Johann Gustav Droysen

German historian (1808–1884), author of the Historik (lectures on the theory of history) and the historian who named "Hellenism." In Gadamer's Ch 3 he is "the acute methodologist" who advances on Ranke yet, like him, ends in "aesthetic-hermeneutic categories."

Key Points

• Understanding via expression and the moral powers (sittliche Mächte). Droysen grounds historical understanding in the expression of the moral powers (family, people, state, religion) that are "the actual reality of history," from within the historian's own one-sided situation — freeing it from Ranke's "aesthetic-pantheistic communion."
• Understanding-through-research has a qualitative infinity. Unlike the repeatable experiment of natural science, historical tradition "is always new"; this distinguishes the human-scientific from the natural-scientific relation to its object.
• Still caught in the romantic schema. By routing all this through expression — "hermeneutics becomes the master key to the study of history" — and through Schleiermacher's whole-part formula, Droysen's goal remains "to reconstruct the great text of history from the fragments of tradition."

Connections

• advances on Ranke but remains within aesthetic-hermeneutic categories.
• is interpreted by Dilthey (the historical school's whole-part schema made explicit).
• contributes to the genealogy reconstructed in hermeneutics / effective-history.

Sources

• gadamer-1960-truth-and-method — Ch 3, "The relation between historical study and hermeneutics in J. G. Droysen" (pp. 216–222). confidence: medium.