The Expert’s Historian: Otto Hintze and the Nature of Modern Historical Thought

The Expert’s Historian

Otto Hintze and the Nature of Modern Historical Thought

Leonard S. Smith

Foreword by R. Guy Erwin

THE EXPERT’S HISTORIAN

Otto Hintze and the Nature of Modern Historical Thought

Copyright © 2017 Leonard S. Smith. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Pickwick Publications

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paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-8161-4

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-8163-8

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-8162-1

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Names: Smith, Leonard (Leonard Sander), 1932–2013. | Erwin, Guy.

Title: The expert’s historian : Otto Hintze and the nature of modern historical thought / Leonard Smith ; foreword by R. Guy Erwin.

Description: Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: ISBN: 978-1-4982-8161-4 (paperback). | ISBN: 978-1-4982-8163-8 (hardcover). | ISBN: 978-1-4982-8162-1 (ebook).

Subjects: Historiography. | Hintze, Otto, 1861-1940.

Classification: DD86.7 H56 S62 2017 (print) | DD86.7 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 09/17/15

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Chapter 1: A Fifty-Year Encounter with Otto Hintze and Historicism as a Method of Doing History, 1962–2012

Chapter 2: Meinecke, Troeltsch, Hintze, and the Discovery of Historicism as a Methodology

Chapter 3: Otto Hintze and Max Weber

Chapter 4: Frederick C. Beiser and The German Historicist Tradition

Appendix: Inaugural Speech of Mr. Hintze

Epilogue: Teaching the Idea of History and Historicism as a Method for Writing a History Paper

A Typology of Western Historiography

An Ideal Type or Model of Classical Historiography

An Ideal Type or Model of Christian Historiography

An Ideal Type or Model of Modern Historiography

Quotations for a Typology of Western Historiography

Bibliography

Dedicated to the children of Leonard and Sharon Smith:

Eric, Kirk, Sander, and Kirstin

Foreword

Leonard S. Smith’s final book, The Expert’s Historian: Otto Hintze and the Nature of Modern Historical Thought, is both a discrete collection of reflections on the development of historiography and, in the collective, a kind of intellectual autobiography. In a striking way, Dr. Smith’s own development as a historian and historiographer relates to his subject matter, and this consonance adds unexpected passion and depth to his conclusions. It is not common, in the rarefied air of historiographical writing, for a historian to make a confession of faith in his material and his method, but Dr. Smith does just that. And anyone who knew him personally found this blend of broad and dispassionate knowledge with intense and passionate conviction to be fully characteristic of Leonard Smith the scholar, teacher, and Lutheran.

I first encountered Leonard Smith when I joined the faculties of history and religion at California Lutheran University in the year 2000. By then Dr. Smith had retired, but even as emeritus professor of history he played a prominent role in the university’s wider circle of friends and supporters. He took a particular interest in me from the time of my first interview, because of our shared experience of study and research in Germany, our commitment to Lutheranism, and our common interest in Leopold von Ranke. I was honored to be in close conversation with Dr. Smith for the last dozen years of his life, and there is not much in his late work that we did not discuss. He was tenacious in his defense of his conclusions, but always open to new evidence and information, and he welcomed new angles of approach to his work—in short, he was learned and imaginative at the same time.

The community of American scholars interested in the great German historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has never been large, and Leonard Smith was at the center of them for most of his career. In the small liberal arts college (and later university) at which he taught for most of his career, Smith was responsible for most of European history, and only his most advanced students benefited from his deep scholarship in historiography. But he prepared some of them for graduate study in that way, and many of his former students remember the intensity of his historiographical seminars with a mix of nostalgia and awe. Only at professional meetings was Smith able to connect with peers who shared his interests, and even there, the gradual eclipse of intellectual history in the 1970s onward made it somewhat challenging for him to find an audience for his work on Ranke, Hintze, Meinecke, Troeltsch, and Weber.

Most challenging of all for Smith’s work was the relative indifference of historians to the religious roots of the German historians of the nineteenth century, admittedly an age of disenchantment and secularism in the face of the rise of economic theory. Smith’s lifelong argument that the moderate rationalism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German Lutheranism—and the view of political and social reality taught through Luther’s Small Catechism in German schools and by German pastors—actually undergirds the Weltanschauung of Ranke and the first generation of professional historians, was an idea that seemed old-fashioned at first, but has stood the test of time. Unfortunately Smith’s thesis, presented most fully in his Religion and the Rise of History: Martin Luther and the Cultural Revolution in Germany, 1760–1810 (2009), has not yet provoked the kind of research and analysis that could test, expand, or challenge it, but that may well be yet to come as the winds of academic fashion continue to blow in new directions.

Certainly, the recent rise in interest in Otto Hintze as a historian vindicates Leonard Smith’s long fascination with his work, described in this volume’s first essay. As a historian, Hintze stood in a liminal period: his early work on the Hohenzollern dynasty, easily understood as special pleading in support of an authoritarian regime, is now appreciated for the quality of its research instead of being dismissed as an artifact of pre-war monarchist propaganda. Hintze was a student of the past, much of whose work was forged in a tumultuous present: the brief creative window of the Weimar Republic. His analysis cannot be completely divorced from his lived experience—precisely the argument Leonard Smith makes about him and about Ranke as well. And the same might be said of Smith himself, whose own historical contribution spanned the drama of the Cold War era and the decline in the West of the authority and influence of traditional institutions like church and academy. Historians may write about what they find, but they write it in contexts that shape and influence how and where they have looked.

In the second essay in this volume, Smith takes the reader more deeply into the intellectual context of Hintze’s work, embedding him in the golden age of German historiography together with his contemporaries and peers Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Troeltsch. Smith evokes the heady political and nationalistic spirit that pervaded German historiography and history of political institutions in the early twentieth century.

On a more theoretical level, the third essay explores the connections between Hintze and Max Weber, and charts Hintze’s use of Weber’s sociological understandings and his movement beyond Marxist theories of structure. In developing his own ideas of the structures of human community, Hintze both drew from and further refined the dominant ideas of his time. Smith’s appreciative essay gives us a hint, as well, of Smith’s own adaptive skill in using but expanding frameworks and categories.

In the fourth essay, Smith returns to the basic idea of historicism as expressed by Friedrich Meinecke and described in Frederick Beiser’s book The German Historicist Tradition: A Critical View, critiquing Beiser’s interpretation from a historical perspective. The intellectual principles that Meinecke described as Historismus reflect an application of the great currents of German philosophy to the subject matter of history: a movement from the individualizing efforts of historical research (which digs downward into cases) to a grander framework in which the human forces in history can be understood in more general ways. In this essay, Smith also shows his rhetorical skill as he exposes several of Beiser’s views to criticism based on his own deep research.

Ultimately, this volume is Leonard Smith’s confession of faith in the historical method and analytical insight of Otto Hintze. And, characteristically, Smith lets Hintze have (almost) the last word by including his own translation of Hintze’s inaugural address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1914. In this speech, Hintze points frankly (and in an eerily prescient way) to the problem of the origin of absolutism and its creature: the modern militaristic great state. Within months, the great state in question (and Hintze’s homeland) would help plunge Europe into the vast destruction of the First World War. In that war’s aftermath, Hintze will write two volumes trying to come to terms with its meaning, and ultimately, the rise of Nazism will silence his voice completely.

Leonard Smith lived a scholar’s life within a teacher’s vocation. As the epilogue of this book indicates, his research was strongly reflected in his teaching. This is another illustration of Smith’s thoroughness and insight that each aspiring historian needs clarity about what she is doing and what premises she is bringing to bear on her interpretation. With charm and lucidness, Smith invites his students into a conversation with the great historians of the past, to help them understand their own preconceptions and step outside of them.

The Expert’s Historian is more than the title of Leonard Smith’s final book; it is an apt description of the man himself. Perfectly at home both in the library and the classroom, Smith worked long and hard outside the limelight of historical fashion to create a lasting contribution to his field, and to build his own memorial in the hearts of his students and many friends. May his memory be a blessing!

R. Guy Erwin, PhD

Preface

In the year 1941, Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954)—the most famous and influential German historian of the twentieth century—summarized the significance of his friend Otto Hintze (1861–1940) for the discipline called history in this way: As we hoped, Hintze’s further development made him one of the great ones in the discipline. To be sure, he was one of those who was only known in the circle of experts, like a very high mountain in a mountain range which one first noticed from the vantage point of a high pass (F. Meinecke, Erlebtes, 158–59).

In the year 1967, my PhD dissertation, Otto Hintze’s Comparative Constitutional History of the West (Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri) was completed and became available through UMI Dissertation Services. For many reasons this was a very long dissertation (617 pages), but one of the major reasons was the necessity of summarizing many of Hintze’s most important essays, since almost nothing of his work had been translated at this time. In the year 1970, in a very important essay called Otto Hintze: His Work and Significance in Historiography, Dietrich Gerhard called attention to my dissertation and the need for it to be published in a condensed form.¹

In the year 1975, Felix Gilbert translated, edited, and introduced some of Hintze’s articles in a very important book for the English-speaking world called The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze: Edited with an Introduction by Felix Gilbert with the assistance of Robert M. Berdahl (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). In the first paragraph of the Introduction, Otto Hintze 1861–1940, Gilbert wrote: Those acquainted with the work of Otto Hintze are unanimous in regarding him as one of the most important, if not the most important, German historical scholar of the period of William II and the Weimar Republic. Yet, the number of those to whom his writings are known is small; and his influence on historical scholarship, although profound and decisive in individual cases, has been limited. Hintze’s fame has certainly not reached far beyond the German frontiers (p. 4).

In the next paragraph, Gilbert rightly explained that the foremost reason has been the inaccessibility of Hintze’s writings. This however, does not explain why this book, which Oxford University Press published both in hardcover and paperback and went all out to publicize, was a costly failure in sales. Certainly, the neglect of this book of essays by one of the most important historians of the twentieth century and this book of translations by Felix Gilbert, a Meinecke student who became one of the most prominent American historians of the second half of the twentieth century, suggests that this neglect is still a major problem for the entire history profession in the United States. Even today, most professional historians in the United States are not familiar with Hintze’s work and his significance for Western historical thought and their profession as a whole.

One reason for this is that there is still no basic work, either in German or in English, which deals with Otto Hintze’s life, work, and significance as a whole. Sadly, my long dissertation from the year 1967 is still the only single study that has attempted to do this. If, however, I would have been able to write a highly condensed and updated version of my dissertation, what publishing company would publish such a work when so few historians, history teachers, and other scholars were willing to buy such a work when they don’t even recognize Hintze’s name? Was there another way to make his name known in the United States first?

In 1971, when I was pursuing my study of Leopold von Ranke for a highly condensed (less than 300 pages) and updated version of my dissertation on Hintze, I discovered a quotation from Ranke written in the year 1828 that ultimately led to a book entitled Religion and the Rise of History: Martin Luther and the Cultural Revolution in Germany, 1760 – 1810 (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009). Because of the title, depth, and breadth of this study, I believed that this was the best way to make Hintze’s name known to a large audience, for it was an interdisciplinary work that placed him in the context of the idea of history or Western historical thought as a whole.

It