Habsburg Climatology and Historiographic Pluralism in the Anthropocene

This paper will shed light on the problem of the “incommensurability” of scales necessary to write the history of the Anthropocene by exploring the interface between the natural and human sciences in the nineteenth century. My research shows that essential elements of our modern physical model of the global atmospheric circulation arose as a means of thinking across scales, in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy—where such thinking was a political imperative. Habsburg climatology sought both “explanation” and “understanding,” in Dilthey’s senses. Its practitioners defined the goal of climatology as “a maximally life-like [lebendig] picture of the interaction of all atmospheric phenomena over a patch of the earth’s surface.” In this way, they rejected the anthropocentrism of Alexander von Humboldt’s earlier definition of climate as “all the changes in the atmosphere that perceptibly affect our organs.” And yet they insisted on Anschaulichkeit, visualizability, on satisfying the human need for understanding. The understanding they sought came from relativizing the human scale; they sought to visualize the cosmic significance of things that might appear small to humans as a species or as individuals—and the relative insignificance of merely personal concerns. In this respect, they shared the goals of today’s Big Historians. Crucially, however, they also shared some of the goals of the critics of Big History, namely the value placed on intellectual pluralism and human diversity. By studying the solutions they proposed as natural and human scientists, we can better understand our own predicament and our own options.