Abstract
In chapter 3, Robertson’s View of the Progress of Society in Europe was discussed separately on two grounds: first, its inherent character arising from the consistent application of the stadial scheme throughout the text, and second, the rather drastic nature of the transformations it underwent during the process of German reception. There are similarly compelling reasons for a combined treatment of the narrative sections of the History of Charles V and the History of Scotland in this chapter. While the fundamental sociological assumptions concerning the incentives and structures of material, cultural, and institutional progress, together with the relevant vocabulary, are nowhere suppressed in them, both of these works are fundamentally political narratives of wielding and losing power, of maneuver and stratagem applied to the building or challenging of states, in which personal sentiment and character receive an amount of attention commensurate with their importance. In discussing these topics, both works inevitably address their implications for the wider themes of the chances of civil and religious liberty in the face of ambitious bureaucratic-military establishments (or, paradoxically, the lack of them). In turn, the tackling of such themes generated conceptualizations of political loyalty, commitment, community, and identity. From the angle of the comparisons and transfers that are the central concern of this book, the preoccupation of this chapter should be the uses to which Robertson’s relevant views were put among a linguistic and cultural community that was different from his primary audience.
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Notes
This use of “crisis,” perhaps introduced by Jakob Burckhardt in ch. 4 of the Reflections on History, was applied to the birth pangs giving rise to the Enlightenment in Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, in 1935. This book in turn was to some extent responsible for the fashionableness of the term in the 1950s and thereafter among historians studying the “general crisis” of the seventeenth century which marked the advent of capitalism.
Cf. 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), 182.
On Buchanan’s relevant views, see Hugh Trevor-Roper, “George Buchanan and the Ancient Scottish Constitution,” English Historical Review, supp. 3 (1966); Roger A. Mason, “Scotching the Brut: Politics, History and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Britain,” in Scotland and England 1286–1815, ed. Roger A. Mason (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1987), 60–84.
Andrew Fletcher, “Speeches by a Member of the Parliament which Began at Edinburgh on the 6th of May, 1703,” in Andrew Fletcher, Political Works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 135.
Edinburgh Review (1755–1756), ii. For the general context, see Nicholas Phillipson, “Scottish Public Opinion and the Union in the Age of Association,” in Scotland in the Age of Improvement, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Rosalind Mitchison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970), 125–47.
The expression of Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 108.
William Robertson, The History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI, till His Accession to the Crown of England, 2 vols. (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1996), I: 25.
Alex du Toit, “Cosmopolitanism, Despotism and Patriotic Resistance: William Robertson on the Spanish Revolts against Charles V,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 86/1 (2009): 19–43.
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. II: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2011), 263.
Cf. Neal Hargraves, “National History and ‘Philosophical’ History: Character and Narrative in William Robertson’s History of Scotland,” History of European Ideas 26 (2000): 22.
As Robertson wrote on account of Mary’s final tribulations: “A woman, young and beautiful, and in distress, is naturally the object of compassion. The comparison of their present misery with the former splendour, usually softens us in favour of illustrious sufferers” — irrespective of our moral or political judgment on the sufferer’s character. “But the people,” he adds, “beheld the deplorable situation of their sovereign with insensibility.” History of Scotland, I: 445–6. As a matter of fact, the question why tragedy pleases was a hotly debated one in Edinburgh at the time of the writing of Robertson’s History of Scotland, with virtually all of the literati contributing something on it. For the broader context see Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 65–92.
Among many references in Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc. [1900], ed. John M. Robertson (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997), see II: 137; Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 38–65; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 127 ff.
I have discussed this in more detail in László Kontler, “Beauty or Beast or Monstrous Regiments? Robertson and Burke on Women and the Public Scene,” Modern Intellectual History 1/3 (2004): 305–30.
Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chs. 5 and 7.
Edward Hundert, The Enlightenment’s ‘Fable’: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. ch. 4
Hundert, “Introduction,” in Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, ed. E. J. Hundert (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), esp. xxℓxxxii.
Neal Hargraves, “The ‘Progress of Ambition’: Character, Narrative, and Philosophy in the Works of William Robertson,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (2002): 270.
On Seiler, see Ottfried Jordahn, Georg Friedrich Seilers Beitrag zur praktischen Theologie der kirchlichen Aufklärung (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Vereins für bayerische Kirchengeschichte, 1970). Cf. also the references to “theological Wolffianism” above, chapter 2, 159 f.
The causes of the initiative, and especially of its bitterness, have not been sufficiently explored. General explanations as the crisis of Protestant rationalism, or the relatively weak self-confidence of the Aufklärung, are hardly satisfactory. For an overview, see Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein, Die These von der Verschwörung 1776–1945 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1976), ch. 1. Aspects of this episode relevant to the present subject are summarized in Wolfgang Schieder and Christoph Dipper, “Propaganda,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Brunner, Conze, Koselleck, V: 71–6.
See also László Kontler, “Superstitition, Enthusiasm and Propagandism: Burke and Gentz on the French Revolution,” in Propaganda. Political Rhetoric and Identity 1300–2000, ed. Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 1999), 97–114.
See Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). But cf. also the view that apparently “absolute” monarchies were in fact moderate, with a generally constructive relationship between crown and estates, and the system of Landstände and imperial Kreistage perceived by several Germans as representative bodies comparable to the British parliament.
Rudolf Vierhaus, “Politisches Bewußtsein in Deutschland vor 1789,” in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert: Politische Verfassung, soziales Gefüge, geistige Bewegungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 195
Charles Ingrao, “Introduction: A Pre-Revolutionary Sonderweg,” German History 20/3 (2002): 282.
George P. Gooch, Germany and the French Revolution (London: Longman, 1920), 22–3.
Friedrich Carl von Moser, Der Herr und der Diener, geschildert mit patriotischer Freyheit (Frankfurt: Raspe, 1759); von Moser, ed., Patriotisches Archiv für Deutschland, 12 vols. (Frankfurt and Leipzig: C. F. Schwan, 1784–1790). On Moser, see Notker Hammerstein, “Das politische Denken Friedrich Carl von Mosers,” Historische Zeitschrift 212 (1971): 316–38
John Gagliardo, Reich and Nation: The Holy Roman Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763–1806 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), ch. 4
Angela Stirken, Der Herr und der Diener. Friedrich Carl von Moser und das Beamtenwesen seiner Zeit (Berlin: Ludwig Röhrscheid, 1984)
Wolfgang Martens, Der patriotische Minister. Fürstendiener in der Literatur der Aufklärungszeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996), III: 1.
Michael Stolleis, “Reichspublizistik und Reichspatriotismus vom 16. zum 18. Jahrhundert,” Aufklärung 4/2 (1989): 7–23; Karl Othmar Freiherr von Aretin, “Reichspatriotismus,” ibid., 25–36. The standard treatment of the history of the waning Holy Roman Empire is still Karl Othmar Freiherr von Aretin, Heiliges Römisches Reich 1776–1806: Reichsverfassung und Staatssouveränität, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1967).
Geoff Grundy, The Emulation of Nations: William Robertson and the International Order (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2005), 140 ff.
Richard Pares, “American versus Continental Warfare, 1739–1763,” English Historical Review 51 (1936): 436.
Jonathan Knudsen, Justus Möser and the German Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 99–109; Umbach, Federalism and Enlightenment, 134 ff.
Volker Press, Das Reichskammergericht in der deutschen Geschichte (Wetzlar: Gesellschaft der Reichskammergerichtsforschung, 1987).
Manfred Friedrich, Geschichte der deutschen Staatsrechtswissenschaft (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997), 131.
On the character of Pütter’s legal scholarship, see Ulrich Schlie, Johann Stephan Pütters Rechtbegriff (Göttingen: Verlag Otto Schwarz, 1961); for a broader contextu-alization, see Friedrich, Geschichte der deutschen Staatsrechtswissenschaft, ch. 9.
Franz Xaver von Wegele, “Häberlin, Franz Dominicus,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. X (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1879), 274–5.
Josiah Dornford to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, August 22, 1791. Niedersächsisches Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, Cod. Ms. Lichtenberg III, 51. It is noteworthy that before his premature death, Dornford also contributed in a thoroughly Burkean spirit to the debate on the French revolutionary wars. Josiah Dornford, The Motives and Consequences of the Present War Impartially Considered (London: Pridden, 1793).
Recently, Schmidt has been explicitly put forward as a counterpart of Robertson in the following terms: he too is portrayed as a religious and ecclesiastical “moderate” who belonged to the broader family of enlightened narrative history, and sought to place the history of the clergy “within the history of civil society and manners” (a reference to Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II: 282). Michael Printy, Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 198, and the whole of ch. 9.
See also Michael Printy, “From Barbarism to Religion: Church History and the Enlightened Narrative in Germany,” German History 23 (2005): 172–201.
On Schmidt as a historian, see further Arnold Berney, “Michael Ignatz Schmidt. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Historiographie in der deutschen Aufklärung,” Historisches Jahrbuch, 44 (1924): 211–39; Hans-Wolfgang Bergerhausen, “Michael Ignaz Schmidt in der historiog-raphischen Tradition der Aufklärung,” in Michael Ignaz Schmidt, ed. Baumgart, 63–79.
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© 2014 László Kontler
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Kontler, L. (2014). Scottish Histories and German Identities. In: Translations, Histories, Enlightenments. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137371720_5
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