TROELTSCH, ERNST. – Sociologist, born in Augusta on 17 February 1865, died in Berlin in 1923. He was professor of evangelical theology (1891–1915) and of philosophy.
He wrote works of various kinds, among which the following deserve mention: 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 the latter work, while acknowledging the importance of Protestantism for the formation of the modern spirit, he does not excessively overestimate the Reformation and asserts that Luther’s conception is essentially linked to the Middle Ages and to the fundamental ideas of that period, while he sees a new impetus in Luther’s anti-sacramental attitude. His work of revising the interpretation of 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 with 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 foreign. 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 totality of individual wholes which, through their becoming, constitute, also as collectivities, the fundamental historical categories, each of which is identified with a value that characterizes II. Every concept of historical development is therefore eliminated, and a historical period is evaluated according to the principle that determined it, by an essentially aprioristic criterion that connects us with the self-centrality of Dilthey’s structures. The eternal nature of religious values is reconciled, within this form of historical relativism, through a constant oscillation between moral value and the various attempts at its historical realization, whereas the other values, e.g. religious ones, lie outside collective individualities and therefore outside history.