Disintegrating Effect Of German Education

Emery Neff, The Poetry of History: The Contribution of Literature and Literary Scholarship To the Writing of History since Voltaire (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1947; repr. 1961), 192-4 (emphasis all mine):

Before long, this atmosphere [= professionalisation of learning and collecting extremely detailed histories] began to affect even distinguished minds. The revolutions of 1848 had wrenched Theodor Mommsen from the collecting of Latin inscriptions to plunge him into the struggles of liberal journalism. Fresh from this experience in the actual making of history, he published in 1854-1856 the opening volumes of a brilliantly narrated History of Rome interpreting the downfall of the Republic in vividly intelligible terms of nineteenth-century political life. The work scandalized academic historians by the modernity of its phrasing, its partisanship for Caesar, and its lack of references and footnotes. In its defense, the author wrote: “I wanted to bring down the ancients from the fantastic pedestal on which they appear, into the real world. . . . Those who have lived through historical events, as I have, begin to see that history is neither written nor made without love and hate.” But after the Prussian Academy had invited him to Berlin to direct and edit the collection of all extant Latin inscriptions, Mommsen began to regard his masterpiece as a youthful indiscretion. Always convinced that he needed to learn more, he scattered his phenomenal energy over more than a thousand technical publications, and never executed his plan to complete his Roman history with the aid of impeccable information. Even more disintegrating was the effect of a German education on the widely cultured Lord Acton, who read and annotated enormously for a life’s work on the History of Liberty, without writing a line of it, and is remembered chiefly for his planning the Cambridge Modern History, prepared by many historians on the principle of the division of labor. John Morley, who could not be accused of bias against science, lamented in 1878 that history “threatens to degenerate from a broad survey of great periods and movements of human society into vast and countless accumulations of insignificant facts, sterile knowledge, and frivolous antiquarianism.” Looking backward from 1925, the scientific philosopher Whitehead described the widespread results of this professionalization of learning: “In its last twenty years the century closed with one of the dullest stages of thought since the time of the First Crusade. It was an echo of the eighteenth century, lacking Voltaire and the reckless grace of the French aristocrats. The period was efficient, dull, and half hearted. It celebrated the triumph of the professional man.”

As usual, my ailment is perhaps German even in this. The barely bearable and controllable penchant for erudition, to the point where one experiences, in Neff’s words, a «pathological fear of making generalizations that might be contradicted by facts dredged up by rivals with even more limited interests [but more specialised knowledge]». Does one has to choose between proceeding either horizontally or vertically in gaining and producing knowledge?