This remarkable history tells the story of the independent city-republic of Basel in the nineteenth century, and of four major thinkers who shaped its intellectual history: the historian Jacob Burckhardt, the philologist and anthropologist Johann Jacob Bachofen, the theologian Franz Overbeck, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. "Remarkable and exceptionally readable . . . There is wit, wisdom and an immense erudition on every page."—Jonathan Steinberg, Times Literary Supplement "Gossman's book, a product of many years of active contemplation, is a tour de force. It is at once an intellectual history, a cultural history of Basel and Europe, and an important contribution to the study of nineteenth-century historiography. Written with a grace and elegance that many aspire to, few seldom achieve, this is model scholarship."—John R. Hinde, American Historical Review

Contrary to his usual portrayal as a disinterested aesthete, Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt is characterised as an original social and political thinker in Richard Sigurdson's timely book Jacob Burckhardt's Social and Political Thought. Burckhardt's thinking on a number of ideas - including the relationship between the individual and the mass, the tension between the ideals of equality and human excellence, and the role of the intellectual in the modern state - is the subject of insightful analysis, thus providing a rare investigation into Burckhardt's culture-critique of the nineteenth century. Other important aspects of Burckhardt's life that undoubtedly influenced both his historical and political thought, such as his ambiguous relationship with Friedrich Nietzsche, are carefully scrutinised in this groundbreaking analysis of the Swiss historian. Known primarily as an historian, Burckhardt's historical writings provide not only a powerful critique of his own times, but also a broad ranging political philosophy that can be placed within the larger German tradition of evaluating politics according to the values and standards of art and culture. Although Burckhardt himself expressed his scepticism towards general theories and claimed to be devoid of a personal philosophical position, through an examination of his works Sigurdson argues that both implicit and explicit political reflections and theories are recognisable.

Republished in 1949, Jacob Burckhardt’s brilliant study, first published in Germany in 1852, has survived all its critics and presents today perhaps a more intelligible and a more valid picture of events, their nexus, and their relevance than any later study. This English version is apt to the moment. No epoch of remote history can be so relevant to modern interests as the period of transition between the ancient and the medieval world, when a familiar order of things visibly died and was supplanted by a new. Other transitions become apparent only in retrospect; that of the age of Constantine, like our own, was patent to contemporaries. Old institutions, in the sphere of culture as of government, had grown senile; economic balances were altered; peoples hitherto on the peripheries of civilization demanded attention, and a new and revolutionary social doctrine with an enormous emotional appeal was spread abroad by men with a religious zeal for a new and authoritarian cosmopolitanism and with a religious certainty that their end justified their means. For us, contemporary developments have made the analogy inescapable, but Jacob Burckhardt’s insight led him to a singularly clear apprehension of the meaning of the transition almost a century ago, and the analogy implicit in his book is the more impressive as it was unpremeditated.

Reproduction of the original: The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt

In 1872 Burckhardt, one of the preeminent historians of classical and Renaissance culture, presented this revolutionary work, which portrays ancient Greek culture as an aristocratic world and tyrannical state with minimal personal freedoms. This landmark culmination of 30 years of scholarship offers a rich cultural history of a fascinating society.