With Montesquieu and Voltaire and the emergence of a self-consciously enlightened historiography in Germany, the religious aspects of historiography became less prominent in the course of the eighteenth century. But so did the role of the great individual in history. For the anti-absolutist Montesquieu, history was not the battlefield of exceptional men (read: monarchs), virtuous or not, but a chain of causes and effects, the higher rationality of which is intelligible only with hindsight. The end of the Roman Republic was thus a necessary event, and had not Caesar brought it about, somebody else would have done so. Caesar’s hunger for power was not a sign of his individual moral deficits but rather a problem he shared with all men of his time: it was not Caesar who was corrupt but Rome as a whole (Montesquieu 2000: 166-75; Volpilhac-Auger, Andrivet, Weil, & Courtney 2000). Frederick the Great, although admiring Montesquieu as one of the few modern historians who held a rank in historiography similar to Thucydides, did not accept the legitimation of Caesar’s assassination as the just killing of a usurper. The Prussian king rather insisted that ‘‘the state of the republic was dominated and agitated by brute force to such a degree that it could not be saved from the domestic wars tearing it apart in any other way than by falling under the rule of a single leader’’ (Montesquieu 1957: 96, 217; Merten 1987).
Voltaire elegantly dismissed the theological four-monarchies model of world history by dividing history into four periods of human achievement culminating in Louis XlV’s France. Together with Augustus, Caesar is allowed to preside over one of these great ‘‘siecles,’’ but it is the civilizations and peoples, rather than the individuals and events, that constitute Voltaire’s history (Muhlack 1991: 118-19). Voltaire’s concept of a ‘‘transfer’’ of high civilization from ancient Greece and Rome down to Ludovican France mirrored, of course, the traditional German claim that the Roman Empire had been ‘‘transferred’’ to the Germans via Charlemagne and the Ottonian emperors. However, eighteenth-century German historians, whether Protestant and North German like Johann David Kohler or Catholic and in Imperial service like Johann Christoph Schmidt, also turned their back on this teleological model of human history, and rather wrote the history of the peoples, and their states, that had lived on the Empire’s territory (Kohler 1767; Schmidt 1780). The Gottingen professor August Ludwig Schlclzer was not the only historian to expand his fold to ‘‘all peoples and states of the world’’; for him, Caesar became a figure not more important than ‘‘Attila, the Inkas and Timur’’ (Schlozer, quoted in Muhlack 1991: 156).
If the role of ‘‘great men’’ was considerably reduced in this new model of history, Caesar was given a newly important role within it beyond the classic discussion of virtus and libertas. Building on Montesquieu’s interest in a higher rationality of history, Herder demanded that the history of mankind must not be written as the history of chance but should, like natural history, consider the ‘‘exact interlinking of all circumstances’’ (Herder 1989: 651-4). Even the Protestant theologian Herder shunned the view that history had an intended divine purpose; neither could he see any reason to prefer one period or region over another, putting an end to the old preference for Greco-Roman antiquity as well as to the use of history as a repository of moral exempla. Rather, he identified in the ‘‘benevolent, animated, comprehending spirit of Caesar’’ one of those great individuals in world history (a novel concept in itself) who allow insight into the workings of humanity and reason, an expression of‘‘the one soul of the world, the one human reason, the one human truth’’ through which past and present are connected over all differences of space and time (Herder 1989: 611). Here, Herder went further than other enlightened historians of civilization and opened up a novel way of thinking about the philosophy of history, which would later be taken up by Hegel’s concept of the ‘‘Weltgeist.’’
World History
