1 In conclusion, as well as fulfilling his aim to outline the ways in which these schools ‘break new ground and add to the notion and the work of history’, the general tenor of the essay offered nothing less than a full-blown evocation of the historical spirit of the age: Indeed, he even suggested - in what had by 1886 already become a standard trope of political discourse - that although German ‘historical writing was old’, strictly ‘historical thinking was new in Germany when it sprang from the shock of the French Revolution’. For at root, Acton’s discussions of these schools of history were underpinned by an account of the political implications of different versions of historical enquiry. Of course, although Acton was the most cosmopolitan of scholars, the fact that the first edition of what would quickly become the premier English historical periodical should be so concerned with the state of German scholarship suggests something more than passing historiographical interest. Reviewing so much more than Professor Wegele’s Deutsche Historiographie in the first edition of the English Historical Review of 1886, in what has since become a justly famous essay, Lord Acton critically evaluated various German ‘schools’ of history in the nineteenth century.
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