The twentieth century has not been kind to the idea of progress, to that core of optimistic Enlightenment thinking whose project Condorcet described as the "limitless perfectibility of the human species." If the trenches of the First World War were not enough to cast doubt upon its prospects, certainly Auschwitz and Hiroshima more than sufficed. The holdouts thereafter--those liberals and Marxists still upholding the Enlightenment's positivist, materialist orthodoxies--have come largely undone through the manifest maladies of the welfare state on the one hand, and the far more dramatic collapse of communism on the other. Richard Rorty advises socialists and their sympathizers that they will one day have to admit, if they haven't already, that the once-celebrated "image of Lenin at the Finland Station . . . will form a triptych along with that of Hitler at a Nuremberg rally and of Mussolini on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia."

The idea of progress, in its essential Enlightenment beginnings and even more so in its nineteenth-century expressions, was bound up with an exchange of faith: the substitution of science and reason for God and Providence. Now that the gods of the Enlightenment have had their clay feet exposed, the way is open for some to return to faith. But many cannot; too secular for belief in God, and too skeptical for trust in reason, they have given birth to postmodernism in its various guises.

It is easier to ridicule postmodernism than it is to define it. Its basic impulse oscillates between nihilism and humility, between denying objectivity and the possibility for meaningful rational discourse on the one hand, and recognizing the frailties and limits of the human endeavor on the other. In the former cast of mind, history is reduced to hopelessly subjective narrative; in the latter, however, it turns into a philosophical challenge that puts it, very surprisingly perhaps, into the company of St. Augustine.

To understand how two such seemingly opposite philosophical strains can coexist, there is no better mentor or model than Jacob Burckhardt, the great Swiss-German historian of the last century (1818-1897). Burckhardt is unusual among the nineteenth-century critics of progress in that he arrived at his skepticism not from an explicitly religious standpoint to battle against Hegel and Marx, Comte and Spencer, Proudhon and the English Whigs. Unlike Cardinal J. H. Newman, Kierkegaard, and the popes of the day, Burckhardt wrote as an insider of modernity's secular elite culture. Burckhardt was an apostate to Christianity and an avowedly secular historian, and his attacks against some of the central assumptions of his time were made quite often on his enemies' own intellectual ground. Nonetheless, and perhaps unbeknown to Burckhardt, his skepticism of progress bears witness to the validity of certain religious insights; but perhaps so does the skepticism of many postmodernists whether or not they would ever admit it. For all these reasons, present-day postmodernist critics of progress will ignore Jacob Burckhardt at their peril.

A pastor's son and himself an aspirant to the ministry, Burckhardt renounced Christianity after encountering German historical criticism of the Bible while a theology student at the University of Basel. The wrenching religious crisis that he experienced led him to become a historian; reasoning that "Christianity [had] entered the realm of purely human periods of history", he left Basel in 1839 for Berlin to study under Leopold von Ranke, the father of modern historical scholarship.

Publishing little after his renowned The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), Burckhardt devoted his entire life to the craft of teaching history. Until German historians re-examined their cultural assumptions after the Second World War, the Swiss (and hence anti-Prussian) Burckhardt was little known and little understood. In 1874 he declined a prestigious chair in history at the University of Berlin, preferring to stay in humble Basel, where, as he put it, "I can say what I want to." A lifelong bachelor, he lived in two rooms above a bakery, took long walks on Sunday afternoons, and periodically sojourned to Italy for research. Townspeople knew him simply as "the old man with the portfolio" because of the art reprints he lugged to lectures.

He was a masterly lecturer. When in 1870 the twenty-four year old Friedrich Nietzsche first heard Burckhardt, he was delighted by Burckhardt's cultural pessimism and anti-modern sentiment--"a lovely and rare refrain" he called it, and with characteristic immodesty believed himself to be the only person in attendance who understood Burckhardt's "profound thoughts" with "their strangely abrupt breaks and twists." The two were colleagues and friends together for ten years at Basel before Nietzsche's controversial philosophizing dismayed Burckhardt, prompting him to dismiss his younger friend's activities as a "publicity stunt."

Today, those interested in Burckhardt's critique of liberalism and progressivism have made much of his influence on Nietzsche. Many argue that Burckhardt's thought represents a precocious disillusionment with modernity, a proto-existentialism or proto-postmodernism that properly got underway in the writings of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger and in the general fin de sicle malaise that characterized Europe's intelligentsia just before and during the Great War. Yet those who link Burckhardt with postmodernism's "founding fathers" have failed to investigate his once serious religious faith and the vestigial Northern Renaissance humanism that he inherited as a Basler Pfarrersohn ("pastor's son"). Closer examination suggests that an abiding Augustinian conception of human nature, a belief in the flawed and frail character of things human, more accurately accounts for Burckhardt's disaffection with modernity: his anti-modernism was of a distinctly premodern, religious sort, however postmodern it might appear today.

To be sure, Burckhardt's Augustinian pessimism was not fashionable in his day, even among most Christians. The bourgeois, optimistic religiosity of the nineteenth century was a far cry from that of its medieval and early modern antecedents. The doctrine of original sin and the notion of the world as a "vale of tears" had become the most attenuated aspects of Christian theology among high culture elites. Further, the ideology of material progress was by no means restricted to secular utopianists. For example, Walter Rauschenbusch, father of the "Social Gospel", in his Christianity and the Social Order remarked on the eve of the misery of 1914-18 that nearly two millennia of Christian influence had served its purpose as "a long preliminary stage" for the contemporary achievement of worldwide material improvement.
Such associations of wealth and progress with Christianity deeply disturbed Burckhardt, who looked wistfully to his lost childhood faith to provide the antidote to the uncritical belief in the forward march of history. Sadly, he felt that modern Christianity had compromised its once pessimistic appraisal of human nature. Burckhardt commented to a friend in 1871:

"The only conceivable salvation would be for this insane optimism . . . to disappear from people's brains. But then our present-day Christianity is not up to the task; it has gone in for and got mixed up with optimism for the last two hundred years."
Lecturing in Basel, Burckhardt lambasted "progress", that "most ridiculous vanity, as if the world were marching toward a perfection of mind or even morality."

Indeed, Burckhardt never bought into historical optimism, convinced that "progress" was defined by political leaders, who, despite allegiance to ideals such as popular sovereignty and social reform, were ultimately concupiscent human beings inclined to abuse power. His judgments of contemporary political developments were made from this distrustful perspective. For example, Burckhardt noted that Otto von Bismarck's liberal rhetoric often only served to mask his nationalist militarism and efforts toward state centralization. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Burckhardt thus opined that "such events demonstrate repeatedly on what hollowed-out ground we stand. The roots are much deeper than one thinks. They are connected to the freedom swindle, to Rousseau's ideas of the goodness of human nature. To be sure, Christianity has often made its doctrine of the corruptibility of the human heart unsavory, but it nonetheless rests on more profound insight into human nature."

Bismarck's policies and actions were not anomalies in Burckhardt's eyes; they were characteristic of unsettling trends stemming from the worst elements of the French Revolution. In his historical analysis, Burckhardt thus scoured the putatively liberal milieu of recent history for masked powers manipulating progressive rhetoric for sinister purposes. Above all, Burckhardt deplored the "lawless centralization" of state power. The modern liberal nation-state in his eyes had attained the potential for a "sultanic despotism", instanced in such phenomena as the forced secularization of church property and wars of "national necessity." In the future, Burckhardt made clear, Europe would soon witness the specter of a new Caesarism. Since "public benefit" and "public opinion" cannot be realized collectively, he reasoned, "the people" must look to the state as "benevolent father." As the weary French had earlier welcomed the dictatorial powers of Napoleon, so Burckhardt thought that nineteenth-century socialists "would assign the state never-heard-of and outrageous tasks, which could be accomplished only by a mass of power which also was never-heard-of and outrageous."

Unlike Hegel, then, Burckhardt did not see the state as a desirable agent of good; rather he saw it as a potential evil, more likely to become "a mere dreary self-enjoyment of power, a pseudo-organism existing by and for itself":

"The 'realization of ethical values on earth' [Hegel] by the state would simply be brought to grief again and again by the spiritual inadequacy of human nature in general, and even of the best of humanity in particular. The forum of morality lies quite outside the state, and we may wonder that it can do as much as uphold conventional justice. The state will be most likely to remain healthy when it is aware of its own nature . . . as an expedient."

Burckhardt also made clear that the concept of property had outlasted all other principles and values, and in the hands of the "all-powerful state" had become coterminous with the principle of "the nation." This portended militarism, the suppression of difference, and the ruthless imperialist agglomeration of lands.

Put simply, Burckhardt did not celebrate post-1789 Europe. Increased state power, nationalism, and revolutionary energies, combined with rampant commercialism, betokened for him a future "accelerated by nationalist wars and deadly industrial competition." The individual was at risk of being subsumed by the state, which in turn might succumb to rule by "terribles simplificateurs." "It has long been clear to me", Burckhardt wrote some thirty years before Mussolini's march on Rome and Hitler's Munich putsch, "that the world is moving toward the alternative between complete democracy and absolute, lawless despotism, and the latter would certainly not be run by the dynasties, who are too softhearted, but by supposedly republican Military Commanders. Only people do not like to imagine a world whose rulers utterly ignore law, prosperity, enriching work, and industry, credit, etc., and who would rule with utter brutality. But those are the people into whose hands the world is being driven."
A confirmed apostate, Burckhardt nonetheless found a modicum of solace in acknowledging the Christian conception of the world as a fallen place. This outlook contained in his judgment a sad but true wisdom, not reflected in the political and intellectual refrains of modernity. Burckhardt's unusual retention of this attitude after his apostasy helps account for his critical and lonely perspectives on otherwise celebrated developments.
Significantly, Burckhardt also embraced a very unmodern mindfulness of the limits of human reason. In reaction to the widespread confidence in the Promethean powers of modern science (Wissenschaft), Burckhardt described his own mode of inquiry as essentially subjective and unwissenschaftlich. Like the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, Burckhardt regarded Hegel's all-embracing philosophical system as the fateful prototype of modernity's faith in ratiocination:
"Hegel, in his . . . Philosophy of History, tells us that the only idea which is 'given' in philosophy is the simple idea of reason, the idea that the world is rationally ordered: hence the history of the world is a rational process. . . . We are not, however, privy to the purposes of eternal wisdom: they are beyond our ken. [Hegel's] bold assumption of a world plan leads to fallacies because it starts out from false premises."
Instead of attesting to the inevitable triumph of reason, for Burckhardt history was closer to what the American author James Agee once called "the cruel radiance of what is." History offered neither progressive patterns nor embedded rationality. Although he did not speak explicitly of "sin", Burckhardt maintained that his conception of history was simply one of "man, suffering, striving, doing, as he is and was and ever shall be. Hence our study will . . . be pathological in kind."
Despite residual allegiance to certain religious sensibilities, Burckhardt never rallied sufficient conviction to reaffirm his lost faith. His religious crisis, brought on by historical criticism and by the subsequent historicizing of his mind as a student at Berlin, exemplifies Franklin L. Baumer's assertion that, even more so than natural science, "the historical . . . [was] the most devastating of all the modes of nineteenth-century skeptical criticism." The notion of historicism (or, if you will, cultural relativism), pervasive in the American humanities today, has its roots in nineteenth-century German intellectual life. Historicism is a "world-view", observed the German sociologist Karl Mannheim in 1924, "which came into being after the religiously determined medieval picture of the world had disintegrated and when the subsequent Enlightenment['s] . . . supra-temporal Reason, had destroyed itself. . . . Historicism alone . . . provides us with a world-view of the same universality as that of the religious world-view of the past."

Today, one need only observe the working out of multiculturalism on America's campuses to behold the extent to which historicism has permeated contemporary humanistic discourse. Any undergraduate may come away from "Humanities 101" with historicism's two chief tenets: all ideas, cultures, and religions are time- and place-conditioned phenomena and hence of only relative worth; and because of this relativity there is no place for a priori, religious (or "foundationalist" or "essentialist") claims to truth. Yet, a problematic third tenet is often not articulated: modern historicism itself is a product of historical conditions and hence cannot claim to be "true." Ironically, while undermining past verities, modern "historicists" rarely pause to recognize the relativity of their own cultural-relative analysis.

Burckhardt puzzled over this conundrum. He observed once that "we [in the present] can never rid ourselves entirely of the views of our own time and personality, and here, perhaps, is the worst enemy of knowledge." Nonetheless, he thought that historical inquiry was beneficial for it encouraged a "true skepticism", which had an "indisputable place in a world . . . in constant flux." A historical sense, in his view, guarded one from accepting facile dogmatisms at face value. But unlike many present-day historicists, who often undermine traditional values through historicization only to advance their own agendas, Burckhardt recognized that the past had profound power to speak to and criticize the present. Indeed, the present had no privileged observer status and he thus warned repeatedly against "taking our [own] historical perspectives for the decrees of history."

If historical knowledge often led to uncertainty, what is the function of the historian? Burckhardt thought that the historian should strive for reverent remembrance by contemplating the culture and thought of bygone eras. Repudiating Hegel's teleological History, Burckhardt settled instead for a more modest conception of knowing the past, one that emphasized the steady acquisition of wisdom, and which he saw not only as a "duty . . . [but a] supreme need, our very freedom in the very awareness of universal bondage and the stream of necessities."

There is indeed much pathos in Burckhardt's stance toward modernity. Once he abandoned Christianity, he never embraced another idea or faith with deep conviction. This has led the historian Wolfgang Hardtwig to describe him as an intellect trapped "between 'old Europe' and the modern world." Matthew Arnold, Burckhardt's contemporary and fellow apostate, alluded to himself in a poem as "wandering between two worlds, one dead, / the other powerless to be born." This too was Burckhardt's path.

Yet Burckhardt's legacy speaks strongly to us on the cusp of the twenty-first century. His residual adherence to a Christian conception of evil furnished him with a realistic appraisal of human nature and allowed him to glimpse the potential shortcomings of an unfettered faith in modernity. Especially prophetic was Burckhardt's conviction that the modern nation-state, because of its increased powers, had the capacity for hitherto unimaginable terrors. Writing during the height of Nazi brutality, the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr thus praised Burckhardt's prescience:

"No one predicted the modern totalitarian state more accurately. . . . He believed that modern tyrants would use methods which even the most terrible despots of the past would not have had the heart to use. . . . Burckhardt even predicted fairly accurately to what degree liberal culture in totalitarian countries would capitulate to tyranny through failure to understand the enemy."

Similarly, Karl Barth and other neo-orthodox theologians have hailed Burckhardt as a voice of social realism in a period adrift in nationalism, state expansionism, and facile intellectual idealisms.

To be sure, the idea of an innately flawed self has been one of the most unpopular and consciously rejected aspects of Christian theology in modern times. There is indeed something profoundly disturbing and paradoxical about a doctrinal position that regards evil and sin as inevitable but also holds human beings responsible for actions prompted by their ineluctable state. Nonetheless, the case of Burckhardt aptly demonstrates that moral and political judgments that approximate such a view often prove more enduring than those that do not.
Anticipating neo-orthodox trends in theology and neo-conservative trends in political theory, Burckhardt's thought provided (and still provides) a powerful critique of many typically modern ideological excesses (totalitarianism, scientism, progressivism). Burckhardtian realism offers insight into the complexity, pettiness, and self-interest that regrettably characterize the human condition. Burckhardt recognized that professions of ideals (for example "progress", "the nation", "Absolute Spirit", "science", "equality") frequently conceal more limited selfish interests, and that the expressed pursuit of justice may mask a ruthless exercise of power. Attentiveness to the factions and forces in both the intellectual and political spheres, and a mindfulness of the potentially disastrous unintended consequences of even the best moral aspirations, comprise the central feature of Burckhardt's misgivings about modernity.

Burckhardtian realism stands against the mistaken notion that devoting oneself exclusively to determining and proclaiming "the right thing to do" can produce sufficient political resolutions. This notion, in fact, is actually more likely to render one powerless in the actual course of events, and it may--in the event that the proclamation is widely heeded--prove horribly destructive, abolishing the necessary balance of powers and unleashing potent fanaticisms. The effective resolution of conflicts will take into consideration the ever-shifting equilibrium of power interests and regard each solution as indeterminate and provisional; the creative work of moral inquiry and social analysis must always begin anew. Finally, since those who control moral and political discourse would be, in Burckhardt's view, most prone to mask interests and abuse power, honest assessments of situations would more likely be rendered by listening to those who had experienced injustice and repression--those outside and distrustful of political power.

Notwithstanding the irony of the prevailing postmodern attitude toward progress today, our historical situation in the late twentieth century bears a certain resemblance to the European one in the late nineteenth. When Burckhardt was in his fifties, Germany under the leadership of Bismarckian Prussia had achieved a decisive political hegemony in central Europe; Germany held a place on the continent similar in many ways to America's place in the world today. Germany's political systems and cultural sensibilities were proclaimed by many (often Hegelian-influenced) nationalist intellectuals as the inevitable outworking of world history--indeed as the necessary fulfillment of a providential design. As the Great War and the totalitarian nightmare readied themselves for the historical stage, the future of Europe seemed to many a divinely sanctioned expanse of material and political achievement with Germany at the helm.

History did not end in Burckhardt's time, nor--as Francis Fukuyama's critics have reminded him--shall it end in ours. As Burckhardt might simply comment to the neo-Hegelian Fukuyama: "The impulse to great periodical changes is rooted in human nature."

Finally, Burckhardt's anti-modernism is relevant to our "postmodern condition." While one does well to eschew the extreme relativism and irony of postmodernism, we must also recognize that the current moment, for all its shortcomings, has fostered a healthy recognition of the limits and indeterminacy of human thought, action, and language. It is no accident that Burckhardt's Augustinian sensibilities are mistaken as proto-postmodern ones by theologically unsophisticated contemporary critics. This case of mistaken identity suggests that certain aspects of postmodernism may hold much in common with a more traditional, religion-based anthropology and epistemology. While orthodox religiosity and postmodernism are certainly far from soulmates, the current tendency toward wholesale dismissal of postmodernism among both pious and non-pious conservatives may not, in the final analysis, reflect judicious insight. Rather, perhaps it only represents a conditioned negative response to novelty. Yet as St. Augustine reminds us in his famous reply to Tertullian, one often must take from the spoils of Egypt, yet put them to better use.

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