"Revolution and Freedom in Theodor Mommsen's "Romische Geschichte

IN THE HALF-CENTURY BEGINNING AROUND 1830, German readers of narrative history were presented with a great number of histories of revolutions and of revolutionary ages. The authors of these histories were almost all liberals, among them many of the most illustrious names of two generations of German scholarship, including Carl von Rotteck, Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, Johann Gustav Droysen, Georg Gervinus, and Heinrich von Sybel.1 This interest in revolution as an historical event was not mere fashion. An array of the most important and troubling political questions of that explosive age hinged on the interpretation and evaluation of revolution, such as the question of the legitimacy and the limits of popular political expression and resistance, and of the nature and integrity of law and the state. Through an evalution of revolution, liberals hoped to formulate their stance vis-a-vis the progressive currents of the day, and to secure their position against their chief opponents in the first half of the nineteenth century, the conservatives, and later, during and after the revolutionary events of 1848, against the nascent left.2 Liberals were convinced, moreover, that an evaluation of the potential and significance of popular revolution was impossible without a serious consideration of the role that revolution occupied in history. Despite the diverse character of the periods studied and the divergent

Art · Art history · Humanities · Sociology · Central European national history · European history and politics · European Political History Analysis · History · Philosophy

• Politics in the Roman Republic

  Cary M Barber•Brill Research Perspectives in…•2022

  Add to list