Journal of European Studies

The theory of storms: Jacob 40(4) 307–327

© The Author(s) 2010

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DOI: 10.1177/0047244110382168
of ‘historical crisis’ http://jes.sagepub.com

James R Martin
Harvard University

Abstract
This paper looks at the role of the ‘historical crisis’ in Jacob Burckhardt’s theory of history. By
examining how Burckhardt praised the ‘crisis’ for the ways in which it could accelerate historical
processes, the paper challenges interpretations of his work that focus exclusively on its synchronic
elements. It also examines the relationship of his theories of the crisis to his views on warfare and
on how large-scale wars could serve to speed up historical development. Ultimately, this paper
seeks to challenge the easy categorization of Burckhardt as either a conservative or a liberal
thinker by suggesting that his work channelled the rhetoric of both his radical and his reactionary
intellectual contemporaries.

Keywords
Jacob Burckhardt, crisis, Reinhart Koselleck, philosophy of history, Prussian School, Leopold von
Ranke

In the introduction to his famous lectures series ‘Über das Studium der Geschichte’, first
delivered at the University of Basel in the winter semester of 1868, Jacob Burckhardt
announced that he would be teaching:

the accelerated movements of the whole process of history, the theory of crises and revolutions,
and also of the occasional abrupt absorption of all other movements, the general ferment of all
the rest of life, the ruptures and reactions – in short, everything that might be called the theory
of storms (Sturmlehre). (1979: 31)

Known for his rich, multifaceted studies of past epochs of cultural vibrancy,
Burckhardt now turned his focus to the sore spots of history, the hinges where violent
disruptions shifted the passage of time in one direction or another, and the political or

Corresponding author:
James R Martin, Harvard Department of History, 35 Quincy Street, Robinson Hall, Room 201, Cambridge,
MA 02138, USA
Email: jrmartin@fas.harvard.edu

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308 Journal of European Studies 40(4)

social storms that dissolved the familiar and accelerated the historical process with
terrifying celerity. ‘Only a study of the past’, he continued, ‘can provide us with a
standard by which to measure the rapidity and strength of the particular movement in
which we live’ (1979: 46).
Interpreters typically look first to these 1868–9 lectures, in which Burckhardt was
more willing to address theoretical and methodological concerns than in his book-length
historical studies, to determine the extent to which the historian – despite his own claims
to the contrary – espoused a particular philosophy of history, or at least a well-developed
historical methodology. And most take his observations here – that the proper study of history
should eschew chronological recapitulations of ‘world development’ (Weltentwicklung),
and take instead ‘transverse sections (Querdurchschnitte) of history in as many directions
as possible’, looking for what remained constant across these cross-sections, as opposed
to what had changed along the ‘longitudinal’ (Längsdurchschnitte) axis of the passage
of time (1979: 32–3) – as organizing principles at work in his major historical works: Die
Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen and the Griechische
Kulturgeschichte. But there has been almost no extended discussion of his description of
the ‘historical crisis’ in the ‘Über das Studium der Geschichte’ lectures, or of the fact that
he dedicated an entire section of these lectures to an elucidation of the crisis’s historio-
graphical significance.1 There are, perhaps, reasons for this interpretative elision: nearly
all readers of Burckhardt focus on the synchronic aspects of his historical methodology
to the exclusion of other elements of his work, and see Burckhardt as having been more
concerned with providing static portrayals of the human mind throughout history than
with describing historical development and change.2 The historical dynamism implied
by his description of the crisis as accelerator of the ‘whole process of history’ is thus
easily overlooked, as it does not sit comfortably with his own explicit eschewal of devel-
opmental histories and chronology. For many, this eagerness to accept at face value his
own estimation of his histories as fundamentally anti-developmental in focus springs
from a desire to differentiate him from Leopold von Ranke and the so-called ‘Prussian
School’ of political history – and its focus on chronology, historical development and the
history of political events – in order to distance him from a German historical academy
that intellectually legitimated the German Machtstaat established under Bismarck. By
remaining a cultural historian, interested only in static moments of past artistic greatness,
they argue, Burckhardt rebelled against the love affair of the German academic main-
stream with Bismarck and the Reich, and thus acquitted himself of responsibility for the
horrors of the twentieth century. While his peers in the historical academy glorified the
rise of the Reich to greatness as the logical endpoint of centuries of preceding European
history, Burckhardt the cultural historian dedicated himself instead to protecting the con-
tinuity of Kultur Alteuropas from the diremptive forces of post-1789 European moder-
nity and the rise of the modern nation-state.3
Those dedicated to tracing the history and etymology of political concepts have
recognized the importance of Burckhardt’s contribution to the modern usage of the
term ‘crisis’ – according to Reinhart Koselleck, Burckhardt was the only true histori-
ographer of ‘crisis’ in nineteenth-century Europe (Koselleck, 2002: 239). But even
their Begriffsgeschichten have not considered Burckhardt’s contribution to the modern
formulation of the term ‘crisis’ at length. This paper intends to fill that lacuna. By

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Martin 309

looking closely at the importance Burckhardt ascribed to the crisis in history, it sug-
gests that significant tensions in his thought can be revealed – tensions that call into
question the readings of him as a synchronic historian tout court, interested in preserv-
ing cultural continuity and unconcerned with historical development. By taking seri-
ously Burckhardt’s intense interest in the disruptive potential of the crisis, this paper
also brings to attention certain aspects of his political thought that are often over-
looked, and that complicate attempts to categorize him comfortably either as a con-
servative or a liberal thinker.

The crisis and ‘accelerated development’

In the section of his lectures entitled ‘Die geschichtlichen Crisen’, Burckhardt described
the ‘crisis’ as a decisive moment of political or social agitation powerful enough to shake
the ‘political and social foundations of the state’ (1979: 223). Overturning existing insti-
tutions and establishments, the crisis would clear the ground for rapid social and political
development:

something breaks out, subverting the public order. Either it is suppressed, whereupon the ruling
power, if it is a wise one, will find some remedy, or, unexpectedly to most people, a crisis in the
whole state of things is produced, involving whole epochs and all or many peoples of the same
civilization … the historical process is suddenly accelerated in terrifying fashion. Developments
which otherwise take centuries seem to flit by like phantoms in months or weeks, and are
fulfilled (1979: 224).

Most crises had both a ‘negative, accusing’ aspect and a ‘positive’ aspect. They would
begin with the former, as ‘an accumulated protest against the past, mingled with dark
forebodings of still greater, unknown oppression’ (1979: 227). Fanatics, he argued, ‘howl
the others on’ to the ‘subversion of public order’, justifying their uprising in the name of
change and the righting of historical wrongs: ‘individuals and masses attribute every-
thing that irks them, without exception, to the existing dispensation … in the end, the
movement is swelled by anyone who simply wants a change, whatever it may be’ (1979:
227). While the different crises throughout history were ‘extremely diverse’, Burckhardt
continued, the crisis was a timeless feature of the human social and political experience,
as the desire for ‘great periodical changes’ was part of human nature (1979: 226): ‘what-
ever average bliss were granted to man, he would one day … exclaim with Lamartine:
La France s’ennuie’. When this day comes, Burckhardt wrote, ‘the infection flashes like
an electric spark over hundreds of miles and the most diverse peoples … all men are sud-
denly of one mind, even if only in a blind conviction: Things must change’ (1979: 226).
Burckhardt’s typology of the crisis seems to have been derived from his understanding
of the French Revolution (Starn, 2004: 500): each stage of the crisis, as he described it
here, correlated to a moment in the development of the Revolution, and other instances of
crisis mentioned – Caesar’s takeover of the Roman Republic, for example – were explained
largely in terms of the French experience. He did not, however, limit his concept of crisis
to the Revolution or to historically homologous acts of revolt, but would use the term to
describe myriad conflicts, invasions and periods of social unrest throughout history that

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had important consequences: the Völkerwanderung (barbarian invasion) of late antiquity,

the expansion of Islam under Mohammed, the Crusades, the Reformation and the Peasants’
War. What all crises had in common was the way in which they accelerated the ‘historical
process’ (Burckhardt, 1979: 213) and brought about an ‘absolutely new form of life …
founded on the destruction of what has gone before’ (1979: 247). The Migration Period,
for example, served as ‘a great rejuvenation for the moribund Roman Empire’ (1979: 336)
while the Reformation signified a great ‘transformation of the world’ (Burckhardt, 1999:
101) and a ‘tremendous intellectual change in Germany’ (1999: 76). By contrast, the
English Civil War was not a genuine crisis, as it did not ‘for one moment attack the prin-
ciples of civic life, never stirred up the supreme powers of the nation, spent its early years
as a slow legal process, and by 1644 had passed into the hands of the parliamentary army
and its Napoleon, thus sparing the nation the years 1792–94’ (Burckhardt, 1979: 230). The
conflict did not shake up the social and political order forcefully or quickly enough to
result in the transformation of the old order into something new, having stabilized itself
before it could reach the depths of chaos into which the Revolution descended in the years
1792–4. The Civil War, like all incomplete crises, ‘filled the air with lasting and deafening
clamour, yet [did not lead] to vital transformations’ (1979: 223).
Most readings of Burckhardt tend to focus on his concept of crisis solely as it relates
to his views on the French Revolution and on how the Revolution had torn man from the
‘spiritual continuum’ (1979: 38) linking him to the past. These interpreters are right to
point out that, for Burckhardt, the knowledge of cultural achievements of the past and a
feeling for the intellectual continuum linking one to one’s ancestors was what separated
civilized man from the barbarian: ‘It is self-evidently the special duty of the educated to
perfect and complete, as well as they can, the picture of the continuity of the world and
mankind from the beginning’, he argued in his Griechische Kulturgeschichte, ‘This
marks off conscious beings from the unconscious barbarian. The vision of both past and
future is what distinguishes human beings from the animals’ (Burckhardt, 1998: 12). To
the secular mind of Burckhardt, to be separated from the achievements of the past would
mean to lose man’s only possession of truly enduring value:

that continuity [of intellectual tradition] is a prime concern of man’s earthly life … for whether
a spiritual continuity existed without our knowledge … we cannot tell, and in any case cannot
imagine it; hence we most urgently desire that the awareness of that continuity should remain
living in our minds. (Burckhardt, 1979: 338)

The Revolution had torn this ‘spiritual continuity’ asunder. It marked a complete break
from the past, and as a result of its great upheavals, Burckhardt wrote to Gottfried Kinkel
in 1842, ‘the nineteenth century began with a tabula rasa in relation to everything’
(Burckhardt, 2001: 46). Great historical transformations like the Revolution, he wrote,
‘are always bought dearly, often after one has already thought that one got them at a
bargain price … How much must perish so that something new may arise!’ (Burckhardt,
1999: 77, 79) Burckhardt’s view of 1789 as an unbridgeable gap between the present and
the pre-Revolutionary epoch was an idea of Tocqueville’s, whose 1856 L’Ancien Régime
et la Révolution influenced the development of Burckhardt’s views on the Revolution.4
His language echoed that of Tocqueville’s:

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no nation had ever before embarked on so resolute an attempt as that of the French in 1789 to
break with the past, to make, as it were, a scission in their life line and to create an unbridgeable
gulf between all they had hitherto been and all they now aspired to be. (Tocqueville, 1983: vii)

Most significantly for Burckhardt, the changes wrought by the Revolution were respon-
sible for having made possible the rise of the democratic and capitalistic modern state.
This state was one in which the concerns of culture had been displaced by those of busi-
ness and power politics, art was replaced by technology as the focus of society’s creative
energies. Modern Europeans had begun to resemble Americans, Burckhardt wrote, who
in their lack of historical understanding were akin to barbarians:

people of American culture … have to a great extent forgone history, that is, spiritual
continuity, and wish to share in the enjoyment of art and poetry merely as forms of luxury. Art
and poetry themselves are in our day in the most wretched plight, for they have no spiritual
home in our ugly, restless world, and any creative spontaneity is seriously menaced.
(Burckhardt, 1979: 106)

Burckhardt stressed how the rise of the masses in the post-Revolutionary era signified
the twilight of old Europe and the dawn of a new age of cultural mediocrity. As David
Gross argues, the ‘fast-tempo, present-mindedness, utilitarianism, acquisitiveness,
practicality … endorsement of science, technology, and nationalism’ of the modern
masses represented to Burckhardt a ‘bourgeois ethos’ that had pushed Europe ‘so far into
materialism that it no longer knew how to get back in touch with the vital stream of life’,
and thus severed it from its ‘spiritual heritage (Erinnerungenswelt)’ (Gross, 1978: 396–
7). This ‘bourgeois ethos’ of middle-class ‘mass man’ was complemented by the growing
radicalism of the working classes, and by an increasing instability in inter-state relations.
The revolutionary legacy of 1789, combined with widespread dissatisfaction among the
peoples of Europe, had led to the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which in turn gave way
to the wars of the 1850s – the Crimean War of 1853–6 and the Italian War of 1858 – and
then to Bismarck’s Wars of Unification.
Burckhardt did not offer any significant suggestions for the reform of present-day
Europe. His pessimism about human nature and about the possibility of long-term politi-
cal progress prevented him from doing so; moreover, the reform movements of his con-
temporaries appeared to him as only compounding the problems posed by the emergence
of the modern state.5 Nevertheless, Burckhardt saw his practice of cultural history as
performing a vital function in the spiritually bankrupt era in which he lived: preserving
the continuity of Western culture in the face of the massive upheavals brought about by
modernity.6 Most interpreters of Burckhardt emphasize these conservative implications
of his concept of crisis: for the cultural historian, they argue, whose task it was to study
the unchanging nature of man across time and his cultural achievements of enduring
value, the crisis was historiographically significant only insofar as it represented a threat
to this continuum. As John Hinde writes:

Burckhardt’s cultural history, formulated initially against the backdrop of revolution in the
turbulent 1840s, was an aesthetic response to a perceived political and cultural crisis in the

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Western world. It was an attempt to create a new historical discourse or language which,
without resorting to contemporary theories of progress in history, could explain not only the
phenomenon of crisis and change in history but also the continuity of the Western cultural
heritage. (Hinde, 1992: 435–6)

Jörn Rüsen agrees: ‘Burckhardt surpasses the discontinuity of his age, the age of revolu-
tion, by having recourse to the surprahistorical, that is anthropological nature of human
mind’ (Rüsen, 1985: 242). According to these readings, it was this ‘great general crisis’
of his own century that Burckhardt primarily had in mind when he spoke of the historical
crisis in this section of his lectures.7
Given this focus, it is unsurprising that interpreters often neglect to comment on the
fact that Burckhardt praised the crisis for the role it could play in accelerating historical
development and bringing about massive change, and that his concept of crisis had dual
connotations, both negative and positive.8 Burckhardt dedicated much space in these
lectures to describing what good they could bring, and argued that the crisis was to be
regarded as a ‘genuine sign of vitality’ and as ‘an expedient of nature, like a fever … the
fanaticisms are signs that there still exist for men things they prize more than life and
property’ (Burckhardt, 1979: 248). Despite the fact that the crisis could uproot man from
tradition and cut him off from the past, the developmental acceleration brought by the
crisis was at times necessary for his ‘spiritual growth’: ‘All spiritual growth takes place
by leaps and bounds, both in the individual and, as here, in the community. The crisis is
to be regarded as a new nexus of growth’ (1979: 248).9 Indeed, Burckhardt continued, the
significance of these moments of ‘rapid movement’ in history ‘resides in the destruction
of the old and the clearing of the way for the new’ (1979: 330).
Burckhardt’s positive estimation of the ability of the crisis to ‘accelerate’ historical
development is striking: not only is it at odds with the supposedly anti-developmental
focus of his histories, but it also raises the question of whether his historiography, despite
his own claims to the contrary, contained certain teleological elements. What exactly did
Burckhardt mean when he spoke of the ‘spiritual growth’ and the ‘higher development’
of man? Was there a goal towards which this development tended? The answer is clearly
in the negative: for Burckhardt, development was not synonymous with long-term
progress. The ‘progressive way of thinking’, he wrote, would lead one to ignore ‘the
silenced moans of all the vanquished, who as a rule, had wanted nothing else but parta
tueri’ (Burckhardt, 1999: 79). And contrary to Hegel’s claims, even if there were a
rational plan underlying the processes of history, ‘we are not … privy to the purposes of
eternal wisdom: they are beyond our ken’ (Burckhardt, 1979: 33). The ‘spiritual growth’
and ‘higher development’ of man was his passage into periods of relatively greater
cultural vibrancy; there was nothing dictating, however, that history tended towards
these periods or that they would be long in duration. The Renaissance, an epoch unri-
valled in its artistic brilliance, had been superseded by periods of inferior cultural signifi-
cance, which in turn had led to the decadence and mediocrity of European modernity.
There was no ultimate goal of history, nor any law of development that explained its past
and future paths.10 Burckhardt’s suggestion here that the crisis was the ‘nexus’ of ‘spir-
itual growth’ did not imply a teleology of continual development or progress. Instead,
Burckhardt suggested, the crisis contributed to man’s ‘growth’ simply by clearing the

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ground of moribund political and social institutions, and by allowing for the emergence
of ‘strong personalities’ and communities of greater intellectual and cultural vibrancy:
‘Crises clear the ground, first of a host of institutions from which life has long since
departed, and which, given their historical privilege, could not have been swept away in
any other fashion’ (1979: 248–9). These strong personalities, in turn, were ‘necessary to
our life in order that the movement of history may periodically wrest itself free from
antiquated forms of life and empty argument’ (1979: 315).11 And while the chaos of the
crisis could disrupt creative productivity, it could also encourage the creation of great art.
Augustine’s De civitate Dei and Dante’s Divina Commedia, Burckhardt argued, were
both the products of their authors’ experience of crisis (1979: 249).
Burckhardt was clear: not all crises contributed to the ‘spiritual growth’ of man and
his communities. Some, like the Mongol invasions of Muslim lands during the thirteenth
century, simply resulted in the destruction of previous forms of life and offered nothing
of renewed vitality in their stead; others, such as the English Civil War, did not go far
enough and thus left standing antecedent social and political forms. The ‘genuine crisis’,
Burckhardt wrote, occurred only in the ‘fusion of a fresh physical force with an old one,
which, however, [survives] in a spiritual metamorphosis’ (1979: 223). The truest exam-
ple of this kind of crisis was the Völkerwanderung, which brought fresh spiritual vitality
to the dying Empire, and transformed the Roman state into the church. Not all invasions
would bring such rejuvenation: there was, Burckhardt wrote, ‘a purely negative and
destructive barbarism’; however, there was also a ‘healthy barbarism, in which superior
faculties lie latent’ (1979: 216). The latter would bring rejuvenation to a spiritually bank-
rupt form of life by carrying ‘a youthful race capable of assuming culture into an older,
already cultured race’ (1979: 214).
Burckhardt further developed this idea of the ‘genuine crisis’ in a lecture on the his-
tory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from May 1869:

The development of the West has the most genuine characteristic of life: out of the struggle of
its opposites something really new develops; new contrasts supplant the old; it is not a mere
inconsequential, almost identical repetition of military, palace, and dynastic revolutions, as
happened for seven hundred years in Byzantium and even longer in Islam. At each struggle
people become different and give evidence of it. (1999: 164–5)

Most readings of Burckhardt that claim his histories were concerned only with those
aspects of human life that remained constant and unchanging across time do not give
sufficient weight to passages such as the one above, which maintain that the long history
of Europe exhibited a great diversity of forms of life and that genuine change and develop-
ment occurred throughout this history through the intermingling of old and new forces.
This development and transition were facilitated by the meeting of opposing forces in
conflict: ‘the great forces, individual as well as collective, develop only in struggles, and
these can be very terrible’ (1999: 68); thus, in the study of European history, Burckhardt
wrote, we must see ‘discordia as concors’ (1999: 164). A prime instance of this meeting
of new and old forces was the Protestant Reformation: by the sixteenth century,
Burckhardt wrote, the church had lost its spiritual vitality, having traded contemptus
saeculi for worldliness. Incapable on its own of a self-revitalization, he continued, it was

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only through its conflict with the nascent Protestants that the decadent church was to
receive new life.12
Burckhardt’s source for this notion of ‘concordia discors’ in history was the 1856
Neuer Versuch einer alten, auf die Wahrheit der Tatsachen gegründeten Philosophie der
Geschichte by Ernst von Lasaulx, a philosopher and philologist at the Universities of
Würzburg and Munich in the 1830s and 40s.13 The text, all but forgotten in the twentieth
century, was profoundly influential on Burckhardt’s composition of the lectures ‘Über
das Studium der Geschichte’. Indeed, despite the purportedly anti-philosophical perspec-
tive of the lectures, Burckhardt was deeply drawn to Lasaulx’s philosophy of history.
And it was likely Lasaulx, not only Herder (1979: 34), that Burckhardt had in mind when
he admitted in his lectures that he was ‘indebted’ to the ‘centaur’ of the philosophy of
history and that it was a ‘pleasure to come across him now and then on the fringe of the
forest of historical study. Whatever his principles may have been, he has hewn some vast
vistas through the forest and lent spice to history’ (1979: 34). Burckhardt’s ‘Über das
Studium der Geschichte’ lectures reference Lasaulx six times – more than anyone else.
And beyond these direct citations, Lasaulx’s voice can be heard throughout. An earlier
draft of the lectures displays how central Lasaulx was to their formation. In Burckhardt’s
notes in this draft, Lasaulx’s name appears in reference to an alarming diversity of topics:
inter alia, ‘the general laws of life and decline’; ‘the religious movements of the seventh
century’; ‘the movement of world history from east to west’; ‘the growth, blossoming,
and decay of spiritual and bodily, and collective and individual things’; ‘theory of reju-
venation through invasion’. (Burckhardt, 1982: 168, 169, 170, 175, 205 n. 2).
While Burckhardt would have had little patience for the more teleological, specula-
tive and theological aspects of Lasaulx’s philosophy of history, he was drawn to
Lasaulx’s descriptions of the catalysing effects of turmoil and conflict on historical
developmental: ‘out of the opposition and conflict of powers the most beautiful har-
mony emerges … rerum Concordia discors’ (Lasaulx, 1952: 117). Burckhardt’s notion
of the Völkerwanderung as a ‘genuine crisis’ that grafted the new, vital energies of the
barbarian tribes onto the dying Roman Empire, for example, appears to have been
plucked directly from the Philosophie der Geschichte: in an earlier draft of his lectures,
Burckhardt would cite Lasaulx by name in his notes on the ‘primitive crises’ and the
Völkerwanderung (Burckhardt, 1982: 205). According to Lasaulx, the barbarian tribes’
transformation of the Empire demonstrates ‘the oft observed law of nature that the life of
an aging people is rejuvenated in the same way the noble fruit tree is’ (1952: 121).
Lasaulx’s analogy of the rejuvenation of the domesticated olive-tree through the grafting
of the bough of its wild cousin was undoubtedly the model for Burckhardt’s notion of the
‘genuine crisis’ as the ‘fusion of a fresh physical force with an old one’:

When a domestic olive-tree in Jerusalem begins to grow old and to die, the young branch of a
wild olive-tree is implanted in order to refresh and rejuvenate it. As a result, the dying
domesticated olive-tree is rejuvenated and the wild branch is tamed. This same law shows itself
in the great process of rejuvenation in the history of European peoples. (Lasaulx, 1952: 121)

For both Lasaulx and Burckhardt, the Völkerwanderung marked the birth of Europe
from antiquity, with the crisis of the barbarian invasions providing the momentum

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necessary for such a massive transition.14 Burckhardt would admit in his lectures that
Lasaulx displayed a ‘somewhat facile optimism with regards to the fruits of such inva-
sions’ (Burckhardt, 1979: 214). This admission, however, stemmed from his refusal, unlike
Lasaulx, to pigeonhole historical phenomena such as invasions into playing specific, cat-
egorical roles in an overarching philosophy of history. For Burckhardt, invasions and other
crises could be both rejuvenating and purely destructive, depending on circumstances. He
agreed with Lasaulx that given the right conditions, the crisis of invasion – when a ‘youth-
ful race capable of assuming culture’ is brought into contact with ‘an older, already cultured
race’ – could have a positive transformative impact on the course of history.
Burckhardt’s concept of crisis also seems to have borrowed from Lasaulx’s descrip-
tion of the phenomenon of revolution. Like Burckhardt, Lasaulx distinguished between
revolutionary moments that encouraged the higher development of a culture and those
that contributed to its downfall. A revolution during the ‘youth’ of a culture, Lasaulx
wrote, should be understood as a necessary, purificatory stage in the process of its
development:

Revolutions, through which this natural process of transformation of constitutional-forms is

brought about, are also developmental illnesses (Entwicklungskrankheiten) in the political life
of a people … when they occur in the youth of a people, when this people is in a stage of
ascendance, they are often actually sanative. (Lasaulx, 1952: 131)

While revolution should be considered an ‘illness’, it was the kind of illness that ren-
dered a people healthier and stronger that it had been originally, a necessary stage in its
‘natural process of transformation’. If the revolution occurred in the ‘old age’ of a cul-
ture, however, it would lead to its death. A democratic revolution, which according to
Lasaulx’s political typology would occur only in this advanced stage, would be ‘as dan-
gerous as severe illnesses in the old age of an individual’ (Lasaulx, 1952: 131). This
medical language would reappear in Burckhardt’s description of the crisis as ‘an expedi-
ent of nature, like a fever’ (Burckhardt, 1979: 248); for both, the phenomenon of violent
social and political upheaval, given the right circumstances, could act to accelerate the
natural processes of the growth and development of a people or culture. Burckhardt
would agree with Lasaulx that when

civilization reaches a certain level, the apex of its formation, there is no other way to achieve a
new starting-point and a new progressive development of life (Lebensentwicklung) as a
momentary return to the condition of natural wildness. Because only out of the wilderness does
fresh game (Wildbret) and fresh life emerge. (Lasaulx, 1952: 131–2)

While the intellectual germs of Burckhardt’s concept of crisis came in large part from
these theories of Lasaulx’s, the actual term ‘crisis’ (Krise or Crisis) was absent from the
latter’s Philosophie der Geschichte, making the proximate sources for Burckhardt’s ‘cri-
sis’ term more difficult to locate. By the 1860s, ‘crisis’ as a category of political analysis
was still a young concept, having appeared in German-speaking lands only in the eigh-
teenth century. Until then it was primarily used as a medical term denoting a critical stage
or turning-point in an illness.15 The eighteenth-century political meaning of ‘crisis’ – a

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316 Journal of European Studies 40(4)

critical moment in the evolution of a political body – remained analogous to this original
medical signification. Leibniz, for example, used it in 1712 to describe the emergence of
Russia as a world-power in the early years of that century: ‘Europe is now in a state of
change and in a crisis [crise] such as has not been known since Charlemagne’s empire’
(Koselleck, 2006: 363). After 1789, the term came increasingly to signify a political
event of sufficient gravity as to constitute a turning-point in history. Friedrich Schlegel
wrote in 1810 that ‘the national character of the European state system has already expe-
rienced three great evolutions in the course of three decisive crises – in the time of the
crusades, in the period of the Reformation and discovery of America, and in our own
century’ (Koselleck, 2006: 380). During this period, the term retained both optimistic
and pessimistic connotations: for some, the ‘crisis’ would signify a historical turning-
point that ushered in a brighter future, and was frequently used in this sense to describe
the historical significance of the French and American Revolutions. Others used the term
to describe the horrors of periods of upheaval and violence. An older, more conservative
Schlegel would describe the revolutionary ethos of his era as promising ‘a new epoch
that threatens everyone with a new and terrible crisis and general upheaval’ (Koselleck,
2006: 380). For Burckhardt, the term would come to carry both of these positive and
negative significations.
One proximate source for Burckhardt’s crisis theory may have been the mid-century
work of Johann Gustav Droysen, a former teacher of Burckhardt’s at the University of
Berlin and a prominent Prussian historian. In particular, Droysen’s 1854 essay ‘Zur
Charakteristik der europäischen Krise’ (Droysen, 1933) spoke of the crisis in terms very
similar to Burckhardt’s own.16 Like Burckhardt, Droysen described the political order of
contemporary Europe as teetering on the brink of collapse as the result of several specific
events: the 1848 revolutions and their lingering impact on the European state system, the
outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853, the rise of tzarist Russia and a rejuvenated imperial
France, and growing instability in the European balance of power: ‘So is the present:
everything is uncertain, in immeasurable disruption, fermentation, wildness. The entire
past is exhausted, falsified, worm-eaten, incapable of being retrieved. And the new is still
formless, goalless, chaotic, and only destructive’ (Droysen, 1933: 328). Both Burckhardt
and Droysen saw the inevitable consequence of the present state of crisis as the outbreak
of a great Europe-wide war: ‘Finally to the heart of the “driving-force of disaster”
(Treiber des Unheils), a war in the most horrific dimensions’ (Droysen, 1933: 328). Like
Burckhardt’s, Droysen’s concept of crisis was not limited to describing contemporary
problems in the European political order, but was also a term of broader historiographical
significance: ‘We stand in the middle of the kind of great crisis,’ Droysen wrote, ‘that
bridges the gap between one epoch and another, a crisis that resembles that of the
Crusades … that of the era of Reformation, when America appeared on the horizon of
history’ (Droysen, 1933: 328).17 Both Droysen and Burckhardt saw the present-day crisis
as homologous to that of the Reformation, the Crusades, and even the discovery of
America,18 in that it signalled the transition from one epoch to another. In the intensity of
its upheaval, they agreed, European man would pass over into a new age. As Droysen
argued in his Historik lectures, ‘the old becomes the new in this terrifying process; parties,
the order of things, ideas all decompose; a kind of permutation and transformation occurs
… a new world breaks through; finally it appears’ (Hardtwig, 1974: 375).

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Another possible point of reference for Burckhardt was the Young Hegelians, Arnold
Ruge and Bruno Bauer in particular. For Ruge, as for Burckhardt, the crisis would catalyse
the transition from one epoch to another. It was the moment when the old order dissolved
and was replaced by the new: ‘the crisis [is] … nothing less than the attempt to break
through and discard the shell of the past … a sign that something new has developed’
(Koselleck, 2006: 384). The crisis determinately negated the present, and made possible
the emergence of something radically new in its stead. It was a normal, periodic occur-
rence throughout history; as Bauer wrote, ‘history will take care of the crisis and its out-
come’ (Koselleck, 2006: 385). Marx, of course, would also take up the term to describe
periodic breakdowns in the balance between production and consumption that would lead
ultimately to the collapse of capitalism and to the advent of a new age (Starn, 1971: 7–10).
It is unlikely that Ruge or Marx were direct influences on Burckhardt. We know that
Burckhardt was a reader of both and an exact contemporary of the latter – he was only
20 days younger than Marx (Kaegi, 1947–82: 3.331; 5.621–2; 2.437; 6.58 and Ganz,
1982: 24) – but we can also be sure that Burckhardt would not have found either a com-
fortable intellectual bedfellow: both exemplified exactly the kind of mid-century radical-
ism of which Burckhardt was deeply suspicious, and the generally Hegelian philosophical
outlook within which they formulated their historical theories would have clashed with
Burckhardt’s own avowed anti-Hegelian outlook. But the rhetorical proximity of Ruge’s
description of the crisis as ‘breaking through and discarding the shell of the past’ and
Burckhardt’s as ‘the destruction of the old and the clearing of the way for the new’ is
undeniable (see Burckhardt, 1979: 330) – a fact that suggests Burckhardt may have at
least been aware of and intrigued by the historico-philosophical ideas formulated within
radical German intellectual circles of his day. While Burckhardt’s praise for the crisis
was not a call for immediate revolution, both for him and for Ruge it was to be antici-
pated for the same reason: as a ‘new nexus of growth’ and an ‘accelerated movement of
the whole process of history’. Whether intentionally or not, the Basel patrician found
himself parroting the eschatological rhetoric of his radical peers.
Thus, whatever the immediate source of his concept of crisis, Burckhardt’s positive
evaluation of the ability of the crisis to bring massive change and a ‘regeneration of life’
in the abolition of the old order sits uncomfortably with his purportedly conservative
outlook and his views on cultural continuity. Here an important tension in his thought
becomes apparent: while on the one hand dedicating his efforts as a historian to the pres-
ervation of man’s ties to his cultural achievements of the past, an aspect of his thought
that is continually emphasized by his interpreters, Burckhardt, on the other hand, thought
that periodic upheavals were necessary for the passage of man to ages of relatively
greater cultural vibrancy: ‘we must admit that permanence means paralysis and death.
Only in movement, with all its pain, can life live’ (Burckhardt, 1979: 329). And while the
crises of Burckhardt’s day had cut man off from his past and subordinated the ends of
culture to the ends of business and power politics, Burckhardt was adamant that a genu-
ine crisis, if of the right nature and occurring in the proper circumstances, could bring
new life to a people worn down by the present. An important question thus arises: did
Burckhardt believe it was possible in his own day that a new, genuine crisis could over-
turn the current order of modern Europe and push man beyond the mediocrity of the
present towards ‘higher development’?

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The rejuvenating potential of warfare

If so, Burckhardt certainly did not advocate revolution as a means to radical change.
After the failures of 1848, he continually insisted that revolution would only bring fur-
ther destruction to Europe’s already enfeebled culture. On the other hand, Burckhardt did
seem to suggest in his ‘Über das Studium der Geschichte’ lectures that the crisis of war
could push Europe out of the doldrums of the present and into a new era of regenerated
life and energy. He described at length how war could act as such a catalyst: ‘we must
already consider war as a crisis in the relations of people and a necessary factor of higher
development’ (Burckhardt, 1979: 216). War called forth the vital energies of a nation, he
continued, rejuvenating ‘the precarious, fear-ridden, distressful lives’ of a people ener-
vated by long periods of peace: ‘A people actually feels its full strength as a people only
in war … war restores real ability to honour’ (1979: 218). Burckhardt’s description of the
rejuvenative and purificatory potential of warfare was framed in similar terms to those of
the genuine crisis: in war, a ‘real regeneration of life’ could be achieved, he wrote,
through the ‘reconciliation in the abolition of an old order by a really vital new one’
(1979: 219):

Warlike exploits in particular are disproportionately dazzling, for they directly affect the fate of
countless peoples, and again indirectly by establishing new conditions of life, which may be
very durable. In this case the new kind of life is the criterion of greatness … These new
conditions of life, however, must not merely consist in shifts of power. They must produce a
great regeneration of national life. (1979: 302)

Quoting Heraclitus’s glorification of war as ‘father of all things’ (1979: 217), Burckhardt
again invoked Lasaulx’s principle of concordia discors to describe the fruits of warfare:
‘Lasaulx accordingly explains that antagonism is the cause of all growth, the “discordant
harmony” or the “harmonious conflict” of things’ (1979: 217). War would channel the
energies of a nation into the service of some great ideal, and would call forth heroism and
virtue from a populace that, in idleness, had become cowardly and iniquitous. Most of all,
war would teach the individual to subordinate his own will to the greater good of the col-
lective: ‘war alone grants to mankind the magnificent spectacle of a general submission
to a general aim’ (1979: 218). Burckhardt’s was not an unconditional glorification of
conflict. ‘Every successive act of violence is a scandal’, he wrote, and it was wishful
thinking ‘to prophesy of all destruction that regeneration will come of it’ (1979: 219).
Nevertheless, a genuine war, one that placed the existence of a people or a nation at
stake – the Greeks’ defence of Hellas in the Persian War or the Dutch stand against the
Spanish, for example – could revitalize a moribund and decadent people or nation. It
would be one in which the ‘full forces of despair’ would have to come into play: as the
life of a people hung in the balance, this people would draw from the deepest wellsprings of
its energy to protect itself. And in so doing, Burckhardt suggested, it would achieve new life.
The radicalness of Burckhardt’s theory of war can be seen in his choice of citations in
this section of his lectures. Burckhardt called on Lasaulx’s view of war as ‘divine in
character, a world law and present in all nature’, to support his own: ‘Not without cause
do the Indians worship Shiva, the god of destruction’ (1979: 217). He agreed with the

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philologist that ‘in the moral world, wars are what thunderstorms are in the physical
world, they purify and freshen the atmosphere’, and that war would encourage contem-
porary man to adopt the virtue of the ancient heroes (altheroischen Tugenden), calling to
life his ‘fear of God, battle-courage, and obedience’ (Lasaulx, 1952: 117). For Lasaulx,
the waning of cultural vitality in nineteenth-century Europe was intimately tied to the
decline of European soldierly virtue. And only war could be the rejuvenative shock, the
‘thunderstorm’, that reawakened European man from his degenerate state and called him
forth to greatness (Tonsor, 1964: 379–85). Burckhardt also drew support for his views
from the conservative Prussian historian Heinrich Leo: ‘we might here also recall H. Leo’s
reference to “fresh and cheerful war, which shall sweep away the scrofulous mob”’
(Burckhardt, 1979: 217). Burckhardt’s decision to cite Leo is striking, as the latter
espoused precisely the kind of Prussian militaristic nationalism Burckhardt found so
distasteful. An early supporter of Bismarck, Leo saw Prussia’s rise to power as linked to
her success on the battlefield. In a letter from 1842, he called for the ‘devouring of our
miserable neighbouring nations’ (Schoeps, 1981: 152), and in 1853, in the passage that
Burckhardt would quote in his lectures, Leo declared that ‘God should send for our
salvation ... a fresh and cheerful war’ (1981: 153).19 While Leo’s imperial nationalism
would not have appealed to Burckhardt, he was evidently sympathetic to Leo’s views on
warfare and on how its destructive energy could transform a nation. And both agreed:
the advent of war would be welcomed if it would ‘silence’ the ‘scrofulous’ masses
(Burckhardt, 1979: 218).
The complexity of Burckhardt’s attitude towards warfare is further demonstrated in
his reflections in ‘Über das Studium der Geschichte’ on Bismarck’s wars. While inter-
preters are quick to point out Burckhardt’s disapproval of Bismarck’s assertive foreign
policy, and read his opposition to Bismarck’s wars as proof of his anti-Reich political
orientation,20 it is less frequently recognized that one of the principal reasons for his
disapproval of these wars was that they were insufficiently grave and existentially threat-
ening to constitute genuine crises:

the wars of today are certainly aspects of a great general crisis, but individually they lack the
significance and effect of genuine crises. Civilian life remains in its rut in spite of them, and it
is precisely the pitiable existences referred to above which survive … Their brevity too deprives
them of their value as crises. (1979: 219)

These paltry, brief wars never once put the existence of either belligerent at serious risk.
They left civilian life untouched, the Volk unchallenged to shed blood for the sake of the
nation. Modern mass life would continue its ‘pitiable existence’ in a ‘rut’ of a society,
sapped of what cultural vitality it once had. Only a great war, Burckhardt continued, one
that required the submission of the nation to a cause of utmost existential significance,
and one that dissolved the boundary between battlefield and home front, could have
value as a crisis, and could ‘bring about a real regeneration of life, that is, reconciliation
in the abolition of an old order by a really vital new one’ (1979: 219).
While these minor wars would never achieve this regenerative power, they laid the
groundwork for a future war that perhaps could: ‘these wars leave behind them vast
debts, that is, they bequeath the main crisis to the future’ (1979: 219). Burckhardt

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described what this ‘main crisis’ would be in a lecture from November 1867: ‘At this
very moment events are being shaped, and on the horizon, in the near or distant future,
there is a great European war as a consequence of everything that has gone before’ (1999:
223). Burckhardt limited his discussion of this coming ‘great European war’ to only a
few scattered suggestions, from which it is difficult to determine with certainty how
hopeful he was about the regenerative potential of its outbreak: ‘The great continental
war which must destroy all weaker state structures’, he wrote, will bring ‘times of terror
and profoundest misery’, the outcome of which would be uncertain. Nevertheless,
Burckhardt was optimistic that European man would survive this war, and perhaps
emerge from it into a brighter era: ‘mankind is not yet destined for downfall, and Nature
is creating as graciously as ever’ (1999: 230). And as he had earlier suggested in a letter
to Kinkel, ‘I still anticipate frightful crises, but mankind will survive them, and Germany
will then perhaps attain its golden age’ (2001: 47).
It is possible that Burckhardt was here predicting the outbreak of Prussia’s 1870–1
war with France. In January 1871, Burckhardt did remark that the war with Napoleonic
France was much more significant than Bismarck’s prior conflicts: ‘A great war has
broken out … setting power against power on the biggest scale and throwing the two
greatest nations in Europe back on their elementary powers’ (Burckhardt 1979: 184).21
The 1870–1 war, however, was ultimately a disappointment; as he remarked in a March
1873 version of the ‘Über das Studium der Geschichte’ lectures:

The first great phenomenon to follow the war of 1870–1 was a further extraordinary
intensification of moneymaking … The spiritual results … are that the so-called best minds are
going into business or are actually being educated to that end by their parents … Art and
science have the greatest difficulty in preventing themselves from sinking into a mere branch
of urban moneymaking and from being carried away on the stream of general unrest … What
classes and strata of society will now become the real representatives of culture, will give us
our scholars, artists, and poets, our creative personalities? Or is everything to turn into big
business, as in America? (1979: 265–6)

As he was with most incidents of crisis, Burckhardt was both apprehensive and enthusi-
astic about the event of war:22 depending on the nature of its occasion and the circum-
stances in which it occurred, war could be purely destructive or rejuvenating; a terrible
break in the continuity of man’s history and culture or a means by which a new era of
greater vibrancy could be ushered in. His remarks about Bismarck’s wars are frequently
marked by this ambivalence; decrying the deleterious effects the war with France would
have on German cultural life, Burckhardt still greeted it with a morbid fascination: ‘but
what a tremendous spectacle (Schauspiel)’, he wrote to von Preen on New Year’s Eve
1870, ‘if the new world is born in great suffering’ (Burckhardt, 2001: 140).
Burckhardt’s scattered suggestions about the vitalizing effects of warfare – its ability
to ‘rouse the nations to their very depths’ (Burckhardt 2001: 138) and call up their ‘vital
energy’ (1979: 217) – again bring to mind the tension in his thought between the valuing
of continuity for its own sake and the desire for massive change that would propel man
forwards towards ‘spiritual growth’. Given the wilfully unsystematic nature of his
thought and his reluctance to prophesy,23 it is difficult to say with certainty whether

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Burckhardt saw war as a possible way out of the degenerate order of the present.
Nevertheless, the fact that he described the regenerative potential of warfare in conjunc-
tion with his negative assessment of the inability of present wars to achieve this end
suggests that Burckhardt may have imagined that a great future war might indeed accom-
plish what these wars had been unable to: a real ‘regeneration of life’.24

The politics of crisis

By looking at Burckhardt’s idea of the rapid development of history in the event of warfare
and the crisis, we can come to a more nuanced understanding of his political thought. Most
readings of Burckhardt as a political thinker have attempted to locate him on a spectrum
ranging from traditional liberalism on the one end to reactionary conservatism on the
other; almost none, however, have taken into account the implications of his concept of
crisis for his political views.25 Briefly stated, the standard interpretative foci of the litera-
ture on Burckhardt’s political thought are the following: those that emphasize his distance
from Ranke and the Prussian School, and their nationalistic sympathies for Bismarck’s
state, tend to see Burckhardt as closer to the liberal pole. Those that stress his disdain for
democracy, the masses, and modern culture see him as closer to the conservative.
The former reading highlights the similarities between Burckhardt’s support for a lim-
ited state and a tradition of German liberal political thought, particularly as found in the
works of Wilhelm von Humboldt.26 Burckhardt’s state had the duty to guarantee law and
order, protect the security of its citizens, and regulate competition between them (1979:
71); it had no claim, however, to promote moral or cultural ends, and it was to be restricted
from interfering with the individual’s right to freedom of thought: ‘it is a philosophical
and bureaucratic arrogance, for the state to attempt to fulfil moral purposes directly, for
only society can and may do that’ (1979: 70). In the face of the powerful post-Napoleonic
state, which would inevitably have ‘a repugnance to genius’ (1979: 313), Burckhardt
argued for a limitation of the state’s role to the encouragement of individual Bildung and
the protection of one’s freedom to pursue cultural and intellectual greatness: ‘freedom of
the individual’, he wrote, is ‘the unimpeded right to know and communicate knowledge,
and the freedom of the creative impulse’ (1979: 126). Burckhardt remained pessimistic
about the possibility of radical reform, and viewed the revolutionary liberalism of his
contemporaries with disdain. Nevertheless, according to this reading, Burckhardt must be
understood as having shared with the classical German humanists the liberal view that
politics was to guarantee the ‘harmonious growth and training of all the potentialities of
the individual in proud independence from the state’ (Baron, 1960: 218-9), a state whose
unbridled pursuit of power threatened to stamp out individual brilliance.
The readings of Burckhardt as a political conservative, on the other hand, stress that
his notions of intellectual freedom did not translate into support for political freedom,
and that his brutal criticisms of democracy and the masses reflected an anti-modern,
aristocratic sensibility.27 As Burckhardt argued in his lectures, ‘the freedom of the indi-
vidual in no way implies the free right of every individual to do as he likes’ (Burckhardt,
1979: 126). Mass rule in the form of a modern democracy, he continued, would lead
ineluctably to the tyranny of the majority, whose uncultured and banausic sensibilities
would only worsen Europe’s cultural and spiritual malaise. This reading is right to point

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out certain Burkean elements in Burckhardt’s thought: like Burke, Burckhardt greeted
with deep suspicion the idea born of 1789 that progress would come through constant
change: ‘During the following three relatively peaceful decades the great new storms are
clearly getting ready, in accordance with the most profound principle of the revolution,
one which differentiates it from all earlier such events: eternal revision’ (Burckhardt,
1999: 236). In the words of Sigurdson, Burckhardt shared with Burke

the praise of tradition, the need for roots, and the championing of prudence as the proper guide
to political behaviour in a busy world. One could imagine Burckhardt nodding in approval at
these words from Burke: ‘A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and
confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their
ancestors’. (Sigurdson, 1992: 504)28

Neither of these readings of Burckhardt’s political thought, however, sits comfortably

with his praise of the developmental potential afforded by the crisis. As pointed out
above, Burckhardt’s fascination with the crisis is difficult to reconcile with his seem-
ingly conservative views on cultural continuity, tradition and change. While the French
Revolution had gone terribly wrong, its excesses were not sufficient to dissuade
Burckhardt from his view that the periodic upheaval of the status quo was necessary for
the rejuvenation of a people. And while it was the job of the cultural historian to pre-
serve a link to the past and to provide alienated modern man with roots in the great
cultures of his ancestors, Burckhardt praised the crisis for its ability to bring forth ‘abso-
lutely new forms of life … founded on the destruction of what has gone before’
(Burckhardt, 1979: 247). It is true that Burckhardt remained a bona fide counter-revolu-
tionary until his death, but it is equally true that his guarded optimism regarding the
fruits of the historical crisis echoed the rhetoric of his revolutionary contemporaries:
Ruge, Bauer and even Marx.
On the other hand, Burckhardt’s view of the crisis, particularly as it related to the
rejuvenative event of massive warfare, does not mesh easily with the liberal, humanistic
reading of his political thought. Burckhardt praised warfare for its ability to force men
into subordinating their individual wills to that of the common goals of the polity. And it
would ‘silence’ the masses who in peacetime ‘thicken the air and as a whole degrade the
nation’s blood’ with their ‘clamouring’ for non-existent rights (1979: 218). In the place
of piecemeal reform, Burckhardt called for a radical ‘regeneration’ of life: by placing the
lives of nations at stake, war would encourage a radical transformation of their status quo
existences. The rhetorical similarities between Burckhardt’s glorification of the rejuve-
native potential of warfare and those of some of his conservative Prussian contemporaries –
Heinrich Leo or even Heinrich von Treitschke – should give pause to those readers of
Burckhardt who neatly categorize him as a humanist.29
Egon Flaig is one of the only interpreters of Burckhardt to point out the implications
of views on warfare for his political thought. In contrast to Carl von Clausewitz’s mili-
tary doctrines of limited war, Flaig writes, Burckhardt ‘sketched the basis for a theory of
“total war” that stood in sharp contrast to the official military doctrines endorsed in
Prussia and elsewhere at the time’ (Flaig, 2003: 31). ‘Total war’ was important for
Burckhardt, according to Flaig, as it would generate an energy and vitality that could be
carried over into peacetime and transferred to the ends of culture. In this way, Flaig

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boldly claims, Burckhardt’s aestheticization of war foreshadowed that of the ‘war gen-
eration’ writers of 1920s Germany. According to all of these thinkers,

only in permanent armed conflict could man retain his cultural dimension and rise above
material interests; once this struggle abated, society was unable to sustain the level of spiritual
intensity attained in war; as soon as peace set in, this intensity degenerated completely …
Spengler, Jünger, Heidegger ... fomented to the point of paranoia this fear of cultural decline,
of sinking into the morass of material interests or a state of inauthenticity. But hardly anybody
articulated this fear as vehemently as Burckhardt. (Flaig, 2003: 33)

Flaig’s interpretation of Burckhardt as a proto-fascist, intended to challenge the histori-

an’s liberal apologists, goes too far, and wilfully overlooks other elements of Burckhardt’s
politics that coexisted with his radical, anti-liberal views on war: his respect for indi-
vidual intellectual freedom, distrust of the Machtstaat and disdain for radical national-
ism. Indeed, many fascist historians and apologists for the Third Reich would accuse the
Swiss historian of having harboured values antithetical to those of the National Socialist
state (Gossman, 2002: 566).
But if Burckhardt was not a proto-fascist, nor a radical, nor a liberal humanist, nor a
conservative tout court, how should we categorize his historical and political thought?
This paper suggests that the attempt to do so, and to deftly interpret his concept of crisis
so that it is compatible with a rigid historiographical or political category, is ultimately
futile. Burckhardt would have thought so himself: ‘we shall … make no attempt at sys-
tem’, he stated in the introduction to ‘Über das Studium der Geschichte’; and as he told
Paul Heyse in 1862, ‘I will never establish a school!’ (Burckhardt, 1949–86: 4.125).
While Burckhardt’s political thought exhibited both liberal and conservative elements,
his view of the regenerative potential of crises does not fit comfortably under either
label. Nor should it be seen as pointing to revolutionary longings on his part or to a proto-
fascistic, palingenetic radicalism.
The tensions within Burckhardt’s political thought are ultimately akin to those within
his historiography: on the one hand, in both his histories and political writings Burckhardt
stressed continuity. In the former, Burckhardt searched the past for what was constant and
recurring in the human experience; in the latter, he critiqued the levelling tendencies of
modern society and the despotism of the powerful modern state for cutting man off from
the ‘spiritual continuum’ connecting him to the past and for crushing his centuries-long
traditions of culture underfoot. On the other hand, Burckhardt’s histories were also dedi-
cated to understanding how development over time occurred, and how it was speeded up
in the event of the crisis. And the latter concern had important implications for his politics:
social and political turmoil and upheaval were often necessary for man to break through
periods of cultural and intellectual stagnancy and to move into eras of greater vibrancy.
These tensions in Burckhardt’s thought that come to the fore when we closely exam-
ine his writings on crisis mirror the tensions that have existed within the modes of the
term’s employment since the early nineteenth century. As a historico-philosophical con-
cept, ‘crisis’ has led a dual existence: employed by progressives to indicate the moment
when the present will slough off the burdens off the past, and by reactionaries to warn
against the dangers of time falling out of joint. Burckhardt was aware of both implica-
tions of the term: ‘Plato’s Republic contains a theory of the avoidance of crises’,

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Burckhardt told his students near the conclusion of his lectures on ‘Die geschichtlichen
Crisen’, ‘What bondage is the price of that avoidance!’ (1979: 248).30

Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the anonymous referees and to Martin Ruehl and Peter Dietrich for their com-
ments on earlier drafts of this paper. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

Notes
1 One notable exception is Schieder (1962).
2 For a reading of Burckhardt as a ‘synchronic’ historian, see Gossman (2000: 285; 1988:
27–30); Hinde (2000: 226); Salomon (1945: 236); White (1973: 230). For the related, ‘anthro-
pological’ reading of his methodology, see Schieder (1962: 129ff); Löwith (1984: 3); Rüsen
(1985: 241; 1978: 189); Hardtwig (1974: 51–69); Koselleck (2002: 242).
3 See, e.g., Sigurdson (2004: 66–9); Trevor-Roper (1984: 359–78); Meinecke (1968: 93–121).
See also Gossman (2002: 538–72) for a history of Burckhardt’s reception as a critic of the
strong German state by the Anglo-American academic community in the twentieth century.
4 For a discussion of Tocqueville’s influence on Burckhardt, see Kaegi, (1947–82: 5.255–7,
401–5).
5 It is generally recognized in the secondary literature that Burckhardt gave up his early sympa-
thies to revolutionary liberalism as the result of his experience of the 1848 revolutions. See,
e.g., White (1973: 234–5).
6 As Lionel Gossman refers to it, ‘Cultural history, in short, was a survival kit for hard times, the
repository of what is essentially human and humanly essential about the “old culture of
Europe”’. See Gossman (1994: 427).
7 See also Mommsen (1983: 471).
8 Schieder is, again, an exception. And Randolph Starn does highlight Burckhardt’s seemingly
odd attraction to crises, although he does not discuss this point in depth: ‘While crisis signified
a “terrifying acceleration” of historical processes for the patrician conservative, the passionate
enemy of his bourgeois age, whose greatest pupil was Nietzsche, exulted in the spectacle’
(Starn, 1971: 8).
9 Interestingly, Burckhardt would read the Reformation, like the French Revolution, as an instance
of ‘a break with all historical things’. Unlike the Revolution, however, Burckhardt saw the
Reformation as a beneficial forward step in the ‘higher development’ of Europe (1999: 111).
10 Indeed, as Burckhardt would ask, ‘Is the movement of Europe on the whole, therefore, a rising
or a falling one? This can never be determined by mere calculation’ (1999: 67).
11 Burckhardt would further describe how the actions of the individual ‘great’ man could catalyse
major historical transformations during the crisis.
12 The similarities between Burckhardt’s view of historical development as occurring through the
meeting of opposing forces and Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of history are noteworthy, and
some have argued that Burckhardt, despite his own claims to the contrary, should be read as a
crypto-Hegelian. See, e.g., Rüsen (1978: 199) and Gombrich (1969: 14–25). The scope of this
paper does not afford consideration of these Hegelian readings of Burckhardt in depth. It is
important to keep in mind, however, that their plausibility is seriously weakened by the fact
that Burckhardt does not appear to have been a close reader of Hegel: as Karl Joël and Peter
Ganz point out, Burckhardt checked out Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der
Geschichte from the library of the University of Basel on 16 October 1868 – only weeks before

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Martin 325

the beginning of his first session of the ‘Über das Studium der Geschichte’ lectures – and does
not appear to have owned a copy of the text himself. According to Ganz, Burckhardt would
have become indirectly acquainted with Hegelian thought from his teachers and colleagues at
Basel. See Joël (1918: 55) and Ganz (1982: 18). Burckhardt’s idea of conflict in history as
leading to ‘higher development’ was more likely borrowed from Ernst von Lasaulx.
13 The original source of the quotation was Horace’s Epistles (I, 12, 19): Quid velit et possit
rerum concordia discors.
14 Ranke shared this interpretation. See Gilbert (1990: 55).
15 This paper draws heavily on Koselleck’s work on the history of the term ‘crisis’, while main-
taining that Koselleck underestimated Burckhardt’s praise for the crisis’s purificatory poten-
tial. See, e.g., Koselleck (2006: 357–400; 2002: 236–47; 1976: 1235–40; 1988: 167–8 n. 31).
See also Starn (2004: 500–1; 1971: passim).
16 For a discussion of Burckhardt’s thoughts on Droysen during this period, see Kaegi (1947–82:
6.114–16) and Ganz (1982: 15–17). See also Koselleck (2006: 386).
17 Interestingly, these same three events – the Crusades, the Reformation and the discovery of
America – were used by Schlegel as examples of crises and epochal turning-points (see above).
18 Burckhardt would similarly see the discovery of America as a moment of epochal transition:
‘After renewed intermingling with the Germanic peoples, this active humanity strikes out
anew, assimilates America for itself and is now about to open Asia thoroughly … It is a great
fortune to be part of this active humanity’ (1999: 2).
19 As Christoph von Maltzahn describes him, Leo was caught in between a ‘religiously-shaped
old conservatism (Altkonservatismus) and a militaristic new conservatism (Neukonservatismus)’
(Maltzahn, 1979: 51).
20 See, e.g., Trevor-Roper (1984: 370).
21 MD Hottinger’s translation of ‘elementaren Kräfte’ in Burckhardt (1979) as ‘natural resources’
is misleading and can be more accurately rendered as ‘elementary powers’.
22 In a letter to Friedrich von Preen of 15 October 1887, Burckhardt wrote – in reference to the
possibility of a great war in the Mediterranean and future conflict across Europe – ‘let us still
hope, for peace’ (Burckhardt 2001: 224).
23 ‘Fortunately our consideration of history is not concerned with the future, unlike certain phi-
losophers … soothsaying is dead, to be sure, but it is a fact that our time in general provokes
calculations and constructions about the future’ (Burckhardt, 1999: 242).
24 In two letters to von Preen from September 1890, Burckhardt does speak of the possibility of
the outbreak of world war, although he mentions this possibility only in passing and does not
discuss its potential significance in depth. See Burckhardt (2001: 234–6).
25 Except, as mentioned above, insofar as the crisis was seen solely as the ‘great general crisis’ of
Burckhardt’s day.
26 The intellectual similarities between Burckhardt’s supposed liberal humanism and that of
Goethe, Herder and Constant have also been stressed in the secondary literature. See, e.g.,
Gossman (2003: 59) and Sax (1985: 27–31).
27 As Burckhardt wrote to von Preen in March 1888, ‘Itself the product of mediocre minds and
their envy, Democracy can only use mediocre men as tools’ (Burckhardt, 2001: 225).
28 According to Sigurdson, Burckhardt, as a so-called ‘liberal-conservative’, had no ‘faith in pro-
gressive change achieved through evolutionary no less than revolutionary means’ and sought to
‘safeguard individuality and freedom without forsaking tradition and without disregarding the
accumulated wisdom of past generations and civilizations’ (Sigurdson, 1992: 489).

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326 Journal of European Studies 40(4)

29 ‘War’, Treitschke wrote, ‘must be taken as part of the divinely appointed order’ (Treitschke,
1916: 598).
30 Of which there were few. There were 30 students in attendance when Burckhardt first gave
these lectures in 1868–9; 36 in 1870-1; and 22 in 1972-3. See Ganz (1982: 14 n.2)

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James R Martin is a doctoral student in the Department of History at Harvard University.

He has also studied at Cambridge University, where he was Paul Mellon Fellow in the
Faculty of History, and at Yale University.

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