Jacob Burckhardt

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The Swiss historian Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (1818-1897) was a philosophical historian whose books dealt with cultural and artistic history and whose lectures examined the forces that had shaped European history.

Through the use of eyewitness accounts, diplomatic documents, and the contents of government archives, the teachers and contemporaries of Jacob Christoph Burckhardt sought to reconstruct political events "as they had really happened." Burckhardt, however, viewed history as the record of the achievement of the human spirit. Politics was only part of that record. The highest expression of any age was to be found in its poetry, art, literature, and philosophy. The historian's task was to seek the spirit these works expressed, so the reader might be "not smarter for the next time but wiser forever."

Burckhardt was born in Basel on May 25, 1818. His father, a pastor at the Basel Minster, was elected administrative head of the Reformed Church in the canton in 1838. The year before, Jacob had begun theological studies at the University of Basel. Within 18 months, however, he lost his orthodox religious beliefs and turned from theology to history. He studied in Berlin for 4 years, attending the lectures of Johann Droysen, August Boeckh, and Franz Kugler, and Leopold von Ranke's seminar. Burckhardt formed close friendships with a group of poets and students of revolutionary liberal political views.

In 1843 Burckhardt returned to Basel, where he took a post as political correspondent with the conservative Basler Zeitung, and lectured at the university on art history. He immersed himself in the political crisis then shaking Switzerland, a crisis brought on by the return of the Jesuits to the Catholic canton of Lucerne. Then in 1846, disgusted by what he had seen, he left for Italy. His political views had turned to cultural and aristocratic conservatism. During the next 12 years he taught and wrote in Berlin, Basel, and Zurich, with lengthy trips to Italy in 1847, 1848, and again in 1853 to prepare the Cicerone.

"The Age of Constantine" and "Cicerone"

During the winter of 1847-1848 Burckhardt planned a series of cultural histories, beginning with the age of Pericles and ending with the age of Raphael. The first to appear was The Age of Constantine the Great (1852). The structure of this work was one that Burckhardt would use again in his later cultural histories and analyze in detail in his Reflections on World History: the "three great powers" - state, religion, and culture - and the ways in which they determine each other. The book is thus concerned as much with art and literature as with politics and religion.

Burckhardt's Cicerone (1854) was "a guide for the enjoyment of art in Italy." In form a traveler's guidebook, it was in reality a history of Italian art. In it Burckhardt first tried to solve the problem of systematic art history, tried, as he later put it, to get away from "the mess of art history as the history of artists," to go beyond biography to the analysis of historical and geographical styles.

"The Civilization of the Renaissance"

While still a student in Berlin, Burckhardt had come to the conclusion that the French Revolution had "pulled the historical ground from under the feet" of all European peoples. Just as in art the styles of every age now coexisted, "one beside the other," with no single tradition dominating, so with the state "the nineteenth century began with a clean slate." The individual now had free choice in politics, and nothing to fall back on but his own "inner truth." The application of this insight to the culture of Renaissance Italy resulted in Burckhardt's masterpiece, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).

In this work Burckhardt proposed that the conflict between popes and emperors had deprived 13th-century Italy of legitimate political rule, had left it with that "clean slate" he saw in his own times. This climate allowed political units to appear "whose existence was founded simply on their power to maintain it." But it also freed the individual of all traditional constraints, whether political, religious, or social. Expressed through artistic and literary forms revived from antiquity, this freed and self-conscious individualism, this "genius of the Italian people … achieved the conquest of the western world." In the Italian Renaissance, Burckhardt saw the major characteristics of the modern world, its evil as well as its good.

Later Years

Burckhardt explained his thesis in his lectures of 1868-1869, "On the Study of History," in the course of a wide-ranging analysis of the "three powers" at the heart of his historical vision. Culture, in contrast to the constants, state and religion, "is the sum of those spiritual developments that appear spontaneously." Its form and its vehicle - language - are the product of societies and epochs, but its source is always the individual. To study culture is thus to study the individual giving expression to his place and his age as well as himself.

After publishing his notes on Italian architecture in 1867, Burckhardt prepared nothing more for the press but devoted himself until his retirement in 1893 to lecturing at the university. His series of cultural histories was never completed, but his lectures covered the entire sweep of European history from the ancient Greeks to the European crisis of 1870. In an age of ever-narrower nationalisms, Burckhardt reached back to the universal humanism of Goethe.

After 1870 Burckhardt became increasingly pessimistic about the future of European culture. Though he hoped for another Renaissance, he feared the arrival of the "fearful simplifiers," the demogogues who would lead the "masses" to tyranny and destroy the European culture he loved. "The world is moving toward the alternative of complete democracy or absolute, ruthless despotism," he wrote to a friend in 1882. The day would come when "the military state will turn industrialist." He withdrew to two sparsely furnished rooms above a bakery shop and devoted himself to his work on Italian art, which he never completed. He died on Aug. 8, 1897.

Further Reading

The definitive biography of Burckhardt is in German. In English, analyses of Burckhardt's work on the Renaissance are presented in Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (1948), and Karl J. Weintraub, Visons of Culture (1966). George P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1913; 3d ed. 1935; with new preface, 1959), analyzes Burckhardt's life and work. Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation (1960), and H. Hearder, Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 1830-1880 (1966), are recommended for general historical background.

Burckhardt, Jacob (Basel, 1818-97, Basel), after studying theology for a time at Basel, transferred his interest to history and the history of art, which he studied at Berlin University under L. von Ranke and subsequently at Bonn. Visits to Italy focused his attention on the Renaissance period. He was appointed to a professorial chair at Zurich University in 1855, and three years later at Basel, where he remained for 35 years, retiring in 1893. Burckhardt's published work was concentrated into a comparatively short span of his professional career (1853-67), but his influence extended well into the 20th c. His principal works are Die Zeit Konstantins des Großen (1853), Cicerone (1855, an erudite guide to the art of Italy), Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), which constitutes his outstanding achievement, and Die Geschichte der Renaissance (1867). Burckhardt strongly influenced the pessimism of the late 19th c. and early 20th c., seeing the modern world as undergoing a retrogression in cultural and spiritual values, and condemning, as a detached Swiss observer, the pursuit of power in the Bismarckian age. He gave expression to his views in numerous public lectures.

He left the MSS. of two works, which were published soon after his death: Griechische Kulturgeschichte (4 vols., 1898-1902) and Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (1905). Burckhardt's Gesammelte Werke (10 vols.) appeared 1955-9.

Burckhardt, Jakob Christoph (1818-97) Swiss cultural historian. Philosophically he was an opponent of Hegel's view of history as essentially progressive, as well as a conservative opponent of democracy and industrialization. His best-remembered work is The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy (1860, tr. 1878).

Jacob Burckhardt
Jacob Burckhardt in 1892
Born	May 25, 1818(1818-05-25) Basel, Switzerland
Died	April 8, 1897 (aged 78)
Nationality	Swiss
Occupation	Historian

Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (May 25, 1818, Basel, Switzerland – August 8, 1897, Basel) was a historian of art and culture, and an influential figure in the historiography of each field. He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history^[1], albeit in a form very different from how cultural history is conceived and studied in academia today.^{[citation needed]} Siegfried Giedion described Burckhardt's achievement in the following terms: "The great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well."^[2] Burckhardt's best known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).

Contents 1 Life 2 Work 3 Notes 4 References 5 External links

Life

The son of a Protestant clergyman, Burckhardt studied theology in Basel and in Neuchâtel until 1839 after losing his faith; he moved to the University of Berlin to study history, especially art history, then a new field. At Berlin, he attended lectures by Leopold von Ranke, the founder of history as a respectable academic discipline based on sources and records rather than personal opinions. He spent part of 1841 at the University of Bonn, studying under the art historian Franz Kugler, to whom he dedicated his first book, Die Kunstwerke der belgischen Städte (1842). He taught at the University of Basel from 1843 to 1855, then at ETH, the engineering school in Zurich. In 1858, he returned to Basel to assume the professorship he held until his 1893 retirement. Only starting in 1886 did he teach art history exclusively. He twice declined offers of professorial chairs at German universities, at the University of Tübingen in 1867, and Ranke's chair at the University of Berlin in 1872.

See Life by Hans Trog in the Basler Jahrbuch for 1898, pp. 1-172.

Work

Jacob Burckhardt on a Swiss one thousand franc banknote

Burckhardt's historical writings did much to establish art history as an academic discipline, and also have literary value in their own right. His innovative approach to historical research emphasized the value of art, culture and aesthetic representation when analyzing the social and political trends underlying particular historical epochs. His approach to the study of history emphasized art, culture and the aesthetic/social existence of the people in a given period; as a historian he was strongly opposed to the interpretations of Hegelianism, which was popular at the time, economism as an interpretation of history and positivism, which had come to dominate scientific discourses (including the discourse of the social sciences).

In 1838 he made his first journey to Italy, and published his first important articles, Bemerkungen über schweizerische Kathedralen ("Remarks about Swiss Cathedrals"). In 1847 he brought out new editions of Kugler's two great works, Geschichte der Malerei and Kunstgeschichte, and in 1853 published his own work, Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen ("The Age of Constantine the Great"). He spent the greater part of the years 1853–1854 in Italy, collecting materials for his 1855 Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens (7th German edition, 1899), also dedicated to Kugler. This work, "the finest travel guide that has ever been written"^[3] which covered sculpture and architecture, as well as painting, became an indispensable guide to the art traveller in Italy.

About half of the original edition was devoted to the art of the Renaissance. Thus Burckhardt was naturally led to write the two books for which he is best known, his 1860 Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien ("The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy") (English translation, by SGC Middlemore, in 2 vols., London, 1878), and his 1867 Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien ("The History of the Renaissance in Italy"). The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance in the 19th century and is still widely read. Burckhardt and the German historian George Voigt founded the historical study of the Renaissance. In contrast to Voigt, who confined his studies to early Italian humanism, Burckhardt dealt with all aspects of Renaissance society.

Burckhardt considered the study of ancient history an intellectual necessity and was a highly respected scholar of Greek civilization. "The Greeks and Greek Civilization" sums up of the relevant lectures, "Griechische Kulturgeschichte", which Burckhardt first gave in 1872 and which he repeated until 1885. At his death, he was working on a four-volume survey of Greek civilization.

Friedrich Nietzsche, appointed professor of classical philology at Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, admired Burckhardt and attended some of his lectures. Both men were admirers of the late Arthur Schopenhauer. Nietzsche believed Burckhardt agreed with the thesis of his The Birth of Tragedy, namely that Greek culture was defined by opposing "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" tendencies. Nietzsche and Burckhardt enjoyed each other's intellectual company, even as Burckhardt kept his distance from Nietzsche's evolving philosophy. Their extensive correspondence over a number of years has been published. Burckhardt's student Heinrich Wölfflin succeeded him at the University of Basel at the age of only twenty-eight.

There is an interesting tension in Burckhardt's persona between the wise and worldly student of the Italian Renaissance, and the cautious product of Swiss Calvinism which he had studied extensively for the ministry. The Swiss polity in which he spent nearly all of his life was a good deal more democratic and stable than was the norm in 19th century Europe. As a Swiss, Burckhardt was also cool to German nationalism and to German claims of cultural and intellectual superiority. He was also amply aware of the rapid political and economic changes taking place in the Europe of his day, commenting in his lectures and writings on the Industrial Revolution, the European political upheavals of his day, and the growing European nationalism and militarism. Events amply fulfilled his prediction of a cataclysmic 20th century, in which violent demagogues (whom he called "terrible simplifiers") would play central roles. In later years, Burckhardt found himself unimpressed by democracy, individualism, socialism and a great many other ideas which were fashionable during his lifetime.

Notes

1. ^ Jakob Burckhardt Renaissance Cultural history
2. ^ Siegfried Giedion, in Space, Time and Architecture (6th ed.), p 3.
3. ^ Giedion, p. 4.

References

Primary:

• 1878. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The Middlemore translation of the 1860 German original.
• 1990. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Penguin Classics. ISBN 0-14-044534-X
• 1999. The Greeks and Greek Civilization, Oswyn Murray, ed. New York: St Martin's Griffin. ISBN 0-312-24447-9

Liberty Fund reprints:

• 1929. Judgements on History and Historians. Translated by Harry Zohn. Foreword by Alberto Coll.
• The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt. Selected, edited, and translated by Alexander Dru. Foreword by Alberto Coll, ISBN 0865971226.
• 1943. Reflections on History. Introduction by Gottfried Dietze, ISBN 0913966371.

Secondary:

• Gilbert, Felix (1990). History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. pp. 109. ISBN 0-691-03163-0. 
• Gossman, Lionel, 2000. Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas. The University of Chicago Press. ISBN0226305007
• Grosse, Jurgen, 1999, "Reading History: On Jacob Burckhardt as Source-Reader," Journal of the History of Ideas 60: 525-47.
• Hinde, John R., 2000. Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas. McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0773510273
• Howard, Thomas Albert, 1999. Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L. De Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65022-4
• Sigurdson, Richard, 2004. Jacob Burckhardt's Social and Political Thought. Univ. of Toronto Press. ISBN 0802047807

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Jacob Burckhardt

• Works by Jacob Burckhardt at Project Gutenberg
• Jakob Burckhardt Renaissance - Cultural history.
• A Brief Biography.
• Complete German text of The Greeks and Greek Civilization ("Griechische Kulturgeschichte")
• Jacob Burckhardt, Judgments on History and Historians (1929) at The Online Library of Liberty
• Jacob Burckhardt: Historian Of Civilization essay on the life and works of Jacob Burckhardt by Olivier Burckhardt, Contemporary Review, November 1997, Vol. 271, Issue 1582, pp. 250-256

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