Throughout the nineteenth century there was much talk of “the people,” but the term had many meanings. Yet not even those who used it in a seemingly allinclusive way—like the Romantics with their vision of Volk—meant to bridge the gap which in reality separated a substantial group from full participation in Western society: the members of the Fourth Estate, mainly the less educated and propertyless laborers. Many of those who spoke of “the people” were either insensitive to the exclusion or found it a proper one. Early in the century, with industrialization not yet fully developed, it was easy to affirm the concept of the people as a whole and to ignore social divisions. Thus, Ranke wrote histories of Volker, in the sense of nations. Michelet stayed close to that meaning, too, when he praised the people whom he loved and who in turn inspired him.
1 then shut the books, and placed myself among the people to the best of my power; the lonely writer plunged again into the crowd, listened to their noise, noted their words. They were perfectly the same people, changed only in outward appearance; my memory did not deceive me. I went about, therefore, consulting men, listening to their account of their own condition, and gathering from their lips, what is not always to be found in the most brilliant writers, the words of common sense.'
In the people were the noblest features of French history: the faculty of devotion and the power of sacrifice. The “people, these paupers really so rich,” possessed heroism.2 They were France. Thomas Carlyle, just as fascinated by the people as Michelet, tilted more distinctly towards the common people, “the nameless multitude.” A bit abstractly he spoke of his awe of them. “Great is the combined voice of men; the utterance of their instincts which are truer than their thoughts: it is the greatest a man encounters, among the sounds and shadows which make up this World of Time.”3 Although Carlyle wished for historians to treat real human beings “with colour in their cheeks, with passions in their stomachs, and the idioms, features, and vitalities of very men,”"* the common people he praised, at least in his earlier works, still were not the people who revolted or demanded their just share through radical reforms; rather there remained an intimate bond between them and their society. Such visions of harmony could not last because in the 1800s the members of the Fourth Estate were taking seriously the call for equality and were in no mood to equate contemporary conditions with social harmony. They eventually disappointed Carlyle by, as he saw it, being obsessed with wrong, mostly material goals. The rise of the Fourth Estate to recognition and power would change the perception of “the people” in historiography.
The past and dark visions of the future. Carlyle’s “cloudcapt, fire-breathing Spectre of Democracy”® conveys well the sense of unease, even alarm, caused by the onrush of democracy throughout European societies. That sense spurred philosophers and historians to attempts to ascertain the status of their period in Western development. While the majority of intellectuals remained full of hope in the positive forces of science and progress in the midst of a profound shift in the Western world, a small group of scholars comprehended the vast potential of such a shattering of tradition. Jacob Burckhardt spoke for those who had visions of catastrophic consequences while Friedrich Nietzsche celebrated the chance to revolutionize human life.
Burckhardt preferred to analyze the great transitional periods of the past (that of Constantine the Great and the Renaissance) which he perceived as akin to his own times. On the basis of what he learned about cultural dissolution and through his own critical observation of life he pointed to some contemporary hopes as follies: the trust in Bismarck’s Germany, the philosophy of progress, or the trend toward an egalitarian society. Particularly the latter was now—after 1870—beginning to show its corrosive effects and reveal its frightful ultimate results. As ever new attempts would have to be made to achieve equality among people who by nature were unequal, traditions, laws, and values would be destroyed as roadblocks on the way to absolute equality until, finally, social stability would disappear. In order to restore that stability and achieve ultimate equality people would call upon socialism with its ever-increasing regimentation and centralization; this was a perfect situation for the emergence of despots—the terrible simplifiers—who offered order to a world without true legitimacy and tradition. In such a new society tradition and with it history would be replaced as society’s guides by fickle public opinion and quickly changing fashions of thought.
Of the three perennial stabilizing forces in human affairs, the state was developing according to wrong models and religion had been weakened beyond efficacy. Only culture offered contemporaries a spiritual refuge in a period of increasing debasement of all values, and thus he preferred cultural history, which reached beyond the confines of politics, diplomacy, and war into those of thought, art, and literature. Burckhardt, who otherwise rejected all speculative interpretations of history, found in culture a quasi-metaphysical force: it inspired all creativity, was perennial and universal, and offered hope to those anxious about the age of the masses.
Burckhardt’s educated contemporaries shared his conviction that what is now called “high culture” was central to Western civilization. For the past hundred years that conviction has maintained a vigorous branch of historiography— intellectual history. Its basic contention has been that the motive force of history, at least for those of its aspects that mattered, was ideas, a force that no longer was connected to a transcendent entity in the mode of idealist philosophy but constituted simply the creative and shaping element in human life. With that view intellectual history has stood as a strong bulwark against all types of determinism, although it has never formed a rigidly cohesive school. Outstanding representatives have reached from Burckhardt to Dilthey, J. Huizinga, and Ortega y Gasset, and its primary American voice has been the Journal of the History of Ideas. It has faced its greatest challenge in recent years when culture was redefined as a natural dimension of human life, one which included everything done and thought by everybody, and was heavily determined by social and natural environmental forces. Ideas came to be seen not as shapers of phenomena but as shaped by phenomena.
Burckhardt’s refuge in cultural history was rejected by Friedrich W. Nietzsche. He agreed with Burckhardt that the emancipation of the masses was the last blow to a Western tradition that had been eroding for centuries; indeed, ever since Copernicus, Western man seemed to have got upon an inclined plane, and “he is now rolling faster and faster away from the center—whither? Into nothingness?”* Nihilism threatened, and with it a “herd existence” under despotisms which were necessary consequences once the rootless masses of modem industrial society had destroyed the traditional ties holding Western societies together. As individuals would become increasingly isolated from each other, an ever more powerful state would be needed to keep things together. Year by year, hope for cultural vitality would grow more faint as industrial work wasted the nervous energy of the populace, the barbarism of specialization stupified those who thought, the sciences destroyed old values without offering new ones, and philosophy and religion retained too little strength to help. Nietzsche himself hoped for the creative Higher Man to rescue the world from nihilism, while the masses could do little more than be the soil from which these individuals would rise.
These fears of and opposition to the emancipation of the masses stood as a formidable obstacle in the way of creating a new history which incorporated the past of all the people. The Marxist version of a people’s history strengthened the resistance to such a history even more. Enthusiasm for a democratically oriented history also was lessened by a technical problem. In past centuries the common people had led a shadowy life and the few traces they had left were nearly invisible in those sources contemporary scholars were accustomed to study. Only occasionally an outstanding commoner, a revolt, or a great feast found mention in documents while the life cycles of the multitude ran their course without direct references to them. These difficulties were felt not so much by those who talked about “the people” or “the masses” as entities but by those who wished to employ empirical methods for assessing the actual life and importance of the common people. The problem showed plainly in the work often considered—with some justification—as the first English attempt to write social history, John R. Green’s Short History of the English People.
Green, an Oxford-trained clergyman, who for years had ministered to the poor people in a London district, was enchanted by the common people. His sympathy showed in his work, the first complete and concise English history, which after 1874 became a best-seller. His sympathies with the common people as well as his conviction that social and religious development were fundamentally more important than politics persuaded him to leave behind “drum and trumpet” history. Accordingly he discarded the usual organization of English history by dynasties in favor of sketching a period-by-period image of English culture. But Green did not really write a history of the common people, although he showed his sympathy for them wherever he could. In his work the term “people” still referred to the nation as a whole and little was said about the actual life of the masses. At best, Green’s work was a gentle hint of the social history to come. The democratization of historiography was still quite a few years away. Most historians were unconvinced by Michelet’s outcry:
Often, in these days, the rise and progress of the people are compared to the invasion of the Barbarians. The expression pleases me; I accept it. Barbarians! Yes, that is to say, full of new, living, regenerating sap. Barbarians, that is, travellers marching toward the Rome of the future, going on slowly, doubtless; each generation advancing a little, halting in death; but others march forward all the same."'
Throughout the 1800s social history remained institutional history and dealt with the people as a nation—as a whole. The questions that were raised concerned not social tensions and conflicts but the source of national identity, unity, and destiny. The earliest attempt at matching historiography and the democratic spirit came in tum-of-the-century America, which had recently acquired both continental scope and industrial stature and where a call went forth for a democratic history; the so-called New History.
World History
