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PARTISAN REVIEW
pensation for a secretly felt deficiency. Here belong also many
other tendencies that arose in the further development of bourgeois
world history during the 19th century; among them such real
achievements as
l)
the successive extension, following every new
expansion of the capitalist "world market," of the field of histori–
cal research to hitherto neglected countries; 2) the progressive
extension of genuine historical research to the formerly so-called
"pre-historical" epochs; 3) the widening of the subject matter of
history by the inclusion of new realms of human activity. All these
theoretical developments can be realistically explained by an
underlying tendency towards world conquest which, according to
the theory of Marx, arises from the insatiable need of capital for
an ever increasing accumulation. What bourgeois society was lack–
ing in world-wide extension, the bourgeois historians tried to make
good by various forms of a never satisfied quest for universality.
This game went on until the two revolutionary crises of 1830
and 1848.
3.
A critical phase for universal history began after 1850, when
the revolutionary tendencies of the bourgeois class had finally
petered out in the abortive revolution of 1848. For the first time
the European bourgeoisie had accepted the frustration of its own
aims by the victorious restoration of an autocratic monarchy in
Prussia and by a quasi-Fascist counter-revolution in France rather
than risk a further advance of the new revolutionary movement
of the proletarian class. From here on all "Philosophy of History"
and every form of "Universal" or "General" History fell into
almost universal contempt. The energies of the greatest masters
of history, even more so the life work of minor historians up to
today, were turned to that highly specialized research which alone
was now recognized as true historical "science."
This tremendous change in the history of history is best illus–
trated in the case of one man who lived through these two phases.
No sharper contrast can be imagined than that between the scope
and importance of the work that the German historian Mommsen
published in 1855-56 before he had completed his thirty-ninth
year, and his subsequent publications. The later volumes of his
collected works are aptly described by A.
J.
Toynbee as "so many
volumes of a learned periodical which happens to have had only
