JOHN E. TASHJEAN
the directions in which knowledge could advance at a given pe–
riod; but the book was not Marxist in an "orthodox" sense, since it
did not seriously try to derive those categories from the "relations
of production," and the references to the "period of manufacture"
in its subtitle and opening chapter were superficial and only con–
ceived as an afterthought under "orthodox" criticism from within
the [Frankfurt] Institute, to whose inner circle Borkenau never
belonged.
295
The book is unique in social and historical thought after World
War
1.
Borkenau's preface acknowledges inspiration by the Austrian
socialist, Otto Bauer, the Russian philosopher, A. M. Deborin,
and, most of all, George Lukacs'
History and Class Consciousness.
Early in his section on the antinomies of bourgeois thought,
Lukacs had considered Descartes' struggle against the medieval out–
look. Here Lukacs followed Engels who, in turn, had adopted the
liberal historiography, exemplified by Guizot and Thierry, of a con–
tinuous rise of the bourgeoisie from the middle ages to the nineteenth
century. Lukacs referred forward from Descartes to Leibniz, whose
cosmic optimism had provoked Voltaire's
Candide.
In
History and
Class Consciousness,
Lukacs also said that he could not go into the
struggle with medievalism. Borkenau seems to have taken that as a
hint and an invitation. More than half of
Ubergang
deals with Renais–
sance, Protestant, Molinist, and Cartesian antitheses to Thomism,
chronologically spanning the centuries from Aquinas to Pascal.
And, like Lukacs, Borkenau points forward to Liebnizian optimism
in his preface.
In
any case, the
Ubergang
is unthinkable without the
focus on reification derived from Lukacs, and thus seems to be a
massive elaboration of Lukacs' ideas.
It
is searching and brilliantly
original, yet the literature on Lukacs seems to ignore it.
Borkenau's doctoral dissertation had given him an interest in
universal history which survived a critical encounter with Spengler.
Equally, Dilthey's historiography of science is so much a target that
Borkenau says his work is largely meant to refute it. We have here,
then, in the
Ubergang,
a study defined by its essential affiliation to,
and massive elaboration of a lacuna in
History and Class Conscious–
ness,
by its posture as an alternative to Dilthey and by its implicit
alternative to Spengler, whose
Decline of the West
also bears on the
history of European science and philosophy. No other such work
seems to exist, and it is enhanced now that Princeton is translating
the complete works of Dilthey.
