TROELTSCH, ERNST. – Sociologist, b. at Augsburg on 17 February 1865, d. at Berlin in 1923. He was professor of evangelical theology (1891-1915) and of philosophy.
He wrote works of a varied character, among which the following are to be noted: Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen (Tübingen 1912); Der Historismus und seine Probleme, of which he wrote and published only the first part; Das logische Problem der Geschichtsphilosophie (Tübingen 1922) and Il protestantesimo nella formazione del mondo moderno (Italian trans., Venice 1929). In this last work, while admitting the importance of Protestantism for the formation of the modern spirit, he does not excessively overestimate the Reformation and affirms that Luther's conception is essentially linked to the Middle Ages and to the fundamental ideas of that period, whereas he sees a new point of departure in his anti-sacramental attitude. His work of revising the Reformation was continued by a pupil, P. Wernle (Die Renaissance des Christentums im 16. Jahrh., Tübingen-Leipzig 1904, Italian trans., Florence 1944).
T., taking into account the method of W. Dilthey and M. Weber, understands history as an identification of the individual in a collective individuality. His historical time assimilates present, past and future into a single whole, confused in an incessant becoming, to which the scientific concept of time is completely alien. Starting from religion understood as an a priori of reason, T. is led to a conception of historicism in which all values are identified in a continuous becoming within the ensemble of individual totalities which, with their becoming, constitute — also as collectivities — the fundamental historical categories, each of which is identified in a value that characterizes it. Thus every concept of historical development is eliminated, and a historical period is evaluable according to the principle that determined it, with an essentially aprioristic criterion, which links us back to the self-centeredness of Dilthey's structures. The eternal of religious values is reconciled, with this form of historical relativism, in a constant oscillation between moral value and the various attempts at its historical realization, while the other values, e.g. religious ones, are outside the collective individualities and therefore outside history.