ABSTRACT
The concept of moral history, which is, after all, precisely what is wanted and sought in the name of history, is a concept to be reinstated on the one hand and to be defined better on the other. In justifying this reinstatement almost as a quaestio facti, one takes for granted its theoretical justification, that is, one considers as solved the quaestio juris concerning the truth and autonomy of moral activity against every utilitarian or other kind of negation of it. In opposition to this conception of moral history as the history of civilization, which might be called a French one, arose the other conception which might be called German, of history as peculiarly political history, the history of the State, as the true, concrete and only ethical reality. The “moral” or “ethico-political history” is, after all, what lies at the bottom of that frequently expressed assertion or postulate: that religious history is the true history of mankind.
