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The Philosophy of History
1829 · translated from the German · 567 pages
The Philosophy of History
by Friedrich von Schlegel
Why our edition. The free text is a proofread transcription from Project Gutenberg rather than a page scan, so there is no scanning damage to report. What ours adds is the typesetting: one clean file, in three formats, without the boilerplate. The full German text is public domain and free — linked below.
On this page: a summary of The Philosophy of History, which translation this edition uses, and our clean edition as a PDF or EPUB.
Delivered as lectures at Vienna in 1828 and published the following year, Schlegel’s Philosophy of History runs from the origins of the human race to the Europe of his own day and argues that the whole sequence is intelligible only as a religious history. It is Christian apologetic in the form of world history, from one of the founders of German Romanticism who had been thoroughly irreligious into his late twenties.
The convert behind the argument
Schlegel was a pastor’s son who became, with his brother August Wilhelm, the theorist of the early Romantic movement — and whose scandalous novel Lucinde was about as far from his father’s world as a book could get. He converted to Catholicism at Cologne in 1808 with his wife Dorothea, herself a convert from Judaism and the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, and spent his later career in Austrian service.
Summary
The lectures were given in Vienna in 1828, the last year of Schlegel’s life, and translated into English by James Burton Robertson with a long memoir of the author attached — a memoir that traces the arc from the early Romantic manifestos to the Catholic and conservative writer of the Vienna years.
The argument treats history as the unfolding of a single religious drama: primitive revelation and its corruption, the dispersal of the nations, the preparation of Israel, the incarnation as the center, and the Christian ordering of Europe as the consequence. Schlegel handles Asia at unusual length for his period — he had learned Sanskrit and written the pioneering German study of Indian language and wisdom.
The book was widely read in the nineteenth century as the standard Romantic-Catholic account of history, and its influence on later conservative and providentialist historiography was considerable. Robertson’s translation is the one that carried it into English.
Who was Friedrich von Schlegel?
Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) was born in Hanover, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and became with his brother the leading theorist of early German Romanticism — editor of the Athenaeum, author of the fragments that defined Romantic criticism, and of the novel Lucinde, which scandalised even his allies.
He was irreligious well into adulthood. In 1808, at Cologne, he and his wife Dorothea — a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn who had herself converted — were received into the Catholic Church. He entered Austrian service, worked for Metternich, and spent his last years lecturing in Vienna, where he died in 1829.
Which translation of The Philosophy of History is this?
James Burton Robertson’s translation of 1835 is free at Project Gutenberg in two volumes. Our edition sets both volumes as one continuous, corrected text.
This is a clean reading edition of Friedrich von Schlegel's Philosophy of History — eighteen lectures delivered at Vienna in 1828 and published the following year — in James Burton Robertson's English translation. Schlegel's German and Robertson's English are both in the public domain, and we set the text from the Project Gutenberg transcription.
Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) had been the theorist of German Romanticism, the man who gave the movement its vocabulary, and one of the first scholars of Sanskrit in Europe. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1808, to the dismay of the circle he had made. These lectures are the last work he finished; he died in the middle of delivering a further course. They are an attempt to read the whole of human history as a single argument, and they range from Chinese script to Indian caste to the Greek republics to get there.
A note on what we changed. The transcription is of two volumes, each with its own Project Gutenberg licence, and we took only what lies between them; all eighteen lectures are here. It kept the line breaks of the printed page, so 535 paragraphs arrived as columns of short lines, and we joined them back, which is whitespace and nothing else. 1,283 double hyphens were the em dashes the transcription had no way to write, and are set as em dashes. 170 phrases marked with underscores — Trimurti, gau, kuh — are set as italics. We broke the longest paragraphs at sentences already ended, checking chapter by chapter that the words and their order are unaltered.
We corrected nothing. A checker offered six candidates and all were real: Veii is an Etruscan city, Gothico is Latin, behoved and nomade are words, and Mahomedan is Robertson's own spelling.
The free transcription is linked from this book's page.
Common questions
- What is Schlegel’s Philosophy of History?
- A course of lectures delivered at Vienna in 1828 that reads universal history — from the earliest civilizations through Israel, the incarnation and Christian Europe — as a single religious development, arguing that history is unintelligible without that frame.
- Was Friedrich Schlegel a convert?
- Yes. He was a pastor’s son who became a thoroughly irreligious Romantic in his twenties, and was received into the Catholic Church at Cologne in 1808, at thirty-six, together with his wife Dorothea, herself a convert from Judaism.
A note on the text. The Philosophy of History is in the public domain. What you’re buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
That free text is already well proofread — we measure about 0.2 errors per 1,000 characters. What our edition adds is the typesetting, not a rescue: one clean file, in the formats above, without the archive boilerplate.
Related reading
The same tradition
Vom Ewigen im Menschen
Max Scheler · 1921
Also among german on the apologetics shelf.
The same tradition
Socratic Memorabilia
Johann Georg Hamann · 1759
Also among german on the apologetics shelf.
From the same language
The Story of a Muslim Who Became a Christian
Johannes Avetaranian · 1930
Also translated from the German.
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