Some Notes on Burckhardt

Author(s): Burleigh Taylor Wilkins

Source: Journal of the History of Ideas , Jan., 1959, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Jan., 1959), pp. 123-
137
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2707971

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 SOME NOTES ON BURCKHARDT *

BY BURLEIGH TAYLOR WLKINS

Friedrich Nietzsche's essay The Use and Abuse of History remains the
most eloquent attack upon historicism, historicism being here considered as
any kind of thinking that advises man to rely upon history or the " course "
of history when he ought instead to rely upon himself.' Nietzsche's essay
also continues unsurpassed in several other, lesser respects. As we read it
today, we experience successive shocks of recognition as Nietzsche provides
us with general categories, with descriptive suggestions, that seem to cry out
to us to apply them to so many historians and to so many of the motives of
historians. Here, for example, is a sentence that at once calls to mind Lord
Acton: " Only he whose heart is oppressed by an instant need ... feels the
want of 'critical history,' the history that judges and condemns." 2 And
here, I think, is the subject of our essay, Jacob Burckhardt: "History is
necessary to the man of conservative and reverent nature, who looks back to
the origins of his existence with love and trust." 3
The origins of Jacob Burckhardt's existence lay in Basle, Switzerland,
where the families of both his parents had lived since the fifteenth century.
Burckhardt's father was a pastor, a simple man who taught his son how to
sketch and draw. He belonged, however, to a branch of a family that had
long been a prominent and conservative force in a community once described
by Treitschke as the " sulking corner " of Europe. It was natural that
Treitschke, a Prussian apologist, should depict Basle in this way, for the
citizens of Basle were skeptical of a good many things, including the propo-
sition that God, history, and Prussia all marched in the same legion.
Burckhardt, however, had not always shared the skepticism of his coun-
trymen. The letters of his student days in Berlin reveal an admiration,
though not an uncritical one, of Prussian dreams for a greater Germany.4
Indeed, the question of Burckhardt's reactions to nationalism is apt in the
long run to prove the most difficult for those historians who have of late
shown an enthusiasm for drawing a thorough-going distinction between
Burckhardt and his teacher at the University of Berlin, Leopold von Ranke.

* I wish to thank Professor Harold T. Parker of Duke University for reading an

earlier draft of this essay and for asking some pertinent questions about Burck-
hardt's philosophy of history. As this is mainly an interpretative essay, I have tried
to keep the footnotes to a minimum and to refer to readily available sources.
1 Nietzsche's eloquence against historicism has, of course, been complemented in
recent years, most notably by the logic of Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its
Enemies (2 vols., London, 1945; 1 vol., Princeton, 1950).
2 F. Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (New York, 1949), 25. Ibid.
4 Jacob Burckhardt to Louise Burckhardt, Frankfurt, April 5, 1841, and Braun-
schweig, September 25, 1841. The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, selected, edited and
translated by Alexander Dru (London, 1955), 58-61, 63-5. Burckhardt's own
youthful dream for a greater Germany was cultural rather than political.

123

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 124 BURLEIGH T. WILKINS

Burckhardt the liberal champion of " cultural history," Ranke the national-
ist defender of " political history," it makes a nice distinction; and it may
very well be irrelevant that Burckhardt himself was most imperfectly aware,
if at all, of any marked antithesis between his " cultural history" and his-
tory as it had been done previously.5 It must, however, be significant that
Burckhardt, while increasingly critical of the kind of historicism that finds
ethical fulfillment in the development of the nation-state, never did cease to
speak of the nation in a non-liberal way as having purposes that transcend
the well-being of its individual members.6 As for the state itself, that was
a different matter, as we shall see; in contrasting the attitudes of Burck-
hardt and Ranke towards nationalism, we would, however, do well to remem-
ber that Ranke was in many ways a " good European " much concerned
with relating the history of individual nations to " universal history." 7
Burckhardt might never begin a series of lectures with the clumsy and
mischievous kind of metaphysic with which Ranke had begun-" Gentle-
men, nations are God's thoughts " 8-but concern for the Idea of nationality
and the allied conviction that historical thinking has its spiritual side (as it
seeks to uncover such Ideas) were present in his mind, although without the
harmful emphasis sometimes given them by Ranke. It could even be
argued, against Burckhardt's " liberal " admirers, that his final revulsion
against power-" power is in itself evil " 9-had its origins not so much in
his distrust of nationalism as in his weariness with that secular factionalism
which the quest for German national unity appears to have intensified.
" Yes," he wrote in 1846, " I want to get away from them all, from the
radicals, the communists, the industrialists, the intellectuals, the pretentious,
the reasoners, the sophists, the State fanatics, the idealists, the 'ists ' and
'isms' of all kind." 10
Burckhardt's desire to escape from faction was probably occasioned by
two sets of experiences, neither of them pleasant. First, there were his ob-
servations as a youth of the cliques and rivalries among German scholars.
Then, as proof that Basle itself was becoming neoteric, came his impressions
of political strife gathered when he served for a time in the eighteen-forties
as editor of the conservative Basler Zeitung. The revolutions of 1848 served
only to confirm Burckhardt in his worst fears, and he began to cast about,
unsystematically, for an historical explanation of such disruptions of social

5Examples of this exaggerated distinction lie in F. Meinecke, "Ranke and

Burckhardt," German History, Some New German Views, ed. Hans Kohn (Boston,
1954), 141-56; and in E. Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge (New Haven, 1950),
264-80.
6 Jacob Burckhardt, Force and Freedom, Reflections on History, ed. James Hast-
ing Nichols (New York, 1943), 333.
7For a defense of Ranke on this score see Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past
(Cambridge, England, 1955), 100-28.
8 Leopold von Ranke, quoted by Jacob Burckhardt to Louise Burckhardt, Ber-
lin, August 1840. The Letters, 58. 9 Burckhardt, Force and Freedom, 115.
10 Jacob Burckhardt to Hermann Schauenburg, Basle, Switzerland, February 28,
1846. The Letters, 96.

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 SOME NOTES ON BURCKHARDT 125

harmony. His famous predictions concerning the emergence of terribles

simplificateurs and of a dehumanized industrial-military order still lay in
the future, but by the end of the eighteen-forties the historical groundwork
had been laid. The gratuitous assumption of all conservatives, that before
the French Revolution European culture had possessed organic unity, had
been taken up by Burckhardt; and he was wont to reflect upon how Europe's
capacity for greatness and artistic vitality had been considerably reduced."
Throughout his life Burckhardt would wisely refrain from burdening
historical science with the question of whether there had been a " Golden
Age " somewhere in the past,'2 but he would think it more important than
polite to add that such a question is a matter of personal taste. Burck-
hardt's own taste was for periods in which tremendous individual creativi
was possible. It was all too clear to him that since the French Revolution
the cultural potential of Europe had declined to a point where his own best
efforts could only be directed to the contemplation of the achievements of
earlier periods, such as the Renaissance. Already, before he was scarcely
in his thirties, Burckhardt had succumbed to one of the dangers of history
depicted by Nietzsche: " We get the belief in the old age of mankind, the
belief at all times harmful, that we are late survivals, mere Epigoni." 13
Perhaps, Nietzsche in writing this actually had in mind the man whom
he would at one time have chosen to call master, had Burckhardt only been
willing, for Burckhardt could not resist referring to himself as one of the
Epigoni.'4 In his more sanguine moments, which were infrequent, Burck-
hardt hoped he might live to take part in the eventual restoration of Europe,
after the " natural order of inequality " had been recognized once more.
Meanwhile, he would dutifully act as a teacher at the University of Basle, a
position he romanticized as part of the last defenses against the levelling
forces then operative. Unfortunately for his qualifications as one of the
Epigoni, it cannot be said that Burckhardt had personally acquitted him-
self nobly in the eighteen-forties. When, for example, his friend, the impos-
sible Gottfried Kinkel, was imprisoned for revolutionary behavior in 1849,
Burckhardt did not mention his name again. The heroic generality usually
took the place of the heroic gesture with Burckhardt, and more typical of
Burckhardt was his longing to escape to the " beautiful, lazy south, where
history is dead." 15
Burckhardt, of course, did not literally think that history was dead in
Italy; this was, I think, only his way of noting the comparative absence of

11 Jacob Burckhardt to Gottfried Kinkel, Basle, April 18, 1845, and to Hermann
Schauenburg, Basle, September, 1849. The Letters, 92-4, 107.
12 He did, however, think that " Only the study of the past can provide us with
a standard by which to measure the rapidity and the strength of the particular mo-
ment in which we live." Shades of Henry Adams! Burckhardt, Force and Free-
dom, 92.
13 Nietzsche, op. cit., 36. 14Jacob Burckhardt to Hermann Schauenburg,
Basle, May 5 [1846]. The Letters, 97.
15 Jacob Burckhardt to Hermann Schauenburg, Basle, February 26, 1846. The
Letters, 96.

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 126 BURLEIGH T. WILKINS

partisan history in the south, an

torians were focused more upon t
Prussia than upon Piedmont. Burckhardt's words do, however, suggest
strongly that there was one kind of history he would have liked to see dead.
It was not academic history, or political history written in the academies,
both of which he respected, but that partisan history which serves mainly
to widen the gap between opposing parties, the kind of history we speak of
as too much history so convinced are we of its baneful consequences.
Burckhardt's own sense of history was more personal than partisan; it
enabled him to continue to defer, in a limited way, to the principle of con-
tinuity at a time when men such as Nietzsche could not. Burckhardt chose
to be a Burckhardt, to ignore or play down as best he could the differences
between father and son, between past and present Burckhardts. During
early manhood and middle-age he sometimes fretted at the cultural limita-
tions of his Basle traditions, but in the study of history, especially the his-
tory of art, it seemed as though Burckhardt had found a field where his
piety and his professional ability could be joined in such a way as to liberate
him from much that he considered mean and petty in the present. Later he
might discover that much of history was not so pleasant, but the history of
art would never disappoint his expectations. In his active days he travelled
to Italy, France, Germany, and even to England in search of beauty in the
art works of the past; and in his old age memories of these experiences
would continue to inform his public lectures, as well as to preserve his sense
of having enjoyed his life and culture-according to the best traditions-
before the deluge.
Such a man as we have seen thus far could not be considered singular,
apart perhaps from his professional achievements which we have yet to
discuss. However great our sympathies, there is an unmistakable air of
gentlemanly weariness about him, and his desire to stand apart from faction
and strife suggests renunciation more than statesmanship. Even within his
own profession, one might suspect, he would lack the substance of a Niebuhr
or a Ranke; his loves or interests would constantly outrun his scholarship.
It might be expected that Burckhardt's feeling for art would enable him
to appreciate, on a different level of experience, the aesthetic quality of his
teacher Ranke's willingness to listen with apparent sympathy to men of all
persuasions: Ranke, acording to legend, was a diplomatic historian in both
senses of the word diplomatic. What is so interesting about Burckhardt is
that he realized fully the taint of corruption, the dulling of moral sensibility
that seems to come from such vicarious experiencing of evil. Burckhardt
did not challenge the products of Ranke's method, but he did suspect the
effects of such a method upon the historian's integrity. If such a method
did not tend to dim the historian's ability to distinguish between good and
evil, then it was itself the result of hypocrisy. It was, Burckhardt appears
to have thought, evil in itself before it came into contact with the evils of
others.16 Partly in reaction against Ranke's " diplomacy," Burckhardt re-

16Ranke was "utterly bereft of character," wrote Jacob Burckhardt to Louise

Burckhardt, Berlin, August 15, 1840. The Letters, 57-8.

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 SOME NOTES ON BURCKHARDT 127

fused to accommodate himself to those things, either past or present, for

which he had no use or whose values he suspected.
Sometimes this refusal approached the point of selfishness; doubtless
there were times when it led him to minimize the various possibilities in a
given situation. When, for example, Burckhardt declined to accept the chair
of history formerly held by Ranke at the University of Berlin, he did so on
the grounds that he would not be free there.17 The chair went instead to
Treitschke whose subsequent use of the chair to further the cause of exag-
gerated nationalism appears to confirm Burckhardt's opinion, to make us
forget that Ranke had conducted himself in a manner far removed from
Treitschke's, and to obscure the possibility that had Burckhardt accepted
the chair history might have been different. I mean, of course, that written
history might possibly have been different, had Burckhardt chosen to throw
the weight of such a position not against nationalism certainly, but against
the vulgar nationalism then current in German historical circles. As for the
other kind of history, the kind that matters most, who can say? And who
would venture to decide, with certainty, exactly when Prussia led her his-
torians or when she was led by them?
In any event, there would be no denying that Burckhardt's ethical will
and his unwillingness to be bothered were often indistinguishable from one
another. This could, however, be true of even more radically different
things, as, for instance, a man's aesthetics and his ethics; there is sometimes
a fundamental difference between two entities that manage nevertheless to
live peacefully side by side for years. Although we shall have more to say
about the nature of Burckhardt's ethics when we come to consider the social
and political implications of his thought, historians are not compelled to say
finally whether Burckhardt was personally more ethical than inert, or more
inert than ethical, since there was, so far as I know, no genuine test case.
With the question of his aesthetics and his ethics, they are less fortunate;
there the difference approached the point of conflict. It began with the
obvious, that there is a considerable leap from understanding the artistry of
a performance to judging its worth, something Burckhardt himself knew as
he watched Ranke move about the drawing rooms of Berlin. It approached
the point where the judging, or the felt necesssity of judging, could some-
times short-circuit the very understanding upon which the judgment must
ultimately rest.
Commentators upon Burckhardt may have studied the conflict within
him of the aesthetic and the ethical to the point of exaggeration, but we
cannot afford to forget that such a conflict, or at least a considerable ten-
sion, was there. And it is conceivable that our knowing of this conflict or
tension might contribute to our understanding better the charge, made by
Croce and others, that Burckhardt's histories are in some way anti-histor-
ical.18 Perhaps Burckhardt's propensity to judge so much of the present so
severely may have carried over into his studies of the past, and it may be
that his apparent delight, for instance, in appreciating the immoralities of

17 Jacob Burckhardt to Friedrich von Preen, Basle, June 28, 1872. The Letters,
152-3. 18 Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty (London, 1941), 100-10.

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 128 BURLEIGH T. WILKINS

the Renaissance is misleading; p

his occasional censures of Renaissance man.
Whatever the cause or causes, Burckhardt's reputation as a general his-
torian, though not as an historian of art, is now less secure than his reputa-
tion as a critic of his own times and as a prophet of the evils that would be-
fall Europe. While his Civilization of the Renaissance (1860) has attained
the classic status where it is more often referred to than consulted, its de-
ficiencies have become more evident. Its author's conception of the histor-
ical significance of Renaissance man has been challenged more and more
frequently as misleading and lacking proper perspective. Burckhardt's idea
of " Culture," we moderns are inclined to think, became rather haphazard
when it went below the level of the fine arts, and he was too poor a demo-
crat to give us the sociology of his " Civilization." Lord Acton, who other-
wise commended it highly, complained of the weakness of its political
sections-a weakness arising most likely from Burckhardt's distaste for fac-
tionalism. An easy criticism today is that Burckhardt tended to ignore the
economics of his subject, although this neglect did save him from excesses
of the kind present in Lord Acton's account of the threepence tax that broke
the British Empire.19
None of these deficiencies proves Burckhardt anti-historical, for if this
were so, few historians would escape a similar charge. When, however, it is
said that Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renatssance is overly impression-
istic and that it is a tableau which doesn't move, we are closer to under-
standing Burckhardt's basic fault. It is a fault manifest in his efforts to be
both historian and prophet, despite his failure to make his personal sense of
continuity with parts of the past into a public philosophy of development.
The idea of development, as we shall see, was much too close to the idea of
progress for a man of Burckhardt's persuasion; the idea of progress was in
turn too closely linked with extreme nationalism, or else it had been taken
over by economic man. Without a philosophy of development on what log-
ical grounds then could Burckhardt act the prophet? His personal sense of
continuity scarcely extended to anyone in the present save himself, and it
stopped almost entirely before the future, which he thought belonged to the
" barbarians." His attempts at what is called " historical detachment " and
even his pleas for historical objectivity 20 came, alas, in part from his inabil-
ity to identify himself with anything in the present that might have a future.
As for our initial concern with Burckhardt's difficulties as an historian, it
must be recognized that historical explanation often depends upon the same
kind of " logic " we encounter in would-be prophecies: the logic of develop-
ment by which one thing comes, apparently, from another. We sometimes
go so far as to reverse the historical process, in our minds, by making his-
torical " retrodictions," probability judgments about the past in the light of
present developments. This being so, it looks as if Burckhardt had placed
himself in a position where his refusal to accept any ethic alleged to be im-
manent in the course of historical development had carried him too far for
his own good, so far that he tended as an historian to ignore process, growth

19 Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History (London, 1930), 310.

20 Burckhardt, Force and Freedom, 88, 95.

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 SOME NOTES ON BURCKHARDT 129

and development. Burckhardt wished like all of us, I think, that the course
of history and his own judgment of what that course ought to be might coin-
cide. Failing that, he would have preferred to think that history is not on
anyone's side, that each generation makes its own destiny. He knew, how-
ever, that the course of human events in his own time ran counter to those
remains of the past with which he had identified himself; and he had in fact
resigned himself almost entirely to the fact that extreme nationalists, mate-
rialists, and others of equally gross nature were in the ascendancy and were
likely to grow stronger.
It is rather difficult for a man to understand, with proper historical sym-
pathy, those parts of the past that lead directly into those things in the
present that he loathes; it is even more difficult for him to concede that the
things he loves have become powerless before the things he hates, have in
some instances become accessories in the crime, as when art becomes com-
mercial. It is small wonder then that in Burckhardt's case a reaction
against that variety of historicism which emphasizes our obligation to sup-
port this or that course of development tended at times to become a reac-
tion against history itself. Often one has the impression that he could no
longer explain the past but could only condemn or admire certain parts of
it. Were we correct in saying in our introduction that history is necessary
to a man of Burckhardt's " conservative and reverent nature," it may be
that Burckhardt's reaction against the usual logic of historical explanation
accounts to a considerable extent for the decline of his creative powers at a
comparatively early age.
If, as Burckhardt was prepared to concede, history or the course of hu-
man events appeared to have no use for him or the things of which he was
fond, he still wished to make use of history, so strong is the pragmatic or
utilitarian tendency in everyone. Burckhardt would not have cared to be
spoken of thusly; he usually abhorred the " pragmatic " historian who, when
he is not a straightforward party man, is tirelessly sifting the past in search
of precedents to be followed or morals to be drawn. Rather than seek this
kind of immediate utility in historical study, Burckhardt hoped mainly that
history might make us " wiser forever." 21
Forever is, however, a long time; and those of us who try desperately to
be wise for the here and now might have endless fun, for awhile, at the ex-
pense of the historian who looks for wisdom on such a grand scale. Burck-
hardt's hope might, however, be more easily apprehended if we bear in mind
what we shall later discuss in more detail, namely that the kind of wisdom
Burckhardt might discover, or might think he had discovered, in history
would be not so much a workable knowledge as a knowledge that enlightens
us as to the futility of certain kinds of work.
Even so, any historical wisdom, if it is possible, is dependent upon cer-
tain assumptions as to the nature of man's experiences. Just as a series of
items cannot sum itself, a series of past experiences cannot of itself bring
wisdom. Since it is notorious that the past has taught, or has appeared to
teach, so many different, even conflicting lessons, it is undeniable that his-
torical interpretation as distinct perhaps from historical narrative involves

21 Ibid., 86.

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 130 BURLEIGH T. WILKINS

something more than empirical description or sampling. This is not in-

tended as a plea for " historical relativism," but as a warning that we should
not take at their face value two of Burckhardt's contentions. Because
Burckhardt considered Hegel's philosophy " a drug on the market " and re-
ferred contemptuously to the philosophy of history as a " centaur "22 it
would be all too natural to infer that his own reflections on history would
somehow be free of philosophy, or at least of the philosophy of history.
At first this inference appears correct: there are in Force and Freedom,
Reflections on History no attempts at building a system or pattern of history
to rival Hegel's, no efforts to equate the rational and the real. Much of the
book, which consists of lectures published posthumously, is an inquiry into
the historical interactions of Culture, Religion, and the State. When, how-
ever, Burckhardt announces his intention of discovering what is " recurrent,
constant, and typical " 23 in man's history, we see, despite the author's de-
nial, a philosophy of history loom large. Here, at last, is something of an
alternative to philosophies of development, as well as a possible basis for
predicting the course of human events.
The idea of recurrence is, of course, pre-Darwinian; constancy is at best
an illusion; and Croce may have been right when he insisted, in his com-
mentary on Burckhardt, that the typical is one of the most anti-historical
ideas imaginable, that it really belongs in that " small corner of the world
where drab psychological and sociological generalizations rule." 24 Still, in
fairness to Burckhardt, it is a corner of the world inhabited by Hume and
Schopenhauer alike, and a good part of Burckhardt's ' reflections on history '
can be regarded as an attempted application to historical thinking of Scho-
penhauer's judgment that the man who has read Herodotus has read enough
history.
Also Burckhardt was modest in one important respect. Admitting that
First Causes and Final Ends were beyond him, he hoped to fix upon the
" typical " in man as he had been in the knowable past. If Burckhardt
failed to go very far in his declared intention and appeared, like Brooks
Adams later, to be overwhelmed by a mass of evidence that he had no
scientific means of evaluating, his failure came after he had made some
rather interesting observations on the differences between nature and his-
tory, observations that contain in themselves a very real hindrance to any
sort of " typology."
Burckhardt may have been innocent in assuming that his thoughts about
history could be offered in lieu of a philosophy of history, but he was not so
innocent as to think that the constancy of man as a creature in history is
the same as the constancy of man as a creature in nature. The breach be-

22 Jacob Burckhardt to Albert Brenner, Zurich, March 16, 1856. The Letters,
122. Force and Freedom, 80. 23Ibid., 82.
24 Croce, op. cit., 103. I suspect that the vehe
the " typical " stems from the fact that theories
torian much of what Croce insisted could be su
we say, for example, " Napoleon was a man," doe
whether we conceive of the predicate " man " as
a " universal " taken from philosophy? If this
only way to unite the particular with the univer

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 SOME NOTES ON BURCKHARDT 131

tween the two, he thought, is occasioned by the " awakening " of man's
consciousness. While nature works upon a "few primeval models in the
people," society is " not so much a type as a gradual product " in which
mind is ever involved. Every species in nature possesses what it needs for
life; man, however, is incomplete and striving for completion. In nature,
Burckhardt wrote in a way that shows he was not always at odds with
Hegel, the species remain relatively constant; but the " essence " of man's
history is change. In nature the individual counts for nothing; in history
the exceptional man can sometimes act effectively upon society (Burck-
hardt's estimate of the importance of the " great man " in history was
Carlylean, although he did not dwell upon the subject or resort to fustian
language). Burckhardt's last distinction between nature and history con-
cerns death: in nature death is external; in history it is prepared for by
inward degeneration.25
It was a habit of Burckhardt's, after he had in his youth given up the
study of theology for the study of history, to protest modestly, especially to
Nietzsche,26 that he had no capacity for philosophizing. Nietzsche thought
that this was a ruse by which Burckhardt sought to avoid following his own
arguments to their logical end, but perhaps Burckhardt was honest all along.
Certainly there is much in Burckhardt's brief distinctions between nature
and history to suggest a philosophy of development, or at least to point
away from the doctrine of the " same anew " that Burckhardt had espoused.
To say that the essence of man's history is change is to say in effect that it
has no essence, of the kind that can be broken down into the " recurrent,
constant, and typical." To say that man's consciousness awakens and that
society is a gradual product is to recognize that history does move; and, in
fact, Burckhardt's conclusion that the body social is " the peculiar spirit of
the people in its gradual development 2227 iS, taken by itself, indistinguish-
able from that of the German historical school.
If Burckhardt did not embrace the idea of historical development in a
century when such an idea was supreme, he did sometimes accept the fact of
historical development. And in a few areas of human experience, mainly in
historical science and art appreciation, he was willing to recognize develop-
ment as progress. At this point in his thinking Burckhardt did a curious
thing: although the future looked dark, he uttered the cry of a wishful con-
servative. Against the certainty he had repeatedly affirmed, that the future
belongs to the masses or to the men who can explain things simply to them,
he wondered if even now a " spiritual current " might not be near at hand to
sweep aside the forces of barbarism. Then Burckhardt proceeded to do
something even more curious, for a man whose posthumous fame depends so
much upon his prophecies: he stated that a future known in advance is an
absurdity and that " Foreknowledge of the future. . . is not only undesir-
able, it is probably beyond our powers as well." 28

25 Burckhardt, Force and Freedom, 101-3. 26 See, for instance, Jacob Burck-
hardt to Friedrich Nietzsche, Basle, February 25, 1874, which is Burckhardt's note
of thanks for a copy of Nietzsche's essay on the use and abuse of history. The
Letters, 158-60.
27 Burckhardt, Force and Freedom, 102. 28 Ibid., 90-1.

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 132 BURLEIGH T. WILKINS

Such statements would attract little attention were they made by a

workaday historian, serene in his knowledge that " historical prophecy " is a
contradiction in terms, but coming from Burckhardt they are disconcerting,
to say the least. Had Burckhardt not examined the recent past and com-
pared its velocity to that of other historical cycles, and did he not know
that no " spiritual current " could possibly be at hand to save Europe? It
throws one off balance to be advised that the Four Horsemen of the Apoca-
lypse might be held up, when one had been told that all the signs pointed to
their imminent arrival. If the Four Horsemen can be held at bay or can be
persuaded to change their minds, how can anyone, even Burckhardt, aspire
to be "wise for all time "? Recurrence, as a concept, may allow for good
and evil in history in a way that the idea of development does not, but as a
yardstick for measuring the course of human events it appears unduly elas-
tic, to the point of meaninglessness. Perhaps we had best reexamine the
signs for ourselves and ask whether Burckhardt's usual pessimism about the
present and the future was, in some respects, an attitude he had brought to
the study of the recent past.
If Burckhardt thought, ordinarily, that historical science had progressed
to a stage where it served to verify his pessimism concerning the course of
human events, there have, of course, been other historians who have re-
garded the study of the past quite differently. The reader should be re-
minded that one President of the American Historical Association was later
to define history as a prophylactic against pessimism.29 This does at least
suggest that history can cut two ways, if it does not altogether confirm the
conclusion of yet another President of the American Historical Association,
that pessimism and optimism are more a matter of temperament than the
result of any common body of knowledge.30 Burckhardt, however, would
not have been much interested in these opinions: they came from Americans,
and Americans are a people who have renounced history in a most alarming
and unacceptable way, he thought.;"
Americans indeed figure among the causes of Burckhardt's pessimism,
for where else could he find more conclusive evidence of the growing tend-
ency to equate, or confuse, material and moral progress? Burckhardt
looked upon commercial development with disdain, and he could not share
in any enthusiasm for the future as outlined by President Grant in one of
his speeches. In order to facilitate commercial transactions we might some-
day create a world in which there was only one State and one language,
President Grant had reflected; but such a possibility left Burckhardt cold,
and even trembling. In such a world liberty would perish, and a man of
Burckhardt's refinement might be worth less than a journalist on the Basler
Zeitung. Against the cyclic theory that there is nothing new under the sun,
Burckhardt had, therefore, to wonder whether everything would eventually

29 Edward P. Cheyney, " Law in History," American Historical Review, XXIX

(January 1924), 231-48.
130 Charles A. Beard, " Written History as an Act of Faith," American Historical
Review, XXXIX (January 1934), 219-29. 31 Burckhardt, Force and Freedom, 86.

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 SOME NOTES ON BURCKHARDT 133

turn to " big business as in America," 32 an efficient development of avarice

made universal in an unprecedented way.
Here, as elsewhere, the idea of development was about to burst through
the barrier of the " recurrent, constant, and typical." That it did not was
due largely to Burckhardt's ethical preoccupations, which checked his his-
torical thinking at a number of points. Burckhardt simply would not con-
cede that the forces of moral advance had advanced at all, so great was his
pessimism. He liked to taunt contemporaries who believed in moral prog-
ress by saying that " morality as a power stands no higher nor is there more
of it than in so-called barbarous times."33 Good and evil, he informed
them, have kept on an even balance through all epochs and cultures, al-
though it might be difficult to reconcile this with his own concern with de-
generacy, or with his prophecies of the moral collapse of Europe.
While his dire prophecies may not have been consistent always with the
rest of his thought, they were couched in a language that was consistently
moral-so much so that one wonders how Croce could have mistaken Burck-
hardt's moral pessimism for the unsatisfied hedonism of the aesthete.4
Actually the apparent moral quality of Burckhardt's prophecies is such that
it is easier to mistake him at times for a Biblical prophet reincarnate. Iron-
ically, Burckhardt had, by orthodox standards, lost his religion quite early
in life; but he had not ceased to be religious, he assured his sister,35 and
certainly he had not lost the tone of the morally elect. Because of his pessi-
mism and his understanding of something called Original Sin his later ad-
mirers have seen fit to consider him more profoundly Christian than either
Hegel or Ranke, both devout Protestants.36 It all depends, as the proverbial
sophomore would say, on how you define " Christian "; but in some churches
pessimism is still not sufficient qualification for membership, least of all for
a man who denies divine revelation and thinks theology impossible.
Perhaps Burckhardt's refusal to let go entirely of religion may have saved
his soul in some synthetic heaven-where East and West meet, if they have
not met sooner under the auspices of Toynbee or Northrop. There Burck-
hardt's feeling of Oneness with the universe, but not with man, may have
counted. His " religion " did, however, make him guilty of one of the sins he
had so virtuously detected in his contemporaries. I am not here concerned
with the possibility that the man who looks down upon partisanship may
himself come to be considered partisan (witness the difficulties of certain
unattached, "neutralist " states in the world today) but with the fact that
Burckhardt's " religion," along with his love of art, reveals his own absorp-
tion with the feeling of happiness and well-being.
To rest with a feeling of religion, content in not knowing what it is by
any use of reason, would seem scarcely to qualify Burckhardt as a critic of

32 Ibid., 298-9. 33 Ibid., 149. 34 Croce, op. cit., 103.

35 Jacob Burckhardt to Louise Burckhardt, Berlin, July 16, 1840. The Le
54-6.
3a James Hastings Nichols, " Jacob Burckhardt," Force and Freedom, 73.

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 134 BURLEIGH T. WILKINS

the intellect of his, or our, contem

such as to inspire confidence; they were in any event more in the tradition
of Schopenhauer, to whom Burckhardt referred simply as "the Philos-
opher," than in the tradition of the Christian Schleiermacher, whose theol-
ogy had meant so much to Burckhardt's father. Jacob Burckhardt's all
inclusive condemnations of democrats, Liberals, utilitarians, radicals, mate
rialists, and extreme nationalists continue to make good reading, but with-
out some painstaking causal analysis such opinions could not be given muc
precision and might ultimately collapse under careful scrutiny. It is all
very well to begin by assuming that guilt is universal, especially when at-
tempting to explain the misfortunes of Europe, but surely it is unhistorical
not to push the inquiry one step further by trying to establish the varying
degrees of guilt. We sometimes wonder as we read those letters to Von
Preen written by Burckhardt in his later years why the Swiss historian did
not do as Lord Acton, and insist, formally, upon the ethical duties of the
historian; but most of all we wonder where reason or intuition left off and
fear took hold.
Fear can, of course, paralyze action or reason more effectively than even
lethargy or pride; and we must credit Burckhardt with having known that
the French Revolution, the revolutions of 1848, and the Franco-Prussian
War were not isolated events but parts of a continuous pattern. Around
his legitimate fears of this internecine tendency among Europeans Burck-
hardt had pieced together a philosophy of sorts. He spoke as though it had
been confirmed by history, although it was, one might say, the " recurrent,
constant, and typical ' philosophy of all do-nothing parties. Burckhardt
had gazed too long at the ruins of Rome, had read too much in the philos-
ophy of Schopenhauer, to think that human efforts could remove the causes
of his fears. The present, he thought, was not a time for greatness, as its
recent history proved; and it was too tightly enmeshed in the web of cir-
cumstances dating from the French Revolution to free itself.
To read Burckhardt, however, is by no means an unqualified experience
of human misery before the coming collapse of Europe. He was too urbane
for that; and besides there is something oddly delightful about the wilful
way in which he, like Schopenhauer before him, preached the denial of the
will and expounded the virtues of the ascetic life, like a schoolboy who has
learned his lesson too well. Because of the necessary recurrence of evil,
which eventually overtakes our good intentions, Burckhardt seems to be say-
ing, one of the highest virtues may well be the will not to will. Having,
however, recognized the importance of the will and its thirst for power,
Burckhardt thus doomed himself to impotence; and it is here that
Nietzsche's philosophy parts company with that of Schopenhauer and
Burckhardt.
It would be difficult for the historian of ideas to exhaust all the parallels
between Schopenhauer and Burckhardt, although someone ought to try. It
seems as if Burckhardt's life had been intended as a mould into which
Schopenhauer's philosophy could be poured. The warning to people to

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 SOME NOTES ON BURCKHARDT 135

"keep their distance," with which Schopenhauer had ended his Studies in
Pessimism,37 fitted perfectly Burckhardt's personal aloofness. On the level
of thought, how pleased Burckhardt probably was to read in Schopen-
hauer that " the really essentially content [of history] is everywhere the
same." 38
Paradoxical as it may seem, there was, however, another side to Schopen-
hauer's philosophy that must have been of considerable appeal to Burck-
hardt and, in this case, to Nietzsche as well. It was Schopenhauer's doc-
trine of the " inconstant flux of time " as distinct from his doctrine of the
" permanence of substance." Although Schopenhauer was prone to talk
endlessly of the principle of causality, he conceived of the " accidental " as
causal in itself, not as Hume had done, as a cause as yet undiscovered.39
In their nearly poetic awareness of the " inconstant flux of time " Schopen-
hauer, Burckhardt, and Nietzsche, too, shared an exaggerated deference to
the " accidental"; and they bent over backwards to prove that history was
not, as Hegel had thought, a " planned whole " in which reason progressively
triumphs over all.
According to Burckhardt his own emphasis upon the role of accidents in
history could be traced back to the early death of his mother during his
childhood, which, he later recalled, impressed upon him the " great frailty
and uncertainty of all earthly things." This event, Burckhardt was certain,
had " determined his view of life "; 40 and the conclusions he drew from it
must surely have played havoc with his attempts in his maturity to discover
what is " recurrent, constant, and typical " in man's history. Behind these
mental efforts there must have lain an awareness of their vanity, a suspicion
that flux may be the only constant and accidents the major recurrence.
Such a weakness or possible contradiction within Burckhardt's thoughts
served, however, to strengthen his hand. For now he had two arguments in
behalf of his pessimism. If the constant recurrence of evil does not wreck
the good intentions and the best laid plans of men, then he could predict
that the " accidental " would. Only in a moment of wishful tlhinking, in his
suggestion that a " spiritual current " might now be on hand to save us all,
had Burckhardt envisaged the accidental (that is to say, something for
which Burckhardt in his strictures of the recent past had not prepared us
as an aid to humanity. Ordinarily Burckhardt seems to have seen through
one dubious, optimistic kind of " historical necessity," the Hegelian, only to
fall victim to another, the kind that relies upon an uncritical mixture of
arguments emphasizing the necessary and the accidental to inform us that
our present trajectory is a fatal one.
" I hate democracy because I love liberty " is a sentiment more intel-

37 Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism (New York, 1925), 182.

38 A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea (London, 1926), III, 224.
39 Ibid., I, 10-13.
40 Jacob Burckhardt's curriculum vitae quoted by Alexander Dru, Introduction
to The Letters, 4.

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 136 BURLEIGH T. WILKINS

ligible today than during Burckhardt's lifetime,4' especially in view of the

tendency of certain 'democracies' to become narrowly nationalistic in out-
look. At the very least we must in the light of recent history question the
belief that there is a natural harmony between democracy and liberty, al-
though unlike Burckhardt we may come to think that such a harmony is as
necessary as it is unnatural. Burckhardt's own love of liberty did not en-
able him to appreciate the Liberal or anyone else who sought to preserve
liberty by increasing the number of persons fit to enjoy it. Even pleas for
state scholarships for schools failed to impress Burckhardt as being different
in quality from demands for bread and circuses. They were all alike, dis-
guised or not, demands for comfort.
Burckhardt's love of liberty thus served to narrow his already slender
social sympathies, but in the very narrowing process he seems to have be-
come unusually sensitive to certain dangers. Most of all he saw the dangers
inherent in the general tendency of Culture and Religion to depend more
and more upon the State; he saw the underside of the State that had gen-
erally escaped the notice of Hegel or even the more cautious Ranke.
Having seen these dangers, however, only confirmed Burckhardt in his
determination to stand aside. In so doing he may well have been acting
from the highest motives, or from fear, or inertia, or a combination of all
these. I do not care, so long as we realize that his historical reflections on
the futility of certain human labors need not be ours, that we are not obli-
gated by history or by Burckhardt's " insights " into history to follow his
example, which-whether or not he knew it-amounted to acquiescence in
the future victory of those forces he distrusted. Regardless of Burckhardt's
personal integrity, the weakness of his counsel can easily be seen in his dis-
tinctions between the State, which as a pessimist he feared, and society,
which as a conservative he respected. The State, he warned in his 'reflec-
tions on history,' is not meant to realize " ethical values on earth," 42 and on
several occasions he came near to saying that history teaches that we ought
to rely upon society for such things. In suggesting that we turn to society
instead of the State, Burckhardt was actually urging us to rely upon little
or nothing, because he had himself successfully demonstrated the growing
dependence of all social bodies upon the State. Rather than advise us to
use the State for good, he in effect counsels us to leave it alone because it is
evil-a counsel of defeatism, as a good reformer might say.

41 Were this essay concerned with the history of the concept of " mass culture "
and the infringements of such a culture upon individual liberty (or privilege), it
would be fruitful at this point to compare and contrast Burckhardt with de Tocque-
ville and Chateaubriand, for instance. Emphasis would have to be placed upon
Burckhardt's awareness of the importance of the military and the industrial orders
as means of providing social discipline in mass cultures. Burckhardt's love of liberty
would, however, have to be placed beside his fear of anarchy for examination; in the
light of Burckhardt's loyalty to the principle of multiple social corporations as a
check upon individual or mass despotism, he might appear to agree with the de-
spised Hegel. See Burckhardt to von Preen, April 13, 1882. The Letters, 206-8.
42Burckhardt, Force and Freedom, 118.

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 SOME NOTES ON BURCKHARDT 137

Even if we could rely upon society against the State, this might prove
immoral. For if, as Burckhardt thought, the State is only an expedient
(whose power has outgrown its value) and society is a necessity, can we
ever construct an ethics out of this social necessity without deifying society
in much the same way as Hegel and Ranke were accused of deifying the
State? Were we to grant Burckhardt, for the moment, that power may al-
ways be evil in itself (ordinarily this would be a nonsensical proposition,
arising from the noble failure to realize that the ends do sometimes justify
the means), is there not something yet to be said in favor of the power of
impersonal public law against the power of social custom? Is it not possible
still to see custom, despite Burckhardt and Burke, as often accidental and
capricious, and to see reason, even the reason of the majority, at times in a
more favorable light, perhaps as the ultimate protector of that individual
freedom of thought prized so highly by Burckhardt?
As for his dire predictions, their partial success does not prove the cor-
rectness of many of his analyses or assignments of guilt. It is important to
remember that neither Hitler nor Stalin symbolizes adequately the deeds of
Western man since Burckhardt's death. Even where they do symbolize
some of the deeds Burckhardt foresaw, we must consider whether the suc-
cessful prediction of human behavior is always as difficult as present opinion
would have it, and whether, as Burckhardt would have to admit, the " acci-
dental " has not actually assisted in the verification of many a mournful
prophecy. We would be claiming too much for history, and our understand-
ing of it, to think that the moral properties of any human instrumentality
such as the State had been forever determined somewhere in the past, at
about the time of the French Revolution, so that the behavior of the State
in the twentieth century is only a chapter in a story already written before
Burckhardt's death.
By the same token we would be claiming too little for man; and, like
Burckhardt with his prophecies based in part upon his interpretation of
what is " recurrent, constant, and typical " in history, we would be guilty
of a subtle historicism that must be exposed as such, lest it become in the
long run more pernicious than any historicism contained in Hegel's philos-
ophy of development. The sometimes false hopes of Hegel and the way in
which he confused what is and what ought to be are as nothing in compari-
son with the premature despair of Burckhardt and the way in which he con-
fused what was and what will be. Burckhardt himself we had best leave in
the capacity he most enjoyed, a beloved and dutiful Cicerone to the students
of art history. A man who so bitterly condemned philosophies that were
intended for some positive utility could surely not protest overmuch if we
found his own philosophy, or thoughts, not especially useful and preferred
his feelings for art to his reflections on history.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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