BURCKHARDT AND THE GENESIS OF MODERNITY

1. BASEL

Both Burckhardt and Nietzsche were professors (in history and philology, respectively) at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Founded in 1454, the University had been a center of Christian humanism during the Reformation and a place of confluence for Italian, French, and German learning, as well as a center for scholarly publishing. By the middle of the nineteenth century Basel was something of an anachronism, a city-state stubbornly clinging to its independence in an era when nation-states were forming at last in central Europe. On the one hand it was still a cosmopolitan city, living by trans-national commerce: it owed its economic prosperity to the manufacture of silk ribbons and the forwarding of goods between Northern and Southern Europe along the Rhine. But its sophisticated cosmopolitanism in commerce and culture went along with a narrow localism in politics: the merchant oligarchy of the city resisted the trends toward centralization and nationalism that flowed from the revolutions of the 1840s. To stay in Basel after 1848, as Burckhardt and Nietzsche did, was to reject those forces, which were gathering momentum most impressively in Bismarck's Germany. Although Basel was industrializing and growing rapidly (from 25,000 in 1848 to 80,000 in 1880), Burckhardt could still think of the city as a kind of observation-post on the edge of modernity. Here is a paradox: Burckhardt hated factories, trains, "the loud-mouthed masses," and most of the modernizing trends of the nineteenth century, but this very conservative historian had, as we'll see, some of the deepest insights into the genesis of modernity.

2. BURCKHARDT AS HISTORIAN

Burckhardt was born in 1818, the same year as Karl Marx. His family was part of Basel's patrician elite, playing leading roles in the ribbon industry and city government. Burckhardt, like Nietzsche, began as a student of theology but lost his faith at an early age. In 1839 he went to Berlin and plunged into the student life of that period: he wrote poems, composed songs, developed a taste for theater and opera. His main interest at this stage was architecture and he attended classes on classical art and archaeology, but also the lectures of the great historian Leopold von Ranke. The discovery of the monuments and buildings of the Rhineland, and particularly his admiration for the cathedral at Cologne, confirmed Burckhardt's interest in the emerging discipline of art history.

But after his return to Basel in 1843, Burckhardt became a professor of history. His theory and practice of history, however, were quite different from those of Ranke and the German historians. There was first a difference of style and self-image: "The German professors were pompous, omniscient, magisterial. Burckhardt affected a deliberate informality, a self-mocking insouciance, a Socratic affectation of ignorance. The German professors were bureaucrats, or satraps, in an academic empire. With their hierarchy of patronage and their organized seminars they trained a professional class. Burckhardt remained an individual, an amateur" (Hugh Trevor-Roper). After The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), he refused to publish any more books, and concentrated his attention on his lectures for the students and citizens of Basel.

On a deeper level, Burckhardt developed a different approach to history. Where the German historians practiced political and diplomatic history, and told the story of the European state system and the growth of Prussian power, Burckhardt practiced cultural history. Their approach was diachronic, concerned with the progressive development of the power of the state over time; his was synchronic, a cross-section of society and its culture, a portrait of a period. They strove for "objectivity"; he did not attempt to deny or to disguise the subjective character of his vision of the past. They believed in progress (in Ranke's case, perhaps "providence" would be a better word); he did not. In fact, his first major work, The Age of Constantine the Great (1852), was a study of cultural decline. Where did that pessimism come from?

3. SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR

Behind Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Freud, and Thomas Mann, there was the titanic figure of Schopenhauer (1788-1860). He was one of the great philosophers of the nineteenth century, though scarcely anyone reads him now. And he was the most pessimistic of the major European philosophers. Hayden White gives a concise summary of this extremely melancholy yet seductive worldview: "He denied all the shibboleths of laissez-faire capitalist theory and of Ranke's pious historism, the notion that a hidden hand directs society to the realization of a general good, that competition under law is really productive of cooperation, and the like. Instead, he professed to reveal life as it really is: a terrible, senseless striving after immortality, an awful isolation of man from man, a horrible subjection to desire, without end, purpose, or any real chance of success.... Darwin's nature was purposeless, and so was Schopenhauer's. By extension, man was purposeless too. Schopenhauer's social world was an aggregate of atomic individuals, each imprisoned within his own desires, individuals bumping against one another in random movement, each appeaering merely as a possible means of egoistic gratification for every other."

For the philosophers of the Enlightenment, reason had been the distinctive human characteristic. For Schopenhauer, desire is the essential feature of the human condition. And the effort to gratify desire through will is bound to be self-defeating: either it fails, and thereby increases pain, or it succeeds, and thereby produces boredom or satiety and initiates another round of desire and frustration. The attempt to embody reason in the reform of institutions is bound to fail; all apparent progress is a self-serving myth; every pretense of love for our fellow human beings is a fraud. The best one can hope for is a strategy of withdrawal and contemplation rather than action: the only kind of salvation available to the individual comes through art and music. This bleak and narcissistic vision appealed to intellectuals disgusted by the failure of political action in 1848. It's the basis of Nietzsche's first important work, The Birth of Tragedy, of Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, of Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks. And Burckhardt was a Schopenhauerian pessimist throughout his career.

Hence Burckhardt's distance from the optimistic narratives of political history produced by the great German historians: "Ranke believed in the power of the state as guardian of order and stability; Burckhardt regarded power as tied to evil. Ranke, the Protestant scholar, confidently sought the hand of God in the events of the past; Burckhardt, skeptical and withdrawn, saw in history an unending struggle among antagonistic forces" (Felix Gilbert).

4. THE STATE AS A WORK OF ART

Burckhardt was forty-two years old when he published his great work in 1860. One hundred and forty years later it still defines the field, and it's probably the only book on its topic written during the nineteenth century that will continue to be read in the twenty-first. Yet it doesn't offer a continuous narrative, with a strong plot, like the great nineteenth-century novels that we still read for pleasure and instruction. What it does offer is an unforgettable picture of cultural creativity emerging in a milieu of political depravity. If Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, Burckhardt illustrated some of the possible consequences in his rogues' gallery of tyrants and bastards, condottieri and popes. When he discusses "the state as a work of art," he means that the state is an artifact, an entirely secular phenomenon, a human contrivance that owed nothing to tradition, inheritance, or the sacred. The Italian princes were mostly illegitimate usurpers, and as Machiavelli showed, they could only keep the power they had won by force or fraud through the continuous exercise of their wits.

Intense political competition acted on the corporate mentality of the Middle Ages as a solvent. The result: individualism, unbridled egotism, the desire for fame, for personal rather than spiritual immortality. Having shrugged off the Christian values of piety and humility, Renaissance man seeks to prove his individuality by conspicuous achievement. Fame implies achievements that distinguish the individual from his or her peers; it's quite different from the medieval concept of honor, which implies an impersonal standard of conduct that all members of the same class must satisfy in the same way.

The political circumstances of Renaissance Italy also encouraged a new objectivity about means and ends and the calculation of success. And a new subjectivity, visible in the taste for portraits and biographies, not of saints, but of personalities. "The discovery of the world and man"–the formula Burckhardt borrowed from the great French historian Michelet–suggests the positive and creative aspects of Renaissance culture. But all of this cultural fertility was born out of that very world of force and fraud so memorably encapsulated by Machiavelli in The Prince.

Carl Schorske has brilliantly summarized the paradoxical character of Burckhardt's vision of the Renaissance: "At the back of the Renaissance stage Burckhardt has hung a backdrop of medievalism; in front of it a scrim of modernity through which we view it. Burckhardt portrays the medieval backdrop as a unified culture in which politics and religion penetrate each other and in which the individual was conscious of himself only as part of a community organized for the salvation of mankind. Seen against this background, the Renaissance is an era of decadence, as religion and politics divide. That the state is not God-given but man-devised, an artifact posited against the chaos of existence, often brings new terrors in its train. Where Enlightenment historians has associated the Renaissance flowering of art with social progress, Burckhardt connected it with ruthless political individualism and despotism. Burckhardt's vision linked the glory of cultural creativity with the curse of unconstrained self-assertiveness that the decay of medieval unity released.... The warmest appreciation of man's achievements in the sphere of culture was interwoven with the most unsentimental sense of the realities of naked power."

RECOMMENDED:

Carl Schorske, "Science as Vocation in Burckhardt's Basel," in The University and the City, ed. Thomas Bender (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Felix Gilbert, History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt (Princeton, 1990).

Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Jacob Burckhardt," Proceedings of the British Academy LXX (1984).

Lionel Gossmann, "Cultural History and Crisis: Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy," in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche, ed. Michael S. Roth (Stanford, 1994).

Hayden White, "Burckhardt: Historical Realism as Satire," in Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1975).