Herder and modern science of history

Much research has recently been done into eighteenth-century historiography and into the sources and method of Herder's historical writing. But the reputation of his being nothing else but the "father" of German nationalism, and a representative of "Counter-Enlightenment" is persistently clinging to his name and work. This essay tries to challenge this image in the light of new approaches to history: The American economist and evolutionary biologist Peter Turchin has proposed a new "metatheory" of history in order to show, in the wake of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, how empires grow and disappear on the basis of territorial conflicts between ethnic groups. In France, the highly renowned historian Francois Hartog has studied forms of concepts of the past - "regimes d'historicite" - in order to describe the attitude of post-modern societies towards history, swaying between its selective use for present needs, and its function as an archive of cultural memory. These approaches can be viewed in the critical light of Herder's methodical attempt at a philosophy of history, revealing the capacity of his work as a critical commentary to seemingly new endeavours in historiography.