Jacob Burckhardt and the anthropological concept of culture as expression of historical conservatism

Vol.12,No.1(2021)

Ivo Budil

https://doi.org/10.5817/AI2021-1-7

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Abstract
The category of culture has established itself in the Anglo-Saxon world in the works of classical evolutionism in anthropology by Edward Burnett Tylor, John Lubbock or Lewis Henry Morgan as a key tool for studying and understanding human difference and diversity, emancipating Western anthropological and historical thought from racial concept. These authors were intellectually linked to the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment, represented by Adam Ferguson, John Millar or William Robertson, who understood human history as a progressive sequence of universal phases leading to the highest moral and material stage in the form of civilization. Against this combination of Scottish Enlightenment progressivism and anthropological instrumentalization of culture, however, one can oppose the original German definition of culture, which was associated with a conservative response to the Enlightenment and was closer to contemporary anthropological and historical sciences, free from the ethnocentric and ideological prejudices. This interpretation of culture reflecting conservative historical pessimism and concerns about the further development of Western society can be demonstrated in the person and work of the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose Renaissance Culture in Italy marked not only a breakthrough in the study of the Renaissance but also an important inspiration in the emergence of modern cultural history and historical anthropology.

Keywords:
Culture; Jacob Burckhardt; Basel; conservatism; liberalism; Ernst Peter von Lasaulx; Friedrich Nietzsche; Renaissance; Karl Ludwig von Haller
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