lothar Schilling (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996)
Karl Härter, ed., Policey und Frühneuzeitlicher Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000)
Thomas Simon, “Gute Policey.” Ordnungsleitbilder und Zielvorstellungen politischen Handelns in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004).
For wider implications of “police” and the problem of govern-mentality in the early modern period, see Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 201–22
Gerhard Oestreich, “‘Police’ and Prudentia Civilis in the Seventeenth Century,” in Neostoicism and the Early Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 155–86.
On the same issue and the relevance of natural jurisprudence, Robert von Friedeburg and Michael Seidler, “The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation,” in European Political Thought 1450–1700: Religion, Law and Philosophy, ed. Howell Lloyd, Glenn Burgess, and Simon Hodson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 120–6, 133–41, 167–72.
On eighteenth-century state sciences, Keith Tribe, Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse, 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8–31
Tribe, “Cameralism and the Sciences of the State,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 525–46.
Gabriella Valera, “Statistik, Staatengeschichte, Geschichte im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Aufklärung und Geschichte, ed. Bödeker, Iggers, and Knudsen, 119–43; Pasquale Pasquino, “Politisches und historisches Interesse. Statistik und historische Staatslehre bei Gottfried Achenwall (1719–1772),” in ibid., 144–68; Hans Erich Bödeker, “… wer ächte freie Politik hören will, muss nach Göttingen gehen,” in Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen, ed. Bödeker, Büttgen, and Espagne, 325–69, esp. 343, 354; Johan van der Zande, “Statistik and History in the German Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 71/3 (2010): 411–32.
Paul Wood, “The Natural History of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment,” History of Science 28 (1990): 89–123; Peter Hanns Reill, “Science and the Science of History in the Spätaufklärung,” in Aufklärung und Geschichte, ed. Bödeker, Iggers, and Knudsen, 430–50; Reill, “Das Problem des Allgemeinen und des Besonderen,” esp. 146–57
see also Reill, “Anthropology, Nature and History in the Late Enlightenment,” in Schiller als Historiker, ed. Otto Dann, Norbert Oellers, and Ernst Osterkamp (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 1995), 243–65
Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2006).
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Kontler, L. (2014). Politics, Literature, and Science: William Robertson and Historical Discourses in Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Germany. In: Translations, Histories, Enlightenments. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137371720_2
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