Abstract

Droysen’s Grundriss der Historik is one of the most important nineteenth-century texts on history, historiography, and historical research. An English version of the work, published in 1893 as Outline of the Principles of History, is the translation reproduced here, with some glosses on the text. A more literal, and also more adequate, rendering of the title is Outline of the Theory of History. “History” in “theory of history” is more closely tied to Historie than to Geschichte—the two German words normally used as equivalent to it. This is in keeping with Droysen’s predominant focus on history as a form of knowledge. However, as will be shown, Droysen’s theory is no pure epistemology, since it addresses not only methodical or representational issues attached to “history” but also material and normative ones. Contemporary and later commentators acknowledged Droysen’s reflections as synthesizing and elaborating the presuppositions of classical German historicism. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer Droysen was the “sharpest methodologist” of the nineteenth-century German “historical school,” whose theory of history had “groundbreaking significance” for the philosophy of the human sciences. As this suggests, the Outline is part of an inquiry on historical method that went far beyond the technicalities of historical research and deep into its epistemic, ontological, moral, political, and religious roots. Many of the Outline’s arguments tackle problems still important within early twenty-first century historical cultures. To a large extent, Droysen’s questions on history and historiography are still our questions. He explored aesthetical and representational issues pertaining to history writing and reception. He strongly contested the single-mindedness of many of his fellow historians about source criticism, calling attention to other important methodical operations in the process of historical knowledge, and to sources other than written, official texts. He insisted that research should be conducted according to a logic of questions and answers, a point now established as part of our methodological common sense. Furthermore, he argued that research questions are embedded in cultural and political dynamics, and accordingly that whatever historical objectivity is, it cannot presuppose the extinction of subjectivity. In Droysen’s Outline, knowledge of the past is depicted as an essentially interpretative way of cognition which is full of ethical potential for the present. By developing a hermeneutical approach that was very explicit about its ethical implications, Droysen illuminated—perhaps like no one else in his century—the enigmatic problem of the nature of the “historical.”