Friedrich Engel-Janosi · 1964
Engel-Janosi’s essay is a compact genealogy of modern universal history rather than an attempted universal history of its own. Its governing premise is that the whole of human history can never be narrated exhaustively; any such project must select, symbolize, and philosophically order. Universal history therefore reveals less a neutral totality than a historian’s “Grundeinstellung”: providence, progress, cyclical recurrence, national mission, cultural morphology, scientific synthesis, or mythic meaning.
Unser Gegenstand ist ein überaus umfangreicher. Nur um das Aufzeigen der Grundeinstellungen kann es sich im folgenden handeln.
English translation: Our subject is an exceedingly vast one. In what follows, only the delineation of fundamental attitudes can be undertaken.
The essay begins by distinguishing ways in which the whole has been made visible. One line is symbolic or representative: sacred history, chosen peoples, empires, nations, or cultures stand for world-historical meaning. Another seeks systematic completeness, the “botanical” inventory of mankind’s civilizations. Ancient and Christian models already contain both impulses. Herodotus and Thucydides write from limited centers, Polybius grasps interconnection as a new historical object, and Augustine gives world history a providential architecture. Bossuet still belongs to the old schema of world empires, but he also points toward progress and Zusammenhang; Vico, by contrast, offers a universal pattern of recurring national development.
The Enlightenment marks the decisive modern transformation. Voltaire, Turgot, Gibbon, Hume, and Condorcet shift the center of universal history from salvation and dynastic politics to civilization, security, utility, and the progress of the human spirit.
Wie immer man die geistige Leistung dieses Zeitalters beurteilen mag, eines ist gewiß: es sah und wollte Geschichtsschreibung im Sinne von Universalgeschichte.
English translation: However one may judge the intellectual achievement of this age, one thing is certain: it saw and willed historiography in the sense of universal history.
Yet Engel-Janosi stresses the limits of Enlightenment universality. France or England often becomes the privileged model of humanity, and the doctrine of an unchanging human nature authorizes conjectural reconstruction where evidence fails. Universal history gains breadth, but its empirical discipline remains uneven.
Die Historiker der Aufklärung, gefangen in der Sicht der einen und unwandelbaren menschlichen Natur, fühlten sich frei von der Verpflichtung, solche Mühen auf sich zu nehmen, sie sahen sich berechtigt, dort, wo der Boden der Tatsachen nicht mehr ausreichte, Zuflucht zu nehmen zur Konjektur, zur Vermutung.
English translation: The historians of the Enlightenment, caught in the view of one and unchangeable human nature, felt free of the obligation to take such trouble upon themselves; they saw themselves entitled, where the ground of facts no longer sufficed, to take refuge in conjecture, in supposition.
The German development complicates this legacy. Winckelmann discovers historical individuality in art; Herder extends dignity to peoples and civilizations beyond Europe; Romantic organismic thinking prepares Ranke’s elevation of world history as the historian’s highest task. But Ranke narrows practice to the Roman-Germanic world, while Hegel gives world history metaphysical rigor at the price of excluding peoples not chosen as vehicles of spirit. Marx secularizes a providential pattern through modes of production and class struggle, reopening the horizon toward all humanity while preserving a movement toward fulfillment.
Nineteenth-century universal history then oscillates between national culmination and plural cultural comparison. Michelet and Guizot make France the privileged bearer of general meaning; Comte transforms universal history into a law-governed succession of intellectual stages. Gobineau, Lasaulx, and Brooks Adams turn race, organism, and decline into pessimistic world-historical systems. Acton, Dilthey, Weber, and Eduard Meyer refine the idea of a higher comparative series beyond national history, but remain marked by Western categories.
Spengler is treated as both distortion and breakthrough. Engel-Janosi rejects his determinism and factual crudeness, yet regards him as decisive because he compels historians to abandon the assumption that Western development simply is world history.
Der Durchbruch zu bewußtem und sehr gewolltem welthistorischem Sehen ist mit Spengler erfolgt.
English translation: The breakthrough to a conscious and deliberately world-historical vision was accomplished with Spengler.
The appendix carries the argument into twentieth-century syntheses. Cooperative world histories, including UNESCO-style projects, pursue global scope, cultural catholicity, and relativist tolerance. Henri Berr and the Annales milieu seek synthesis against merely political narrative; Breysig gives biological development a systematic architecture; Toynbee organizes the whole through civilizations, religions, and finally myth. Engel-Janosi’s enduring contribution is this conceptual grammar of world-history writing: representation versus inventory, progress versus cycle, nation versus civilization, evidence versus conjecture, explanation versus myth. The essay ends not by validating any final system, but by insisting that serious historiography must remain answerable to the problem of the whole.
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