On Jacob Burckhardt

Life Burckhardt was born in 1818 into a family which was a minor branch of one of the great burgher clans of Basle: the name of Burckhardt had been prominent in the city since the fifteenth century.2 His father was a Protestant minister who had been much influenced by Schleiermacher’s theology.

Basle was a patrician city, conservative and increasingly prosperous, at the same time as being detached from the turbulence of European political events; Burckhardt belonged to its intelligentsia. He completed a degree in theology at Basle, but ceased to be religious, having become convinced by his youthful studies that the life of Christ was a myth. In 1839 he went to Berlin to study history under Ranke, Boeckh and Droysen; but his closest friend and greatest influence was Franz Kugler, the bohemian professor in    the new subject of art history. In another friend, Gottfried Kinkel, he found one of the last of the great Romantics; he moved into the circle of Kinkel’s mistress, the divorced Johanna Matthieux, and of Bettina von Amim, who had once loved Goethe and who lived in Berlin with her sister, the widow of the great legal historian F. C. von Savigny. Burckhardt was Kinkel’s best man at his wedding with Johanna in 1844; but he distanced himself from him during Kinkel’s subsequent career as a revolutionary. Kinkel was con- demned to death in 1848, and escaped with his wife’s help to exile in London, where Johanna finally committed suicide.

Burckhardt was safely back in Basle in 1844, where he served for eighteen months as editor of the main conservative newspaper, the Basler Zeitung.

He was already lecturing at the university on the history of painting, where he caused offence in religious circles by criticizing the dominant Nazarene School, a group of German religious painters in Rome who served as a model for the later pre-Raphaelites. In 1852 he resigned from the university and left for Italy, where he wrote the immensely popular Cicerone (1854), ‘a guide to the enjoyment of art in Italy’, which remained the standard guidebook to Renaissance Italian architecture, sculpture and art for three generations and went through seven editions during his lifetime. On the basis of this he was given a post at the Zürich Polytechnic. In 1858 he was appointed Professor of History at Basle, where he was required to lecture both at the university and at the high school; from 1874 he was also Professor of the History of Ar t. The first post he held until 1885, and the second until 1893. He was a conscientious and assiduous lecturer in both history and history of art, who taught as much as ten hours weekly, and also gave many lectures for the general public.

Burckhardt never married (although as a young man he was in love and wrote poetry to a girl whose parents disapproved); his youthful German friends drifted away, and in his thirties he confessed to being lonely beyond all expectations. He had a few close friends with whom he corresponded, and lived a regular and uneventful life in two rooms above a baker’s shop, devoting himself to his lectures, his books and his travels.

Politically Burckhardt was a natural conservative, who disliked and despised the new industrialization and the development of the national state: he foresaw in the course of his own lifetime the coming of an age of ‘terribles simplificateurs’ and demagogues, who would control the masses and bring ruin to Europe. This pessimistic conservatism is characteristic of a reflective historian, who cultivated irony and distance from the enthusi- asms of contemporary nationalist historians. In so far as he foresaw the development of industrial society towards the totalitarian popular regimes of National Socialism and Marxism, he was of course a prophet out of his time, standing against the tide of history. But he was not a political thinker; and these prejudices, however clear-sighted, are merely the regrets of a marginal observer over the decline of the patrician order to which his own family so clearly belonged. Hence his attack on the vice of reading news- papers and concerning oneself with the agitations of the present in the introduction to the present book.3 It is not Burckhardt’s political views or his pessimism in regard to the future which matter, but his conception of historical method; as he wrote already in 1846:

But, my dear friend, Freedom and the State have lost nothing in me. States are not built with men like me; though as long as I live I mean to be kind and sympathetic to my neighbour; I mean to be a good private individual, an affectionate friend, a good spirit; I have some talent in that direction and mean to develop it I can do nothing more with society as a whole; my attitude towards it is willy-nilly ironical; the details are my affair. . . we may all perish, but at least I want to discover the interest for which I am to perish, namely the ancient culture of Europe.4 So he developed the mask of a dilettante, immersed in his work and his few friends, and devoted to the study of European culture, by which he meant the artistic, literary and spiritual achievements of the past, placed in their context and explained as the result of the forces of history. History was the contemplation of the past: ‘leisure, the mother of contemplation and of the inspiration that springs from it’ (writing from London); ‘Listen to the secret of things. The contemplative mood.’ ‘How is the collector of inscriptions to find time for contemplative work? Why, they don’t even know their Thucydides! Don’t bother about others.’5

Early Works

In the 1840s, while still a student, Burckhardt rebelled against the prevailing conception of history, ‘the one-sidedness of the present that only wants to have a biassed history (Tendenz-Geschichte), just as it has a biassed poetry and a biassed art’.6 ‘For me the background is the chief consideration, and that is provided by cultural history, to which I intend to dedicate myself,’ Burckhardt wrote in 1842.7 From the start his conception of history was concerned, not with actions and events or the great men who appeared to have caused them, but with the cultural context in which such events occurred, a context which might explain the changes far more satisfactorily than by ascribing them to the actions of individuals or the workings of chance. How had Constantine converted the Roman Empire to Christianity, and what did that mean to contemporaries? This was the subject of his first book, The Age of Constantine (1852); it was translated into English a century later (1949),8 and had an enormous effect on my generation of historians, who were in the process of discovering, for the first time in the Anglo-Saxon world since Gibbon, the inexhaustible fascination of late antiquity; for he taught us how to see the age as a cultural phenomenon, rather than in terms of its politics and power structures, or its governmental organization, as more recent historians had interpreted it.

In this book the arrangement is already around three thematic centres - politics, religion and culture. Politics in this period is a necessary evil, a defence against barbarian invasion and internal anarchy. Culture is in decline: literature is reduced to dependence on power (in panegyric) or religion; art is an adjunct of religion: ‘the relevant myths were represented as symbolic husks of general ideas, and the separation between kernel and shell could in the long run only be injurious to art’.9 Philosophy is a solitary pursuit, even if as Themistius said, ‘the value of a philosopher’s discourse is not diminished if it is delivered under a solitary plane tree with none but cicadas to hear’.10 The Christian Church was already a powerful corpor- ation. In this picture Constantine is simply a man of his age, almost irrel- evant to the revolution in consciousness which he brought about; he belongs firmly in a world of mixed pagan and Christian beliefs, and his conversion simply ratified a formal division of equality between two cultures which already existed. The core of the argument lay in Burckhardt’s portrayal of the dominance of religious modes of thought. Late antique paganism was an immensely complex set of rituals and beliefs trying to make sense of the spiritual world:

Christianity was bound to conquer in the end because it provided answers which were incomparably simpler, and which were articu- lated in an impressive and convincing whole, to all the questions for which that period of ferment was so deeply concerned to find solutions.11

Burckhardt’s most famous book, on which his reputation still rests, was The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Lord Acton, the founder of modern historical studies in Cambridge, described it as ‘the most pen- etrating and subtle treatise on the history of civilization that exists in literature’.1 2 It is indeed this book which still shapes and challenges all subsequent attempts to explain the central phenomenon in European history. Burckhardt set out to present an analysis of the new forces at work in the period, and how they interrelate. The first part treats of politics and warfare under the provocative heading, ‘The State as a Work of Art’. That is to say, political life was no longer determined by traditional forms of government or by underlying forces revealed by the modem historian, but by the conscious knowledge of protagonists that there existed a science or art of government, which could be discovered either by experiment or by reflection. The catalogue of murder, treachery and tyranny which ensues shows the consequences of believing in the power of reason rather than tradition: it is a view of the history of events which places the new political science of Machiavelli at its centre; yet whatever its consequences in terms of anarchy and suffering, Burckhardt showed how politics had never before or since been conducted at such a high intellectual level by leaders with such practical and theoretical talents.

The second part describes ‘The Development of the Individual’. This was a constant preoccupation of nineteenth-century post-Hegelian thought: how had the modem idea of the individual arisen from the tribal and religious stages of history? Burckhardt does not explain: he simply describes the forces which separated individuals from their communities, the creation of the ideal of ‘the universal man’ and the modem conception of fame, together with its antithesis, the modem idea of wit and satire:

Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation - only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.13

So Burckhardt establishes that ‘it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which achieved the conquest of the western world’.1 4 His third section concerns ‘The Revival of Antiquity’ and the education of this new man through contact with ancient literature and culture. The discovery of the New World is treated in a section which relates it to the inner exploration of the psyche, to the development of poetry and biography, and to descriptions of the external world, in ‘The Discovery of the World and of Man’.

Under ‘Society and Festivals’, Burckhardt treats of how men and women actually lived in this new world, the principles of courtesy, good manners and outward refinement, styles of language and conversation, lovemaking, physical exercise and music, the equality of men and women within a masculine ideal of the courtier, and the development of a style of official popular festival, which was modelled on conceptions of ancient triumphs and bacchanals. Finally ‘Morality and Religion’ seeks to relate this new age to the medieval religious forces which it never wholly superseded, so that the last chapter concerns the mixture of ancient and modem superstition which led towards the inevitable disintegration of belief.

It is this work which marks the definitive establishment of a new form of history, which has come to be known in German as Kulturgeschichte, ‘cultural history’.15 Each theme is seen from an entirely new viewpoint, which is on the one hand descriptive and concerned with the details, and on the other corresponds to an underlying view of the basic elements which through their interrelation make up the idea of a culture. In this book Burckhardt was able to discard the determinism inherent in the philosophical problem of the meaning of history for the development of the human spirit, as Hegel had formulated it, while using contemporary philosophical concepts (such as the State, religion and the individual) to structure his description of reality. At the same time he avoided the trap of historical positivism, which consists in believing that the meaning of history is con tained in a chain of cause and effect, and in the certification of the truth or falsehood of alleged events or facts. For Burckhardt the explanation of events lies not in their causes but in the interrelations between them, of which the idea of cause is only a partial and pseudo-scientific two-dimensional reflection. Societies are not linear series of events, but highly complex and interconnected systems, where a change in any element may provoke multiple effects elsewhere. Moreover what people believe and how they behave are far more important than whether their beliefs are true or usefu l: it is not the event which matters, but the perception of that event as a ‘fact’, which is neither true nor false, but simply believed.

It is a valid criticism of Burckhardt’s view of culture that he concerned himself essentially with high culture, with the expression of values contained in the activities and beliefs of an educated elite. His concept of cultural history is therefore fundamentally different from that prevalent in modem universities, where ‘cultural studies’ means the investigation of popular culture and especially minority cultures. Even so the appropriation of the nineteenth-century term by this new modern discipline points to the fact that the tradition begun by Burckhardt opened the way to the study of gestures, customs and behaviour patterns, festivals and other forms of popular expression. Even if Burckhardt might not have relished it, he is in a sense also the father of this discipline, derived from a multicultural and egalitarian conception of society. But it is important to realize that the techniques, concepts and archival materials necessary to make this leap into the future were not available in Burckhardt’s day; and that the great strength of his own reliance on the elite culture is that it was this culture which was self-conscious and fully realized, recorded in the literature and art of the period.

At one time the Constantine and the Renaissance had been intended to be the beginning and end of a great study of the development of European culture from antiquity to the start of the modem age.16 But The Civilization of the Renaissance was the last book published by Burckhardt during his lifetime. Burckhardt came to believe that teaching was far more important:

‘in my experience learned authorship is one of the most unhealthy, and mere teaching (however troublesome it may be and however detailed the studies and preparations need to be) one of the healthiest activities in the world’.17 Behind this ironic withdrawal from the duty to publish, and his refusal to accept that teaching and writing are part of a continuous process of communicating ideas, lay a deeper distaste for the activities of his academic contemporaries, with their unreadable multiple volumes, their obsession with detail and facts, and the pompous arrogance of ‘the viri eruditissimi in their professorial chairs’ whom he refused to join in 1872, when he turned down the offer of Ranke’s chair in Berlin. Heinrich von Sybel proclaimed the programme for the first number of the new historical journal Historische Zeitschrift in 1859: it was to be devoted to the true method of historical research, which was to be combined with a special place for modern history rather than older history and German history rather than the history of other peoples.18 Increasingly Burckhardt could accept neither the political purpose nor the conceptual method of this new history. He no longer believed in the way positivist historicism was going, and could not bring himself to betray his vision of history as contemplation.

The lecture hall in Basle was the one place where it was still possible for a professor to meditate on history rather than making political propaganda or writing boring books designed to kill the interest in his subject. As he said in conversation with his successor Heinrich Wölfflin:

A teacher cannot hope to give much. But in the first place he can keep alive belief in the value of spiritual things. And secondly he can awaken the conviction that there is real happiness to be found in such things.19

The Greeks and Greek Civilization Lectures
Jacob Burckhardt
Edited and translated by
Oswyn Murray and Sheila Stern