Against the widespread neglect and criticism of Schiller the historian and of Enlightenment historiography generally, this essay offers a rehabilitation of both and a criticism of allegedly more realistic attitudes to history in the nineteenth century. It analyzes the flawed views of recent commentators, shows the sociopolitical intentions behind Kant's theory of historiography and Schiller's programme for his Jena lectures, presented in the Inaugural. Ranke's and Hegel's assumptions — the hand of God in history, history as the embodiment of Reason — prove to be more naive than Enlightenment thinking, and indeed represent a relapse into pre-Enlightenment modes of thought. Enlightenment modes are shown continuing in the outlook of twentieth-century writers — Thomas Mann, André Malraux, Nadine Gordimer. The conclusion is that the Enlightenment's combination of hope and activism is the only valid way of living in and with history.

WHO IS THIS SCHILLER NOW, Schiller the historian and thinker about history; and who has he been for some time? In a word, nobody. The collection of essays Deutsche Historiker edited by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, five volumes in the early 1970s, another batch of four in the early 1980s, has nothing on Schiller. At seven names per volume, a total of sixty-three favoured historians: might Schiller have squeezed in at number sixty-four? It looks unlikely. This in a collection that stretches all the way back to his predecessors and contemporaries, Pufendorf, Möser, Schlözer, and Spittler, and whose foreword declares that a discipline is lost if it forgets its founding fathers. At least, that is what it must have meant to say.