The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze

In the years between the last of the kaisers and the demise of the Weimar Republic, the historian Otto Hintze (1861-1940) emerged as one of the most important contributors to the debate between the established Rankean political historians and the new social scientists. Hintze's long essays, originally dispersed over a great number of German periodicals and until recently unavailable in English, concern the broad problems of comparative European political and institutional history, and discuss the crucial question of the relationship between history and sociology. The eleven essays selected and translated for this volume represent the major themes in Hintze's work. In them he deals with such fundamental problems as individual initiative and instructional continuity, and the connection between social activities and their subordination to a central political purpose. The author's growth can be charted in the essays, from his early conception of the state as a firm entity independent of social groups, to a later, more pragmatic model. The selections span his first period of investigation in the field of Prussian history and his later revision of that material, as well as his work in comparative history and theory. Felix Gilbert's introduction traces the important intellectual influences in Hintze's life and identifies his place in the general development of his biography. Hintze's original annotations are placed at the back of the volume to illustrate the state of historical research in the first quarter of this century.