The Temporality of Realpolitik

History became, in the Romantic era, the most popular of disciplines. It struck the consciousness of the cultivated public as it never had before. It became the reference in a multiplicity of intellectual domains, from law to political thought. Whereas hitherto it had barely existed as an academic specialty, in the nineteenth century’s first decades it established itself on the curriculum of Germany’s universities, existing or new. The University of Berlin, inaugurated in 1810, shortly thereafter acquired a history faculty that was the first in Germany. Its first professor was Barthold Georg NiebuhrNiebuhr, Barthold Georg, who read on Roman history, and it presently offered lectures on historical theory and method.