Page 32 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

‘lived experience’ by grounding experience and value judgements
in the nation, rather than in the abstract ideals of reason and law.
For Herder, ‘The cultivation of its mother tongue alone can lift a
nation out of a state of barbarism’ (Herder, 1968, p. 328).
After Herder, the most important German ‘historicist’ is almost
certainly G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel’s was a historicism of
a very different kind, however: it attempted to effect a theoret-
ical synthesis between culturalist Romanticism and Enlightenment
rationalism. For Hegel, as for the earlier historicists, history was
essentially the history of ‘world-historical’ nations. So in the
Philosophy of History (Hegel, 1956), for example, the nation is
the medium through which the ‘World Spirit’ is consciously
realised. But for Hegel an appreciation of the cultural specificity
of each age could also be subsumed within a wider under-
standing of historical development as possessing an overall
rationality and direction. Hegelian philosophy would later
exercise a very real fascination for the twentieth-century Anglo-
American culturalist poet and critic T.S. Eliot. But in Germany
itself, Hegel’s ‘historicism’ opened up an intellectual space from
within which much emerged: a great deal of the modern dis-
cipline of history; Marx’s Marxism, or ‘historical materialism’, as
he would term it; and, finally, that set of responses to Marx, both
positive and negative, which provided the founding moment and
much of the continuing momentum behind German sociology.
We shall return to these matters in the chapter that follows.

Hermeneutics
The third aspect of German culturalism is ‘hermeneutics’, a term
normally used to refer to those theories of ‘interpretation’ that
take as their central problem how to understand the more or
less intended meanings of others. Historically, the origins of
hermeneutics can be traced to the Reformation and to the Protes-
tant insistence on the believer’s right to interpret the Bible free
from the authoritative dictates of the Catholic church. In the first
instance, then, what was to be interpreted was the religious canon
itself, and for no less a purpose than to understand God’s own
intended meaning. This is obviously no small matter: if God

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