Johann Gustav Droysen
(Treptow an der Rega, Pomerania, 1808-Berlin, 1884) German philologist, historian and politician.He advocated the unification of Germany and the leading role that Prussia should have.In 1848 he was elected Member of the Parliament of Frankfurt.His most important work is History of Prussian politics , in fourteen volumes (1855-1886), which he left unfinished.
Founder of the so-called Prussian historical school, Droysen, who was One of the initiators of that cultural pan-Germanism that was taken to its maximum expression by Treitschke, always maintained the superiority of Prussia over all the peoples of the Germanic race, laying the historical bases on which Bismarck oriented his hegemonic policy.His History of Prussian Politics is a colossal monument to the glory of the Prussian State, personified in the monarchy of the House of Brandenburg; This great work follows the development of the Prussian monarchy from its origins to 1756, that is, until the beginning of the Seven Years' War, which elevated Prussia to the rank of a great European continental power.
Johann Gustav Droysen
Despite the results of the most recent research and the new horizons open to historiography, Droysen's pages keep everything its value for the amount of material collected and for its wise distribution.The author showed an outstanding personality of historian and creator and a rare ability to highlight the set of internal and invisible forces that make history.However, trying to prove his thesis, Droysen departs from the purely objective terrain to enter that of polemic; for example, the tendency to glorify success at all times appears too accentuated, regardless of any moral judgment.The whole work suffers from this defect because, being difficult to admit that the Prussian state possessed from the beginning the immutable and constant aspiration to reunite all the Germanic peoples under the guidance of the Hohenzollern of Brandenburg, Droysen, to confirm its thesis, it is seen forced many times to force the facts that he had accumulated and wisely elucidated.
Before the History of Prussian politics , Droysen had distinguished himself as a distinguished historian with another ambitious work, the History of Hellenism .The author proposed a larger work that finally consisted of three parts, appearing separately: The story of Alexander the Great (1833); the History of Alexander's successors (1836) and the History of the constitution of the Hellenistic kingdoms (1843); each of these parts, much revised, were later collected and published under the title of History of Hellenism , published in 1877-78, in Gotha.
Droysen was the first historian to use the term "Hellenism" to designate the new form of culture that, after the conquests of Alexander the Great, flourished in much of the known world: a culture that is fundamentally the Greek culture, but when it came into contact with other peoples, it absorbed certain characteristics of their cultures, transforming itself from Greek to universal.Droysen recognized and characterized the historical function of this period, which is seen not as an expression of Greek decadence but as the emergence and flowering of a new historical phase, essentially diverse but equally glorious and significant; not as the end but as the expansion of the Hellenic genius, thanks to the fusion of Greek and Western culture.
Starting from this point of view, Droysen's judgment on Alexander the Great, whose activity mainly determined the physiognomy of this time, could only be admiring.Droysen extols the Macedonian, trying to justify even the least admirable aspects of his character and action, be it from a historical point of view or from a human point of view.Above all, of course, it celebrates the fusion between Greeks and barbarians advocated by Alexander, which although it might seem like a denial of the purposes for which Macedonia had declared war on Persia, was also the necessary premise for the new civilization to emerge., as the Greek spirit spread throughout the world.
The second volume it includes the history of Alexander's empire, from the death of the hero (323) to the occupation of Macedonia by Antigonus and the end of the Celtic invasion (277).It is an era of struggles and upheavals that Droysen tries to interpret, considering them as the development of the negative forces that had to arise necessarily from the great work of Alexander, as the antistrophy of the time of the great king, according to Droysen's own definition.Alexander had proposed as his ultimate goal to achieve the fusion between East and West in an Eastern-type monarchy.But the reaction naturally operates in the opposite direction with the decomposition of the Macedonian Empire, in spite of the attempts made to prevent it by Perdicicas first and later by Polysperchon in the West and Eumeno in the East.All solutions are tried, but in vain, and the various Hellenistic kingdoms are formed.
The third volume begins with a comprehensive summary that examines the march of culture on the two banks of the Aegean Sea, after which the original theme is resumed.While Macedonia and Thessaly are agitated by endless fighting, by the plague and by the Celtic invasion, new historical elements come to light: in Greece, the Etholic League and the Achaean League; in the West, Carthage, the mercantile state, and Rome, the agrarian state.The antagonism between these three great powers allows the formation and existence of small states, which live a life of tension and discontent, thus preparing the ground for the Roman conquest.With this conquest, a new series of struggles moved by religious ideas between monotheism and polytheism will begin, which will end with the victory of monotheism, although it is a monotheism that, with Christianity, renounces its primitive nationalistic character to assume the character of universality.
Droysen's story is clearly developed, in accordance with the principle of the Hegelian dialectic; events are generally viewed in the light of their ultimate causes.Droysen is endowed with an exceptional faculty of abstraction and of grasping an essential line in the complexity of the facts, as well as of vision of the motive causes over the superficial appearances of the events; the consequence is that his work, more than a history of events, appears as a history of ideas.
This faculty of synthesis and clarification stands out, above all, in the history of Alexander's successors, a very complicated historical period in itself and of which, in addition, we had very incomplete and disconnected testimonies.Droysen made the events of this period a complex but intelligible movement, unfolding according to a logical and well-defined line of development.
Parallel to this attitude of his, the way in which Droysen conceives history according to another tendency is characteristic: that of seeing in events the stamp of a superior will that guides them towards a certain end.It is thus understood how Droysen was attracted, rather than by another subject, by the period of Alexander the Great, in which such a will can be seen better than at any other time in history.
As for Droysen's value as a writer, he has a fast, tense style, in which sometimes the effort to express in a clearer way ideas that by themselves would be quite complicated: a style almost tormented, more of a thinker than a narrator, but which, precisely because of its density, often presents a particular efficacy.The way of outlining the characters is very vivid, perhaps superior to what we would like today for a historical work.And if it is true that today it can be said that ideas and their method are partly out of date, no one can deny the importance that these volumes (and especially the first, which is still the most alive) have had for our knowledge of the world.Old.
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