The writing of cultural history in eighteenth-century Germany

The idea of culture came into circulation in the European vernacular languages simultaneously around 1780. A dynamic concept implying development and change, culture described the origin and progress of civil society from the primitive state of nature to modern Enlightenment. In reconstructing the late-eighteenth-century debate over human nature and human culture I discuss three separate aspects of European scholarship, anthropology, philology, and literary history.;The first section uses a debate between Christoph Meiners and Georg Forster over the ideology of egalitarianism to illustrate the uses of travel literature and cultural history in the 1780s. Although they relied on identical sources, used identical methods, and asked the same questions, they arrived at opposite conclusions about human nature. Both appealed to biology and anthropology to influence public policy concerning the Atlantic slave trade and the French Revolution. Their debate I place in the context of biological and human classification of Linnaeus, Buffon, and Blumenbach.;Centered around C. G. Heyne's mythological hermeneutics the second section examines the attempt by philologists to learn about how humanity developed from its earliest, animal-like conditions into sophisticated national cultures. I discuss the deeply influential but now neglected scholarship of A. Y. Goguet on the origin and progress of the arts and sciences before Herodotus. The results won by Goguet led Heyne to conclude that one learned the most about the culture of the Homeric Greeks and the Mosaic Hebrews through the comparative use of ancient texts and modern travel literature. Comparative history was used in J. G. Eichhorn's higher criticism of the Old Testament and Christoph Meiners's histories of the decline and fall of Greek and Roman culture.;The final section treats literary history as cultural history. I discuss attempts by literary historians and encyclopedists in the sixteenth and seventeenth century to recover the fragments of lost ancient knowledge. Initially an auxiliary to rhetorical argumentation, literary history became both a pedagogical devise and a tool for the progress of the arts and sciences in Europe. In the late eighteenth century literary history was linked explicitly to cultural history.