Review of Jacob Burckhardt's Judgments on History and Historians

By Fr. James Thornton

Judgments on History and Historians, by Jacob Burckhardt, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999, 290 pages, hardcover, $25.00

Judgments on History and Historians is a collection of the author's lecture notes for a history course he taught between 1865 and 1885. First appearing in German in the 1920s under the title Historische Fragmente (Historical Fragments), it was published in English in 1959. This edition by Liberty Fund is identical to the 1959 edition, with the exception of the superb new foreword by Alberto R. Cole of the US Naval War College, who provides readers an excellent synopsis of Burckhardt's worldview.

Professor Cole observes that Burckhardt stood "unabashedly and defiantly" against the prevailing trends of his age, trends that continue today, but in vastly more potent form. Judgments on History and Historians is therefore, Cole writes, "a profoundly counter-cultural book." Moreover, Burckhardt, so much wiser than most of his contemporaries, has been proven correct again and again. Were it possible for him to pay a visit to the present, a century after his death, he would doubtless shake his head knowingly since all of his apprehensions have come to pass. His warnings about a coming age of brazen demagogy, the perils engendered by mass man and mob rule, the drab human landscape fostered by egalitarianism, the suffocation of the things of the spirit under a thick blanket of vulgar commercialism, and the debilitating effects of state-sponsored welfarism -- all of these were seen by him as symptomatic of a culture that had lost its bearings, like a runaway carriage careening down a hillside. All heralded a retreat from civilization, order, and liberty to unbridled barbarism.

Burckhardt is not an historian for those who nourish illusions about the upward march of progress and material prosperity. That is why he is regarded as a "pessimist" by most scholars. It may be more accurate to deem him a realist, however, since his study of history taught him the hard, fixed truths about mankind.

Review of Jacob Burckhardt's The Greeks and Greek Civilization

By Fr. James Thornton

The Greeks and Greek Civilization, by Jacob Burckhardt, edited by Oswyn Murray, translated by Sheila Stern, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, 504 pages, paperback, $22.99.

Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), a professor of history at the University of Basel, Switzerland, was one of the great scholars and thinkers of the last century. He is remembered principally for two works which have achieved renown: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which Lord Acton called "the most penetrating and subtle treatise on the history of civilization that exists in literature"; and Reflections on History, an extremely perceptive and timeless work that has been compared to the writings of Burke and Tocqueville.

Burckhardt looked with pessimism on the political, social, and historical tendencies of his time, predicting somberly, and correctly as it turned out, the ascendancy of men whom he characterized as the "terrible simplifiers," by which he meant men who by their clever manipulations and vulgar appeals to mob psychology would achieve popular acclaim and, with the approbation of the people themselves, seek to extinguish freedom.

The present volume was originally a lecture series the author delivered to his students in the 1870s. Shortly after his death, these lectures were assembled and published in German under the title Griechische Kulturgeschichte ("Cultural History of the Greeks"). Though the work has never been fully translated to English, this new book rectifies that deficiency in part by publishing major selections from the German text.

It is a curious fact that when published in 1899, Burckhardt's lectures were severely criticized by scholars, for at that time a romanticized view of the ancient Greeks, and especially of Athenian democracy, prevailed. The author was labeled "a clever dilettante" and the work one that "is incapable of saying anything. . . which deserves a hearing." What nettled the critics was that Burckhardt, while he showed the highest reverence for Greek cultural attainments, discussed Greek political and social institutions with cold realism. He adjudged in grave terms the dominance of Greek life, at certain times and places, by a coarsely commercial and materialistic spirit, and, magnifying that spirit, the spread of a highly capricious democratic polity. Each of these factors -- the commercial and the political -- fed on one another, making society unstable and life difficult for all but the wealthiest or the most crafty.