SOURCE: "Burckhardt," in Meaning in History, The University of Chicago Press, 1957, pp. 20-32.

In the excerpt below, Lowith discusses Burckhardt's understanding of political continuity, with special reference to Reflections on World History.

The proper purpose of Burckhardt's lifelong study and teaching of history was neither to construct "world history" philosophically nor to promote technical scholarship but to develop the historical sense. His course on history was intended as an introduction to the study of "the Historical," in order to stimulate the genuine appropriation of those periods of our history which may appeal individually. For to him history was not an objective science concerning neutral facts but "the record of facts which one age finds remarkable in another." As a record it depends on remembering, and each generation, by a new effort of appropriation and interpretation, has to remember time and again its own past unless it wants to...