The Expert’s Historian: Otto Hintze and the Nature of Modern Historical Thought

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As we hoped, Hintze’s further development made him one of the great ones in the discipline. To be sure, he was one of those who was only known in the circle of experts, like a very high mountain in a mountain range which one first noticed from the vantage point of a high pass. –Friedrich Meinecke, 1941 (translated by Leonard S. Smith) What we call historicism is a new, unique, categorical-structure of the mind [des Geistes] that began to arise in the West in the eighteenth century and achieved authoritative currency in the nineteenth, particularly in Germany, though not in Germany alone. It is characterized by the categories of individuality and development, which postulate a view of historical reality based on the analogy of the life unit [Lebenseinheit] and the life-process [Lebensprozess]. –Otto Hintze, 1927 (translated by Leonard S. Smith) If Hintze could be included, as he should be, as one of ‘the great ones in the discipline’ in historiography classes throughout the United States, this could greatly widen ‘the circle of experts’ in this and other English-speaking countries and/or encourage history teachers to lead students to reach ‘the vantage point of a high pass’ where they could see this ‘very high mountain’ for themselves. –Leonard S. Smith, 2012