Book Chapter

Intellectual History and Historismus in Post‐War England

Young, Brian

2015

Overview

This chapter addresses historiography as a subject of study as this was undertaken by post‐war English intellectual historians. It undertakes a critical examination of the reception and dissemination of the studies of the German tradition of Historismus (historicism) as represented by the work of Friedrich Meinecke in the politically troubled 1930s and 1940s. It places both Meinecke and the English reception of his work in an immediately post‐war context, tracing how criticism of his methods only seriously emerged in England during the 1990s; different generations had reacted to Meinecke and his legacy according to their own experience of the 1930s and 1940s. This story is then placed comparatively alongside the rather different treatment of Meinecke made by predominantly Jewish émigré historians in the United States. The chapter argues that, with some exceptions, English intellectual history has tended to be insular in terms of its methods and approach, and that renewed acquaintance with German and American approaches to the study of intellectual history needs to be made by its English practitioners.

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
• Subject: Friedrich Meinecke / Germany and the Second World War / Herbert Butterfield / Historismus (historicism) / Hugh Trevor‐Roper / intellectual émigrés / J.G.A. Pocock / J.W. Burrow
• ISBN: 9781118294802, 1118294807