Online Encyclopedia
August Ludwig Schloezer
August Ludwig Schloezer (1735-1809) was a noted European historian.
Schloezer was born in 1735 in Jaggstadt (Württemberg). His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all were protestant priests. In 1751 he followed them and began his studies in theology, but changed quickly to the increasingly famous university of Göttingen to study history. After his studies he worked as private teacher in Sweden, Lübeck and Petersburg. He became fairly well known through publications on Phoenician and Swedish history, and after a short term professorship at the Petersburg University he returned to Göttingen to become history professor.
Schloezer was acknowledged a brilliant professor who drew crowds of students, amongst whom were Arnold Heeren , Karl Friedrich Eichhorn and Johannes von Müller. Schloezer had broad interests. He translated a pedagogical piece by the Frenchman De La Chalatois in 1771, as well as a travel book about Jamaica for children and an introductory work on world history (Vorbereitung zur Weltgeschichte für Kinder, 1779). Schloezer criticised harshly (Filantropijn) Basedow , a then famous pedagogue, for his education approach using games and for his separation of girls and boys education.
Schloezer was equally interested in politics and statistics. He was a proponent of John Locke and Montesquieu. Statistics were also important to him for their informational value for government. Between 1776 and 1793 he had his own political periodical: A.L. Schloezer's Briefwechsel meist historischen und politischen Inhalts (later: A.L. Schloezer's Staatsanzeigen). This periodical criticised the German government harshly, and was widely read with up to 4400 subscribers. It was first in German to publish the declaration of human rights in 1791. In 1793 the government prohibited the publication of the Staatsanzeigen.
Schloezer was a versatile historian giving lectures on a range of issues including Oliver Cromwell, the Dutch revolution, banks, the French Revolution (already in 1790), luxury, and the history of Germans in Romania, while continuing publishing on Russian history. His general northern history (1771) was long considered a reference work on Russian history. Between 1802 and 1809 he edited in three parts the famous Nestor Chronicle from the 12th century. 1769 he started lecturing on the general world history, a topic reserved to the most educated in that time. The growing knowledge of other continents and the past posed a challenge to historians. How to compress all this information in history books in an understandable way? And what are the criteria for selecting and sorting information? In other words, scholars sought fundamental threads in history. Hundreds of articles and books addressed this question in the second half of the 18th century, drawing famous intellectuals including Herder and Schiller. Schloezer contributed to these discussions and published his Vorstellung einer Universalgeschichte in 1772. He continued to improve this piece in the following decades, until finalising the two part Weltgeschichte nach ihren Haupttheilen im Auszug und Zusammenhange (Main elements of world history in excerpts and context, 1792-1801).
The Weltgeschichte provides guidance for education. Parts of this piece appear unfinished and it sometimes has a halting style. Its ideas are sometime superseded or plain wrong. However, other ideas are fascinating, one of which is globally applied until today as we will see in the following. The Weltgeschichte is a fascinating work that offers insight in the state of science at that time. Schloezer tackled three challenges: the scope, the topic and the structure of a global history.
Since Schloezer opposed a strictly European perspective, the scope was the entire mankind. Moreover, he included all classes of society and social and cultural developments. The development of glass by the Phoenicians and the introduction of potatoes in Europe were more important than the names of the Chinese or German emperors.
The central topic was development and the influence of historical events on today. Schloezer identified five fundamental factors for development: "Die Lebensart bestimmt, Klima und Narungsart erschaft, der Herrscher zwingt, der Priester lert, und das Beispiel reisst fort" . (Schloezer, Weltgeschichte I, 66) – "The life-style determines, climate and nutrition creates, the sovereign forces, the priest teaches, and the example inspires."
Schloezer also developed a structure for a universal history, separating it in six epochs:
- Urwelt (primeval world) - from the Creation to the Flood
- Dunkle Welt (dark world) - from the flood to Moses and the first written sources
- Vorwelt (preworld) - up to the Persian Empire
- Alte Welt (old world) - up to the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D.
- Mittelalter (middle ages) - up to the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492
- Neue Welt (the new world) - up to the present
This classification was not new, except for setting the Middle Ages between 476 and 1492, which he as well as his colleague and rival in Göttingen Johann Christoph Gatterer suggested roughly at the same time. These time borders for the middle ages are still accepted today.
Schloezer’s most important innovation, however, was his suggestion to count backwards from the birth of Jesus Christ. An incentive for this was the growing disbelief of the biblical Creation and the then generally acknowledged creation date of 3987. First speculations that the sun and the earth were perhaps created tens of thousands of years ago emerged in the 18th century. Schloezer’s suggestion offered room for further theories about the creation of the earth. Schloezer mentioned in a footnote that he adopted this idea from foreign historians, but did not reveal them. Whoever they were, Schloezer was the one to introduce this novel chronology into the European history, an act of tremendous importance for it was the fundamental for all ancient history. According to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, this new method enabled man to look back "into an indefinite past to which one can add at will and into which we can inquire further as it stretches ahead" . August Ludwig Schloezer was instrumental in abandoning Creation beliefs of our collective consciousness, more than anybody else.