ABSTRACT
Friedrich Meinecke, the Dean of German historians, celebrated in October 1951, the month of his eighty-ninth birthday, the fiftieth anniversary of his appointment to a full professorship. In his reply to an address by the Freie Universitat Berlin, of which he is one of the founders and Ehrenrektor, Professor Meinecke called our time great because of its concern with the ‘highest and most sacred values of mankind, the liberty, honour, right and dignity of the individual’, a struggle which draws ‘all the vital forces of Western civilization’ closer together, labour and the middle class, Catholics and Protestants. The Germanic Dutch and Swiss incline much more to the ‘insular’ attitude which in reality is the general Western attitude. In Germany, too, critical voices were raised against Machiavellianism even when its policy appeared successful and when it was embodied in great personalities like Frederick II or Bismarck.
