Both of them occupied specific positions within the broad spectrum of historians in the Second Reich, and the spectrum reached from
Treitschke
to Mommsen, from Dietrich Schiaferto Ludwig Quidde.
Nolte - 1974 - The Relationship between "Bourgeois" and "Marxist" Historiography
?
Wesleyan University
The Relationship between "Bourgeois" and "Marxist" Historiography Author(s): Ernst Nolte
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Feb. , 1975), pp. 57-73 Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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? ? THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN "BOURGEOIS" AND "MARXIST" HISTORIOGRAPHY*
ERNST NOLTE
At many universities in the Western world today, there is hardly any topic an historian will be asked to discuss more frequently than the relationship between "bourgeois" and "Marxist"historiography. At the same time, he will be obliged to define himself and his own work in terms of these two poles. Discussion of the matter is difficult because the basis for scholarly inquiry
an objective relationship to one's subject - is lacking. The "bourgeois his- torian" seems to look at the question differently from the "Marxist historian. " But we must not forget that in using the terms "bourgeois" and "Marxist" we, too, are following Marxist practice. Our acceptance of the Marxist posi- tion as a point of departure is clearly provisional, and as we proceed, we shall see that the apparently irreconcilable opposition of "bourgeois" and "Marxist" will prove not to be so irreconcilable after all. In making this initial concession to the Marxist view, we shall be able to temper the military metaphors both sides are so fond of using. I shall not roll out the heavy artillery of Hegelian concepts, as Bernard Willms does in his valuable essay Marxismus - Wissenschaft- Universitfit,' nor shall I open the attack on a number of fronts, as the authors of issue number 70 of Das Argument do in their "Kritik der biirgerlichen Geschichtswissenschaft. "2 Instead, I shall try to characterize the bourgeois and Marxist positions in historiography. This will involve three steps: citing statements of purpose by major represen- tatives of both schools, comparing the contents of leading bourgeois and Marxist publications in the field, and describing the most extreme and what have been to date the most usual types of exchange between the two camps. I shall then expand the scope of our inquiry by examining Marx's and Engels'
* This essay is a slightly abridged version of an inaugural lecture at the Free Uni- versity of Berlin. The lecture, announced as one in a series on the "Cold War," was not delivered in the university because powerful student groups had called for a boycott of it. This incident is not atypical of the current situation at the Free University.
1. Bernard Willms, Marxismus - Wissenschaft - Universitfit: Zw6lf Thesen (Diussel- dorf, 1971).
2. "Kritik der birgerlichen GeschichtswissenschaftI," Das Argument: Zeitschrift fuir Philosophie zind Sozialwissenschlaften, 70, Sonderband (Berlin, 1972).
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? ? 58 ERNST NOLTE
views on scholarship in general and on historical scholarship in particular. The insights derived from these first two steps should enable us to formulate, in a third section, distinctions and results that will make our controversy look very different from the way it did at the outset of our discussion.
I. THE "MARXIST" AND "BOURGEOIS" SCHOOLS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
From 1953 on, the problem of defining the Marxist position in historiography has been the subject of numerous contributions in the Zeitschrift ffur Geschichtswissenschaft. Ernst Engelberg published essays on this theme in
1964, 1968, and 1971. In my remarks here, I shall draw primarily on his work as well as on relevant studies by Ernst Diehl and Gerhard Lozek. 3 The argument- greatly condensed but not, I feel, in any way distorted- is as follows:
Marxist historiography is concerned with the "arc of world history"4 that reaches from classless primeval society to the communistic society of the future. That is, Marxist historiography conceives of world history as a series of class struggles -and of class alliances as well - that have arisen from the one factor central to all previous history; man's exploitation of his fellow man. In its research, Marxist scholarship always takes sides with the progres- sive classes and parties that represent the future in the dialectical struggle between the forces of production and the system of production. Only the socially conscious advance guard of the working class, i. e. , the Marxist- Leninist party, has a comprehensive understanding of the social nature of production, and without such understanding it is impossible to determine unequivocally what is progressive and what is reactionary at any given time. The advance guard is in a position to understand because it is the leading element of a group that is not merely one historical group among others but a group that potentially includes the great majority of all humanity or at least the great majority of humanity's most progressive forces. If past history has been no more than a sequence of events in which one form of exploita- tion has replaced another in accordance with predictable laws, then this progressive group has transcended history and already stands beyond it.
3. Ernst Engelberg, "Die Aufgaben der Historiker der DDR von 1964 bis 1970," Zeitschrift fiir Geschichtswissenischaft 12 (1964), 388-402; Uber Gegenstand und Ziel der marxistisch-leninistischenGeschichtswissenschaft," ibid. (1968), 1117-45; "Qber Theorie und Methode in der Geschichtswissenschaft,"ibid. (1971), 1347-66; Ernst Diehl, "Zu einigen Problemen und Aufgaben der Geschichtswissenschaftder DDR in dergegenwiirtigenEtappe,"ibid. (1969), 1393-1402;GerhardLozek,"ZurMethodologie einer wirksarnenAuseinandersetzungmit der bUrgerlichenGeschichtsschreibung:Das Problem der Strukturelementeund die Hauptrichtung der Auseinandersetzung,"ibid. (1970), 608-616.
4. Engelberg (1968), 1129.
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? ? "BOURGEOIS" AND "MARXIST" HISTORIOGRAPHY 59
If Marxist historiography is biased, its bias differs fundamentally from the bias of any other form of historical scholarship. Its bias is not at odds with objectivity, for "the basic interests of the working class are in harmony with the conditions of objective reality. "5
The basic interests of the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, cannot be in harmony with the conditions of objective reality because the time has passed in which exploiting classes could be progressive. What holds true for the bourgeoisie obviously holds true for its advocate, the bourgeois histori- ographer. Since bourgeois historiography is inextricably linked to a reac- tionary economy and to reactionary politics, it can only obscure the truth. "The questions an historian asks of history are determined by the interests of the class with which he identifies. "6 Bourgeois historiography is therefore unscholarly by nature, even when it concerns itself with remote subjects. The closer it comes to the present, the more obvious its defensive and reactionary position becomes. It shrewdly offers, for example, a partial criticism of Bis- marck and Hitler but at the same time obscures the very class structure that made Bismarck's Reich and the Fascist regime possible.
Marxist-Leninist historiography, however, adheres to strict standards of scholarship when it helps build the "intellectual arsenal" of peace and social- ism, when it exposes the neo-colonial plans of West German militarists and monopolists,7 and especially when it demonstrates that the German Demo- cratic Republic (GDR) represents the high point of German history to date. 8 There is no fundamental difference between state and party leadership on the one hand and Marxist historians on the other because government in the GDR "is based on a Marxist-Leninist view of history. "9
Granted, Engelberg allows for a "dialectical tension between politics and scholarship,"'10and Lozek does not deny that there are "certain practical and methodological skills of historical scholarship on which class has no bear- ing. "'" In these respects, the Marxist and the bourgeois are not completely at odds. As Engelberg expressed it in 1971, the Marxist-Leninist historian can "learn within limits'12 from his bourgeois counterpart. And the two schools seem to have some enemies in common, although these enemies do not pose the same kind of threat to them both. Among these mutual oppo- nents we find "left-wing opportunists," dogmatists, and "leftist-sectarian adventurers. " In the GDR it is sometimes openly said that these opponents
5. Engelberg (1964), 391.
6. Lozek, 611.
7. Engelberg (1964), 388 and 399. 8. Diehl, 1397.
9. Engelberg (1964), 388.
10. Ibid. , 393.
11. Lozek, 613.
12. Engelberg (1971), 1360.
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? ? 60 ERNST NOLTE
have still not freed themselves of bourgeois thinking. In the same issue of the Zeitschrift ftir Geschichtswissenschaft (XII/ 1964) in which Engelberg out- lines the historian's tasks in the GDR for the period 1964 to 1970, two Soviet writers published an article entitled "Problems of Historiography in the People's Republic of China," which sharply attacks certain "bourgeois- nationalistic" tendencies observed in that country. 13
Even at this early stage of our discussion it would seem that the relation- ship between "bourgeois" and "Marxist" historiography and between "bour- geois" and "socialistic" in general is much more complicated than the customary language of the Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenchaft would lead us to believe.
But now let us examine a representative statement of purpose by a "bour- geois historian. " I have chosen as my example a short essay by Friedrich Meinecke. I realize that methodological objections could be made to this choice, but I think it remains an appropriate one here nevertheless. Meinecke's article, entitled "German Historiography and the Needs of the Times," was first published in 1916 in Friedrich Naumann's Hilfe. It is now available in volume IV of Meinecke's Werke, where it appears together with other essays on the "Theory and Philosophy of History. "14 Meinecke ad- dresses himself to the criticism, which seems to have been frequently leveled at historians during World War I, that contemporary historical scholarship in Germany "concerned itself too little with the intellectual life of our times
and therefore offered it too little. "15Meinecke by no means takes this criti- cism lightly. He notes, without polemical overtones, "the preoccupation of our young scholars with problems of the nineteenth century. "'6 He modestly sees himself and his generation merely carrying on the tradition of the "great epoch of Ranke, Burckhardt, and Treitschke. '17 With an obvious tone of resignation, he points out that he and his contemporaries, too, like their great predecessors, had been summoned to the battlefield of national struggle but that in terms of "persuasive power" their manifestoes could not bear com- parison with those of a man like Treitschke. 18
For Meinecke, it was self-evident that historiography was closely con- nected with the state and era that produced it, and an "ideological critique" that demonstretad this interdependence would surely have contained no surprises for him. But when he rejects the "dramatic and sweeping syntheses"
13. R. V. Vjatkin and S. L. Tichvinskij, "Vber einige Fragen der Geschichtswissen- schaft in der Volksrepublik China," Zeitschrift ffir Geschichltswissenschaft 12 (1964), 403-422.
14. IV, 172-180. 15. Ibid. , 172. 16. Ibid. , 173. 17. Ibid. , 178
18. Loc. cit.
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? ? "BOURGEOIS" AND "MARXIST" HISTORIOGRAPHY 61
that an age hungering for "ever new sensations" demands,19he is not only censuring Lamprecht but also attacking "ruthless nationalism" and the idea of a central Europe under German domination - all this in the midst of World War 1. 20 And when he insists on seeing things the way they really are, seeing them in their own light and in their own context, his demand stems from an awareness "that in the last analysis it is our own lifeblood we draw on in our attempts to bring the spectres of the past to life. "'21The rigorous discipline and the deep respect for facts and sources that Meinecke demands22 clearly cannot be taken for granted. They do not represent a point of depar- ture but are the results of arduous labor. The true value of these results is that they help us gain distance and perspective on our strongest impulses. And man's strongest impulses are the need for synthesis and the desire to identify with a totality beyond ourselves.
So understood, bourgeois historiography is characterized by its remove from its own time and its own nation. It is not at a remove - or is so only in a few extreme and atypical cases - in the sense that it is by nature remote from life but in the sense that it consciously seeks distance, has to seek it anew in each new situation and in ever shifting constellations. It is clear that Meinecke himself sometimes made misinterpretation inevitable by using ques- tionable metaphors like "the island of pure scholarship,"23and the temptation is certainly great to cite Treitschke as proof for the claim that bourgeois historians identify unquestioningly with their governments. But a reading of Treitschke's Berlin lectures on Politik, assuming that the reader is not exclu- sively interested in collecting offensive-sounding quotations, will show that such a claim can be upheld only with grave reservations. Furthermore, Treitschke was not "bourgeois historiography" incarnate any more than Meinecke was. Both of them occupied specific positions within the broad spectrum of historians in the Second Reich, and the spectrum reached from Treitschke to Mommsen, from Dietrich Schiaferto Ludwig Quidde.
Bourgeois scholarship, properly understood and practiced, cannot be de- fined in terms of content and methodology at all. What characterizes it instead is the extremely broad range of different views and approaches that maintain a running dialogue with one another and that collectively assume both affinity to and distance from the political and social realities in which they are rooted. Their affinity to those realities is taken for granted; their distance from them is not. This dual relationship gives bourgeois scholarship a certain degree of autonomy. Bourgeois scholarship can isolate itself from development within
19. Ibid. , 174.
20. Ibid. , 173, 174, 179. 21. Ibid. , 177.
22. Loc. cit.
23. Ibid. , 172.
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Both of them occupied specific positions within the broad spectrum of historians in the Second Reich, and the spectrum reached from Treitschke to Mommsen, from Dietrich Schiaferto Ludwig Quidde.
Bourgeois scholarship, properly understood and practiced, cannot be de- fined in terms of content and methodology at all. What characterizes it instead is the extremely broad range of different views and approaches that maintain a running dialogue with one another and that collectively assume both affinity to and distance from the political and social realities in which they are rooted. Their affinity to those realities is taken for granted; their distance from them is not. This dual relationship gives bourgeois scholarship a certain degree of autonomy. Bourgeois scholarship can isolate itself from development within
19. Ibid. , 174.
20. Ibid. , 173, 174, 179. 21. Ibid. , 177.
22. Loc. cit.
23. Ibid. , 172.
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? ? 62 ERNST NOLTE
its society to some extent, but it can also be in advance of those developments. Marxist scholarship - if I may anticipate my first conclusion - can do nei- ther the one nor the other, nor does it want to, for in the Marxist view there is no good reason to do either.
The difference between bourgeois and Marxist historiography becomes eminently clear if we compare the subjects they choose to treat. The leading bourgeois and Marxist periodicals in the field, the Historische Zeitschrift and the Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft, can provide us with pertinent information. It is the editorial policy of both to publish articles covering the entire range of world history. Our sampling is taken from the year 1962. The Historische Zeitschrift published, among others, essays on the following subjects: "Frankish Coronation Customs and the Problem of the Ceremonial Coronation," "The Austro-Bavarian Treaty of Linz, September 11, 1534, as recorded in Munich Archives," "Giovanni Giolitti and Italian Policy in the First World War," "Structuresand Personalities in History," "The Emperor- ship of Otto the Great: A Reassessment after 1,000 Years," "The 'Kladder- adatsch' Affair: A Note on the Domestic History of the Second Reich. "
Some of the titles appearing in the Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenchaft were as follows: "Modern Bourgeois Historiography's Attempts to Reha- bilitate German Militarism," "Atomic Arms Policy in West German Imperial- ism: From the MC 70 to the MC 96," "The Clerical-Imperialistic Ideology of the Occident in the Service of German Imperialism. " "Messianic Move- ments in the Middle Ages," "The Theory and Policy of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany on the National Question," "The Historical Mission of the German Democratic Republic and the Future of Germany," "The Major Class Conflict of Feudal Society as Reflected in Some Literary Sources from the Eleventh through the Thirteenth Century," "Friedrich Meinecke - A Precursor of the NATO Historians in West Germany," "Medieval Imperial Policy as Reflected in Bourgeois Historiography of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. " Most significant of all, perhaps, is the fact that an essay by Walter Ulbricht, "The Banner of the People's Democracy on German Soil," is the lead article in the first issue of the year and that the entire sixth issue is taken up with a reprint of Ulbricht's speech "A Historical Sketch of the German Workers' Movement. " We should also mention that in the Historische Zeitschrift, under the heading "Miscellaneous Notes," there is only one article for which it is essential to know the author's name. That is Gerhard Ritter's "A New Thesis on War Guilt? ", a critique of Fritz Fischer's book Germany's Aims in the First World War.
Without conducting a detailed quantitative analysis of subjects treated and methods employed, we can draw a few preliminary conclusions: In the His- torische Zeitschrift, all major historical epochs are equally represented. There are as many if not more studies of limited subjects as there are broad surveys.
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? ? "BOURGEOIS AND MARXIST HISTORIOGRAPHY 63
Theoretical discussions and articles on contemporary history appear rarely, but they are by no means excluded altogether. By contrast, the Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft strongly emphasizes the present and the immediate past, giving considerable space to work on the history of the German Com- munist Party or the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, particularly in their relationship to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A comparable number of pages is given to critical and often fiercely polemical articles on developments in the Federal Republic and in West German historiography. By comparison, all the rest of human history assumes a relatively unimportant position, but articles that do deal with other topics often command great respect for the sophistication and energy with which they investigate pre- viously neglected aspects of history. Needless to say, however, these articles, too, follow a general line of inquiry that focuses on "class structures" in any given society.
Social history, particularly as a statistical discipline, plays a surprisingly minimal role in the Zeitschrift fair Geschichtswissenschaft. Ideas, whether one's own or those of one's opponents, dominate the scene entirely. The level of work differs far more widely than in the Historische Zeitschrift. Along with well-documented, careful studies, there are always other essays that can only be characterized as rhythmic hymns larded with ritualistic condem- nations. But perhaps the most striking feature of all is that the contemporary and the medieval studies, the careful and the shoddy ones, are all informed by a single view that is accepted without reservation. The Historische Zeit- schrift, too, has a fundamental position that no reader will be able to ignore. But when compared with the informing principle of the Zeitschrift fMr Geschichtswissenschaft, that of the Historische Zeitschrift looks like a pale pastel next to a brilliant oil.
We must ask now what kind of exchange can take place between two types of historical scholarship so different that they can hardly be subsumed under the same general definition of "scholarship. " I do not intend to present a historical survey here. It is common knowledge that historians from the GDR attended German Historical Conventions as late as 1958. They were expelled from the meeting in Trier. There were good reasons for the expulsion, but the nationalistic overtones of some of the arguments on which it was based drew criticism not only in the GDR but in the Federal Republic as well. From that point on, the attitude of historians in the West toward their col- leagues in the GDR can best be summed up in the word neglect. Marxism itself, of course, has not been neglected in the least, but to my knowledge Historiography in the GDR was not the subject of a single essay in the West until the new discipline of GDR studies became fashionable and devoted some attention to it. The reverse trend among younger historians soon developed into a movement that has managed to change the earlier picture entirely in
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? ? 64 ERNST NOLTE
some fields of study. The situation in the GDR has been just the opposite. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that historians of the Federal Republic receive more attention from the GDR than from any other country in the world. The treatment West German historiography receives is, of course, almost entirely negative and comes exclusively from historians of the GDR. Their dominant attitude toward their colleagues in the West can be summed up in one word, too, and that word is polemic. More often than not, this polemic is grossly distorting. I recently called attention in print to a typical instance in which a GDR historian, by citing a paraphrase written by a like-minded colleague rather than the original text, was able to destroy a political enemy. 24I was the victim of a similar distortion not long ago myself when a quoted text of mine was so altered by ellipses that it came out mean- ing precisely the opposite of what it had originally meant. 25
We might state our first conclusion as follows: Correctness or, as the modish term has it, "factology" is not the be-all and end-all of scholarship, but whether bourgeois or Marxist, scholarship cannot do without correctness or at least the effort to be correct. Obvious distortions, ellipses that change the meaning of quotations, and outright falsifications of quotations deserve our censure no matter what the circumstances that produced them, but the more extreme the political situation is that forces the historian to be an advocate for his society, the more understandable these distortions become.
II. MARX'S AND ENGELS' CONCEPT OF SCHOLARSHIP
We can move ahead now and ask whether Marx or Engels would have sub- scribed to the position I have developed here. Or to put the question in more general terms: What concept of scholarship did the founders of Marxism hold?
We should note first that when contemporary Marxists criticize bourgeois historiography, or least German historiography and its tradition, they can justifiably cite Marx and Engels as their authority. Marx spoke scornfully of that "dancing dwarf Ranke,"26 and Engels used the phrase "those two schools of historical fabricators 27when he described the division of German historians into those favoring a greater German confederation and those favoring a limited one. But these two remarks should not be interpreted as license for any and all gratuitous attacks. In the foreword to his Contribution
24. Cf. Ernst Nolte, "Ideologie, Engagement, Perspektive"in Geschichte Heute: Posi- tionen, Tendenzen iind Problemne, ed. Gerhard Schulz (Gdttingen, 1973), 292.
25. Cf. Ludwig Elm, Hochsclzule und Neofaschismrus: Zeitgeschichtliclie Stiidien zur Hochlscliulpolitik in der BRD (Berlin [Ost], 1972), 250ff.
26. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (MEW) (Berlin, 1956ff. ), XXX, 432. 27. Ibid. , XXXII, 452.
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? ? "BOURGEOIS" AND "MARXIST" HISTORIOGRAPHY 65
to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx speaks of the conclusions he has reached there as the "results of long and conscientious research. "28Marx and Engels surely would not have called mere political pamphlets scholarly, even if the pamphlets in question had served the interests of their own party. And they would have been even less inclined to regard massive acceptance of their ideas as a substitute for sound arguments. Engels takes it for granted that in matters of scholarship there can be "no democratic forum. "29He does not even hesitate to use language that we would be obliged to describe as traditional: "Whoever is led by an ideal cannot be a scholar, for his mind is already made Up. "311 Engels does not have just the ideals, prejudices, and party interests of others in mind here; for in 1893, when Hermann Bahr asked him to take a position on anti-Semitism, Engels replied that he could not do so impartially because fellow party members in Germany were running for election against some anti-Semitic candidates at the time. 3'
Thirty years earlier, when Marx was treating Ricardo's and Malthus' ideas in his Theories of Surplus Value, he formulated this same view in more gen- eral terms: "I call any man a 'scoundrel' who tries to accommodate scholarship
(whatever its failings) to principles not inherent in it but derived from interests external and alien to it. "32
For Marx, even the immediate interests of the proletariat or of a mass party are interests alien to scholarship. As a scholar, and even to a certain extent as a politician, he by no means regards himself as the advocate of any particular group. This is why he can say that he and Engels received their call to represent the proletarian party from no one else but themselves,33 and this is also why he asserts without bitterness in a letter to Kugelmann that scholarly attempts to revolutionize scholarship will never find a great echo. :4 But the primacy of scholarly "rigor" in Marx's thinking is perhaps
nowhere more apparent than in his and Engels' ceaseless efforts to refute Lujo Brentano's claim that in the inaugural address held at the International Workers' Association Marx had quoted a sentence from Gladstone so as to distort its meaning, indeed, so as "to falsify [it] grossly both in form and content. "35
German scholarship would be better off if everyone accused of distorting quotations in the service of a particular party or in the course of a political campaign would try to disprove the accusations leveled at him with even a
28. Ibid. , XIII, 11.
29. Ibid. , XXXIV, 286.
30. Ibid. , XXXVI, 198.
31. Ibid. , XXXIX, 79.
32. Ibid. , XXVI, Part 2, p. 112.
33. Ibid. , XXIX, 436.
34. Ibid. , XXX, 640.
35. Ibid. , XVIII, 89 and especially XXII, 93-185.
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fraction of the diligence that Marx and Engels expended. There can be no doubt whatsoever that rigor, conscientiousness, and objectivity were basic principles of scholarship for Marx and Engels. The best intentions in the service of the noblest party are no substitute for them, nor, of course, are shouting and demonstrating.
So far we have dealt only with the external features of scholarship, with its workmanlike aspects, if you will. If we turn now to Marx's view of its content, we may often have the impression that he ascribes "faithfulness to fact," and therefore true scholarly rigor, only to the natural sciences and that he sees his own research as having scientific character in that it reveals the workings of social and economic laws. He writes in a frequently quoted passage from the foreword to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: "In studying such social changes, we must always distinguish be- tween material changes in the conditions of economic production - changes that can be precisely measured by scientific methods - and the legal, po- litical, religious, artistic, or philosophical forms they take, i. e. , the ideological forms, through which people become aware of a conflict and within which
they fight it out. "36If we were concerned here with more than Marx's and Engels' concept of scholarship, we would have to consider a number of other questions at this point. We would have to inquire into the relationship between dialectic and a linear concept of causality, into the question of whether we can admit a concept of conflict that is independent of the circumstances in which conflict is worked out, and into the meaning of the political character of Marxism itself.
In our present discussion we will have to limit ourselves to asking whether bourgeois thought has any relevance for the mode of inquiry and the method characteristic of Marxism. The answer must be not only that bourgeois thought is relevant to the Marxist approach, but that bourgeois thought created the Marxist approach. In his well-known letter of March 5, 1852, Marx writes to Weydemeyer: "As far as I am concerned, I cannot claim the honor of having discovered either classes or class conflict in modern society. Bourgeois historians had described the historical development of class struggle long before I came along, and bourgeois economists had laid bare the economic anatomy of this struggle. My contributions were to prove (1 ) that the exis- tence of classes is directly linked to specific historical stages in production methods, (2) that class struggle will inevitably lead to a dictatorship of the proletariat, and (3) that this dictatorship itself forms only a transition to the abolishment of classes and to a classless society. "37In other words, what
often goes under the name of Marxism today - demonstration of the exis- tence of classes, structural analysis of societies, acceptance of the concept of class struggle- all this is in fact, as Marx himself clearly stated, the product
36. Ibid. , XIII, 9.
37. Ibid. , XXVIII, 507ff.
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? ? "BOURGEOIS" AND "MARXIST" HISTORIOGRAPHY 67
of bourgeois thought, particularly as represented in French and English writings.
It is well worth noting here, too, that in Marx's lifetime "classes" were a very palpable reality, not, as they are today, a phenomenon we can hardly perceive any more. It was against the law in Prussia as late as 1869 for noblemen to marry women of the petite bourgeoisie, and the French bourgeois thinkers Marx had in mind in the passage just cited above - Guizot, Mignet, the Thierrys- were all followers of the eighteenth-century writers Dubos and Boulainvilliers, a priest and a nobleman. And even if we take the nar- rower of Marx's and Engels' two concepts of class as our basis, a concept by which "estates" were not classes, what was more common usage in the era of Louis Philippe, the Citizen King, than the contrast of bourgeoisie and common people, indeed, of bourgeoisie and proletariat?
On the other hand, the elements of Marx's theory that he identified as his own contributions are precisely the ones that bourgeois thinkers have to call the undemonstrable, the political, the utopian, and the unscholarly tenets of Marxism. We have finally come to a point where "bourgeois" and "Marxist" scholarship differ radically and irreconcilably. But not even this difference is absolute, for bourgeois thought cannot be identified with any one of its manifestations, not with the historicism that most historians of the Second Reich in Germany subscribed to, nor with the positivism that dominated in the French Third Republic, nor with the pragmatism that characterizes most English and American historians. Bourgeois thought can readily admit the possibility that "class society" will be followed and replaced by a "post-class society," just as class society followed and replaced a society based on estates. Bourgeois thought can also accept as given the tendency to dislodge the ruling groups of the past and to initiate an era dominated by the "common man" or even by a broadly defined "proletariat. "But it cannot believe that at any time there will be a world society without inner differentiations, i. e. , classes, and without centers of power, i. e. , states, a world society, furthermore, in which individuals will no longer be subject to a division of labor. Skepticism
toward this idea of a classless society- an idea that is at the heart of Marxism - forms the one real dividing line between bourgeois and Marxist historiography. But both share the same methodological principles and they may share certain procedural techniques, such as structural analysis, ideo- logical critique, quantitative analysis in social history, and even economistic analysis.
III. STATE MARXISM, FREE MARXISM, AND SCHOLARSHIP
Bourgeois historiography cannot, of course, offer any proof for its disbelief because the future is not among its subjects of inquiry. But within its area of
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competence it can ascertain that leftist Marxists have kept the ruling wing of Marxism under sharp and constant attack from nearly the first day the Communist Party came to power.
The Relationship between "Bourgeois" and "Marxist" Historiography Author(s): Ernst Nolte
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Feb. , 1975), pp. 57-73 Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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? ? THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN "BOURGEOIS" AND "MARXIST" HISTORIOGRAPHY*
ERNST NOLTE
At many universities in the Western world today, there is hardly any topic an historian will be asked to discuss more frequently than the relationship between "bourgeois" and "Marxist"historiography. At the same time, he will be obliged to define himself and his own work in terms of these two poles. Discussion of the matter is difficult because the basis for scholarly inquiry
an objective relationship to one's subject - is lacking. The "bourgeois his- torian" seems to look at the question differently from the "Marxist historian. " But we must not forget that in using the terms "bourgeois" and "Marxist" we, too, are following Marxist practice. Our acceptance of the Marxist posi- tion as a point of departure is clearly provisional, and as we proceed, we shall see that the apparently irreconcilable opposition of "bourgeois" and "Marxist" will prove not to be so irreconcilable after all. In making this initial concession to the Marxist view, we shall be able to temper the military metaphors both sides are so fond of using. I shall not roll out the heavy artillery of Hegelian concepts, as Bernard Willms does in his valuable essay Marxismus - Wissenschaft- Universitfit,' nor shall I open the attack on a number of fronts, as the authors of issue number 70 of Das Argument do in their "Kritik der biirgerlichen Geschichtswissenschaft. "2 Instead, I shall try to characterize the bourgeois and Marxist positions in historiography. This will involve three steps: citing statements of purpose by major represen- tatives of both schools, comparing the contents of leading bourgeois and Marxist publications in the field, and describing the most extreme and what have been to date the most usual types of exchange between the two camps. I shall then expand the scope of our inquiry by examining Marx's and Engels'
* This essay is a slightly abridged version of an inaugural lecture at the Free Uni- versity of Berlin. The lecture, announced as one in a series on the "Cold War," was not delivered in the university because powerful student groups had called for a boycott of it. This incident is not atypical of the current situation at the Free University.
1. Bernard Willms, Marxismus - Wissenschaft - Universitfit: Zw6lf Thesen (Diussel- dorf, 1971).
2. "Kritik der birgerlichen GeschichtswissenschaftI," Das Argument: Zeitschrift fuir Philosophie zind Sozialwissenschlaften, 70, Sonderband (Berlin, 1972).
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views on scholarship in general and on historical scholarship in particular. The insights derived from these first two steps should enable us to formulate, in a third section, distinctions and results that will make our controversy look very different from the way it did at the outset of our discussion.
I. THE "MARXIST" AND "BOURGEOIS" SCHOOLS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
From 1953 on, the problem of defining the Marxist position in historiography has been the subject of numerous contributions in the Zeitschrift ffur Geschichtswissenschaft. Ernst Engelberg published essays on this theme in
1964, 1968, and 1971. In my remarks here, I shall draw primarily on his work as well as on relevant studies by Ernst Diehl and Gerhard Lozek. 3 The argument- greatly condensed but not, I feel, in any way distorted- is as follows:
Marxist historiography is concerned with the "arc of world history"4 that reaches from classless primeval society to the communistic society of the future. That is, Marxist historiography conceives of world history as a series of class struggles -and of class alliances as well - that have arisen from the one factor central to all previous history; man's exploitation of his fellow man. In its research, Marxist scholarship always takes sides with the progres- sive classes and parties that represent the future in the dialectical struggle between the forces of production and the system of production. Only the socially conscious advance guard of the working class, i. e. , the Marxist- Leninist party, has a comprehensive understanding of the social nature of production, and without such understanding it is impossible to determine unequivocally what is progressive and what is reactionary at any given time. The advance guard is in a position to understand because it is the leading element of a group that is not merely one historical group among others but a group that potentially includes the great majority of all humanity or at least the great majority of humanity's most progressive forces. If past history has been no more than a sequence of events in which one form of exploita- tion has replaced another in accordance with predictable laws, then this progressive group has transcended history and already stands beyond it.
3. Ernst Engelberg, "Die Aufgaben der Historiker der DDR von 1964 bis 1970," Zeitschrift fiir Geschichtswissenischaft 12 (1964), 388-402; Uber Gegenstand und Ziel der marxistisch-leninistischenGeschichtswissenschaft," ibid. (1968), 1117-45; "Qber Theorie und Methode in der Geschichtswissenschaft,"ibid. (1971), 1347-66; Ernst Diehl, "Zu einigen Problemen und Aufgaben der Geschichtswissenschaftder DDR in dergegenwiirtigenEtappe,"ibid. (1969), 1393-1402;GerhardLozek,"ZurMethodologie einer wirksarnenAuseinandersetzungmit der bUrgerlichenGeschichtsschreibung:Das Problem der Strukturelementeund die Hauptrichtung der Auseinandersetzung,"ibid. (1970), 608-616.
4. Engelberg (1968), 1129.
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? ? "BOURGEOIS" AND "MARXIST" HISTORIOGRAPHY 59
If Marxist historiography is biased, its bias differs fundamentally from the bias of any other form of historical scholarship. Its bias is not at odds with objectivity, for "the basic interests of the working class are in harmony with the conditions of objective reality. "5
The basic interests of the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, cannot be in harmony with the conditions of objective reality because the time has passed in which exploiting classes could be progressive. What holds true for the bourgeoisie obviously holds true for its advocate, the bourgeois histori- ographer. Since bourgeois historiography is inextricably linked to a reac- tionary economy and to reactionary politics, it can only obscure the truth. "The questions an historian asks of history are determined by the interests of the class with which he identifies. "6 Bourgeois historiography is therefore unscholarly by nature, even when it concerns itself with remote subjects. The closer it comes to the present, the more obvious its defensive and reactionary position becomes. It shrewdly offers, for example, a partial criticism of Bis- marck and Hitler but at the same time obscures the very class structure that made Bismarck's Reich and the Fascist regime possible.
Marxist-Leninist historiography, however, adheres to strict standards of scholarship when it helps build the "intellectual arsenal" of peace and social- ism, when it exposes the neo-colonial plans of West German militarists and monopolists,7 and especially when it demonstrates that the German Demo- cratic Republic (GDR) represents the high point of German history to date. 8 There is no fundamental difference between state and party leadership on the one hand and Marxist historians on the other because government in the GDR "is based on a Marxist-Leninist view of history. "9
Granted, Engelberg allows for a "dialectical tension between politics and scholarship,"'10and Lozek does not deny that there are "certain practical and methodological skills of historical scholarship on which class has no bear- ing. "'" In these respects, the Marxist and the bourgeois are not completely at odds. As Engelberg expressed it in 1971, the Marxist-Leninist historian can "learn within limits'12 from his bourgeois counterpart. And the two schools seem to have some enemies in common, although these enemies do not pose the same kind of threat to them both. Among these mutual oppo- nents we find "left-wing opportunists," dogmatists, and "leftist-sectarian adventurers. " In the GDR it is sometimes openly said that these opponents
5. Engelberg (1964), 391.
6. Lozek, 611.
7. Engelberg (1964), 388 and 399. 8. Diehl, 1397.
9. Engelberg (1964), 388.
10. Ibid. , 393.
11. Lozek, 613.
12. Engelberg (1971), 1360.
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have still not freed themselves of bourgeois thinking. In the same issue of the Zeitschrift ftir Geschichtswissenschaft (XII/ 1964) in which Engelberg out- lines the historian's tasks in the GDR for the period 1964 to 1970, two Soviet writers published an article entitled "Problems of Historiography in the People's Republic of China," which sharply attacks certain "bourgeois- nationalistic" tendencies observed in that country. 13
Even at this early stage of our discussion it would seem that the relation- ship between "bourgeois" and "Marxist" historiography and between "bour- geois" and "socialistic" in general is much more complicated than the customary language of the Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenchaft would lead us to believe.
But now let us examine a representative statement of purpose by a "bour- geois historian. " I have chosen as my example a short essay by Friedrich Meinecke. I realize that methodological objections could be made to this choice, but I think it remains an appropriate one here nevertheless. Meinecke's article, entitled "German Historiography and the Needs of the Times," was first published in 1916 in Friedrich Naumann's Hilfe. It is now available in volume IV of Meinecke's Werke, where it appears together with other essays on the "Theory and Philosophy of History. "14 Meinecke ad- dresses himself to the criticism, which seems to have been frequently leveled at historians during World War I, that contemporary historical scholarship in Germany "concerned itself too little with the intellectual life of our times
and therefore offered it too little. "15Meinecke by no means takes this criti- cism lightly. He notes, without polemical overtones, "the preoccupation of our young scholars with problems of the nineteenth century. "'6 He modestly sees himself and his generation merely carrying on the tradition of the "great epoch of Ranke, Burckhardt, and Treitschke. '17 With an obvious tone of resignation, he points out that he and his contemporaries, too, like their great predecessors, had been summoned to the battlefield of national struggle but that in terms of "persuasive power" their manifestoes could not bear com- parison with those of a man like Treitschke. 18
For Meinecke, it was self-evident that historiography was closely con- nected with the state and era that produced it, and an "ideological critique" that demonstretad this interdependence would surely have contained no surprises for him. But when he rejects the "dramatic and sweeping syntheses"
13. R. V. Vjatkin and S. L. Tichvinskij, "Vber einige Fragen der Geschichtswissen- schaft in der Volksrepublik China," Zeitschrift ffir Geschichltswissenschaft 12 (1964), 403-422.
14. IV, 172-180. 15. Ibid. , 172. 16. Ibid. , 173. 17. Ibid. , 178
18. Loc. cit.
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? ? "BOURGEOIS" AND "MARXIST" HISTORIOGRAPHY 61
that an age hungering for "ever new sensations" demands,19he is not only censuring Lamprecht but also attacking "ruthless nationalism" and the idea of a central Europe under German domination - all this in the midst of World War 1. 20 And when he insists on seeing things the way they really are, seeing them in their own light and in their own context, his demand stems from an awareness "that in the last analysis it is our own lifeblood we draw on in our attempts to bring the spectres of the past to life. "'21The rigorous discipline and the deep respect for facts and sources that Meinecke demands22 clearly cannot be taken for granted. They do not represent a point of depar- ture but are the results of arduous labor. The true value of these results is that they help us gain distance and perspective on our strongest impulses. And man's strongest impulses are the need for synthesis and the desire to identify with a totality beyond ourselves.
So understood, bourgeois historiography is characterized by its remove from its own time and its own nation. It is not at a remove - or is so only in a few extreme and atypical cases - in the sense that it is by nature remote from life but in the sense that it consciously seeks distance, has to seek it anew in each new situation and in ever shifting constellations. It is clear that Meinecke himself sometimes made misinterpretation inevitable by using ques- tionable metaphors like "the island of pure scholarship,"23and the temptation is certainly great to cite Treitschke as proof for the claim that bourgeois historians identify unquestioningly with their governments. But a reading of Treitschke's Berlin lectures on Politik, assuming that the reader is not exclu- sively interested in collecting offensive-sounding quotations, will show that such a claim can be upheld only with grave reservations. Furthermore, Treitschke was not "bourgeois historiography" incarnate any more than Meinecke was. Both of them occupied specific positions within the broad spectrum of historians in the Second Reich, and the spectrum reached from Treitschke to Mommsen, from Dietrich Schiaferto Ludwig Quidde.
Bourgeois scholarship, properly understood and practiced, cannot be de- fined in terms of content and methodology at all. What characterizes it instead is the extremely broad range of different views and approaches that maintain a running dialogue with one another and that collectively assume both affinity to and distance from the political and social realities in which they are rooted. Their affinity to those realities is taken for granted; their distance from them is not. This dual relationship gives bourgeois scholarship a certain degree of autonomy. Bourgeois scholarship can isolate itself from development within
19. Ibid. , 174.
20. Ibid. , 173, 174, 179. 21. Ibid. , 177.
22. Loc. cit.
23. Ibid. , 172.
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Both of them occupied specific positions within the broad spectrum of historians in the Second Reich, and the spectrum reached from Treitschke to Mommsen, from Dietrich Schiaferto Ludwig Quidde.
Bourgeois scholarship, properly understood and practiced, cannot be de- fined in terms of content and methodology at all. What characterizes it instead is the extremely broad range of different views and approaches that maintain a running dialogue with one another and that collectively assume both affinity to and distance from the political and social realities in which they are rooted. Their affinity to those realities is taken for granted; their distance from them is not. This dual relationship gives bourgeois scholarship a certain degree of autonomy. Bourgeois scholarship can isolate itself from development within
19. Ibid. , 174.
20. Ibid. , 173, 174, 179. 21. Ibid. , 177.
22. Loc. cit.
23. Ibid. , 172.
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its society to some extent, but it can also be in advance of those developments. Marxist scholarship - if I may anticipate my first conclusion - can do nei- ther the one nor the other, nor does it want to, for in the Marxist view there is no good reason to do either.
The difference between bourgeois and Marxist historiography becomes eminently clear if we compare the subjects they choose to treat. The leading bourgeois and Marxist periodicals in the field, the Historische Zeitschrift and the Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft, can provide us with pertinent information. It is the editorial policy of both to publish articles covering the entire range of world history. Our sampling is taken from the year 1962. The Historische Zeitschrift published, among others, essays on the following subjects: "Frankish Coronation Customs and the Problem of the Ceremonial Coronation," "The Austro-Bavarian Treaty of Linz, September 11, 1534, as recorded in Munich Archives," "Giovanni Giolitti and Italian Policy in the First World War," "Structuresand Personalities in History," "The Emperor- ship of Otto the Great: A Reassessment after 1,000 Years," "The 'Kladder- adatsch' Affair: A Note on the Domestic History of the Second Reich. "
Some of the titles appearing in the Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenchaft were as follows: "Modern Bourgeois Historiography's Attempts to Reha- bilitate German Militarism," "Atomic Arms Policy in West German Imperial- ism: From the MC 70 to the MC 96," "The Clerical-Imperialistic Ideology of the Occident in the Service of German Imperialism. " "Messianic Move- ments in the Middle Ages," "The Theory and Policy of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany on the National Question," "The Historical Mission of the German Democratic Republic and the Future of Germany," "The Major Class Conflict of Feudal Society as Reflected in Some Literary Sources from the Eleventh through the Thirteenth Century," "Friedrich Meinecke - A Precursor of the NATO Historians in West Germany," "Medieval Imperial Policy as Reflected in Bourgeois Historiography of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. " Most significant of all, perhaps, is the fact that an essay by Walter Ulbricht, "The Banner of the People's Democracy on German Soil," is the lead article in the first issue of the year and that the entire sixth issue is taken up with a reprint of Ulbricht's speech "A Historical Sketch of the German Workers' Movement. " We should also mention that in the Historische Zeitschrift, under the heading "Miscellaneous Notes," there is only one article for which it is essential to know the author's name. That is Gerhard Ritter's "A New Thesis on War Guilt? ", a critique of Fritz Fischer's book Germany's Aims in the First World War.
Without conducting a detailed quantitative analysis of subjects treated and methods employed, we can draw a few preliminary conclusions: In the His- torische Zeitschrift, all major historical epochs are equally represented. There are as many if not more studies of limited subjects as there are broad surveys.
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? ? "BOURGEOIS AND MARXIST HISTORIOGRAPHY 63
Theoretical discussions and articles on contemporary history appear rarely, but they are by no means excluded altogether. By contrast, the Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft strongly emphasizes the present and the immediate past, giving considerable space to work on the history of the German Com- munist Party or the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, particularly in their relationship to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A comparable number of pages is given to critical and often fiercely polemical articles on developments in the Federal Republic and in West German historiography. By comparison, all the rest of human history assumes a relatively unimportant position, but articles that do deal with other topics often command great respect for the sophistication and energy with which they investigate pre- viously neglected aspects of history. Needless to say, however, these articles, too, follow a general line of inquiry that focuses on "class structures" in any given society.
Social history, particularly as a statistical discipline, plays a surprisingly minimal role in the Zeitschrift fair Geschichtswissenschaft. Ideas, whether one's own or those of one's opponents, dominate the scene entirely. The level of work differs far more widely than in the Historische Zeitschrift. Along with well-documented, careful studies, there are always other essays that can only be characterized as rhythmic hymns larded with ritualistic condem- nations. But perhaps the most striking feature of all is that the contemporary and the medieval studies, the careful and the shoddy ones, are all informed by a single view that is accepted without reservation. The Historische Zeit- schrift, too, has a fundamental position that no reader will be able to ignore. But when compared with the informing principle of the Zeitschrift fMr Geschichtswissenschaft, that of the Historische Zeitschrift looks like a pale pastel next to a brilliant oil.
We must ask now what kind of exchange can take place between two types of historical scholarship so different that they can hardly be subsumed under the same general definition of "scholarship. " I do not intend to present a historical survey here. It is common knowledge that historians from the GDR attended German Historical Conventions as late as 1958. They were expelled from the meeting in Trier. There were good reasons for the expulsion, but the nationalistic overtones of some of the arguments on which it was based drew criticism not only in the GDR but in the Federal Republic as well. From that point on, the attitude of historians in the West toward their col- leagues in the GDR can best be summed up in the word neglect. Marxism itself, of course, has not been neglected in the least, but to my knowledge Historiography in the GDR was not the subject of a single essay in the West until the new discipline of GDR studies became fashionable and devoted some attention to it. The reverse trend among younger historians soon developed into a movement that has managed to change the earlier picture entirely in
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some fields of study. The situation in the GDR has been just the opposite. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that historians of the Federal Republic receive more attention from the GDR than from any other country in the world. The treatment West German historiography receives is, of course, almost entirely negative and comes exclusively from historians of the GDR. Their dominant attitude toward their colleagues in the West can be summed up in one word, too, and that word is polemic. More often than not, this polemic is grossly distorting. I recently called attention in print to a typical instance in which a GDR historian, by citing a paraphrase written by a like-minded colleague rather than the original text, was able to destroy a political enemy. 24I was the victim of a similar distortion not long ago myself when a quoted text of mine was so altered by ellipses that it came out mean- ing precisely the opposite of what it had originally meant. 25
We might state our first conclusion as follows: Correctness or, as the modish term has it, "factology" is not the be-all and end-all of scholarship, but whether bourgeois or Marxist, scholarship cannot do without correctness or at least the effort to be correct. Obvious distortions, ellipses that change the meaning of quotations, and outright falsifications of quotations deserve our censure no matter what the circumstances that produced them, but the more extreme the political situation is that forces the historian to be an advocate for his society, the more understandable these distortions become.
II. MARX'S AND ENGELS' CONCEPT OF SCHOLARSHIP
We can move ahead now and ask whether Marx or Engels would have sub- scribed to the position I have developed here. Or to put the question in more general terms: What concept of scholarship did the founders of Marxism hold?
We should note first that when contemporary Marxists criticize bourgeois historiography, or least German historiography and its tradition, they can justifiably cite Marx and Engels as their authority. Marx spoke scornfully of that "dancing dwarf Ranke,"26 and Engels used the phrase "those two schools of historical fabricators 27when he described the division of German historians into those favoring a greater German confederation and those favoring a limited one. But these two remarks should not be interpreted as license for any and all gratuitous attacks. In the foreword to his Contribution
24. Cf. Ernst Nolte, "Ideologie, Engagement, Perspektive"in Geschichte Heute: Posi- tionen, Tendenzen iind Problemne, ed. Gerhard Schulz (Gdttingen, 1973), 292.
25. Cf. Ludwig Elm, Hochsclzule und Neofaschismrus: Zeitgeschichtliclie Stiidien zur Hochlscliulpolitik in der BRD (Berlin [Ost], 1972), 250ff.
26. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (MEW) (Berlin, 1956ff. ), XXX, 432. 27. Ibid. , XXXII, 452.
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to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx speaks of the conclusions he has reached there as the "results of long and conscientious research. "28Marx and Engels surely would not have called mere political pamphlets scholarly, even if the pamphlets in question had served the interests of their own party. And they would have been even less inclined to regard massive acceptance of their ideas as a substitute for sound arguments. Engels takes it for granted that in matters of scholarship there can be "no democratic forum. "29He does not even hesitate to use language that we would be obliged to describe as traditional: "Whoever is led by an ideal cannot be a scholar, for his mind is already made Up. "311 Engels does not have just the ideals, prejudices, and party interests of others in mind here; for in 1893, when Hermann Bahr asked him to take a position on anti-Semitism, Engels replied that he could not do so impartially because fellow party members in Germany were running for election against some anti-Semitic candidates at the time. 3'
Thirty years earlier, when Marx was treating Ricardo's and Malthus' ideas in his Theories of Surplus Value, he formulated this same view in more gen- eral terms: "I call any man a 'scoundrel' who tries to accommodate scholarship
(whatever its failings) to principles not inherent in it but derived from interests external and alien to it. "32
For Marx, even the immediate interests of the proletariat or of a mass party are interests alien to scholarship. As a scholar, and even to a certain extent as a politician, he by no means regards himself as the advocate of any particular group. This is why he can say that he and Engels received their call to represent the proletarian party from no one else but themselves,33 and this is also why he asserts without bitterness in a letter to Kugelmann that scholarly attempts to revolutionize scholarship will never find a great echo. :4 But the primacy of scholarly "rigor" in Marx's thinking is perhaps
nowhere more apparent than in his and Engels' ceaseless efforts to refute Lujo Brentano's claim that in the inaugural address held at the International Workers' Association Marx had quoted a sentence from Gladstone so as to distort its meaning, indeed, so as "to falsify [it] grossly both in form and content. "35
German scholarship would be better off if everyone accused of distorting quotations in the service of a particular party or in the course of a political campaign would try to disprove the accusations leveled at him with even a
28. Ibid. , XIII, 11.
29. Ibid. , XXXIV, 286.
30. Ibid. , XXXVI, 198.
31. Ibid. , XXXIX, 79.
32. Ibid. , XXVI, Part 2, p. 112.
33. Ibid. , XXIX, 436.
34. Ibid. , XXX, 640.
35. Ibid. , XVIII, 89 and especially XXII, 93-185.
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fraction of the diligence that Marx and Engels expended. There can be no doubt whatsoever that rigor, conscientiousness, and objectivity were basic principles of scholarship for Marx and Engels. The best intentions in the service of the noblest party are no substitute for them, nor, of course, are shouting and demonstrating.
So far we have dealt only with the external features of scholarship, with its workmanlike aspects, if you will. If we turn now to Marx's view of its content, we may often have the impression that he ascribes "faithfulness to fact," and therefore true scholarly rigor, only to the natural sciences and that he sees his own research as having scientific character in that it reveals the workings of social and economic laws. He writes in a frequently quoted passage from the foreword to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: "In studying such social changes, we must always distinguish be- tween material changes in the conditions of economic production - changes that can be precisely measured by scientific methods - and the legal, po- litical, religious, artistic, or philosophical forms they take, i. e. , the ideological forms, through which people become aware of a conflict and within which
they fight it out. "36If we were concerned here with more than Marx's and Engels' concept of scholarship, we would have to consider a number of other questions at this point. We would have to inquire into the relationship between dialectic and a linear concept of causality, into the question of whether we can admit a concept of conflict that is independent of the circumstances in which conflict is worked out, and into the meaning of the political character of Marxism itself.
In our present discussion we will have to limit ourselves to asking whether bourgeois thought has any relevance for the mode of inquiry and the method characteristic of Marxism. The answer must be not only that bourgeois thought is relevant to the Marxist approach, but that bourgeois thought created the Marxist approach. In his well-known letter of March 5, 1852, Marx writes to Weydemeyer: "As far as I am concerned, I cannot claim the honor of having discovered either classes or class conflict in modern society. Bourgeois historians had described the historical development of class struggle long before I came along, and bourgeois economists had laid bare the economic anatomy of this struggle. My contributions were to prove (1 ) that the exis- tence of classes is directly linked to specific historical stages in production methods, (2) that class struggle will inevitably lead to a dictatorship of the proletariat, and (3) that this dictatorship itself forms only a transition to the abolishment of classes and to a classless society. "37In other words, what
often goes under the name of Marxism today - demonstration of the exis- tence of classes, structural analysis of societies, acceptance of the concept of class struggle- all this is in fact, as Marx himself clearly stated, the product
36. Ibid. , XIII, 9.
37. Ibid. , XXVIII, 507ff.
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? ? "BOURGEOIS" AND "MARXIST" HISTORIOGRAPHY 67
of bourgeois thought, particularly as represented in French and English writings.
It is well worth noting here, too, that in Marx's lifetime "classes" were a very palpable reality, not, as they are today, a phenomenon we can hardly perceive any more. It was against the law in Prussia as late as 1869 for noblemen to marry women of the petite bourgeoisie, and the French bourgeois thinkers Marx had in mind in the passage just cited above - Guizot, Mignet, the Thierrys- were all followers of the eighteenth-century writers Dubos and Boulainvilliers, a priest and a nobleman. And even if we take the nar- rower of Marx's and Engels' two concepts of class as our basis, a concept by which "estates" were not classes, what was more common usage in the era of Louis Philippe, the Citizen King, than the contrast of bourgeoisie and common people, indeed, of bourgeoisie and proletariat?
On the other hand, the elements of Marx's theory that he identified as his own contributions are precisely the ones that bourgeois thinkers have to call the undemonstrable, the political, the utopian, and the unscholarly tenets of Marxism. We have finally come to a point where "bourgeois" and "Marxist" scholarship differ radically and irreconcilably. But not even this difference is absolute, for bourgeois thought cannot be identified with any one of its manifestations, not with the historicism that most historians of the Second Reich in Germany subscribed to, nor with the positivism that dominated in the French Third Republic, nor with the pragmatism that characterizes most English and American historians. Bourgeois thought can readily admit the possibility that "class society" will be followed and replaced by a "post-class society," just as class society followed and replaced a society based on estates. Bourgeois thought can also accept as given the tendency to dislodge the ruling groups of the past and to initiate an era dominated by the "common man" or even by a broadly defined "proletariat. "But it cannot believe that at any time there will be a world society without inner differentiations, i. e. , classes, and without centers of power, i. e. , states, a world society, furthermore, in which individuals will no longer be subject to a division of labor. Skepticism
toward this idea of a classless society- an idea that is at the heart of Marxism - forms the one real dividing line between bourgeois and Marxist historiography. But both share the same methodological principles and they may share certain procedural techniques, such as structural analysis, ideo- logical critique, quantitative analysis in social history, and even economistic analysis.
III. STATE MARXISM, FREE MARXISM, AND SCHOLARSHIP
Bourgeois historiography cannot, of course, offer any proof for its disbelief because the future is not among its subjects of inquiry. But within its area of
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? ? 68 ERNST NOLTE
competence it can ascertain that leftist Marxists have kept the ruling wing of Marxism under sharp and constant attack from nearly the first day the Communist Party came to power.
