Abstract
first English edition of Jacob Burckhardťs Reflections on History was published last year under the title Force and Freedom. 1 This English edition comes rather late. The first draft of this book was made by Burckhardt in the summer of 1868 about 75 years ago. If we take into consideration the radical changes of our political and social life made since that period the book seems to belong to a remote past. We may study it with the attention and respect due to a great historian; but we should hardly expect to meet here with anything that has a bearing upon our own actual problems. Yet when reading the book we find quite the opposite. There are only a few historical books that, at this very moment, are so much alive and so apt to arouse a keen interest as Burckhardťs book. In a certain sense it is much nearer to our generation than it was to his own. For what we find here are not only general reflections on the character of historical knowledge. What Burckhardt gives is perhaps the first and most penetrating analysis of that great crisis of European civilization that began to develop in the second half of
Keywords
Reading (process)CivilizationPoliticsHistoryCharacter (mathematics)Period (music)ClassicsLiteratureArt historyPhilosophyLawAestheticsArtPolitical science
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Publication Info
- Year
- 2016
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 53
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 89-93
- Citations
- 0
- Access
- Closed
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Cite This
Ernst Cassirer,
Jacob Burckhardťs Reflec
(2016).
Force and Freedom: Remarks on the English Edition of Jacob Burckhardt's "Reflections on History".
, 53
(1)
, 89-93.
https://doi.org/10.1016/s0300-9629(76)80017-5
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1016/s0300-9629(76)80017-5