Jacob Burckhardt devoted his entire life to the study of history. However, he considered himself a historian of culture and distanced himself from the positivist concept of historian that, after Leopold Von Ranke, spread, first to Germany and then to the rest of the world.
Burckhardt was born in Basel, Switzerland, on May 25, 1818. His father was a well-known Protestant clergyman and member of a wealthy family in the city, which allowed him access a careful humanistic education. At the age of 19 he began to study theology but soon abandoned it to study philology and history at the University of Berlin (1839-1843). After completing his studies in 1843 he began to teach at the university. Under Kugler's direction, he also became interested in art history, which from that moment on became an essential element in his work and an important tool for learning about human events.
During these years Burckhardt flirted with the romantic liberalism that spread throughout Germany claiming unity and the German spirit and collaborated with newspapers of this ideology. Over time, however, he abandoned this thinking and his political views became more conservative. His disenchantment with politics caused him to focus exclusively on the study of history. To this end, he undertook numerous trips to Italy.
In 1858 he returned to his hometown to occupy the chair of history at the University, a position he would not leave until his death, not even after being offered the position of Leopold Von Ranke at the University of Berlin, after his death, an offer he rejected. The prestige he acquired attracted leading figures to the Swiss university. The classes taught by Nietzsche for ten years stand out, with whom Burckhardt established a close relationship. He died in 1897 at the age of 79.
Unlike other contemporary historians who have an abundant production, Burckhardt only published three relevant works during his lifetime and two posthumously. The first was Time of Constantine the Great, published in 1852. In it he studies the decline of antiquity, the strangulation of culture by the State and the Church during the period between Diocletian and Constantine, and illustrates the instruments to be applied to analyze civilizations. Of all his works, it is the most properly historical, in the traditional sense of this discipline.
Three years later (1855) and influenced by his travels to Italy and the history of art published Cicerone . Under the guise of a travel guide or monument guide, he draws a landscape of great aesthetic beauty that some scholars have compared to a written "impressionist painting".
International recognition came after the publication in 1860 of The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy, in which he addresses the changes that occurred in the conception of the world at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age, the new configuration of the relations between the State and the Church and the appearance of individual figures of great creative influence.
Burckhardt highlighted the role that great individual figures play in guiding culture, putting his stamp of genius on times of intense novelties and acute crises. We do not know why he did not publish more works (it is almost 30 years from his last work to the date of his death). The two posthumous works of his ( History of Greek culture and Reflections on universal history ) collect notes from the classes he taught at the university. In the first he seeks to investigate the moral history of the Hellenic, Byzantine and Italian past, while the second condenses his thoughts and theories on history and the study of it.
he was against those for whom historical development constituted an evolutionary progress culminating in the present, as was the case with Hegel and his followers. In his opinion, history does not present a linear and progressive development, subject to chronology and the study of the concatenation of events. It must be studied “in media res ”, that is, through cross-sections without a beginning and an end. The succession of events lacks interest and what is relevant is the framework that opens up when contemplating a certain period.
Within this perspective there are three agents whose mutual relationship conditions the general character of each era:the State, the Church and culture. The first two are stable. The State implies the organization of the force that ensures order, while religion satisfies the metaphysical needs of man. These agents struggle to impose themselves on others but never succeed, they only reach "favorable moments of fixation". Faced with the State and the Church, culture is the movement of the spirit in freedom, the response of man to earthly and intellectual needs. For Burckhardt, culture is “[…] the world of the mobile, of the free, of the necessarily universal, of what does not claim for itself a coercive validity ” or “we call culture the entire sum of evolutions of the spirit that occur spontaneously and without the pretense of having a universal or coercive validity ”.
The mutability of the story demands the presence of an actor. According to Burckhardt, this actor is none other than man in general and, in particular, the "Great Man" who focuses collective force and emerges within the people, out of his own need, to execute his dispersed will. This conception of the individual as the engine of culture and joint will is clearly seen in Renaissance culture in Italy which highlights the role played by some leaders who excel in all areas, whether artistic, political or philosophical.
Burckhardt breaks with historicism and positivism by stating that “history is the least scientific of all sciences ”, By making room in his study for all possible disciplines and by promoting the subjectivism of the historian, who must select, assess and interpret the events of the past as he pleases.
His work has been highly criticized, especially by historicists, for incorporating blunt errors, not applying a critical bias to the sources and being wrong in some of the conclusions he draws . However, neither was the objective of the Swiss historian to produce a rigorously scientific product:his conception of historiography is closer to poetry or, as it has been called, to "aesthetic historicism". Through an elegant, simple and beautiful language he tries to transform the story into an artistic form, into knowledge endowed with plasticity in which the reader's imagination flows.