Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit

What it is about

Herder's major work, in four parts between 1784 and 1791: a history of humanity that begins with the earth's place in the solar system and ends with the peoples of Europe.

Context and history

The idea that made it influential is that every people has its own way of being human, with its language, its poetry and its climate, and cannot be measured by another's yardstick: there is no single road towards one civilisation, but many equally legitimate forms. Herder set this expressly against the Eurocentrism of his contemporaries, and defended colonised peoples. The same idea, stripped of its universalist half, later fed romantic nationalism, which he would not have wanted. Kant, who had been his teacher, reviewed it harshly, and the quarrel marked them both.

Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.