Toward a Critical Historicism: History and Politics in Nietzsche's Second “Untimely Meditation”

Abstract

Focusing on the close connection between Friedrich Nietzsche's historical thought and the discourse of German historicism in the second half of the nineteenth century, this article argues in a thick contextual reading that Nietzsche's second “Untimely Meditation,” Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben (1874), needs to be understood as a reflection on the political dimension of historical consciousness, outlining what I shall term a “critical historicism.” In contrast to the standard emphasis on Nietzsche's presumed aestheticism, he is shown to react to rather specific developments within the contemporary intellectual context, such as the establishment of specific historical foundation myths for a new German nation state, exemplified by the public monuments and commemorations of the 1870s, the effect of such foundation myths on the political imagination of historical scholarship, and the intellectual antagonism between Basel's “antimodernism” and the German nation state.

The uneasy European

“…But his criticism of nationalist historiography, which he regarded as the handmaiden of the modern German nation state, has deeper roots (Emden, 2006). By the mid-1870s, Nietzsche had aligned himself strategically with the historical vision of Jacob Burckhardt, whose anti-modern stance provided him with much inspiration against 'overrating the state, the national' (Nietzsche, 1967-, III/4: 32 [72]).…”