Johann Gustav Droysen

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Droysen, Johann Gustav


Born July 6, 1808, in Treptow (now Trebiatów, Poland); died June 19, 1884, in Berlin. German historian.

Droysen was made a professor at the University of Kiel in 1840, at the University of Jena in 1851, and at the University of Berlin in 1859. An active participant in the revolution of 1848-49 in Germany as a moderate liberal politician, he was a member of the constitutional commission of the Federal Diet and a deputy to the Frankfurt Parliament. He advocated unification of Germany “from above” under the leadership of Prussia and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy.

Droysen was a prominent representative of the Smaller Germany (kleindeutsch) school of historical writing and produced a number of works on Prussian history. His political convictions were reflected in his works on ancient history of the Hellenistic period, for he glorified the Macedonian monarchy, regarding it as the highest form of national unification of the Greeks, and he idealized Alexander the Great and his achievements.

Droysen introduced the term “Hellenism” into scholarly circles and made a detailed study of the Hellenistic period for the first time in historical science, bringing his account down to 222 B.C. (The History of Hellenism; Russian translation, vols. 1-3, 1890-93). Droysen understood Hellenism to mean “the spread of the Greek system of government and education” among the peoples of the East, but he ignored the socioeconomic essence of Hellenism.


Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen. Hamburg, 1833.
Geschichte des Hellenismus, vols. 1-2. Hamburg, 1836-43.
Vorlesungen über das Zeitalter der Freihheitskriege, 2nd ed., parts 1-2. Gotha, 1886.
Geschichte der preussischen Politik, vols. 1-5. Leipzig, 1859-86.
Grundriss der Historik. Halle, 1925.


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Principal among these implications was the growing awareness, evident in Johann Gustav Droysen, that the interpretation of history demanded a mode of reasoning distinct from that of the natural sciences.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Johann Gustav Droysen diagnoses what will later come to be known as the "crisis of historicism", i.
Droysen (1808-84) wrote in a sonorous style, but the biography is difficult to read because of its philosophical density, historical detail, and hypostactic style.
Although Wagner often wrote disparagingly of Hegel and never mentioned having read the Aesthetics, Foster argues that there is good reason to believe that this work influenced both his thinking and his music: Hegel was "in the air" (according to Friedrich Engels) during Wagner's lifetime; the philosopher taught Johann Gustav Droysen, one of Wagner's favorite Greek scholars; and Wagner certainly read Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History and likely explored other works by the philosopher (pp.
14) La linea di pensiero sulla quale Piovani colloca se stesso collega in questo caso Vico, Humboldt, Droysen, Dilthey, Troeltsch, e Meinecke (Fs 297).
When Gadamer examines the genesis of the concept of research in the nineteenth century, he turns for his example to Johann Gustav Droysen, author of Historik (1858), because Droysen defines historical knowledge as "understanding through research"; more emphatically, Droysen asserts that historians "only do research [forschen] and can do nothing but research" (215-16).
He did a nice statue of David, even though he showed him with the gesheft in droysen.
At the next stage comes the recursive looping process of systems theory (Wiener) that is to discover more than something hidden and translate it into comprehension, as Schleiermacher and Droysen had done.
Droysen, Wilhelm Dilthey, Wilhelm Windelband e Heinrich Rickert non furono, tuttavia, tanto lontani nella loro anticoncettualizzazione come Meinecke.
Droysen, 54, 56), the first Roman exploit after Cannae, is disregarded; $o is his very noteworthy capture of Syracuse (Eutropius, 3.
classical philologists and archaeologists to update and expand their understanding of hellenistic history - a period, beginning with Alexander the Great, which, ever since the studies of Droysen, Rostovtzeff and Tarn, has been seen as marking a major transformation, on all fronts and at all levels, in the Mediterranean.
provides a clear survey of the theory of historical writing from Max Weber and Johann Gustav Droysen onward.