Meinecke, Friedrich (1862–1954)

Friedrich Meinecke was a German historian of moral and political ideas who addressed the problems of his age through critical study of the writings of past thinkers. He studied at the universities of Berlin and Bonn, before becoming a state archivist in Berlin for fourteen years. He went on to hold professorships at Strasbourg, Bonn and Berlin. He contributed to political thought through books on cosmopolitanism and nationalism, on the morality of states and on historicism. In these works he re-examined the European tradition of moral and political thought, attempting especially to find a middle way between the universalist and cosmopolitan ethic of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century belief in the particularity and historical uniqueness of national cultures. His life spanned the entire period from Bismarck to Hitler, and he sought to bring his deep historical learning to bear on the ethical dilemmas facing Germans during this time.