The search for the universal human history - 1750-1800 and today

Juha Janne Olavi Uski Roskilde, March 2010

This essay considers and discusses the attempts towards universal and world histories in the late Enlightenment period Germany, as well as the discussions around related themes today, basically in the Western world. The choice of limiting myself to the German earlier sources and Western discussions today is due to my personal limitations and the academic institution's limitations in the framing of these issues and I have no access to other points of view. However, even with these limitations, it is certainly possible (and even worthwhile) to reflect on global issues. The European attempts of writing the entire humanitys history in the second half of the eighteenth century were part of the transition from the medieval society to the modern society, as those longer stages may today be characterized. The present moment, on the other hand, is often seen as a moment of crisis for the project of modernity and concepts like postmodernity have been used to describe this crisis or possible change of stage. Thus it appears relevant to consider where did we come from, in order to reconsider where we are going to. Doing so places me in the position that we can learn something relevant from history and even from history writing. Life's teacher It was Cicero, the famous Roman orator, who is known to have said historia magistra vitae history is life's teacher. (Koselleck 1985:23) Those words survived through the European middle ages as an often used idiom. For those Christian times, certainly the teachings considered greatest came from the stories of the Bible, but also some heathen histories were considered educational. (Koselleck 1985:24) The medieval mainstream worldview was an eternal, unchanging God-created universe, and this view applied also to history. This second idiom that nothing really changes - was repeated still in later Enlightenment times; Reinhart Koselleck mentions that for example the poet Novalis affirmed that ... all past and present actions appear similar ... (Koselleck 1985:25) And when the Renaissance interest in the pre-Christian teachings brought the ancient Greeks and Romans

to vogue, Machiavelli called to imitate them. (Koselleck 1985:24) The cultural, social and political process of transformation - increasing contacts with other cultures and continents, the Renaissance, and finally the Enlightenment and its revolutions - changed all this. Future-oriented ideals became the central focus, directing changes and revolutions, in contrast to eternal laws directing eternal hierarchies. Where before there was talk of specific freedoms, now the ideal of Freedom reigned. The ideal of Justice took the place of rights and servitudes, and perhaps most importantly, the idea of Progress emerged. (Koselleck 1985:31) Likewise, instead of histories in plural, History emerged with a capital H, as a future-oriented and unique process, not based on repetitions but on the possibility of Progress (or regression). (Koselleck 1985:32) As the uniqueness of historical processes was recognized, the idiom of history as life's teacher lost much of its appeal. The Histories of Mankind Since the end of the 15th century, European explorers and travellers had discovered hitherto unknown continents and cultures and were accumulating an enormous amount of information about other parts of the world. However, by the end of the 17th century Europeans depicted Christian Europe as something clearly distinct from all others and on the 18th century those others were often portrayed as going through stages that Europe had already passed through. (Harbsmeier 1989:97-99) It is interesting to consider that the idea of Progress that emerged in those times not only placed Europeans in charge of their own necessary self-improvement, but could also justify their rule over other peoples, who were seen as less developed. Whether the history of ideas was driven by political opportunism or not, the early 18th century approach to other continents became generalized into the late 18th century Histories of Mankind. The European explorers had travelled the entire globe; it was the beginning of the search for a global outlook. In Germany, the most influential History of Mankind was written by Isaac Iselin and published in 1764. Iselin placed the different known peoples in an evolutionary ladder. Of the first stage in the ladder, the state of nature, history doesn't give much information about, Iselin explained. From the second stage onwards, there is plenty of sources. The Japanese, the Peruvian Indians, the Turks and the Russians Iselin classifies as savages and barbarians the second stage. On the next higher

stages we find first the Oriental people, then the ancient Greeks and Romans, and finally the contemporary Europeans. (Harbsmeier 1989:100-101) Iselin's evolutionary ladder is presented as a unified story with metaphors for the different ages of humanity: barbarian childhood, civilized old age a kind of a biography of mankind. (Harbsmeier 1989:101) From today's perspective, that kind of a view can well be questioned, and I'll come back to that. For now, it should be noted that not all contemporary historians completely shared Iselin's view and the nature of society and civilization was an ongoing debate on those years. For example Johann Gottlob Steeb, who in 1766 compared the savage and civilized nations, wrote his study as a comparison instead of as a linear story, and gave more voice also to Rousseau's views on the noble savage. However, even Steeb did suggest and discuss on the basis of a three-staged model of development. (Harbsmeier 1989:102) In 1782, Johann Cristoph Adelung wrote a history of the culture of man, abandoning the attempt of Iselin and other historians of mankind to include other cultural spheres in world history than the European. For Adelung, only the Christian Europe is worthy of consideration, and European history (thus the cultural history of mankind) begins from the Old Testament. The concept of Progress, on the other hand, is integrated through the concept of culture, which is associated with refinement, enlightenment, and the development of abilities and derives from population growth in geographically restricted space. (Harbsmeier 1989:103-104) Combining the biblical and the progressive, Adelung's view is some kind of a compromise between the medieval and the modern. Where Adelung focused exclusively on European history, three years later Christoph Meiners wrote a history of mankind focusing on ugly and darkskinned peoples and nations. Meiners' work paints a thoroughly negative image of other peoples than Europeans, bringing out all of the worst experiences available in the multitude of travellers' descriptions that Meiners read through. Thus Meiners expresses the same ethnocentrism as Adelung, but this time looking outwards from Europe rather than inwards. (Harbsmeier 1989:105-107) A slightly more nuanced look than the above mentioned ones was expressed in 1801 by Daniel Jenisch in his universalhistoric overview of human progress. While Jenisch still operates with the idea of developmental stages basically inherited from Iselin and places the European culture as the most developed one, he also contends that not every European has reached the highest levels of development. There are different levels in the society and below the superficial impression of civilization there are barbaric behaviours also in Europe! Jenisch also makes changes to the scheme

of developmental stages and adds further stages: after refined sensuality, there comes a higher stage, where sensual and artistic enjoyment is exaggerated some kind of an unbridled consumerism, it would seem. And after that, there is an even more developed stage, where reason dominates sensuality entirely and human existence is perfected. This last stage has not yet been reached, and thus Jenisch's model contains the aspect of being a utopian project. Interestingly, as can clearly be seen in the contrast between the mentioned highest stages of development, Jenisch's model contains an element of progress through dialectics, making it more dynamic than the earlier ones. However, this dialectic is not a revolutionary dialectic, because the higher stages of development are represented by the ruling groups of the established social hierarchy. (Harbsmeier 1989:112-114) Other developments in the end of the 18th century and in the 19th century Meanwhile, in Gttingen world history was being taught on the biblical basis (like Adelung), but not with the thesis of stages of development, but rather that of epochs, perhaps closer to the medieval look, but also developing historical research as an academic discipline rather than as a political project. (Harbsmeier 1989:117-118) Of course, the academic discipline could also be used to profit from other cultures, that were being researched. (Harbsmeier 1989:121) For this essay, here the most interesting conceptual distinction is that of connected history of such nations that were in frequent interaction with each other, and unconnected history of others, which were more isolated. (Harbsmeier 1989:120) This is interesting for us, because today we are living in a world that is increasingly interconnected and there are no longer isolated societies unlike before. The biblical basis of world history was, however, losing its status as a firmly established bedrock. Already in 1795, Karl Heinrich Ludwig Plitz challenged the authority of the Old Testament as the basis of world history. Plitz characterized the earlier stages of human history as a period of mythical childhood, and where myths reigned, a precise chronology or reliable description (or even an understanding) of the period was difficult because of the nature of the available documents: they are myths including the Old Testament. (Harbsmeier 1989:124-126) Through Jenisch and Plitz and their contemporaries we are reaching the 19th century, where the past was seen as mythical and other cultures and also European culture itself appeared more complex and diverse than before: the idea of nationalism was emerging and Europe was seen divided in increasingly individualized nations. (Harbsmeier 1989:124) The relativity of historical knowledge was discovered and a scientific specialization occurred: History focused on Europe (and increasingly on modern times), the strange other cultures were left to ethnographers and Orientalists, and the

stages of history before alphabetical writing were left to archeologists. (Harbsmeier 1989:127) The horizons of today The Histories of Mankind or world histories of 18th century would for most of us today not qualify as really worthy of their title. Surely we would expect that a history of mankind (or maybe we would rather use the term humanity that sounds more gender-neutral) displays a balanced respect towards the diverse manifestations of humanity? A world history for today could even include environmental history and where would it start then? Would it start from the Big Bang? And how would that respect the cultural diversity of religious beliefs regarding the creation of the world? We must accept that we human beings have not written our common history as a unified work, because we are not living as a unified people we are not truly a universal human nation. A universal human nation, human unity, global understanding and world peace can easily be regarded as unreachable utopies and still, the state of our current technologies makes contradictions between peoples and the lack of a truly global perspective into a very dangerous situation. Therefore it is a serious and urgent task to attempt to chart out the steps that do lead to a deeper understanding of what exactly does human history consist of. However, since the 19th century and still today the majority of historians have confined themselves within the bounds of the histories of their nation-states, specializing in their nations history. (Osterhammel & Petersson 2005:14) Only some aspects of a global horizon have entered the discipline of history as descriptions of globalization. As described by Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmeier, globalization the establishment of global interchange and cooperation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was mainly a Westernbased (European and North American based) and a West-focused project thus continuing the European ethnocentric look of the 18th century universal histories and world histories. (Conrad & Sachsenmeier 2007:6-7) It need not be surprising, then, that the most explored themes of the history writing on globalization whether critical or not seem to correspond with the themes of such an agenda of the West: history of world economy corresponding with the Western project of dominating that world economy; migration research corresponding with migration control; history of international relations corresponding with the first international organizations, which all were Western-based; and the history of imperialism and colonialism corresponding with the challenge posed by the emergence of the nationalist movements in the colonies on that period. (Conrad & Sachsenmeier 2007:9-12 and

Osterhammel & Petersson 2005:14-18) The latter half of the 20th century challenged this balance of power temporarily as Real Socialism gained strength and India and African countries rebelled against the colonial powers and gained their political independence. It is in the 1980s, when Real Socialism was showing signs of exhaustion or at least transformation as the policies of glasnost and perestroika were launched in the Soviet Union, that the earlier referred articles of Koselleck and Harbsmeier, which discuss the 18th century global histories, were written. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama wrote his famous book about the End of History, where he contended that with the triumph of Western liberal democracy, history had come to its final stage. Later even Fukuyama himself has looked at his work critically, but in the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s such arguments were taken seriously Fukuyama was one of those formulating the doctrine of the administration of Ronald Reagan (see Fukuyama's biography in the faculty presentations of www.sais-jhu.edu). Perhaps it is in that atmosphere that Koselleck and Harbsmeier found it of interest to find out and remind about the beginning of that story of Western global superiority. Reflecting on the past may sometimes reveal the limitations of our own mindsets and thus can history act as life's teacher. What we also can notice by comparison is a strong contrast between the idea of Progress and the idea of the End of History. Certainly the various Enlightenment ideas of progress do not simply boil down to what Fukuyama proposed the utopia of the Enlightenment is not reached simply with liberal democracy. An idea of the end of history appears rather more like a return to the medieval worldview. But it is not only Fukuyama who has during the last decades questioned the ideals of infinite Progress; one of the most significant critiques to the idea of the progress of history came in 1979 from Jean-Francois Lyotard, who wrote that we are living in a postmodern world, where such Grand Narratives have collapsed. The contemporary currents of historical research seem to affirm that tendency of the difficulty of constructing unified, universal history. Instead, there is much interest in microhistory and thus valuing the diversity of human experiences. Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmeier note that while more and more historians agree on the need of more exploration of intercultural connections, worldwide exchanges, and global transformations, most proponents of a new transnational and global history agree that the aim today is not all-encompassing, universalizing visions but rather that it is necessary to be careful not to entirely lose sight of local sensitivities when writing global history. (Conrad & Sachsenmeier 2007:8-9)

Should we then conclude, that since historians agree today that a universal history is not needed, the case is closed? World history can be written, but only in the tragic (or tragicomic), Macbethian style, as a collective tower of Babel that is not heading in any particular direction but where stuff just happens...? Is this a new puritanism that forbids us from inserting meaningfulness into our descriptions of human history from seeing meaningfulness in human aspirations? I do not know what steps exactly have there recently been taken towards a truly global history in the framework of a dialogue that involves a convergence of diversity. In the end of his article on world histories in the 18th century, that seems to be the proposal of Michael Harbsmeier to write a world history collectively, as a collaborative effort. Something of that kind appears desirable also from my point of view, including admitting openly that such a project would be political, in the wide, nonpartisan sense of the word. However, even the themes that such a world history would focus on would inevitably be a construction and as such a new world history could only be human-centered. The fulfillment of human rights could be a positive focus for a world history, although their content has to be reviewed in the light of existing and possible criticism regarding ethnocentrism. Such a focus would certainly also give rise to a discussion over the methodology of historical progress in relation to the stated goal, but that would not be a theoretical issue that should simply be formulated in advance, but instead it would be a part of the research to consider the diverse methods applied in the diverse times and spaces. I believe that such an investigation could amplify our horizons for overcoming the crises related to the modern idea of progress, which are manifest in varied fields: ecological destruction, social violence and individual sensation of meaninglessness. Regarding the last point related to the meaning of life and considering the question about ethnocentrism, the right to profess or not to profess religiosity or spirituality in its diverse forms should also be an important theme.

Biography Sebastian Conrad & Dominic Sachsenmaier, Introduction. In: Sebastian Conrad & Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds.), Competing Visions of World Order. Global Movements, 1880-1930s. New York 2007 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press, 1992 Michael Harbsmeier, World Histories before Domestication. Culture & History 5, 1989

Reinhart Koselleck, Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of a Topos Into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process. In Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, MIT Press 1985 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1979 Jrgen Osterhammel & Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History. Princeton 2005