Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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John E. Toews

historical’ European culture – remained a present task and future hope

(Ranke 1925–6, iv,p.37).

Ranke did not perceive his own time and culture as the actuality of

the reconciliation of transcendent and immanent meaning, or of the inte-

gration of church and state as forms of life lived in this double relation-

ship. What tied Ranke to the Prussian regime was the belief that it had

reopened and committed itself to the historical agenda articulated in the

Lutheran Reformation. Ranke rejected the ‘conservative’ interpretations of

this agenda in which the transformation of the nation into an ethical com-

munity was tied to the domination and control of the temporal realm by

transcendent authority (as in Stahl’s theory). But he was also not willing to

accept a purely immanent standpoint in which collective moral conscious-

ness emerged simply as the self-development of the unconscious potential

of the national ‘genius’. He remained suspicious of tendencies (which he

discerned in both Schelling and Bunsen) that completely assimilated the

transcendent realm to either the development of the national community

or the perfection of European philosophical or ‘scientiﬁc’ consciousness.

For Ranke the development of human beings from the blind existing being

of nature to the self-consciousness of moral cultured subjectivity required

recognition by the ﬁnite creature of its origins in, and dependency on,

a transcendent other, a submission of the child to the voice and law of

the creator/father. For Ranke such submissive recognition of the absolute

power of a transcendent father did not destroy, but rather emancipated

and shaped the immanent energies emerging from the maternal womb of

being.

It may seem a bit forced to treat Ranke as a philosophical thinker, but

he deﬁned his project as historian within the cultural dilemmas posed by

post-Kantian idealist and romantic philosophy. When Ranke chose the

vocation of historian in the 1820s, it was at least in par t because he was

convinced that historical knowledge could resolve the questions posed by

philosophers but that had proven to be irresolvable in their terms. The

result was a severely ambivalent attitude towards the stance of philosophy

and philosophers. On the one hand, Ranke insisted on the autonomy of

historical knowledge. As knowledge of the real it was distinguished from

and opposed to the abstract conceptual knowledge of philosophy. On the

other hand, he insisted that history was ‘not the antithesis but the fulﬁl-

ment of philosophy’ (Ranke 1964–75, iv,p.69). All forms of systematic,

conceptual knowledge were ultimately absorbed into historical knowledge

and communicated as a reconstr uction of the embodiment of divine ideas

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in historical actuality. Ideas became real in historical ‘life’, which was the

object of historical knowledge. In this sense Ranke’s views paralleled those

of the Left Hegelians for whom the truth of philosophy was reduced to

the positive knowledge of historical human existence in anthropology, psy-

chology and historical sociology, and for whom the questions of philosophy

were ultimately resolved in historical life or ‘praxis’.

Historical writing functioned for Ranke as an unveiling of existence, a

comprehension of the contextual totality of life-relations that gave indi-

vidual phenomena meaning. Puriﬁed of the distortion of self-interested

individual subjectivity, the documentary traces of past human life emerged

as representations of individual existence whose organic interconnectedness

itself manifested, though often obscurely, the foundations of individual exis-

tence in the ‘ground of universal life (Grund des Allgemeinen Lebens)(Ranke

1964–75, iv,p.63). However, Ranke’s growing conﬁdence in the 1830s

that historiography could displace philosophy as the universal science was

based on his incorporation of the transcendent dimension of philosophical

theology – the comprehension of the grounds of human freedom in the

eternal moral order ruled by the transcendent personality of the absolute

existing subject – into the project of historical knowledge. Ranke expanded

his theory of Ideas to include not only the implicit divine essences actu-

alising themselves in the patterned totality of historical cultures, but also

Ideas of transcendent, inﬁnite reality that entered the historical process as

the empirically recoverable convictions, ethical ideals, and cultural ideolo-

gies of speciﬁc individuals and groups. By tracing the emergence, diffusion,

conﬂict and transformation of religious ideas the historian could discover

how human words and deeds not only exempliﬁed or ‘expressed’ the hidden

organising power of the national Idea, but actually created, in the speciﬁc

actions of historical events, a constructed order of their own. The source of

this constructed meaning was the relation to the transcendent; its practical

actualisation emerged through an appropriation of the ‘Idea’ as a goal of

self-conscious practice.

The transcendent ground of being to which religious ideas referred was

not itself an actor within history. History was not the revelation of a ‘becom-

ing God’ or a progressive self-expression of the redemptive reconciliation

of the ﬁnite and the inﬁnite. The transcendent entered history through

individual conviction, choice and action, as the mark of human freedom.

The religious relation to the transcendent, articulated in the doctrines,

liturgies and sacraments of churches, broke through the apparent neces-

sity of the evolution of immanent relations. In the 1840s Ranke rejected

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John E. Toews

Hegelianism not only because it dissolved concrete existence in abstract

thought, but also because it denied ‘individual human consciousness’ as the

real subject of history (Ranke 1964–75, iv,pp.187–8). Already in 1837 he

had criticised a colleague for identifying ‘life’ and ‘freedom’. ‘Life’, Ranke

claimed, was the ‘inﬁnite all-connecting agency’ that associated cause and

effect in ‘unbroken continuity’. In contrast, ‘freedom’ remained ‘individual,

moral, self-determined, though only in rare moments also self-originating

and self-creating’.

In most eras and among most national cultures, free-

dom took the form of customary obedience and conformity to inherited

religious ideas. But on those rare occasions when the reproduction of reli-

gious meaning veered into historical discontinuity and qualitative change,

the words and deeds of individual human subjects would break into the

ongoing necessities of ‘life’ and the customary forms of religious meaning

and appear as ‘self-originating and self-creating’, providing an experience

of new possibilities for the construction of the relation to the transcendent

and opening new possibilities for the way human lives were lived.

The appropriate representational form for Ranke’s view of the relation-

ship among national cultural totalities, inherited discourses concerning the

connection between ﬁnite existence and its inﬁnite ground, and the free

acts through which a recreation of the discourse of transcendence pro-

vided new possibilities for the direction of national cultures, was a narrative

of contingent human action that only in retrospect displayed the larger

coherence of divine purpose. In such narratives the immanent meanings of

cultural development were set in relation to the construction of meanings

based on direct experience of the transcendent sphere, in order to produce

a genealogy of the contingent events that had shaped the tradition that

confronted the present as a fund of inherited meaning. The narrative of

Ranke’s German History was organised around such historical conjunctures

in which creative intervention and discontinuity had been possible. Many

such moments remained moments of unfulﬁlled possibility because of the

failure of individuals to g rasp the new experiences and act on them with

moral conviction. At the centre of Ranke’s work, however, was the epochal

moment in which Luther’s articulation of a new religious meaning inter-

vened in the evolution of German national culture, revised the direction of

that culture on the basis of a radical encounter with transcendent truth, and

produced a qualitative turn in human history.

21 Ranke to Heinrich Ritter, April 1837,inRanke1949,p.285.

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In the last volume of his history Ranke reﬂected on this post-romantic,

‘existential’ or ‘positive’ historicism that informed his narrative:

From the distance of centuries we can perceive the great combinations that are inherent

in the nature of things; the individual action in every individual present, however, cannot

depend on them. Here it is a matter of the correct handling of what is immediately

given, on the good cause which one represents, on the moral force one can exert.

The moments which condition the progress of world history are, I would like to say,

a divine secret. The value of man is grounded in his self-determination and activity.

(Ranke 1925–6, iv,p.64)

Like so many of his contemporaries, Ranke believed that a reformation of

the human relation to the divine, a recognition of the inﬁnite ground of

human action, would open up the possibility of constructing the national

culture in new ways. The emergence of an ethical community of free

subjects was not just the perfected expression of the immanent potentialities

of the national genius, an objectiﬁcation of the implicit goal of the collective

cultural subject, but a constructive shaping of that culture on the foundation

of an experience of the transcendent grounds of all cultures and historical

possibilities, a construction that expressed the freedom of human beings

to make the world conform to (or to fail to make the world conform to)

divine truth through moral action.

The site of ethical community for Ranke was the ‘national’ state, the

political world produced by the interaction of the immanent forces of ethnic

and linguistic tradition and the moral convictions grounded in religious ideas

about absolute, transcendent truth. In the relations between church and

state, the church became the exemplar of the transcendent grounds of free

action that could break the internal causal nexus of ethno-linguistic national

life and produce a new moral order within the constructed forms of the state.

Within the political constitution of the state the inherent necessities of the

national idea were ‘modiﬁed’ according to a will infused with a conviction

of universal transcendent truth. The national culture provided the speciﬁc

contextual limitations within which such ethical construction could occur.

Ranke afﬁrmed the freedom of the moral subject as the creator of its own

history. But religious convictions only manifested themselves in effective

action if they conformed to the objective foundations of human existence in

both the ‘maternal’ ground of ‘natural’ being and the transcendent spiritual

ground of divine paternal authority. The human subject could exert its will

as a free agent only by conforming to the restrictions imposed by its status

as a ﬁnite creation.

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John E. Toews

In the Rankean historical constructions the description of human exis-

tence in terms of a narrative of relations between religion and nationality,

church and state, became a way of expressing the contingency of histor-

ical events, the freedom of human actions in time. Within the religious

consciousness of church membership recognition of human ﬁnitude and

historical contingency, and thus recognition of human freedom in relation

to the immanent ‘necessities’ of national culture and historical tradition, was

inextricably connected to the experience of transcendence. It was in the

sphere of the ‘church’ that the ultimate meaning of human existence was

encountered, appropriated, internalised and expressed in actions aiming at

the construction of an ‘ethical’ human order. Church and state framed the

discussion of associative life as long as the question of that life as an expres-

sion or construction of fundamental values remained a vital and contested

question, as long as politics was perceived in terms of the historical creation

of an ethical community according to values der ived from an experience

that related the immanent relations of historical cultures to the transcendent

ground that deﬁned their possibility.

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The politics of nature

Science and religion in the age of Darwin

daniel pick

1 Introduction

Perhaps no Victorian was more startled by the implications of evolution

than Charles Darwin (1809–82). Transformations of nature through natural

selection were considered in his private and, eventually, very public writings;

but even as they ﬂowed from his pen, these ideas disturbed him. He was

perennially torn about their moral and ethical consequences. The imagery

of struggle, selection and extinction in nature that Darwin did so much to

fashion was also ready-made to describe the rough passage of arguments and

beliefs through history, including the str uggle for survival of the evolutionary

idea itself. Darwin and his followers identiﬁed themselves with a cause, but

they were not always so sanguine about the social and political repercussions

of their intellectual battles. This chapter situates Darwin’s struggle – and his

concept of struggle – in a wider context of nineteenth-century evolutionary

thought and explores political and religious consequences of the claim that

species (human included) are not deﬁnitively ﬁxed in form, but undergo

change over time.

The controversy generated by Darwin’s most famous published works,

On the Origin of Species (1859)andThe Descent of Man (1871) was not

only intense, but also multifaceted. Religious, political, moral and scientiﬁc

objections became deeply entangled. Moreover, the debate was conducted

in many styles and genres, at times light-heartedly, at others in deadly

earnest. The subject of evolution became the stuff of novels and cartoons,

sermons and popular pamphlets, poems and learned articles. Some com-

mentators raised intellectual objections to Darwin’s account of evolution

which caused him considerable heartache. On the other hand, there were

also many crude attacks on evolutionary ‘morality’ that he found easier to

dismiss, as we see, for instance, in this ﬂippant remark, soon after the pub-

lication of The Origin, to his friend, the distinguished geologist Sir Charles

Lyell (1797–1875): ‘I have received, in a Manchester newspaper a rather

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good squib, showing that I have proved “might is right,” and therefore that

Napoleon is right and every cheating tradesman is also right’ (F. Darwin

1887, ii,p.262). The debate about the politics and ethics of Darwinism

(the ‘ism’ word was coined as early as 1860, in a review by T. H. Huxley

(1825–95)), reduced by some to a straightforward battle between the causes

of the apes and the angels, or the adherents of might and right, became part

of the common currency of the age.

The Victorian critics of evolutionary ideas in general and Darwinian

hypotheses in particular, have often been dismissed as bigots or intellec-

tual dinosaurs. But the range of hostile responses included not only deep

religious and moral objections to such visions of nature, but also scien-

tiﬁc arguments which, on occasion, were to be considered awkward, even

devastating. There were thought to be evidential as well as ethical grounds

for challenging Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and the various fur-

ther claims inspired by it. Moreover, internecine controver sies continued

amongst the evolutionists themselves. The interpretation of scientiﬁc suc-

cess and failure was unclear; speculations as far-reaching and untestable as

Darwin’s led into a quagmire of uncertainty. Historian of science Peter

Bowler has argued that there was even an ‘eclipse of Darwinism’ in the

late nineteenth century as alternative arguments found new favour (Bowler

1983). Certainly the boundaries, credentials and consequences of all such

ideas about metamorphosis in nature remained deeply unsettled throughout

the Victorian period.

Even as it destabilised religious convictions and divided the scientiﬁc

elite, evolutionary thought was producing its own zealots, for whom a

particular text, be it by the best-known contemporary philosopher of the

cause, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who coined the phrase ‘survival of

the ﬁttest’, or by the rather less ebullient Darwin himself, provided a new,

hallowed truth. For many, the initial dizzying experience of reading The

Origin precipitated a crisis. The reader’s disorientation of faith was some-

times followed by a new fervent commitment to naturalism and materialism,

and an insistence that such ideas be applied immediately to every facet of

culture, society and politics. The genius of the author and his books became

the object of worship, bordering on a cult. Some contemporaries sought

to stabilise themselves by stabilising Darwin’s theories (Durant 1977, 1985).

At any event, for what were no doubt multiple political, emotional and

intellectual reasons, many sought moral salvation, and not merely scientiﬁc

education, in Darwin’s books, and in an ever more militant advocacy of his

claims.

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The attitude of Darwin’s German follower, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919),

a professor of zoology at Jena, is a case in point. He sought to have evolu-

tionary theory enshrined in the schooling system and campaigned for this

science with a fervour that smacked of the very religiosity he purported to

challenge. Haeckel was by no means the only disciple to trek to see Darwin

at his home in Kent, there to pay homage before the great man. Emma

(Charles’ wife) privately objected to the intrusion, referring to his thunder-

ing voice, but to no avail (Desmond and Moore 1991,p.28). The style of

the encounter can only be called devotional. As Desmond and Moore put it

in their rich intellectual biography of Darwin, Haeckel’s meeting with the

English scientist, ‘was an intensely religious experience’ (for the former).

He described Darwin as ‘tall and venerable ...withthebroadshoulders of

an Atlas that bore a world of thought: a Jove-like forehead, as we see in

Goethe, with a lofty and broad vault, deeply furrowed by the plough of

intellectual work’ (Desmond and Moore 1991,p.539). Haeckel had seen

The Origin as a contribution to politics as much as science, and felt no

compunction about extending the debate to society, seeing selection as a

driving force, propelling peoples onward to greater things, whilst casting the

failures aside. It was taken to offer sanction for certain government policies

and warning against others. Progress was regarded as a natural but uneven

law, and evolution as crucial to the fortunes of the nation state, Teutonic

supremacy and the genius of the Vo lk. Neither relig ious orthodoxy nor

moral scruples, it was argued, could be allowed to contradict the reality of

evolutionary struggle.

Historians debate how far The Origin was speciﬁcally responsible for

detonating an intellectual explosion, but clearly the foundations of Christian

belief had already been severely tested by other emerging sciences, most

notably geology. Darwin was the heir to eighteenth-century scepticism,

and behind that, to seventeenth-century enquiries into the very nature

of Nature. Darwin’s account was in fact but one of many new lines of

nineteenth-century intellectual endeavour that conﬂicted with traditional

Church teachings. Christianity, of course, was no monolith. Champions

of evolutionary science were as likely to align themselves with a congenial

religious vantage-point as to proclaim out loud the death of God. They

might perhaps ﬁnd themselves confronting earnest and militant evangelical

divines, who were themselves at odds with other churchmen (Hilton 1988),

rather than attacking the value of faith tout court. Nonetheless, Christianity,

as traditionally conceived, faced a variety of powerful intellectual challenges

and sometimes withering analyses. It had been provocatively suggested, for

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instance, that God might be but the alienated construct of man (the thesis

of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, 1841). Presentations of the story

of Jesus also sometimes adopted an unnervingly cool tone; notably in the

historicist focus of David Strauss’ Life of Jesus (1841), rendered into English

by George Eliot in the 1840s. Even this was as nothing beside the positively

icy-toned investigation of the possible psychopathological symptoms of

once-revered saints to be found in the work of late nineteenth-century anti-

clerical provocateurs in the Third Republic, such as the impor tant Parisian

neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot. Icons were battered and some fossilised

beliefs were turned over, not least by new evidence about the fossil record

itself. In short, Darwin’s work needs to be situated amongst numerous other

jolts to conventional faith and traditional beliefs about the human species,

the ‘animal kingdom’ and the age of the Earth.

Nowhere can the challenge be seen more clearly than in the rising tide

of speculations about the ﬂexibility of natural forms themselves. In France,

the notion of species transformation had been most importantly developed

by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829). Sympathetic to the French Revolu-

tion, he had originally been a prot

e of the great naturalist Georges Buffon.

Lamarck had provided an elaborate account of the historical development of

nature and had used the term ‘biology’ to refer to the world of living things.

His work homed in on the way organisms interacted with and adapted to

the environment. Like the famous French physician, Marie Franc¸ois Bichat,

Lamarck was acutely engaged by the problem of how to deﬁne the speciﬁcity

of life. Lamarck’s most-quoted idea was ‘the inheritance of acquired char-

acteristics’, but his work was in fact far more wide-ranging.

His writings

stimulated various important debates, not least about the time-scale of the

creation of life on Earth. Lamarck’s study of hydrogeology in 1802 stressed

that physical changes must have taken place extremely slowly, through the

agency of water. His transformist theory was ﬁrst articulated publicly in

lectures in 1800 and developed in Philosophie Zoologique (1809). Species,

Lamarck contended, were subject to change and underwent adaptive alter-

ations in order to retain the harmonious balance of nature. He believed that

‘spontaneous generation’ could occur, transforming the inorganic into the

organic. Thus gelatinous matter formed into live creatures of a rudimentary

kind where the combination of humidity, heat and substance was right.

Yet Lamarck also argued that nature operated according to a plan and was

1 On the var iety of and controversy surrounding his work, see Jordanova 1984, especially ch. 10.

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subject to laws. Nature itself might appear blind, but somewhere behind it

there existed an organising will.

German nature philosophy also played its part in this story, notably

through the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). He was

not a ‘Darwinian before Darwin’ (despite later attempts to portray him

as a precise forer unner). Goethe did not assume ‘natural selection’ as the

mechanism of change. Moreover, he had no speciﬁc theory of evolution

at all, although it has been argued that there are signiﬁcant hints of this

in his later wr itings. But he merits consideration because he provides an

indication of the emerging representation of natural forms in continu-

ing ﬂux. Recognising the signiﬁcance of metamorphosis, Goethe rejected

rigid, stable classiﬁcations, setting himself against the tradition of dividing

and tabulating plants and their parts on which an earlier botany, associ-

ated particularly with Linnaeus, had rested (Callot 1971,ch.6;cf.Magnus

1949). Goethe was fascinated by variations and by the blurring of species

borderlines. ‘Nature has no system’, he declared, ‘it has – it is – life’ (quoted

in Reed 1984,p.44). In The Metamorphosis of Plants, he suggested that

normal change was progressive, ‘ladder-like in the mind’s eye’. What he

termed ‘retrograde metamorphosis’ was abnormal (Goethe 1790,pp.91–

2). His interest lay in the processes running through structures; in move-

ment, transition, ‘morphology’ (the science of developing forms). Nature

became a space of ‘mobile order’, even if the system itself was ultimately

conceived as a unity. Indeed it was the totality of these processes which

enthralled him. Natural phenomena were to be viewed synthetically; ‘oth-

erwise every separate thing is only a dead letter’ (quoted in Reed 1984,

p. 47).

While Lamarck and Goethe believed in the tendency to progress, order

and economy in nature, each insisted on the real and continuous transfor-

mations occurring within it. Darwin took these transformist ideas much

further. He declared (not without trepidation) that the ﬁxity of species, as

set out in the Bible, was a myth. He acknowledged as much to his friend,

Joseph Hooker on 11 April 1844:

At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the

opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a ‘tendency to progression,’ ‘adaptations

from slow willing of animals,’ etc.!, But the conclusions I am led to are not widely

different from his – though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found

out (here’s presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted

to var ious ends. (Darwin and Seward 1903, i,pp.40–1)

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