Bemerkungen über hypothetische Geschichtsschreibung

Friedrich Engel-Janosi’s “Bemerkungen über hypothetische Geschichtsschreibung” is a compact historiographical essay on a major Enlightenment procedure: writing history where evidence is fragmentary by means of analogy, anthropology, developmental sequence, and philosophical construction. Its argument is not that conjecture is merely error. Rather, Engel-Janosi shows how hypothetical history becomes indispensable and dangerous at once: it makes origins intelligible, but it can also convert gaps in knowledge into necessity, purpose, or myth.

The essay opens from Schiller’s conception of universal history. The historian does not preserve all facts equally, but selects those that can be related to the present condition of the world. This produces a retrospective chain in which the modern European present seems to demand its own past.

So und nicht anders ist und mußte die „Universalgeschichte“ verlaufen.

English translation: Thus and not otherwise "universal history" runs — and had to run.

Engel-Janosi’s emphasis falls on the “mußte.” Universal history is tempted to make contingency appear compulsory. Its narrative order is governed by what the historian already recognizes as historically significant from the standpoint of the present. The question therefore becomes whether such history discovers necessity in events or imposes necessity upon them.

Dugald Stewart gives the procedure its canonical name. In the Scottish context, conjecture is presented as a disciplined substitute for missing records: the historian reasons from human nature, from surviving “primitive” societies, and from stages through which peoples may be presumed to pass.

Nach Stewarts Vorschlag soll eine solche Verfahrensweise „Theoretical or Conjectural History“, „Hypothetische Geschichtsschreibung“ genannt werden¹.

English translation: According to Stewart's proposal, such a procedure is to be called "Theoretical or Conjectural History," "hypothetical historiography."¹

Engel-Janosi treats this not as a marginal curiosity but as a central Enlightenment mode. Stewart, Kames, Smith, and Ferguson make historical explanation possible where archives are silent; at the same time, they risk presuming that different peoples move along comparable lines of development. The essay is especially attentive to this double character: conjectural history is both an epistemic necessity and a source of schematic overconfidence.

Its reach, however, is wider than Scotland.

Die hypothetische Geschichtsschreibung war auch keineswegs auf die Schottische Schule beschränkt.

English translation: Hypothetical historiography was by no means confined to the Scottish School.

Rousseau’s second Discours becomes crucial because it openly brackets factual reconstruction in order to ask what must be thought about human origins. Hobbes does something analogous in political theory: the contract is less a documented event than an explanatory and legitimating “as if.” Engel-Janosi therefore shows that hypothetical history easily crosses into political myth. It asks not only what happened, but what kind of origin must be imagined in order to justify property, sovereignty, inequality, or civil order.

Vico marks the essay’s strongest counterpoint. Unlike forms of conjecture that project a stable human nature backward, Vico insists on the strangeness of early humanity. The past is not simply the childhood of modern reason; it is a different mental world.

Jetzt ist es nicht mehr eine prinzipielle Gleichheit; hier ist eine menschliche Verschiedenheit, ein menschliches Anderssein zum Prinzip der Geschichtsdarstellung geworden: der Weg zu den nächtlichen Bereichen Johann Bachofens war freigelegt.

English translation: Now it is no longer a matter of a fundamental equality; here a human diversity, a human otherness, has become the principle of historical representation: the way to the nocturnal realms of Johann Bachofen had been laid open.

This contrast is central to Engel-Janosi’s interpretation. Hypothetical history can proceed by continuity, assuming that early humans are intelligible through modern motives. Vico instead makes alterity the principle of historical understanding. The historian must imaginatively descend into forms of consciousness no longer immediately available.

The later figures sharpen the range of possibilities. Condorcet turns historical construction toward confidence in progress, whereas Hume keeps alive uncertainty, violence, and the limits of explanation. Ferguson, for Engel-Janosi, is especially important because he sees institutions as unintended products of human action rather than deliberate design. Kant then raises the conjectural mode into a philosophy of history: the “as if” becomes the idea that nature itself guides conflict toward the development of human capacities.

The essay’s lasting value lies in its measured ambivalence. Engel-Janosi neither dismisses hypothetical history nor accepts its grand narratives at face value. He shows that modern historiography, anthropology, and political theory repeatedly depend on conjectures about origins and stages. Yet he also warns that these conjectures can harden into teleology, turning plurality into sequence and ignorance into apparent law.