Democracy, Caesarism, and Kulturgeschichte: Georg Friedrich Kolb Contra Mommsen and Hellwald

This article analyzes the politics of nineteenth-century German cultural history, or what the historian and statistician Georg Friedrich Kolb called the "cultural history of mankind." It shows that nineteenth-century cultural history became a key battleground in a wider dispute about democracy and Caesarism. It argues that questions about the proper scope and method of cultural history, which revolved around claims about human agency, progress and destiny, and the meaning of "true culture," were deeply implicated in the political debate about the viability of modern democracy and its relationship to Caesarism.