László Kontler

Mankind and its Histories: William Robertson, Georg Forster, and a Late Eighteenth-Century German Debate

The Scottish historian William Robertsons works on European encounter with non-European civilizations (History of America, 1777; Historical Disquisition […] of India, 1791) received a great deal of attention in contemporary Germany. Through correspondence with Robertson, as well as by reviewing and translating his texts, Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg took an active part in this process. The younger Forster also became simultaneously involved in a debate which was unfolding on the German intellectual scene concerning the different or equal “value” (Wert) of the various “races of mankind” (Menschenrassen), engaging especially the relevant views advanced by the Göttingen historian Christoph Meiners and Immanuel Kant. The debate was firmly embedded in the context of an emerging ‘science of man’ in the German Enlightenment, to which Forster contributed an almost incomparable richness of empirical knowledge as well as theoretical sophistication. Forsters direct engagement with Robertsons work during the same period (mid-1780s to the early 1790s) creates a context through which the Wissenschaft vom Menschen in the Aufklärung and the Scottish version of the science of man – built on the neighbour disciplines to which Robertsons historiography was crucially indebted – is set in an interesting comparative light. This paper, part of a comprehensive project tracing the German reception of Robertson as an instance of inter-cultural exchange in the Enlightenment, will exploit the opportunities presented by one particular and documented case for a general comparison of enlightened ‘sciences of man’.

What is the (Historians') Enlightenment Today?

This special issue of the European Review of History has its origin in a session held at the Twentieth International Congress of Historical Sciences in Sydney between 3 and 9 July 2005. Panel participants found that the title proposed by the International Committee of Historical Sciences—‘Enlightenment and Communication: Regional Experiences and Global Consequences’—indeed offers itself readily for taking stock of a number of relatively recent developments in Enlightenment studies, to which much of the continuing dynamism of the field may be ascribed. At the beginning of this issue of the journal, it will not be amiss to sketch a catalogue of such developments, arranged in terms of the title we were given. Providing even the most rudimentary bibliography would be a vain effort here, but a tiny portion of the relevant literature will be referred to, somewhat impressionistically, in order to illustrate the points made.

Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought

A much-needed historical perspective in the highly relevant contemporary debates around these two notions by contextualising their discussion from ancient Greece to Soviet Russia.

The enlightened narrative in the age of liberal reform: William Robertson’s View of the Progress of Society in Hungary

ABSTRACT This article examines a translation of the Scottish historian William Robertson’s probably most famous text (based on a previous German edition) in the journal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the 1830s, as a case study on continuity between the Enlightenment and the era of liberal reform in Central Europe. It underlines the benefits of the comparative study of Scotland in Robertson’s time and Hungary in the Reform Age as partners in composite polities at the opposite ends of Europe, where patriotic projects of overcoming limitations of political sovereignty via cultural and economic improvement were pursued. The belated reception of Robertson in Hungary took place within a larger initiative of progress and refinement, associated with the liberal Count István Széchenyi, in an environment where many potential sympathizers with his programme were ambivalent about the values of cosmopolitanism and commerce promoted by Robertson, indebted as they remained to more archaic modes of patriotism. In view of the peculiarities of translation, and selection the Hungarian rendering of the View of the Progress was attuned to the sentiments of this constituency, and may be interpreted as a set of discursive gestures aimed at conquering it for the cause of ‘liberalism as refinement.’

Time and Progress, Time as Progress: History by Way of Enlightened Preaching

On January 6, 1755, 33-year-old Robertson preached the annual sermon of the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge upon the invitation of its governors. The society had been established in 1709 shortly after the Union of Parliaments with the goal of inculcating religion and virtue in the Scottish Highlands and other “uncivilized” (including colonial) areas, in part to counter Roman Catholic missionary activity.1 The pernicious potential that “popery” held to the 1707 settlement became manifest through the active support of Catholics for the Young Pretender in 1745, when Robertson strongly committed himself in favor of the status quo. During the ensuing decade, Robertson emerged as a recognized member of the Edinburgh social, ecclesiastical, and intellectual scene, and a leading figure in the “Moderate Party” of the Scottish Presbyterian church. The Moderates were endeavoring to alleviate doctrinally based zealotry among the popular wing of the clergy through the control of parish appointments by powerful lay patrons, as a means to secure social order, and nevertheless continued to ward off Catholicism.2 From this perspective, the invitation of Robertson by the governors of the society was a political act, and the sermon itself a political text: in its concluding remarks, Robertson reminded that “in this neglected field [i.e., the Highlands], the enemies of our religion and liberty have sown the seeds of the worst superstition, and the most pernicious principles of government.”3

Scottish Histories and German Identities

In chapter 3, Robertson’s View of the Progress of Society in Europe was discussed separately on two grounds: first, its inherent character arising from the consistent application of the stadial scheme throughout the text, and second, the rather drastic nature of the transformations it underwent during the process of German reception. There are similarly compelling reasons for a combined treatment of the narrative sections of the History of Charles V and the History of Scotland in this chapter. While the fundamental sociological assumptions concerning the incentives and structures of material, cultural, and institutional progress, together with the relevant vocabulary, are nowhere suppressed in them, both of these works are fundamentally political narratives of wielding and losing power, of maneuver and stratagem applied to the building or challenging of states, in which personal sentiment and character receive an amount of attention commensurate with their importance. In discussing these topics, both works inevitably address their implications for the wider themes of the chances of civil and religious liberty in the face of ambitious bureaucratic-military establishments (or, paradoxically, the lack of them). In turn, the tackling of such themes generated conceptualizations of political loyalty, commitment, community, and identity. From the angle of the comparisons and transfers that are the central concern of this book, the preoccupation of this chapter should be the uses to which Robertson’s relevant views were put among a linguistic and cultural community that was different from his primary audience.

Maps of Mankind

Edmund Burke referred to “the Great Map of Mankind” that is “unrolld” for the gaze of contemporaries, not in the least thanks to Robertson’s employment of “Philosophy to judge on Manners,” in a now famous letter of compliment to Robertson upon the publication of his History of America in 1777.1 While Burke combined this remark with the observation that “[w]e no longer need to go to History to trace [human nature] in all its stages and periods” (perhaps found not so congenial by the addressee of his praises), it illustrates well the contemporary understanding of the distinctiveness of Robertson’s combination of historical narrative with theoretical reflection. In recent literature, Burke’s eulogy of Robertson has been cited with such frequency that highlighting it here may risk both being impolite and eliciting boredom. There are still several reasons why it is not entirely awkward to start this chapter by referring to it.

Politics, Literature, and Science: William Robertson and Historical Discourses in Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Germany

As proposed at the end of the Introduction, before any attempt to analyze the German reception of Robertson’s individual texts, it is indispensable to take a more general look at the various modes in which history was engaged in Robertson’s Scottish environment and in which it was practiced in contemporary Germany. It is from a comparative assessment of such variables that one might expect to arrive at the understanding of an apparent paradox. The German reception of Robertson, in regard to both its extent and immediacy— the volume of translations, of critical response, and reference—was, if anything, avid. Each of the four great histories appeared in, and was borrowed from, important academic libraries in Germany within a few months of publication. Each of them were equally promptly reviewed in German periodicals, and became swiftly translated into German, occasionally by several different hands simultaneously, and were republished and reedited in new versions over a period of several decades. The intensity of reception apparently contradicts the fact that it would be difficult to claim for Robertson a dramatic influence on the character of contemporary German historiography. This contradiction, however, makes the history of reception no less instructive.

A Different View of the Progress of Society in Europe

As noted in chapter 1, recent scholarship has introduced a great deal of nuance into our understanding of the overall character of Robertson’s achievement, recontextualizing it within the mainstream of eighteenth-century historical studies, which were inspired by narrative as well as political, religious, and educational agendas. However, these valuable correctives to the received image of Robertson as an avant-garde structuralist historian do not seriously affect the status of his admittedly most experimental text on which this image has been largely based (together with Book Four and other portions of the History of America and passages from his other works). The View of the Progress of Society was written by Robertson as a volume-length introduction to the History of Charles V, in an attempt to explore the forces of causality underlying long-term historical processes which led, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, to the rise of states capable of sustaining large-scale and long-standing military efforts. It has been suggested that in his writings Robertson moves rather flexibly between the patterns of “Enlightenment” history (where progress takes place, or at least may take place, as a result of conscious choice, even intervention) and “stadial” or conjectural history (which is dominated by a theory of spontaneous order emerging from a natural succession of various stages in people’s mode of subsistence).1 This is an important distinction in accounting for the variability of perspective within the oeuvre as a whole, but less helpful in approaching the specific case of A View of the Progress of Society.

The Lappon, the Scythian and the Hungarian, or our (former) selves as others. Philosophical history in eighteenth-century Hungary

philosophical history in eighteenth century hungary The only appropriate genre of history is that of Mr Voltaire, which had not existed before him. [...] There is one single object the philosopher must make the target of his historical investigations: the portrayal of manners and morals, because his aim is improvement and enlightenment, which is only to be expected from the better knowledge of the human mind and heart,