TROELTSCH, Ernst.— Sociologist, born in Augsburg on 17 Feb. 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 are noteworthy: *Die Soziallehre 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 acknowledging the importance of Protestantism for the formation of the modern spirit, he does not overestimate the Reformation excessively and maintains that Luther’s conception is essentially anchored in the Middle Ages and in the fundamental ideas of that period, while he sees a new impulse in Luther’s anti-sacramental stance. His work of reassessing the Reformation was continued by a pupil, P. Wernle (*Die Renaissance des Christentums im 16. Jahrh.*, Tübingen-Ipsia 1904, Italian trans., Florence 1944).
Troeltsch, taking into account the method of W. Dilthey and M. Weber, understands history as an identification of the individual within a collective individuality. His historical time assimilates into a single whole the present, past, and future, confused in an incessant becoming to which the scientific concept of time is entirely foreign. Starting from religion understood as an “a priori of reason,” Troeltsch is led to a conception of historicism in which all values are identified in a continuous becoming within the totality of individualities, which, through their becoming, constitute even as a collectivity the fundamental historical categories, each of which is identified with a value that characterizes II. Thus, every concept of historical development is eliminated, and a historical period is evaluable according to the principle that determined it, with a criterion that is essentially a priori and which connects us back to the self-centrality of Dilthey’s structures. The eternity of religious values is reconciled, within this form of historical relativism, in a constant oscillation between moral value and the various attempts at its historical realization, while other values, for example religious ones, lie outside collective individualities and hence outside of history.