JACOB BURCKHARDT, GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

EGON FLAIG
The masterpieces of nineteenth-century historiography are fraught with political agendas. Under the veneer of disinterested historical scholarship, their authors consistently pursue decidedly contemporary concerns. This essay offers a case study of one scholar who did so in an extreme fashion: Jacob Burckhardt. The extent to which his obsessive fear of current political developments determined the account of the crumbling of the Greek polis in his Griechische Kulturgeschichte is truly astonishing, yet rarely recognized. I would like to emphasize at the outset that, in this essay, I am not primarily concerned with Burckhardts comments on contemporary political affairs. Nor do I seek to explore the question of whether or not he was a liberal.*A word that can be employed to refer to political theorists as diverse as Montesquieu and Friedrich von Hayek has ceased to be heuristically useful. Some of the worst defenders of slavery happened to be ardent champions of liberty and individuality, claiming these ideals as privileges both for themselves and the deserving few. What have we actually gained if we call these men liberals? What we have lost, or at least obscured, are genuinely important distinctions, like that between scholars and intellectuals who believed in the fundamental equality of all human beings, and those who did not. Professional historians are often reluctant to pursue such distinctions with the necessary rigour - not for lofty academic reasons but because interrogations of this kind almost inevitably result in harsh controversies over the politics of contemporary historical research. This said, from a strictly methodological point of view, political catchwords such as liberal simply lack the analytic exactitude necessary to bring out with precision the pertinent differences between the diverse political stances and discourses that shape the intellectual outlook of a period. They fail utterly in the case of a historian who, while never shying away from harsh political verdicts, refused from a certain point onwards to get involved in actual politics. Burckhardt assumed the elevated and ostensibly disinterested standpoint of the apolitical sage when commenting on the various periods and the overall fate of Western civilization. Yet while his self-fashioning may have made him relatively safe from political

1 This essay is the expanded version of a lecture delivered at the History Department of Princeton University in April 1999. I am grateful to Suzanne Marchand, Josiah Ober, Lionel Gossman, and Barry Strauss for their criticisms, and to Ingo Gildenhard and Martin Ruehl who kindly translated my text and made many useful suggestions. 2 In his wonderfully learned essay on Burckhardt and the polis (pp. 47-59in this volume), Lionel Gossman traces the literary genealogies by which important themes reached Burckhardt. His assessment of the politics inherent in Burckhardts historiography takes a direction different from mine.

Out o f Arcadia

OUT OF ARCADIA

appropriations and critiques, the same cannot be said for the texts into which our seemingly apolitical Lynceus wove his verdicts - on history, culture, and contemporary society. In terms of method and approach, then, this essay marks a departure from the traditional Burckhardt-philology and the intricacies of biographical criticism, from prosopographical questions of influence and appraisals of the man and his intellectual development over time. Instead, I wish to inquire into the guiding interests, unacknowledged presuppositions, and axiomatically stated premises Burckhardt marshalled to make sense of things - both in his historiographical and in his theoretical writings. Scrutiny of his works from this perspective reveals two pivotal concerns: an almost morbid obsession with those forces that seemed to threaten the continuity of traditional European culture at the time; and a related interest in the social processes that generated and sustained the sort of moral dispositions which Burckhardt deemed vital prerequisites for cultural achievement of the highest order. The upshot of his anxiety about the survival of European civilization was a philosophy of history that brought four different factors into antagonistic correlation: on one side Burckhardt placed the trend towards democracy and the triumph of material interests; on the other the moral quality of war and an aesthetics of the sublime. The two parts of my essay follow this world-historical equation. Part I sets out Burckhardts construction of the problem; part I1 his view of what a possible solution might look like. I Democracy - the downward spiral into the abyss of material interests Burckhardt suffered from a paranoid fear of the masses - a delusory foreboding that occidental culture was under the real, even imminent threat of annihilation, to be effected either by a violent uprising of the masses or by a gradual decline of high culture due to massification.I shall bypass discussion of the rather questionable concept of the masses, which, for almost a century, enjoyed a remarkable currency in European political thought. I simply note, that for Burckhardt, there existed a cast-iron law of history: the masses, once empowered in and through a democratic form of government, would go about destroying cultural achievements until stopped from doing so by the rise of a dictatorship. He thought the masses capable of depriving occidental culture of the vital space necessary for its continued existence, and firmly believed they would do so if given the ~ h a n c e . ~ More specifically, Burckhardts conception of history revolved around three premises that will form the focus of discussion in the first part of my essay. He postulated, first, that there was no distinction between direct and representative democracy: any kind of restraint that the principle of representation could impose on the will of the masses would ultimately fail to be effective, owing to the basic sovereignty of the people in all types of democratic government; second, that political equality inevitably produced the desire for social equality, and that the ensuing fight for social equality produced class struggles; and third, that class struggles
3 See JBB (= Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe. Vollstandige und kritisch bearbeitete Ausgabe, ed. M.Burckhardt, 10 vols, Basel 1949-86), VII, 289, and IX, 125-26. See on this topic in general, W. Hardtwig, Geschichtsschreibungzwischen Alteuropa und moderner Welt. Jacob Burckhardt in seiner Zeit (Gijttingen 1974). J. Wenzel, Jacob Burckhurdt in der Krise seiner Zeit (East Berlin 1967) critically discusses the wider ideological implications, F. Jager, Burgerliche Modernisierungskrise und historische Sinnbildung. Kulturgeschichte bei Droysen, Burckhardt und Max Weber (Gottingen 1994) 134-8 1, addresses the issue of the increasing disciplinary and methodological autonomy of historical research.

E O N FXAIG: JACOB BURCKHARDT, GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

dramatically lowered the moral standard of a society insofar as they generated a historical constellation in which social life fell increasinglyunder the sway of base material motives that lacked any cultural dimension whatsoever. This, in turn, posed the danger of civil wars that threatened to tear the very fabric of society to pieces. Let us consider the central arguments that Burckhardt adduced in support of this doomsday scenario.
I.i The untamable sovereignty o f the people: Burckhardt s historiographical de-legitimization o f modern democracy

For an appraisal of Burckhardts pronouncements on democracy, it is vital to map out briefly the main contours of political thought at the time, that is, the space of possibilities within and against which he defined his own point of view. The cardinal point of reference in nineteenthcentury political debates was, of course, the French Revolution. When formulating their political theories, self-proclaimed liberals, democrats, Bonapartists, legitimists, and reactionaries all argued their case with reference to this event. The most hotly debated issue, in this context, was the sovereignty of the people. The great counter-revolutionary thinkers DeMaistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortis - shared the same fundamental objection to a form of governmentbased on this principle: it would, they thought, result in chaos and the dissolution of society. How so? Quite simply: the sovereignty of the people would bring about the equality of all citizens; political equality would undermine social hierarchies; this would destroy the political authority of social institutionsand lead to anarchy; and anarchy, finally, would plunge society into chaos and civil war. This chain-reaction was bound to happen, since the sovereign people were allegedly unable to maintain a stable order. After all, in a democracy, everything was at a l l times potentially up for discussion,transformation,and repeal -even the constitution itself. In part, this line of reasoning was a backlash against some of the most widely-read theorists of the sovereignty of the people - Rousseau and the Abbe Sieybs - who had developed such radical versions of the concept that one could indeed draw anarchistic conclusions from their ideas. Rousseaus Social Contract of 1762 still struck a compromise. It is true that it rejected the concept of representation - the sovereign, that is, the people, Rousseau argued, could not transfer their will, only their power: le pouvoir peut bien se transmettre, mais non pas la ~ o l o n t e But . ~ the claim that the people could transfer their power implied that a stable government was in fact a distinct possibility, indeed an absolute necessity. Still, a representative government, in Rousseaus eyes was absurd: the will of the sovereign simply had to express itself in direct, not in indirect fashion. The outcome of this line of reasoning was a system of government we would dub direct democracy,in which the will of the entire people was to be constantly polled. In his famous pamphlet, Qu est-ceque le tiers &tat?,AbbB Sieybs took Rousseaus thinking several steps further. He argued that the pouvoir constituant was not bound to any single act of will; it could dissolve or reshuffle the pouvoir constituB, that is, the government and the constitution, at any time and in any way it considered fit. The nation, in other words, could perpetually re-create its societal conditions- when and as it pleased. At the time of the French

J. 3. Rousseau, Du Contrat social 11, 1.

10

OUT OF ARCADIA

Revolution, the AbbB Mably endorsed the same point of view. This was precisely the line of thought against which the counter-revolutionary critics of democracy directed their harshest polemics. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, a liberal movement gradually took shape that defined itself against the forces of radical democracy as well as counter-revolutionary Catholicism and conservatism. These liberals were outspoken proponents of the sovereignty of the people, while at the same time rebutting the ancient model of direct democracy. The best-known advocate of this via media was Benjamin Constant, who, in 1819, delivered a speech on two types of freedom in the Athenaeum at Paris, in which he drew a sharp distinction between the individual freedom of modernity and the political freedom of antiquityS6 He acknowledged the principle of sovereignty of the people (which he considered a good thing); yet at the same time he took the edge off its radical implications by claiming that the people should not govern directly, but via their elected representatives. Here we have, for the first time, a succinct political formula of modern representative democracy. Constants writings were highly influential in the decades leading up to the 1848 revolutions. In many ways, Burckhardt conducted a frontal attack on this notion of representative democracy. For him, the ultimate outcome of any democratic form of government, with or without an element of representation, was the tyranny of the masses. Representation in no way prevented those who were represented from gaining the upper hand over the representing body, because the masses ruthlessly and unconditionally pursued their own interests: Die guten liberalen und selbst radikalen Erwerblinge konnen lange vor den Volksfiihrern auf die Knie fallen und sie anflehen, keine Dummheiten zu machen. Die Volksfiihrer miissen eben, um wiedergewahlt zu werden, die geschreilustigen Schichten der Volksmassen f i r sich haben, und diese verlangen, daB stets etwas geschehe, sonst glauben sie nicht, daB Fortschritt vorhanden sei ... Aus diesem cercle vicieux kommt man beim suffrage universe1 uberhaupt nicht mehr heraus. Eins nach dem Andern mu13 geopfert werden: Stellen, Habe, Religion, distinguierte Sitte, hohere Wissenschaft - so lange die Massen auf ihre meneurs driicken konnen und solange nicht irgend eine Gewalt drein ruft: Haltets Maul! Wozu vor der Hand noch nicht die leiseste Aussicht vorhanden. Und ... diese Gewalt kann beinahe nur aus den Bosesten hervorgehen und haarstraubend wirken. Burckhardt to Alioth, 10 September 1881, JBB (n. 3, above), VII, 288-89.7 The good liberals and even the radicals among the champions of our acquisitive culture, may fall on their knees before the leaders of the people and beseech them not to commit any follies. But in order to be re-elected, the leaders of the people, the demagogues, must have the masses on their side, and they in turn demand that something should always be See, Gabriel Bonnet de Mably, De la lkgislation ou principes des lois, 111, 3 and 4, in Collection compl2te des euvres, ed. G. Amoux, vol. 9 (Paris 1794195; reprinted Aalen 1977) 290-356. 6 See, Benjamin Constant, Cours de politique constitutionelle ou collection des ouvrages publiks sur le gouvernement reprksentatif, ed. E. Laboulaye, 2 vols (Paris 1872) 11, 539-60. Cf. S. Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modem Liberalism (New Haven/ London 1984) 182-87. 7 At that time, Burckhardt compiled the final version of the first two volumes of his Griechische Kulturgeschichte. For the wider historical context of Burckhardts Greek Cultural History, see now S . Bauer, Polisbild und Demokratieverstandnis in Jacob Burckhardts GriechischerKulturgeschichte
5

(Base12001). Bauers study does not touch upon my concerns.

EGON FLAIG JACOB BURCKHARDT, GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

11

happening, otherwise they do not believe that progress is taking place. One cannot possibly escape from that cercle vicieux as long as there is universal suffrage. One thing after another will have to be sacrificed - positions, possessions, religion, civilized manners, higher learning - as long as the masses can put pressure on their Meneurs, and until some power shouts: Shut up! There is not the slightest sign of that for the time being. But ... that power can really only emerge from the depth of evil, and its effect will be hair-raising. Buckhardt apparently believed that delegates of necessity had to yield to the interests of those whom they represented; otherwise, the masses would vote them out of office. In other words, Burckhardt asserted that a state of political equality eliminated the possibility of representation. Succinctly put, he regarded representation as an illusion. This premise had drastic consequences for his perception of the status and significance of ancient democracy in modern times. The liberal supporters of Benjamin Constant were able to keep direct democracy as practised by the Athenian polis at a comfortable distance, together with its potentially radical lessons for contemporarypolitics. As long as representative democracy was held to offer a viable alternative, the disturbing fact of mass-rule in ancient Athens could safely be filed away in the archives of history, bearing little relevance to current affairs. By denying the efficacy of representation in his own time, indeed by rejecting the very principle, Burckhardt, on the other hand, all but eliminated the distinction between the ancient type of democracy and alternative modern forms. As a result, for him, Greek democracy was suddenly no longer a thing of the past. The events in fifth-century Athens had gained a burning urgency. Rather than a closed chapter of history, they were frighteningly real. With one strategic stroke, Burckhardt staked out a distinct theoretical space for himself, in which the historiography of ancient Greece came to bear crucial lessons for Europes political future. This stroke worked in two ways: if no fundamental differences existed between ancient and modern democracies, Greek democracy could be analyzed in terms of ideological schemes articulated in modern political thought; inversely, once these schemes had proved their validity in the analysis of the past, they would have acquired greater plausibility when deployed in arguments about the present and future.
I.ii Political equality and class conflict: Burckhardt s political thought between Tocqueville and Fustel de Coulanges

Within this self-defined theatre of operations, Burckhardt brought into play an armoury of concepts that he freely purloined from a variety of historians and political theorists. Scholarship on Burckhardt has so far paid rather little attention to the extent to which he compiled his texts out of quotations. To discover the original source of an idea or argument is frequently a matter of chance. In the nineteenth century, historians were in the habit of citing much-read philosophers or intellectuals without necessarily indicating the texts on which they drew: thus Rousseau and Benjamin Constant are absent presences in Mommsen, Hegel in Droysen, and Tocquevilleand Fustel de Coulanges in Burckhardt. My point that Burckhardt made extensive use of quotations has little to do with traditional Quellenforschung; rather, I am interested in the political agenda that informs his intertextualchoices. Burckhardt fashioned his philosophy of history by appropriating those explanatory schemes and analytic categories from earlier

12

OUT OF ARCADIA

writers that suited his argument, at times in contradistinctionto the way in which these schemes and categories functioned in the source-text. Unlike Constant, Burckhardt criticized the form of direct democracy that was practised in the Athenian polis not by comparing it to the modern version of representative democracy this was, as we have seen, not a viable alternative for him - but by drawing attention to the inability of ancient Athens to reconcile general civic equality with the distinctly political inequality between the lexders and the masses: Eines scheint in Athen ganz unmoglich gewesen zu sein, ntimlich die Einfiihrung eines Systems, das Regierung durch Wenige mit Freiheit fiir alle verband, einer die Gleichberechtigung der Regierten voraussetzenden Oligarchie ... Denn der MiBbrauch der Gewalt wiire zu unvermeidlich gewesen. Thukydides selber sagt: es bediirfe des demokratischen Regiments, damit die Armen eine Zuflucht und die Reichen einen Ziigel hatten. Die Griechen haben nie biirgerliche Gleichheit mit politischer Ungleichheit zu verbinden gewul3t. Der h e mul3te zu seinem Schutz gegen Unbill Mitstimmen, Richter und Magistrat sein konnen. ... Griechische Kulturgeschichte I (= Gesammelte Werke [GWJV) 205. One thing appears to have been entirely impossible in Athens: the introduction of a system combining rule by the few with freedom for all, in other words, of an oligarchy that would take as its basic assumption the equality of those being ruled ... For it would have been impossible to avoid the abuse of power. Thucydides himself says that a democratic regime is necessary so that the poor may have a refuge and the rich a restraint. The Greeks were never able to combine civic equality with political inequality. The poor man had to be able to act as voter, judge and government official in order to protect himself against injustice. This quotation is taken almost verbatim from Fustel de Coulanges influential book La Cite antique of 1864, where the relevant passage reads: On aurait peutdtre CvitC lavbnement de la dkmocratie, si lon avait pu fonder ce que Thucydide appelle oligarchia isonomos, cest-&dire le gouvernement pour quelques-uns et la Iibertk pour tous ... Les Grecs nont jamais su concilier 16galitC civile avec IintgalitC politique. Pour que le pauvre ne ffit pas lesC dans ses intCr&tspersonnels, il leur a paru nCcessaire quil etit un droit de suffrage, quil fCit juge dans les tribunaux, et quil pQt &tre magistrat.8 Perhaps the coming of democracy could have been avoided if it had been possible to establish what Thucydides calls oligarchiu isonomos, that is to say sovereignty for some and liberty for all ... The Greeks were never able to reconcile civic equality with political inequality. In order to protect the poor man from being abused in his personal affairs, they
8 Fustel de Coulanges, La Cite antique. Etude sur le culte, le droit, les institutions de la Grice et de Rome, 27th edn (Paris 1922) 387. Burckhardt indicates in his text that he is following Fustel here (GriechischeKulturgeschichteI, 206), but he does not say to what extent he echoes Fustels formulations. Right after the quotation given above, Fustel argues that it is precisely the enormous control of the polis over human life in its entirety that makes everyone want to participate in its power. Burckhardt makes this thought his own.

EGON FLAIG JACOB BURCKHARDT, GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

13

deemed it necessary that he have the right to vote, that he be judge in the tribunals and that he have the possibility to act as magistrate. This all but direct quotation is by no means exceptional. In fact, the entire conceptual architecture that Burckhardt employed to explain the socio-politicalprocesses he deemed responsible for the disintegration of the Greek polis, he derived from Fustels masterpiece, changing hardly anything at all in what he took over. We shall see the reason for this in due course. For Fustel, the desire of the masses for political participation and, after its fulfilment, for political equality, was not a sign of moral decay, but had its engine in a defining feature of Greek politics: the absence of a moral code that would keep the strong from abusing their power. This point of view was diametrically opposed to a conservative article of faith, namely that the masses, rather than the rulers, were the true sources of evil in modern times: witness the repeated exhortations of the counter-revolutionaryCatholic Donoso Cort6s. Fustel, in contrast, rejected this verdict of guilt in his historiographical analysis of the Greek polis: evil, he held, did not emanate from the subjects, but from the lack of moral restraints on the part of the rulers. In his Griechische Kulturgeschichte, Burckhardt explained the decline of the Greek polis with the help of an axiom formulated by Tocqueville, namely that political equality would inevitably entail ongoing efforts to attain social equality as well. In a speech he delivered as a delegate in October 1847, Tocqueville stated: La R6volution franpise, qui a aboli tous les privilkges et d6truit tous les droits exclusifs, en a pourtant laiss6 subsister un, celui de la propriCt6. ... Aujourdhui que le droit de propri6t6 napparaTt plus que comme le dernier reste dun monde aristocratique d6truit ... cest B lui seul maintenant B soutenir chaque jour le choc direct et incessant des opinions d6mocratiques ...? The French Revolution which abolished all privileges and destroyed all special rights left one of them intact, the right of property ... In our time, when the right of property appears only as the last remnant of a destroyed aristocratic world ... it alone must bear every day the direct and unceasing assault of democratic opinions ... Tocqueville thus set up an antagonistic relation between political equality and economic inequality. This alleged antagonism was to become crucial both for the so-called liberal and for the so-called conservative thinkers in their endeavours to play off liberty against equality - a move that was only plausible if one radically depoliticized the notion of liberty. Burckhardt even went a step further in suggesting that political equality would eventually result in the breakdown of social stability. Let us take a closer look at how he endowed this tenet with historical plausibility. Without ever substantiatinghis claim empirically, Burckhardt posited that reflection was the mortal enemy of tradition. In so doing, he joined a controversy that dated back to Burkes critique of the French Revolution. Whenever reflection prevailed over customs (put

9 Alexis de Tocqueville, (Euvres, papiers et correspondance, ed. J. P. Mayer (Paris 1952-) (hereafter

0 0 ,XII, 36-37.

14

OUT OF ARCADIA

differently: tradition), so the argument went, it sooner or later gave rise to political equality, which in turn served as a catalyst for the levelling of social and economic hierarchies as well: Alle Herrschaft der Reflexion im Staatswesen drangt uber kurz oder lang auf Gleichheit der Biirger im weitesten Umfange; auf wie viele Lebensbeziehungen sich diese Gleichheit ausdehnen werde, htingt von den Urnstanden ab...Nun wird man sich umzusehen haben nach solchen griechischen Staaten, bei deren Grundung bereits die Reflexion nicht nur tatig, sondern unvermeidlich das Bestimmende gewesen ist. Dies waren die Kolonien.O Griechische Kulturgeschichte I [= GW, V] 202. The dominating presence of reflection within a state sooner or later drives towards the equality of citizens conceived in the widest possible terms; how many social relations this equality affects depends on the circumstances. Now one has to look around for those Greek states at the founding of which reflection was not only active, but even unavoidably the defining factor. Those were the colonies. Fustel de Coulanges had argued that in thepolis, public interest and hence utility replaced adherence to tradition and religious commitment. This was the beginning of mans self-determination, but also of intense controversies over the meaning of utility. For the social norms, which had hitherto constituted the unquestioned basis of communal life became the subject of deliberation and change. Despite appearances, Fustel did not align himself with the outlook of the Catholic counter-revolutionaries. Quite the contrary: he assessed the process of reflection that was set in motion at the time in positive terms. For instance, he highlighted the enormous amount of civic discipline required of the Athenian citizens to make their democracy work. In contrast, Burckhardt, from the outset, dismisses the very notion of public interest as an illusion. Once political reflection has weakened tradition, the various social groups that make up a civic community will assert their own particular interests on strictly utilitarian grounds: Als Regierungsprinzip galt jetzt nirgends mehr das Altiiberlieferte oder gar die Religion, welche dasselbe hatte befestigen helfen, sondern der sogenannte offentliche Nutzen, welcher notwendig wandelbar ist oder so aufgefdt wird; dieser offentliche Nutzen und die Gleichheit aber sind jetzt Wechselbegriffe. Das groBe Regierungsmittel aber, die Quelle nicht bloB der einzelnen MaBregeln, sondern des Rechts, der eigentliche Souveran ist die allgemeine Abstimmung, tatsachlich am Gangelbande von Demagogen ... Griechische Kulturgeschichte I [= GW, V] 242. At that time, tradition - to say nothing of religion - with its stabilizing effects was no longer acknowledged as a principle of government anywhere. It had been replaced by public utility, which is by definition subject to change and is regarded as such. Public utility and equality are now interchangeable terms. The great means of government, the
10 That this view is no longer tenable today hardly needs to be pointed out. That political reflection leads to political equality is a pure idealist assumption. 11 La Cite antique 387. 12 Zbid., 393. Fustels scheme of emancipation seems to be indebted to Donoso Cort6ss famous Speech on Dictatorship (January 1849),although these ideas had become something of a common-place in the new wave of counter-revolutionarythought after the events of 1848. Fustels evaluation of the events was, however, the exact opposite of Donosos.

EGON FLAIG JACOB BURCKHARDT, GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

15

source not only of individual measures, but of law itself, the true sovereign is the general vote, whose reins are held by demagogues ... As emerges from this and other passages, Burckhardt considered public interest as an illusion, and utility only as a slogan used by different social groups to legitimize their own interests. In his eyes, the establishmentof political equality had two fateful consequences: the creation of a new desire to take the next step towards economic equality; and the provision of a new instrument to bring this about - political decision-making by majority vote. Burckhardt described the origins of this fateful nexus thus: In der alten Zeit der GeschlechterherrschaftnWich hatte man die Misere kaum gekannt. Erst die Gleichheit der Rechte machte die Ungleichheit der Lage recht fuhlbar. Ein Ausgleich durch Arbeit aber (welche der Reiche bedurft und der Arme gegen Lohn geleistet hatte) war unmoglich wegen der allgemeinen Antibanausie. Griechische Kulturgeschichte I [= GW, V] 243. In the old times when aristocratic families ruled, people hardly noticed their wretched conditions of existence. Only equality of rights made inequality of position truly noticeable. Compensation through labour (which the rich needed and the poor would have provided for a wage) was impossible owing to the general disdain for manual work. Burckhardt took this line of argument almost directly from Fustel who had taken it, in his turn, from Tocqueville and other commentators on the 1848 revolution in France.13 La dtmocratie ne supprima pas la mishre; elle la rendit, au contraire, plus sensible. Ltgalitt des droits politiques fit ressortir encore davantage 1inCgalitC des conditions. La Cite antique 391. Democracy did not eradicate misery; on the contrary, it made it even more keenly felt. The equality of political rights brought the inequality of social conditions even more to the fore. Here we have the origins of Burckhardtsnotion that the equality of political rights rendered long-standing socio-economic inequalities glaringly obvious. This very axiom formed the centre of Tocquevilles theory of the revolution. In Burckhardt, it became the motor that kept the internal struggles within the Greek city-states going until the final breakdown of their civic communities. Burckhardt argued that the poor citizens, once empowered politically, would begin to pursue material interests in their desire to abolish economic inequality as well. In Burckhardts scenario, this was the moment when class struggles dramatically erupted in the political sphere. Being in the majority, the poor employed the popular vote to change the existing distribution of property: Jetzt wurde der Arme inne, dal3 er als Herr der Stimmen auch Herr des Besitzes werden Griechische Kulturgeschichte I [= GW, V] 243. konne. Now the poor man realized that as master of the votes, he could also become master of property.

13 See Tocquevilles notes for February

1848 (revised in 1850), OC (n. 9, above), XII, 96-97.

16

OUT OF ARCADIA

This sentence, too, was taken all but verbatim from Fustels La Cite antique: Le pauvre avait ltgalitt des droits. Mais assurtment ses souffrances journalibres lui faisaient penser que 16galit6des fortunes eOt Ctt bien prtftrable. Or il ne fut pas longtemps sans sapercevoir que ltgalitt quil avait pouvait lui servir B acqutrir celle quil navait pas, et que, maitre des suffrages, il pouvait devenir maitre de la richesse. La Cite antique 398. The poor man had equality of rights. But naturally his daily sufferings made him think that equality of property would have been much preferable. Now, it did not take him long to realize that the equality he had could help him acquire the one he did not have. As master of the votes he could become master of wealth. For Burckhardt, this thought was absolutely pivotal, the crucial factor in the entire political process of Greek civilization. It was also the core of his conception of social order in the modern age. Let us take a closer look at the reasons he gave for the outbreak of the struggle between rich and poor: In Griechenland aber begann, als die Gleichheit da war und man nicht mehr um Prinzipien und Rechte zu ktimpfen hatte, der Krieg zwischen Reich und Arm, in manchen Stadten schon sogleich mit Eintritt der Demokratie, anderswo nach einer langern oder kurzern Zwischenzeit der MaBigung. Griechische Kulturgeschichte I [= GW, V] 242. In Greece, the war between rich and poor began when equality had been achieved and it was no longer necessary to fight over principles and rights. In many cities, this happened as soon as democracy had been established, elsewhere after a longer or shorter interval of restraint. Burckhardt, again, was drawing on Fustel here, who had argued: Lorsque la strie des rtvolutions eut amen6 16galit6 entre les hommes et qu il ny eut plus lieu de se combattre pour des principes et des droits, les hommes se firent la guerre pour La Cite antique 397. des inttrets. Once the succession of revolutions had led to equality among men, and there was no longer any need to fight with one another over principles and rights, people went to war with one another over interests. Fustel took this thought to its logical conclusion when he observed (La Cite antique 399) that: I1 (the poor man) organisa une guerre en rbgle contre la richesse. The poor man organized a regular war against wealth. Burckhardts explanation of the change and decline of the Greek city-states can be summed up as follows. Since the polis exercized quasi-total power over its citizens, it could enforce arbitrary expropriations. The masses could not resist the temptation to abuse their majority in the assembly and thus to transform political equality into social equality. Naturally, the oligarchs defended themselves as much as they could. The class war that resulted from this socio-political dynamic ruined the Hellenic polis.

EGON FLAIG: JACOB BURCKHARDT,GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY Z.iii Majority vote and the de-legitimization of the social order

17

The establishment of political equality had two significant consequences: it turned the assembly of the people into the decisive political institution, and the vote of the majority into the primary instrument of politics. According to Burckhardt, this entailed, first, that in Greek democracy, the purview of outright political authority in society constantly increased; and second, that an unstoppable merry-go-round of decreeing was set in motion which re-arranged the order of things over and over again. Again, French political thought had anticipated these ideas. Thus the Abbe SieyBs ceded a quasi-divine omnipotence to the sovereign people, refusing to subject their will to any restraint: La volontB nationale ... na besoin que de sa realit6 pour &tretoujours legale, elle est lorigine de toute lbgalit6. Non seulement la nation nest pas soumise h une constitution, mais elle ne peut pas lbtre, mais elle ne doit pas lCtre, ce qui Bquivaut encore B dire quelle ne lest pas.14 The national will ... does not need anything but its own existence to be legal. It is the source of all legality. Not only is the nation not subject to a constitution, but it cannot be and it must not be; which is tantamount to saying that it is not. According to this conception, a nation forever remains in a state of nature; it has only rights, no obligations. This renders the sovereign undefinable since it may change its outlook at any time. Rousseau, for one, would not have gone so far. He would have granted to critics of democracy that a political community in charge of sovereign power could exist only as long as the stability of its will was guaranteed. But then, Rousseau deemed democracy fully capable of maintaining such stability. Here Burckhardt begged to differ - and in differing, he eliminated the claim of democracy to be a legitimate form of government. In other words, he drew anti-democracticconsequences from the fact that the pouvoir constituant as conceived by the Abbe SieyBs could not really be defined. If no stable will stood behind the voting that goes on in the assembly, no subject existed that could exercize sovereignty; rather, the procedure of voting itself in its constant repetition became, quite literally, the sovereign. Let us recall Burckhardts assessment of majority vote as a form of government:

Das grol3e Regierungsmittelaber, die Quelle nicht blol3 der einzelnen Maregeln, sondern des Rechts, der eigentliche Souveran ist die allgemeine Abstimmung ... Griechische Kulturgeschichte I [= GW, V] 242; cf. pp. 14-15, above.
The great means of government,the source not only of the individual measures, but of law itself, the true sovereign is the general vote ... Burckhardts formulation contains a deliberate paradox: it is not the people that are sovereign, but the procedures of decision-making. This is the reason why, for Burckhardt, modern as well as ancient Greek democracy was programmed to expand constantly the sphere of politics:
Quest-ce que le tiers &tat?,ed. R. Zapperi (Geneva 1970) 182. his treatment of government (Contrat Social 111, 1) and, in particular, the legality of suspension of laws in a case of crisis (Contrat Social IV, 6 De la Dictature).
14 15 As is illustrated by

18

OUT OF ARCADIA

Von unten herauf wird kein besonderes Recht des Staates mehr anerkannt; Alles ist discutabel; ja im Grunde verlangt die Reflexion vom Staat bestandige Wandelbarkeit der Form nach ihren Launen; zugleich aber verlangt sie eine stets groljere und umfangreichere Zwangsmacht, damit der Staat ihr ganzes sublimes Programm, das sie periodisch fur ihn aufsetzt, verwirklichen konne (Zusatz: Der Staat sol1 alles Mogliche konnen, aber nichts mehr diirfen). So die Staatsform immer discutabler und der Machtumfang immer groljer ... Uber das Studium d e r Geschichte 324.16 The common people no longer recognize a special right of the state; everything is open to discussion; indeed, the state is required to change form constantly according to the whims of current ideas; at the same time, however, current ideas demand an ever greater and more comprehensive power of coercion so that the state may realize the entire sublime programme that they periodically decree. (Addition: the state should be capable of doing all sorts of things, but no longer be permitted to do anything.) The more the form of state becomes the subject of discussion, the greater the scope of power. The unspoken assumption of Burckhardts argument is that if all decide, everything is up for decision - the entire social order can be put on the agenda of political decision-making. At least in principle, in a democracy, the institutions of the state are incapable of arresting their absorption by society. Burckhardt saw worrying symptoms of this condition in the states of the nineteenth century. Saddled with solving every conceivable ill of society, they became both totalitarian and completely fragile at the same time. This process went hand in hand with their democratization:

... die sogenannte Democratie, d.h. eine aus tausend verschiedenen Quellen zusammengestromte, nach Schichten ihrer Bekenner hochst verschiedene Weltanschauung, welche aber in Einem consequent ist: insofern ihr namlich die Macht des Staates uber den Einzelnen nie grolj genug sein kann, sodalj sie die Grenzen zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft verwischt, dem Staat Alles das zumuthet was die Gesellschaft voraussichtlich nicht thun wird, ezugleicb aber Alles bestandig discutabel a n d beweglich> erhalten will und zugleich einzelnen Kasten ein specielles Recht auf Arbeit und Subsistenz vindiciert. Uber das Studium d e r Geschichte 370-7 1.
... so-called democracy, i.e. an ideology put together from a thousand different sources, varying according to the strata of its apostles, but consistent in one respect: namely that the power of the state over the individual can never be great enough for it, so that it blurs the boundaries between state and society, burdens the state with everything that society is unlikely to do, but at the same time wants to maintain everything as permanently up for discussion and open to change, while providing individual castes with a special entitlement to work and subsistence.
16 Uber das Studium der Geschichte. Der Text der Weltgeschichtlichen Betrachtungen nach den Handschnpen, ed. P. Ganz (Munich 1982).

17 It seems to have been Tocqueville who first formulated this thought: Le pouvoir social accroit sans cesse ses prkrogatives... Ainsi donc, deux rCvolutions semblent sop6rerde nos jours, en sens contraire: lune affaiblit continuellement le pouvoir, et lautre le renforce sans cesse: zi aucune Cpoque de notre histoire il n a paru si faible ni si fort, De la Dkmocratie en Amkrique, in OC (n. 9, above), 1.2, 3 19-20.

EGON FTAIG: JACOB BURCKHARDT, GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

19

Burckhardt thus projects the threatening spectre of a state at the mercy of fluctuating majorities and their shifting opinions. Such a state no longer has a will of its own; in fact, it has completely lost its politicalqualities. This alarming vision served Burckhardt as a heuristic model to account for the dissolution of the polis: a e r a l l war durch die bestiindigen Volksversammlungen alles momentan und willkurlich geworden; ihre Beschlusse banden sich an keine friihern Beschlusse desselben Volkes und durchlocherten die Gesetzgebungen ... Griechische Kulturgeschichte I [= GW, V] 250 (my italics). Everywhere, the constant national assemblies rendered everything evanescent and arbitrary; their decisions were not tied to any prior decisions of the same people and so eroded the process of legislation ...

This progressive loss of legitimacy would not have taken place if the citizens had decreed the order only once. Such a single foundational act could then have served as the basis and point of reference for all future political transactions. In a democracy, however, such foundational acts were bound to recur over and over again. The constant reshuffling of the social order ruined the rule of law since, inasmuch as the assembly incessantly changed individual laws, it turned their overall validity into an object of discussion. With this chain of arguments Burckhardt put forward the first comprehensive attack on decisionism under the veneer of a historiographical work on classical antiquity. A government based on this principle, he believed, generated two related antinomies.First, there was an inherent contradiction between the particularity of competing interests and the normative force of the law. Whenever the defenders of the traditional order opposed a new law passed by majority vote, two different interests were at variance with each other. As a result, even though the interest of the majority could win the day in the assembly, it remained a particular interest. Burckhardt underscored the paradoxical fact that an ephemeral majority was thus in charge of setting up legal norms that claimed universal validity.18 Second, Burckhardt drew attention to what he saw as a stark contradiction inherent in all democratic forms of government: insofar as any act of establishing a social order implied a sovereign autonomy, and insofar as the establishing will was the only source of authority on which an established order could rest, it was of crucial importance that this establishing will remained constant and binding. This, however, was precisely not the case in a democracy: the establishing will simply could not retain these requisite qualities since it articulated itself in the vote of a randomly constituted popular assembly, whose vote on any given issue could change at any time. It followed, for Burckhardt, that in a democracy whatever had been established utterly lacked authority. The only way to resolve these contradictionswas to remove the constitutional law, as soon as it had been established, from being subject to further changes; only then could it acquire universal acceptance and authority. But that was precisely what Greek democracy had been unable to achieve. Burckhardt construed the consequences of this constituent flaw of Greek democracy as a fateful maelstrom: the polis could not endow its law with plausible validity since validity presupposed an element of obligation and continuity; the assembly, however,
1

18 See Gnechische Kulturgeschichte

I [= GW, V] 243.

20

OUT OF ARCADIA

had the power to revoke any law at any time. In other words, Burckhardt identified a paradoxical historical constellation,in which every decision could be overturned and put into a state of limbo, an imaginary dustbin of history for previously binding obligations that had been put out of commission. Such a state produced a distinct lawlessness. Democracy created a historical situation in which society lacked a normative order by constantly under-mining the value of its own decisions.

I. iv Material interests and the dissolution of society in civil war

In his early work The Age of Constantine (1854), Burckhardt followed an organic theory of decline resemblingthat of Ernst von Lassaulx. In contrast, Fustel explained the decline of the Greek polis in terms of class struggle - a thoroughly social way of accounting for historical change. The two conceptions are mutually exclusive. Why, then, did Burckhardts later work on Greek cultural history contain such a remarkable number of quotationsfrom Fustels La Cite antique? To gauge the full significance of Burckhardts borrowings from La Citeantique, it is essential to realize that Fustel operated with theories that to a great extent ran counter to those prevailing in German historicism. First of all, in Fustels view of ancient history, social factors were of prime importance. For him, tensions and contradictions in the fabric of society represented an intrinsic source of unrest and historical change. Second, he utterly marginalized the state as an historical agent and downplayed the whole area of foreign policy. Third, he stressed those factors in historical processes that operated at a more general level than human intentionality and subjectivity. Fourth, with his emphasis on social processes he sidelined the world-historical individuals so cherished by German historicists. Finally, Fustel analyzed dynamic socio-political configurations with the categories of modern political philosophy in the tradition of Auguste Comte and, above all, Tocqueville. This sociological approach made him unpalatable to most German-speaking historians, who indeed ignored his work until well into the 1990s. But it was also the reason why Fustel acquired such outstanding significance for Burckhardt. For by recourse to La Cite antique, Burckhardt was able to put into practice a conception of culturalhistory that, while in many respects diametrically opposed to German historicism, perfectly suited his political agenda. In his Griechische Kulturgeschichte, Burckhardt broke with his earlier interpretation of cultural decline as a consequence of biological laws or the natural exhaustion of vital energies. Instead, he adopted Fustels explanatory schemes. Rather than undergoing a natural process of growing, flowering, and withering, political communities fell apart because of class struggle. He thereby placed himself in the tradition of Catholic counter-revolutionarieslike Donoso Cort6s - and in opposition to the organic views that were so in vogue at the time. To put it more succinctly: by appropriating the analytic categories of Fustels La Cite antique, Burckhardt appropriated a French mode of historical analysis which related cultural phenomena strictly to social factors. Let us consider the practical consequences of this new departure, by which Burckhardt distanced himself from the organic metaphors which continued to prevail in the work of his German colleagues for years to come. First of all, Fustels explanatory schemes enabled Burckhardt to transform the decline of the ancient Greek polis into a historiographical narrative that yielded political lessons for the present. Second, and more important, it provided him with a theoretical model that allowed

EGON FLAIG JACOB BURCKHARDT, GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

21

him to explain why Greek art was able to maintain its extraordinarily high standards despite the dissolution of the polis. It is true that in his lectures On the Study ofHistory Burckhardt had already formulated the idea of three different powers (Potenzen) - state, religion, culture - which underwent an independent evolution. For art in particular, he had posited a high degree of autonomy vis-&vis political and social proces~es.~ But as long as he stuck to the notion of culture as a quasi-organic entity, he was unable to account for this autonomy in theoretical terms. For as an organic entity, high culture, once it had exhausted its material base, had to fade away fast.20 Now Burckhardt, following the communis opinio of the nineteenth century, considered it entirely self-evident that Greek culture manifested an enormous and impressive creativity in several spheres, despite the fact that the polis declined. Already in his early work, The Age of Constantine, he faced the difficulty of having to exempt the production of art from his biologically conceived notion of an aging ancient world - and he was unable to make sense of this exception.21In his Griechische Kulturgeschichte, on the other hand, he had little difficulty in showing that the political and social processes unfolded quite independently of artistic production. The destructive struggles between the classes might have constricted the material scope of that production; but they hardly, if ever, affected the intrinsic laws that regulated artistic creativity.22 Furthermore, Fustels categories allowed Burckhardt to address more directly than before one of his foremost concerns: the fate of the culture of Old Europe (Alteuropa) in the face of the social catastrophes that he considered imminent. Fustels model of historical analysis afforded a flicker of hope: for if a determined group of educated individuals, willing to make personal sacrifices, managed to maintain an autonomous sphere for art, then there was the possibility that neither capitalism (trade and business) nor revolution nor the fickleness of state-power could fully extinguish the flame of higher culture. These considerations most plausibly explain the changes Burckhardt introduced in his theory of history. This conceptual switch has further ramifications for Burckhardts philosophy of culture. When he began to direct his attention to the class struggles in the Greek city-state, the theme of material interests quickly took centre-stage in his thoughts on the history of Western civilization. Fustel, too, pointed out that an interest no longer checked by bounds of religion and custom, triggered a dynamic that endangered the social order: On ne voit plus le principe supirieur qui consacre le droit de propriCtC; chacun ne sent que La Cite antique 400. son propre besoin et mesure sur lui son droit.

Geschichte,ed., with intro., by E. Thurner (Vienna 1952) 78, 142, and 159-60. See E. Flaig, Der Begriff der Alterung in J. Burckhardts Zeit Konstantins des GroSen, in Archivfirr Begripsgeschichte 28 (1987) 201-13. 22 Cf. Burckhardts late treatise Die Kunst des Altertums, in J. Burckhardt, Gesamtausgabe, 14 vols, (Basel, Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig 1929-1934), XIII. Jorn Riisen, by contrast, sees an organic pattern underlying Burckhardts interpretation of Greek history, see J. Riisen, Die Uhr, der die Stunde schlagt. Geschichte als Prozel3 der Kultur bei Jacob Burckhardt, in Historische Prozesse, ed. K.-G. Faber and Chr. Meier (Munich 1978) 186-217.
21

19 See ober das Studium der Geschichte (n. 16, above) 107, 158, 182-83 and passim. 20 Cf. Ernst v. Lassaulx, Neuer Versuch einer alten, auf die Wahrheitgegriindeten Philosophie der

22

OUT OF ARCADIA

The higher principle which consecrates the right of property is no longer discernible; everybody feels only his own needs and tailors his rights accordingly. If what counts as right is determined by individual needs, a legal order cannot be sustained. Burckhardt illustrated this point in his Griechische Kulturgeschichte as follows: Von der spateren Zeit der demokratischen Polis, seit der Schlacht von Chiironea, wendet sich der Blick bekanntlich gerne ab, es ist aber alles Eine Kette von Ursachen und Wirkungen bis zur gegenseitigen Ausrottung, bis zur Verodung desjenigen Griechenlands wie es die Romer ubernahmen, und dieser Krankheitsgeschichtewird sich die Darstellung, sobald sie objektiv verfahren soll, nie entziehen konnen. ... Das Hauptubel war, dal3 sich die Demokratie mit der starken antibanausischen Gesinnung gekreuzt hatte, dal3 die Gleichheit der Rechte mit der Abneigung gegen die Arbeit zusammengetroffen war, worauf die Nichtstuer die Mittel des Stimmrechts und des Gerichtswesens auf permanente Bedrohung der Besitzenden wandten. Es ist wahnsinniger MiSbrauch der Majoritat in einer Sache, welche unvermeidlich auch diese wieder in eine Majoritat und Minoritat Griechische Kulturgeschichte I [= GW, V] 254. spalten mull.. It is well known that the later periods of the democratic polis, after the battle of Chaironeia, are usually ignored; but one single chain of causes and effects leads up to the mutual annihilation of the Greek states, and the destruction of the Greece that was taken over by the Romans. A historical narrative that strives to be objective can never ignore this case history ... The main evil was the synthesis of democracy and a strong anti-banausic ethos, and the combination of equality of rights with low esteem of labour. This resulted in a situation where the idlers exploited the franchise and the judicial system as a permanent threat to the propertied classes. It is an insane abuse of the majority in matters that will inevitably split the latter again into a majority and a minority ... In other words, civil wars - conceived as wars between the poor and the rich - accelerated the self-destructionof the political sphere. This process was tantamount to an erosion of social cohesion, with a slow, yet comprehensive disintegration of society as such. Once the state itself has degenerated to the point of being a mere instrument for the promotion of special interests, no instance is left to counterbalance the collision of diametrically opposed desires. Since these desires are material in nature, a compromise is out of the question, for the simple reason that material desires are insatiable. We shall return to this axiom below. At this point, Fustel de Coulanges and Jacob Buckhardt part company. When Fustel pondered in what way the emergence of interest led to a utilitarian disposition under the banner of (economic) utility and in what way popular needs started to condition the judiciary, he did so exclusively as a historian analyzing a distinct historical phenomenon, that is, the ancient city-state. Fustel saw an effective caesura between antiquity and modernity, believing that Christianity,with its emphasis on individual liberty, introduced a principle into history which forever prevented a return to the oppressive ancient state. For him, the troubles of the Greek city-states had nothing to do with the political circumstances of his own age. Fustel used the analytical models and theories that Tocqueville had derived from his study of contemporary conflicts and applied strategically in public affairs only as heuristic instruments in order to analyze processes of social disintegration in antiquity. In other words, he defused

EGON FLAIG: JACOB BURCKHARDT, GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

23

their political explosiveness. At the same time, it did not occur to him to invoke events of ancient history as timeless exempla for debates about the political and social order. Not so Burckhardt, who used the schemes and categories of La Cite antique in a way unintended by its author. Burckhardt appropriated Fustels antiquarian point of view for his own purposes and recharged ancient democracy with the kind of presentist menace that it possessed in the texts of Tocqueville. In so doing, he endowed the pursuit of material interests with the capacity to unleash those impetuous energies that he regarded as the cause of historical changes in ancient as well as modern times. Burckhardt thus contributed to a wide-spread discourse that had become increasingly virulent after the workers strikes and rebellions of the 1830s and concentrated on the political consequences of demands for material advantages. Donoso Cortks, for instance, regarded these events as the main source of the evils of contemporary society. In his Speech on Dictatorship, delivered on 4 January 1849, which acquired a pan-European notoriety, Cortks proclaimed: [Ell germen de las revoluciones estA en 10s deseos sobreexcitadosde la muchedumbre por 10s tribunos que la explotan y benefi~ian.~ The germ of revolutions lies in the desires of the crowd, stirred up by the tribunes, who exploit them to their own advantage. Cortes, the harshest proponent of counter-revolutionaryCatholicism, was by no means the only one who held this opinion. Liberal politicians and publicists chimed in. Before the revolution of 1848, these had already started to adopt the concepts of counter-revolutionary Catholic thinkers. Burckhardt turned their central axiom into the cornerstone of his reflections on culture. The decline of the Greek polis, for him, taught a more general lesson: Die Wunsche aber sind weit uberwiegend materieller Art, so ideal sie sich auch geb&den, denn die Weitmeisten verstehen unter Gluck nichts anderes; materielle Wunsche aber sind in sich und absolut unstillbar, selbst wenn sie unaufhorlich erfiillt wiirden, und dann erst recht. Historische Fragmente, in Gesamtausgabe (n. 22, above), 111,432. Desires, however, are overwhelmingly of a material nature, even if they are dressed in an idealistic garb, for most people take happiness to mean nothing else. Material desires, however, are in and of themselves absolutely insatiable, even if they are continuously satisfied - or rather - especially when they are continuously satisfied. In his Griechische Kulturgeschichte, Burckhardt expressed the same idea: Die Gier der dotierten Masse hinwiederum war aus innern Griinden unerfiillbar und mul3te stets zu neuen Anderungen dragen. VIII, 204 The greed of the remunerated masses, on the other hand, was inherently unfulfillable and had to bring about constant new changes.

23 Juan Donoso

Cort6s, Obrus Completus, vol. I1 (Madrid 1970) 3 11.

24

OUT OF ARCADIA

These passages reveal that Burckhardt employed the concept of material interests in the same radical sense in which Donoso had used itz4- as a means systematically to associate such concepts as the masses and the sovereignty of the people with political catastrophe. He thus openly expounded a philosophy of history according to which naked material interests undermined the cultural determinants that should ideally shape our habitual dispositions. Burckhardt regarded this development as nothing short of disastrous. Once they had gained the upper hand, material interests set in motion a fateful causal chain: human beings ceased to follow their intellect and higher ideas; their readiness for self-sacrifice broke down, and they were no longer concerned with promoting culture, since they had less and less motivation to do so. Once material drives triumphed and social interaction within a culture was predominantly oriented towards mercenary gain, the power (Potenz) State declined. Quickly, all struggles turned into struggles over the distribution of wealth. This process, Burckhardt believed, would not come to a halt by itself since all material desires were inherently insatiable. In the end, they would induce the masses to tear one another to pieces. According to Burckhardt, democracy was the political order in which these naked material interests could best be articulated. Consequently, in all democracies, a war of the poor against the rich was bound to arise sooner or later: Jetzt wurde der Arme inne, daB er als Herr der Stimmen auch Herr des Besitzes werden konne. In Athen und wohl auch sonst lieB er sich zunachst honorieren fur seine Anwesenheit in Volksversammlung und Gericht, dann verkaufte er seine Stimme, besonders als Richter, lud den Reichen alle Arten von Leiturgien auf und verfugte Konfiskationen (samt Exil) ohne alles Recht - aul3erhalb Athens dann erfolgte Annullierung der Schulden und allgemeiner Umsturz. Denn bei den ersten Mitteln war das Gefiihl der Misere, namlich das Geluste, immer nur weiter gewachsen. Der Besitz hatte alle Weihe verloren, und jeder malj sein Recht nur nach seinem sogenannten Bediirfnis (d.h. Geliiste). Und fur all dies genugte eine momentane Stimmenmehrheit. Uberall sieht man nur Revolution und Gegenrevolution, nur Faktionen am Ruder, alle Fugsamkeit ist nur erzwungen und voll Hintergedanken an Umschwung. Criechische Kulturgeschichte I [= GW, V] 243. Now the poor man realized that, as master of the ballots, he could also become master of property. In Athens and arguably elsewhere as well, he first received remuneration for his presence in the popular assembly and the courts, then he sold his vote, in particular in his capacity as judge, imposed every sort of special tribute upon the rich and decreed confiscation of property (in addition to exile) without any legal basis. Outside Athens, annulment of debt and general revolution ensued. For the first measures had increased the feeling of wretchedness, that is, the intensity of desire. Property had entirely lost its sacred quality, and everybody determined his right according to his own needs (i.e. desires). And in order to enact all these measures a momentary majority vote sufficed. Wherever one looks, there is nothing but revolution and counter-revolution; factions only are at the helm; all obedience is but enforced and fraught with ulterior motives of change ...

24

Abendlund, ed. P. Viator (1849) 95.

See Donosos letter to cardinal Fomari, 19 June 1852, in Juan Donoso CortCs, Der Abfull vom

EGON FLAIG: JACOB BURCKHARDT, GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

25

This protracted state of war led to the gradual destruction of the political as well as the social sphere. No institution was able to provide a counterweight to the opposing factions since the state itself had degenerated into a mere instrument of competing particular interests. The result was a relapse into a state of nature somewhat reminiscent of Hobbes. But whereas for Hobbes everybody was at war with everybody else (bellum omnium contra omnes), Burckhardt projected a succession of conflicts between different social groups. For Burckhardt, then, the notion of material interests was not merely an analytical tool. It was a concept that had political relevance in contemporary discussions about the stability of the social and political order in general. Burckhardt was not merely concerned with the analysis of the fall of the Greekpolis. Rather, he used his historiographical narrative to define a stance in political controversies of the day. As contemporary France showed, the lessons of history were crucial ones: Erbarmlich und hilflos ist die Lage uberall, wo von unten herauf und durch die Presse regiert wird, aber so elend wie in Frankreich geht es doch nirgends. Selbst Boulanger ist nur petulance und contrefaGon und gar alles ist rcklame ... Frankreich ... wird von Strebern bis aufs Mark aufgefressen. So kann s aber noch lange gehen! Die Griechenstaaten haben uber zweihundert Jahre so geserbelt, bis die Bevolkerung sich allm2hlich aufgerieben hatte und die Verodung eintrat, d.h. zwei Drittel der Stiidte nur noch menschenleere Trummer waren. Wo Streber gewaltet haben, erhebt sich die Tyrannis nur noch momentan und lokal, und das Strebertum wird immer wieder Meister. Wenn nicht die Romer druber gekommen wiiren, hatte auch der Rest der Nation sich aufgezehrt. Also Geduld! Und richte man sich aufs dauernde Elend ein. JBB (n. 3, above), IX, 125-26. Wherever the government is run from below and by the press, the situation is miserable and hopeless, but nowhere are matters more desolate than in France. Even Boulanger is only pktulance and contrefacon and everything is rLclame ... France is being devoured to the bone by opportunists. But this can go on for years to come! The Greek states kept warring until the population gradually wiped itself out and desolation ensued, that is, when two-thirds of the cities were depopulated ghost-towns. Where opportunists had ruled, tyranny arose only temporarily and locally, and opportunism always reasserted itself. If the Romans had not arrived, the rest of the nation would have destroyed itself as well. Therefore, patience! We must prepare for a protracted period of misery. According to Fustel, too, Greek history ended in a long period of agony that began with the Peloponnesian War and lasted until the Roman conquest. For him, this agony continued in incessant struggles over the redistribution of wealth even in the Roman Empire, though with diminished force. Yet he found a great many apologetic, even respectful words, in particular for Athenian d e m ~ c r a c yBurckhardt, .~~ in contrast, depicted a social process of disintegration in his Griechische Kulturgeschichte that picked up speed after the Peloponnesian War. His prediction about the outcome of the crisis in contemporary France, however, did not fully converge with his historiographical staging of decline in ancient Greece. There was, according to Burckhardt, one essential difference between modern Europe and Greek

25

La Cite antique, 399ff.

26

OUT OF ARCADIA

antiquity. The Greeks could not find a way out of democracy and thus succumbed to ruinous civil wars: Welches aber auch die Leiden und Wirren sein mochten, tatsachlich behauptet sich immer die Demokratie als das jetzt einzig Mogliche, und auch wenn sie gelegentlich in jene Tyrannis der spatern Art umschlagt, so stellt sie sich stets wieder irgendwie her. Als Timoleon in Sizilien auftrat, schauderten die Sikelioten vor allem, was Rednerbuhne und Agora hieB, weil von daher alle Tyrannien uber sie gekommen waren, aber auch Timoleon konnte nichts als uberall Demokratien herstellen. Auf diesem Boden wachst nichts anderes mehr, bis die groBen Monarchien kommen. Griechische Kulturgeschichte I [= GW, V] 253. Whatever its trials and tribulations, democracy actually always asserts itself as the only possibility left. Even when it occasionally turns into a tyranny of the later type, it always reconstitutes itself somehow. When Timoleon appeared in Sicily, the Sicilians were horrified by everything that went by the name of rostrum and assembly place since from those all tyrants had descended upon them. But even Timoleon was unable to do anything but restore democracies everywhere. On this soil nothing else will grow any more until the great monarchies arrive. Modern nation states, however, maintained large standing armies. That was why they did not succumb to the anarchy of civil war that was the necessary fate of democracies. After a succession of serious social upheavals, Burckhardt predicted, these modern nation states would turn into ruthless military dictatorships. Here, too, the much-lauded Base1 prophet erred. Let me conclude this first part by suggesting that the more Burckhardt ostensibly detached himself from the content of his narrative and insisted on an apolitical stance, the more fiercely he effectively engaged in contemporary political controversy and polemic.

II Culture and war - the enhancement of existence and the aestheticization of history
In Burckhardts eyes, the trend towards democracy threatened to destroy Western civilization since it diminished mans capacity to create and maintain high culture. He thought that democratic forms of government inevitably lowered human motivation to a level so base that it could not sustain cultural production in the higher sense. The fall of society into a state of lawlessness was always an imminent possibility for him. This does not imply that Burckhardt considered any other form of political constitution as inherently conducive to cultural creativity. Rather, he thought that the greatness of an age, that is, above all its cultural productivity, depended on the quota of individuals willing and able to make personal sacrifices. The willingness to make sacrifices thus acquired cardinal importance in Burckhardts philosophy of history. What does he mean by this notion? And how does it play itself out in his Griechische Kulturgeschichte?
II.i Heroism versus utilitarianism

Claude LCvi-Strauss observed that every form of humanism strove in the end to separate human beings from each other and to claim for an ever more exclusive minority the privilege

EGON FLAIG: JACOB BURCKHARDT,GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

27

of a humanism that was corrupted from the start.26 Those who endorse the image of an ideal human existence, according to LCvi-Strauss, were easily tempted to monopolize this ideal for themselves. Ultimately, this amounted to denying others a comparable degree of humanity.* With this in mind, let us return to Burckhardt and his Griechische Kulturgeschichte. In this text, Burckhardt drew a fundamental distinction between two forms of existence along a dividing-line that appears in Homer and Hesiod: that of the heros (that is, the warriorhero) and that of the banausos (that is, the utilitarian trader and craftsman). The upshot of his comparison, illustrated with reference to the Odyssey, reads as follows:

... ein stiirkerer Gegensatz l a t sich allerdings nicht denken als der zwischen dem Banausen und derjenigen Denkweise, die es darauf ankommen l a t , ob man sterbend dem Feinde Siegesruhm verschafft oder siegend von ihm solchen gewinnt. Griechische Kulturgeschichte IV [= GW, VIII] 42.
It is hard to imagine a starker contrast than that between the banausos and the mentality of those men who put their life at risk in battle in order that in death they may hand the glory of victory to the enemy or, as victors, win glory for themselves. For Burckhardt, the willingness to risk a violent death characterized a special form of existence. Untainted by any base utilitarian considerations, the hero distinguished himself by his ability to develop and sustain a truly aesthetic outlook on life. Burckhardt regarded this aesthetic disposition as a defining feature of Western culture and a reason for its superiority over all others. In other words, he granted the attribute fully human only to those who accomplished something special by raising themselves above the level of mere existence, that is, far above utilitarian ends and material interests. In the light of LCvi-Strausss reflections, we are evidently dealing with a special type of humanism here - one that not only deprives those who belong to foreign cultures of a comparable degree of humanity, but, in addition, draws such a distinction within Western culture itself. Again, Burckhardt was not alone in endorsing this point of view. In the eighteenth century, the leading distinction in philosophical reflections on culture involved public versus private interests. The ideologues of the nineteenth century saw the crucial fault-line as running between idealistic and material interests, between human activity directed towards cultural ends and those drives and instincts that were determined by nature. Belief in the validity of this distinction easily generated paranoia about the state of culture. What would happen if material interests increasingly gained the upper hand? For Burckhardt (as for Tocqueville), there was little doubt that men would first lose the capacity for great cultural achievements, then the ability to wage war; politics would gradually degenerate into a mere struggle over the distribution of wealth; and finally society as a whole would stagger from one civil war to the next. It evidently did not occur to them to question whether it made sense to speak of material interests and motivations determined by nature in the context of society. For a growing portion of intellectuals, who conceived of themselves as apostles of high culture while at the same time affecting a deep pessimism about the future of Western culture, the humanity of their
Quoted in W. Lepenies and H. H. Ritter (eds), Orte des Wilden Denkens. Zur Anthropologie von Claude L6vi-Struuss (Frankfurt 1970) 137. 27 C. Uvi-Strauss, Die traurigen Tropen (Cologne 1960) 141.
26

28

OUT OF ARCADIA

fellow Europeans was not a full humanity at all if it remained below a certain threshold of idealistic commitment. Many a cultural critic at the time was obsessed with averting the threat of cultural decline and thereby rescuing Western civilization from suffocating in the quagmire of materialism. Let us consider the solution Burckhardt had to offer.

Il.ii War as a means of enhancing existence

Book One of Griechische Kulturgeschichte contains a brief but revealing discussion of the causes of the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Despite the protracted nature of the conflict, Burckhardt considered the citys collapse as regrettably swift: Athen nach seiner bisherigen Geschichte und seinem Hochgefuhl hatte im Grunde etwas mehr verzweifelten Widerstand (hmhotcl) leisten konnen. Griechische Kulturgeschichte I [= GW, V] 213. Considering its previous history and elation, one could have expected Athens to put up a somewhat more desperate resistance (hn6vota). In his view, Athenian democracy had been thriving on an extraordinary pathos, which he regarded as a source of great moral strength to the citizenry. This pathos should have enabled it to resist the Spartans longer. The key phrase to note here is desperate resistance: a seemingly innocuous formulation at the time, but politically incriminated for us to-day. Burckhardt continued: Die (wohlbemerkt auBerst zahlreichen) Oligarchen aber, indem sie (405 v. Chr.)den letzten Widerstand ... brechen halfen, beforderten aus allen Kraften die Niederlage der Vaterstadt, weil jeder Sieg derselben doch nur ein Sieg des Demos gewesen ware.,. But the (indeed, very numerous) oligarchs promoted the defeat of their city to the best of their ability by helping to break the last resistance in 405 BC, because every victory of their city would only have been a victory for the demos . . . The oligarchs, in other words, thwarted that desperate resistance, that final heroic effort, to which Burckhardt attached so much importance. It failed to happen not because of a lack of energy but because of internal strife: the class struggle between rich and poor, which was ultimately fuelled by material interests. Athens failed in its world-historical duty because material interests had already begun to dominate politics. Insofar as it failed to play its part, Athens deprived European history of a wonderful example of desperate heroism. The question arises: why was this kind of heroism so important to Burckhardt? The answer to this question can be found in the lectures On the Study of History, where Burckhardt articulated his theory of the moral dimension of war. For future reference, it is important to note that Nietzsche attended some of these lectures, and knew either the manuscript or the main ideas: Ein Volk lernt wirklich seine volle Nationalkraft nur im Kriege <, im vergleichenden Kampf gegen andere Volker > kennen, weil sie nur dann vorhanden ist; auf diesem Punct wird es dann suchen mussen, sie festzuhalten; allgemeine VergroBerung des MaBtstabes. Uber das Studium der Geschichte 344.

EGON FLAIG: JACOB BURCKHARDT, GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

29

Only in war, only in its competitive struggle with other nations, does a people really become aware of its full national energy, for this energy manifests itself only in war. The people will then strive to maintain its energy at this level. [The result is a] general enhancement of the standard. Burckhardt thus advances the following two arguments. First, war was the ideal medium to raise human existence above the basic impulses of nature. If life had an inherent tendency to strive towards a vital summit, then athletic competition in the sense of the Greek agon did not suffice. War mobilized energies in a much more intensive fashion. Secondly, war raised the standard of all. The experience of war created new yardsticks of intensive communication and devotion to a common cause, both in the individual and even more so in the community. If a people managed to preserve this newly acquired standard of existential intensity, then their ability to muster resources and strive tenaciously for higher goals would result in cultural achievements. Burckhardts philosophy of history posited a systematic correlation between the cohesiveness of a civic community and its cultural productivity.28 Why should this be the case? Burckhardt offered the following explanation: Der lange Friede bringt nicht nur Entnervung hervor, sondern er l a t das Entstehen einer Menge j ammerlicher, angstvoller Nothexistenzen zu, welche ohne ihn nicht entstanden und sich dann doch mit lautem Geschrei um Recht irgendwie an das Dasein klammern, und den wahren Kraften den Platz vonvegnehmen und die Luft verdicken, im Ganzen auch das Gebliit der Nation verunedeln. Der Krieg bringt wieder die wahren Krafte zu Ehren. <Jene jammerlichen Nothexistenzen bringt er wenigstens zum Schweigen? - >29 Uber das Studium der Geschichte 344-45. Long periods of peace not only cause enervation, they also allow the emergence of a host of wretched characters [Nothexistenzen] whose despicable, fearful lives would not otherwise be possible. Then these characters try to preserve their existence somehow by making a great fuss about rights and thus deprive the true forces of their space. They thicken the air and also generally debase the national stock. War restores the glory of the true forces. <At least it silences these wretched characters?> Thus Burckhardt described the evolutionary profits (in the Darwinian sense of the survival of the fittest) that accrued to a community in and through war. The balance of power among
28 He used this idea to explain the astonishing vibrancy of Athenian cultural activities after the Persian Wars: see Griechische Kulturgeschichte I [= GW, V] 208-11. 29 In this context, Burckhardt explicitly referred to the following plea by Heinrich Leo, published in the Volksblatt of June 1853: Gott erlose uns von der europgschen Volkerfaulnis und schenke uns einen frischen, frohlichen Krieg, der Europa durchtobt, die Bevolkerung sichtet und das skrophulose Gesindel zertritt, was jetzt den Raum zu eng macht, um noch ein ordentliches Menschenleben in der Stickluft fiihren zu konnen. (May God redeem us from the corruption of the European peoples and grant us a fresh, merry war that will rage through Europe, weed out the population and crush the scrofulous rabble which spreads out so much these days that it is no longer possible to lead a proper human life in this stifling air.) It is important to note that the conception of war as beneficial for the hygiene of a people had nothing to do with official military doctrine. Burckhardt compiled his theory of history from a number of diverse sources.

30

OUT OF ARCADIA

the various social types of a nation underwent drastic shifts. Since war involved great efforts and high risks, those types would gain in importance who were able to meet the demands of war and willingly subject themselves to the highest exertions and dangers. Types lacking in this ability would lose in rank and prestige. As a result, extreme talents, whether in the area of igstrumental skills or the moral aptitude to make personal sacrifices, would quickly start tozourish. Burckhardt made no secret of his antipathy to rights and securities. The existence of rights, he believed, produced a moral disposition towards the material interests of everyday life; as a result, men became incapable of taking risks and making sacrifices.His theory of war and his demonization of material interests were intimately connected. He summarized this connection thus: Sodann enonne sittliche Superioritatdes Krieges iiber den blofien gewaltsamen Egoismus des Einzelnen: er entwickelt die Krafte im Dienst eines Allgemeinenund zwar des hochsten Allgemeinen (Der Krieg allein gewtihrt den Menschen den grofiartigen Anblick der allgemeinen Unterordnung unter ein Allgemeines), und innerhalb einer Disciplin, welche zugleich die hochste heroische Tugend sich ent <faken> lafit. Uber das Studium der Geschichte 345. War, then, possesses an enormous ethical superiority vis-a-vis the sheer brutal egotism of the individual: war develops forces in the service of a general good (war alone grants men the great spectacleof a collectivescomplete subordinationto a general goal) and that within a discipline that allows the blossoming of the highest heroic virtue. War, for Burckhardt, was superior to a duel or the Greek agon, because it taught the individual to overcome his egoism and to subordinatehimself to a common goal. The passage above suffices to show that Burckhardt cannot justifiably be called a liberal, not even an Altliberaler (liberal of the old school) for he evidently regarded the subordination of the individual to a collective goal as ethically superior to the pursuit of private goals. War and aristocratic competition (agon) surpass the utilitarian outlook on life as well as the main elements of liberal-bourgeois society, that is, the exchange of goods, which Burckhardt contemptuously called trade. As goes without saying, individual self-sacrifice, in Burckhardts eyes, was a moral phenomenon. Human beings raised themselves above the level of everyday life and their mundane interests in order to work together in the service of an idea and a common cause that demanded complete devotion. But this moral phenomenon, for him, was simultaneously an aesthetic event; or, put the other way, this moral event contained an aesthetic dimension. For it was a great spectacle, as Burckhardt called it in one of the marginal comments quoted above. The aestheticization of war will be on the agenda shortly. But before we turn to this problem, we need to discuss Burckhardts conception of total war.

ZZ.iii The invention of total war and the anxiety about the survival of culture
For Burckhardt, war signified more than the brief military engagementof two opposing armies. Ideally, the entire existence of a people was to be at stake. This was most likely to happen in a defensive war:

EGON FLAIG: JACOB BURCKHARDT, GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

31

Nur m a t e es womoglich ein gerechterund ehrenvollerKrieg sein, etwa ein Vertheidigungskrieg wie der Perserkrieg war, welcher die E 8 t e der Hellenenin allen Richtungen glorreich entwickelte. Ferner ein wirklicher Krieg um das gesammte Dasein. Uber das Studium der Geschichte 345. But probably it would have to be a just and honourable war, for instance, a defensive war like the Persian War, which gloriouslydeveloped the forces of the Hellenes in every respect. Furthermore, it would have to be a true war, in which the entire existence [of a nation] is at stake. It is important to realize that with these observations Burckhardt here diverged from the theorists of war who were in vogue in the middle of the nineteenth century. Carl von Clausewitz, for one, the great Prussian theorist of war, maintained the exact opposite. Like Carl Schmittlater on, Clausewitz considered it a twofold triumph of European modernity that wars had become limited and no longer affected the existence of entire peoples and that, moreover, warring nations began to distinguish sharplybetween combatants and non-combatants. Burckhardt, on the other hand, 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. This point merits further elaboration. In Book 7 of On War, which appeared in its second edition in 1853, Clausewitz discussed the difference between absolute and real war. Absolute war came closest to realizing an ideal type of war since it aimed at the total annihilation of the hostile forces. Real war, on the other hand, for a multitude of reasons did not quite reach this Platonic ideal of warfare. Clausewitz showed how in modern times, in particular in the course of the eighteenthcentury, wars had become increasingly demilitarized: risks and dangers diminished,the population no longer took part in battle, engagements turned into mere skirmishes for diplomatic reasons, in which the existential tension and intensity of warfare could no longer be felt. This, however, changed once again with the French Revolutionary Wars and especially the Napoleonic Wars, which Clausewitz described as the great caesura in modern military ~onflict:~ Der Krieg war urplotzlich wieder eine Sache des Volkes geworden, und zwar eines Volkes von 30 Mio, die sich alle als Staatsbiirgerbetrachteten. ... Seit Bonaparte also hat der Krieg, indem er zuerst auf der einen Seite, dann auf der anderen wieder Sache des ganzen Volkes wurde, eine ganz andere Natur angenommen,oder viehnehr, er hat sich seiner wahren Natur, seiner absoluten Vollkommenheitsehr genaert. All of a sudden, war was again a matter of the people, and a people of 30 million at that, who all deemed themselves citizens. ...Since the days of Napoleon, war, by becoming a matter of the people again first on one side, then on the other, has taken on a completely different nature, or rather, it has come very close to its true nature, its absolute perfection. It is importantto note, however,that what Clausewitzcalled absolute war was different fiom the total war that Spengler and Ludendorff propagated in the 1920sand 1930s,although, at
30 Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege. VollstandigeAusgube i m

1966) 868 and 870.

Urtext,ed. W. Hahlweg, 17th edn (Bonn

32

OUT OF ARCADIA

first sight, it appears as if he anticipated their notion. First of all, the aim of Clausewitzs absolute war was the annihilation of the enemy forces. This was precisely what Clausewitz deemed praiseworthy about Carnot and especially Napoleon. These generals heightened the importance of victory on the battlefield and decisively changed the logic of warfare. The unconditional attack on the main enemy forces became the main strategic operation and the quick decision on the battlefield the primary aim of war. Accordingly, the Prussian theorist distinguished sharply between combatants and non-combatants. Secondly, war, for him, always remained subordinated to politics. In contrast, total war mobilized an entire nation in its service, and erased the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Hence Ludendorff, in his book on total war, published in 1935, explicitly rejected Clausewitzs view of war: Das Wesen des Krieges hat sich geandert, das Wesen der Politik hat sich geandert, so mu6 sich auch das Verhaltnis der Politik zur Kriegfiihrung 5ndern. Alle Theorien von Clausewitz sind iiber den Haufen zu werfen. Krieg und Politik dienen der Lebenserhaltung des Volkes, der Krieg aber ist die hochste AuBerung volkischen Lebenswillens. Darum hat die Politik der Kriegfiihrung zu dienen. E. Ludendorff, Der totale Krieg (Munich 1935) 10. The character of war has changed, the character of politics has changed and therefore the relation between politics and warfare must change as well. All of Clausewitzs theories are to be discarded. War and politics both serve the preservation of a nations life, but war is the highest expression of a peoples will to life. That is why politics needs to be subservient to warfare. According to Ludendorff, war represented the greatest exertion a people could undertake to guarantee their continued existence. Therefore, as he remarked on the same page, total politics had to take measures even in periods of peace to prepare a peoples struggle for survival in war. Ludendorff thus radicalized the problem: if wars were struggles that always implicated the existence of an entire people, then peace was nothing but a brief truce, an interval to be used to prepare for the next round of combat. Ludendorff s take on war was not so much military as political. And it was so in a new sense: all considerations now revolved around the perpetual struggle of a people for their continued existence.

Il.iv Cultural and hygienic consequences of a radicalized war

It turns out that the first widely-read German-speaking author to formulate a concept of total war was Jacob Burckhardt. This is a little embarrassing for the Burckhardt hagiographers, not least because, ever since the end of World War 11, they have held up his historiography as a positive alternative to Rankes statism and the militant nationalism of the Prussian School. To be sure, Burckhardt can hardly be made responsible for the theories of total war proffered by Spengler and Ludendorff, which differed quite dramatically, in many ways, from the relevant observations in On the Study of History and the Griechische Kulturgeschichte. Still, Spenglers remark that war is the eternal form of higher human existence; the purpose of states is war; their

EGON FLAIG: JACOB BURCKHARDT,GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

33

very existence signifies a readiness for war,31 if it partly surpassed Burckhardt, also partly alluded to his definition of the Greekpolis as a semi-totalitarianorganization meant to ensure survival?* The concept of total war was significant for Burckhardt because he posited that a civic community could carry over the existential intensity reached during war into times of peace. On the basis of this presupposition Burckhardt developed several claims with a strong exhortatory character: war was to be a means by which to reach a more intense form of being; but the ultimate purpose of this intensity was not future warfare, but cultural achievements.In other words, war set a standard, but it was not to be the permanent condition of human civilization. Burckhardts judgements of Sparta illustrate this train of thought: they tend to be very respectful, but betray little sympathy (Griechische KulturgeschichteI [= GW, V] 102-10). The authors of the ConservativeRevolution and the ideologues of war in the 1920swere able to use this chain of arguments for their own ends. They only needed to intensify Burckhardts claims concerning the suffocationof culture in material interests. In their polemics against this threat, they resorted to the following hypothesis: 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. Permanent war was therefore vital for the preservation of culture since it was the only means by which the willingness of the entire community to make the necessary sacrifices could be kept at a consistently high level. Authors of the so-called war-generation- Spengler, Jiinger, 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: his thoughts on war and culture were available, in written form, from 1905,when Jacob Oeri published his lectures On the Study o f History under the title Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen. True, Nietzsche provided more radical and earlier formulations of this topic, but these were inspired, to a considerable extent, by Burckhardts lectures, which Nietzsche attended in 1870/71.I shall return to this point. To be sure, Burckhardt, in some respects, only configured a new pattern of thought out of discursive positions readily available at the time. Yet the way in which he formulated the problem of cultural decline was more radical - and so were his solutions. As we have seen, he did not derive his radicalized notion of war from contemporary military theorists like Clausewitz. It seems that he drew it from his study of ancient warfare. In his eyes, wars in antiquity differed fundamentally from modern wars: Ganz besonders aber sind die heutigen Kriege zwar wohl Theile Einer grol3en allgemeinen Crisis, aber einzeln fiir sich ohne die Bedeutung und Wirkung echter Crisen; das biirgerliche Leben bleibt dabei in seinem Geleise (und grade die jammerlichen Nothexistenzen bleiben alle am Leben), sie hinterlassen aber enorme Schulden,d.h. sie sparen die Hauptcrisis f i r die Zukunft zusammen.Auch ihre kurze Dauer nimmt ihnen den Werth als Crisen; die vollen
31 Krieg ist die ewige Form hoheren menschlichen Daseins, und Staaten sind um des Krieges willen da; sie sind Ausdruck der Bereitschaft zum Kriege. 0. Spengler, Preussenturn und Sozialismus (Munich 1920) 52. 32 Cf. Griechische KulturgeschichteI [= GW, V] 57-79.

34

OUT OF ARCADIA

Krafte der Verzweiflungwerden nicht angespannt,bleiben aber auch nachher nicht siegreich auf dem Schlachtfeld stehen; - und doch konnte nur durch sie die wahre Erneuerung des Lebens erfolgen, d.h. die versohnende AbschaffUngdes Alten durch ein wirklich lebendiges Neues. Uber das Studium der Geschichte 345. In particular, the wars of today may well be parts of a great general crisis, but in themselves, they lack the significance and the effect of true crises. Bourgeois life continues more or less as before (and precisely the wretched characters all remain alive). At the same time, these wars accumulate enormous debts, that is to say, they save the main crisis for the future. Their short duration, too, prevents them from becoming a true crisis. The full forces of desperation are not exerted and hence cannot emerge victorious on the battlefield. Only they, however, could bring about a real renewal of life: the conciliatory abolition of the old by a genuinely vital new. Burckhardt makes three interesting points here, all of which were to have repercussions in the discourses of the New Right and the fascists. First, there is the idea of a renewal of life through war, of abolishing the old through something vital and new. The Futurists only had to replace the expression conciliatory abolition with violentabolition and Burckhardts observation could be used as a blueprint for the glorification of modern war. Second, Burckhardt regretted the brevity of modern wars. Clausewitz, as we have seen, evaluated this issue rather differently. One question that arises is what wars Burckhardt had in mind when he referred to the wars of today. This is not easy to determine. It seems safe to exclude the American Civil War: Burckhardt systematically ignored it. In fact, Burckhardt simply failed to make clear his point of comparison, presumably because he evaluated the wars of today on the basis of an ideal type of warfare he thought he could locate in antiquity. If Burckhardt had been interested in validating this notion empirically, he would have been faced with insurmountable problems: the length of the Peloponnesian War and the first two Punic Wars were the exception in antiquity. But Burckhardt seems little concerned with facts. What mattered to him was the construction of a model - and its message that if wars were short, then they would not permeate all of society. The idea that all available social resources had to be mobilized in a civic communitys struggle for survival was a central element of the rhetoric of total war. The inevitable consequence, or implicit premise, of this postulate was the subordination of all social activities to the necessities of war. If war did not affect all areas of social life, then those jammerliche Nothexistenzen would remain alive - in Burckhardtsview a clearly undesirable outcome - and only a few members of society would develop the capacity for self-sacrifice. Unmoved, Burckhardt drew the chilling conclusions from his premises: war not only served as a moral purification insofar as it forced men to raise themselves above their everyday lives and material interests; it also served to cleanse a people in social terms insofar as it eliminated the part of the population that was unable to raise itself to the level of high moral exertion. As we shall see, this social cleansing contained aspects of racial hygiene. Third, there was Burckhardts concern with the mobilization of the full forces of desperation. This expression became a key term in the militant rhetoric of the German wargeneration during the 1920s, and hence a fixture in the repertory of that ideology which

EGON FLAIG: JACOB BURCKHARDT, GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

35

prepared the ground for the National Socialists. That generation regarded it as axiomatic that only desperate heroism could bring about both victory and a genuine renewal of the German people.

II.v The aestheticization o f war

Alongside its moral and social components, war, for Burckhardt, also possessed an aesthetic dimension. War could become a great spectacle of the subordinationof the entire community under a common goal. What was Burckhardts rationale for aestheticizing war? War as an aesthetic experience became possible only when the different moral reasons for individual and collective sacrifice had ceased to be of any great importance. It comes as no surprise that Burckhardt ultimately downgraded the significance of moral aspects and turned the beautiful into the sole point of reference:

D a s Wahre und Gute mannigfach zeitlich gef&bt und bedingt; aber die Hingebung czumal die mit Gefahr und Opfern verbundene> an das zeitlich bedingte Wahre und Gute ist etwas unbedingt Herrliches. Das Schone freilich konnte uber die Zeiten und ihren Wechsel erhaben sein, bildet iiberhaupt eine Welt fiir sich. Uber das Studium der Geschichte 230.
The True and the Good are historically coloured and conditioned in many different ways; but devotion <in particular, devotion involving danger and sacrifice> to the historically contingent True and Good is something unconditionallymagnificent. The Beautiful indeed might transcend the times and their changes altogether. It represents a world of its own. For Burckhardt,the self-sacrifice of individuals, larger groups or entire political communities for an idea represented something unconditionally magnificent. This should be taken quite literally: when Burckhardt says unconditional,he means absolute, that is, regardless of the ends pursued and regardless of the moral significance of the actions involved. Self-sacrifice in war, for him, represented the ultimate indicator of a nations ability to act out of spiritual and cultural motives. Let us consider the implications of Burckhardts point of view. Imagine the spectacle of German SS units on the Eastern Front in the winter of 1944/45, taking a last heroic stand against the superior forces of the Red Army and thus allowing the continuation of industrial mass slaughter in Auschwitz. In purely aesthetic terms, there is no difference between their selfsacrifice and that of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae. From an aesthetic point of view, both events have the same quality.33
33 Burckhardt insisted repeatedly on defending the disposition towards self-sacrifice against moral objections: Die Grorje einer Zeitepoche h a g t an der Quote der Aufopferungsfahigen, nach welcher Seite es auch sei ... Hingebung an eine Sache, welche es auch sei, mit gazlichem Absterben der personlichen Eitelkeit. (The greatness of an age depends on the proportion of those willing to sacrifice themselves, regardless for what cause ... Devotion to a cause, whatever it is, with complete disregard for personal vanity.) Jacob Burckhardt Archiv, PA 207, 131 recto, quoted in J.GroRe, Typus und Geschichte. Eine Jacob-Burckhardt-Interpretation (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 1997) 436 11.76. This definition of greatness fits the case of the warrior much better than that of the artist. Jorn Riisen offers a very precise discussion of Burckhardts aestheticization of history: cf. Jacob Burckhardt, in

36

OUT OF ARCADIA

In other words, Burckhardt discussed the moral phenomena of war and self-sacrifice within an amoral framework. He had no other choice. In order to emphasize the significance of war and
sacrifice for high culture, he had to remain neutral towards the moral dimension of warfare. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this moral indifference has become deeply problematic. But even in the context of nineteenth-century historiography,Burckhardts posture represented something of an anomaly. Most of his colleagues believed in progress and the inherent value of the nation, and for those very reasons could not grant the same kind of moral dispensation upon which Burckhardt insisted. For Theodor Mommsen, for example, history implied not just political but also moral progress. In stark contrast to liberal historians, Burckhardt had nothing but contempt for human rights - as for rights in general. It is quite impossible to recognize human rights and show moral indifference towards violent social processes. Burckhardt tore asunder the traditional triad of the good, the beautiful, and the true. He historicized (and thereby relativized) the good and the true, while exalting the beautiful as a transhistorical absolute. Historiographicallyspeaking, this meant that the most disastrous catastrophes could offer magnificent spectacles of desperate heroism and total devotion: Ganz anders stellen sich zu unserm Gefiihl diejenigen Bevolkerungen, von deren letzten Kampfen und Untergang Kunde erhalten ist: die lycischen Stadte gegen Harpagus, Carthago, Numantia, Jerusalem gegen Titus. Solche scheinen uns aufgenommen in die Reihe von Lehrern und Vorbildern der Menschheit in der Einen groljen Sache: dalj man an das Gemeinsame Alles setze und daB das Einzelleben der Guter hochstes nicht sei. Sod& aus ihrem Ungliick ein herbes, aber erhabenes Gluck f i r das Ganze ensteht. Uber das Studium der Geschichte 242. Those nations whose last struggles and fall are documented elicit a completely different reaction in us: the Lycian cities against Harpagus, Carthage, Numantia, Jerusalem against Titus. These seem to belong to the ranks of models for humankind in that they teach us the greatest of all lessons: that one has to devote everything to the common cause and that individual existence is not the highest of goods. Thus from their misfortune there arises a bitter, but sublime happiness for the whole. This passage makes clear why Burckhardt was not satisfied with the Athenian surrender in 405 BC. His was an aesthetic dissatisfaction. The fall of the Athenians was not a magnificent spectacle. With their swift surrender, the Athenians deprived later generations of a beautiful scene of struggle and destruction. According to Burckhardts philosophy of history, catastrophes had to be incorporated into an ideal image, an image of eternal beauty that occidental humanity could hand down from generation to generation through its poets and historians, who were to disregard moral considerationsand focus exclusively on the sublime and the consolation of the beautiful. It would be possible to trace many of the thoughts that Burckhardt brought into a systematic correlation in the works of other nineteenth-century authors. An intertextual analysis could

Deutsche Historiker, ed. H.-U. Wehler (Gottingen 1972), 111,3-28; see also his Die Uhr der die Stunde schlagt (n. 22, above).

EGON FLAIG: JACOB BURCKHARDT,GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

37

easily bring such affinities to light. For our present purposes, however, such an enquiry is not particularly relevant. What concerns us here is not the origin, but Burckhardts own peculiar synthesis, of diverse ideas. Burckhardt articulated the problem of material interests more radically than other contemporary historians and turned war into a cathartic social event - not any kind of war, but total war, to which he attributed a cultural significance of the first order. The form of total war described by Burckhardt made the destruction of the losers almost inevitable. This destruction yielded a double profit in Burckhardtseyes: in their misfortune the losers rose above their dull determinationby natural instincts and asserted their spiritual and cultural vocation, thereby attaininga moral end; and posterity delighted in the sublime spectacle of catastrophe, thereby experiencing a bitter, but sublime happiness ( herbes aber erhabenes Gluck). It is difficult not to read these ideas in the context of the aestheticistmovement that was gathering momentum in artistic circles in the last third of the nineteenth century and contributed both to the decadent anxieties of thefin de si2cle and to vitalist hopes for a cathartic,redemptive war. As early as 1853 Heinrich Leo expressed his longing for such a war. In 1914 it came. Burckhardtscontemplativeattitude guarded his thoughts from proto-fascist appropriations. Ignoring this means distorting his texts. But habent sua fata libelli. Around 1890, a new, radical Right began to emerge in Germanys intellectual and academic milieux,34 and in this context Burckhardtsworks found a very receptive and ideologicallycharged audience. The New Right was largely anti-conservative, suspicious of traditional elites, ready to intervene socially in radical ways, and susceptible to volkisch positions and the glorification of violence. Within these circles, the first great wave of Nietzscheanism set in. It was no coincidence that in 1912, when the Italian Futurists started to glorify and aestheticize war, the revolutionary Right in Germany greeted their ideas with open arms. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck welcomed the radicalideology of young Italy and interpretedFuturism as the great transvaluationof values promised by N i e t z ~ c h e . ~ ~ Nietzsche knew Burckhardtsideas on war- indeed, he knew them well. For Burckhardt was the only historian whom he unreservedly admired. Burckhardt gave his lectures On the Study of History three times between 1868 and 1872, when Nietzsche was in constant contact with him. Nietzsche sat in on some of these lectures. In his later writings he picked up and radicalized several of their central motifs and concepts. In taking them further, Nietzsche also took them in a different direction. Burckhardt sensed this and kept his distance from the young German philosopher.

ILvi Eugenics and the enhancement of human existence

One last point. In an 1868 lecture, Ernst Haeckel held up Sparta as a model for eugenic policy. The Spartans had attemptedto preserve their racial qualities by killing off the deformed or weak progeny of the ruling elite. Burckhardt also touched on eugenic ideas in his Griechische Kulturgeschichte - but he seemed to reject them. At an earlier stage, in the autumn of 1868,
34 See G. Eley, Reshaping the G

(New Haven and London 1980), and R. J. Evans, Rethinking German History: Nineteenth-Century Germany and the Origins of the Third Reich (London 1987). 35 Quoted in P. Demetz, Worte in Freiheit. Der italienische Futurismus und die deutsche literarische Avantgarde 1912-1934 (Munich 1990) 32-34,228.

e m n Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck

38

OUT OF ARCADIA

when he was finishing the manuscript of his lectures On the Study o f History, he was more susceptible to such ideas.36His reference, quoted above, to the wretched characters debasing the nations stock was hardly a rhetorical faux pus. This term was a stock-in-trade of the eugenicist vocabulary. Recent detailed scholarship on eugenicist ideas and the concept of racial hygiene has shown how the eugenicist movement gained in profile and acceptance from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards.37In this context, Burckhardts statements were anything but innocuous. He was clearly familiar with eugenicist concepts, even though we are unable to determine his sources. In any case, the dissemination of such ideas did not require intensive reading; oral communication fully sufficed. What threatened to defile the nations stock were evidently the inferior members of the community - those who were naturally inferior, that is. Burckhardt not only followed other German (and English) theorists who posited a natural inequality between men, he also described this natural inequality in the chilling language then current amongst eugenicists. However, Burckhardt not only spoke the language of the eugenicists in this context, he also adopted their value-system. He conceived of war as a eugenic process. War separates the great from the base. In his eyes, humanity threatened to fall apart, not because of racial differences, but because of the co-existence of inferior and superior qualities within one and the same people. Some interpreted this hierarchy within a people in eugenic, others in racist terms. In the Griechische Kulturgeschichte, however, Burckhardthad largely given up this eugenic position. In this work, he embraced Taines concept of race, which explained racial differences in terms of environmental factors. Still, Burckhardts lectures left a powerful impression on Nietzsche - and Nietzsche remained a eugenicist. In 1888, he sketched a programme for the segregation of inferior lives and the breeding of superior human beings.38One would assume that the most radical attack on humanism consists of denying a part of humanity the status of being human. But Nietzsche, who played off a higher form of being human against the way the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries conducted their lives, felt justified in drawing a clear line right through humanity. In the name of humanism, he questioned the right to exist of all those who fell short of this norm.

To avoid the misunderstandings that are bound to arise when dealing with a topic such as this one, let me conclude by briefly re-stating the points I have tried to make in this essay - and the points I have not tried to make. First, I am not arguing that Burckhardt was a proto-fascist or that he paved the way for National Socialism. But the condemnationof human rights by so many German academics and intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped to create a cultural climate in which human rights could gleefully be trampled upon. And Burckhardt, as I have tried to show, despised the concept of human rights - almost as ardently as his Basel colleague
36 See ffberdas Studium der Geschichte (n. 16, above) 43-45. 31 See P. Weingart, J. Kroll, K. Bayertz (eds), Rasse, Blut und

Gene: Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt a. M. 1988) 27-187; P. Wendling, Lhygi2ne de la race, tome 1, (Hygidne midical et euginisme midical en Allemagne 1870-1933)(Paris 1998) 67ff. 38 See F. Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, 15 vols, 2nd edn (Munich, Berlin, and New York 1988),XIII, 401,495. See also Rasse, Blut und Gene (n. 37, above) 70-72.

EGON FLAIG: JACOB BURCKHARDT, GREEK CULTURE, AND MODERNITY

39

Nietzsche. Those who value this concept should strike Nietzsche as well as Burckhardt off their calendar of saints. Second, I am not arguing that Burckhardts aestheticizationof violence and war led directly to the militant ideologies of the 1920s and 1930s. But it was only a small step from aestheticization to justification. Even though Burckhardt himself never took this step, his formulations made it easier for others to do so. Third, I am not arguing that Burckhardt advocated the racist segregation of men into subhumans and supermen. But through the dark lenses of his cultural pessimism, he saw a European civilization that was sinkingswiftly into a black sea of materialism and utilitarianism which threatened to drown its great cultural continuity unless drastic measures were taken to revitalize human existence. By expounding this vision, he contributed to a discourse on the enhancement of life that would soon take a racist, eugenicist slant of the worst kind - out of concerns essentially the same as Burckhardts. To sum up, let me paraphrase the comment of Auschwitz inmate no. 174.5 17 - Primo Levi -on the denial of human rights. He who puts the concern for culture and for the so-called higher human existence above human rights and the fundamental equality of human beings denies others a comparable degree of humanity. By doing so, he furthers always and everywherethe possibility that one day they will be deprived of their humanity as such.
University of Greifswald