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Concept
Borussian myth
Résumé
The Borussian myth or Borussian legend is the name given by early 20th-century historians of German history to the earlier idea that German unification was inevitable, and that it was Prussia's destiny to accomplish it. The Borussian myth is an example of a teleological argument. Borussia is the Latin name for Prussia.
A teleological argument holds all things to be designed for, or directed toward, a specific final result. That specific result gives events and actions, even retrospectively, an inherent purpose. When applied to the historical process, an historical teleological argument posits the result as the inevitable trajectory of a specific set of events. These events lead "inevitably," as Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels proposed, to a specific set of conditions or situations; the resolution of those lead to another, and so on. This goal-oriented, 'teleological' notion of the historical process as a whole is present in a variety of arguments about the past: the "inevitability," for example, of the revolution of the proletariat and the "Whiggish" narrative of past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment that culminated in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy.
The narrative of the heroic past fell to such nationalist German historians as Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896), Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), and Heinrich von Sybel (1817–1895), to name three. Treitschke in particular viewed Prussia as the logical agent of unification. These historical arguments can also be called the grand, or great, narratives but they are inherently ethnocentric, at least when applied to the historical process. Treitschke's History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1879, has perhaps a misleading title: it privileges the history of Prussia over the history of other German states, and it tells the story of the German-speaking peoples through the guise of Prussia's destiny to unite all German states under its leadership.
Source officielle
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