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Ranke: History as Worship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

M. A. Fitzsimons
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Extract

Notoriously history has two principal meanings: the past itself and the historian's presentation of the results of his inquiry into it. When the latter meaning is examined, it is evident that, for all of his stance of common sense and matter-of-factness, the historian encounters his profession's form of the problem of knowledge. How and why does he select his sources? What is the validity or truth of his account? What is the relationship between fact and generalization? Does his avowed or unconscious motivation affect the historian's search, selection and presentation? Does his form of presentation affect his use of facts and his judgment?

Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), modern founding father of critical history and patron saint of devourers of archives, raised these questions and responded to them. His masterly histories of Reformation Germany, Prussia, England, France and the papacy were esteemed as the fruit and vindication of his method. In England and the United States, however, the method was identified with a few slogans and injunctions: history is primarily a study of politics and foreign policy; return to or search out the sources; evaluate them and prize, above all, the sources that present the testimony of participants and eyewitnesses; strive simply to tell things as they actually happened. So to reduce Ranke's position is intellectual primitivism, a primitivism that persisted because attempts to discuss the problem of historical knowledge were ignored or derided as futile.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , October 1980 , pp. 533 - 555
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1980

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References

1 For this article I have used the collected works (54 vols.) of Ranke and the more recently published collections of his letters, notebooks and early writings. I acknowledge a particular debt to the essay “Der junge Ranke” in Fuchs, Walter Peter, ed., Leopold non Ranke: Aus Werk und Nachlass (Munich, 1973), 3:13–45Google Scholar (the essay deserves translation). Ranke's teaching, his courses and his seminar are treated in Berg, Gunter, Leopold von Ranke als Akademischer Lehrer (Gottingen, 1968)Google Scholar. Laue, Theodore von's study, Leopold von Ranke: The Formative Years (Princeton, 1950)Google Scholar, remains valuable. Krieger, Leonard in Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago, 1977)Google Scholar, a remarkable and painstaking analysis of the historian's themes and outlook, a rare book indeed, shares too many of his pains with the reader. There is useful material, including an introductory essay in Iggers, Georg G. and von Moltke, Konrad eds., The Theory and Practice of History: Leopold von Ranke (Indianapolis, 1973)Google Scholar. Iggers, Georg G. has also written an important work, The German Conception of History (Middletown, 1968), in which see especially pp. 63–89Google Scholar. Gay, Peter, Style in History (New York, 1974)Google Scholar, has a sympathetic treatment on Ranke. There is a provocative chapter, “Ranke: Historical Realism as Comedy” in Metahistory (Baltimore, 1973)Google Scholar by Hayden White, who may complain that I do not sufficiently attend to his thesis. The pamphlet, “Ranke,” by H. Liebeschutz is admirably brief. An unpublished University of Chicago Ph.D. thesis, “Ranke: the Development of the Historian's Craft” (1975) by Constance Nichols Gengenbach is mainly devoted to Ranke, 's German History in the Age of the ReformationGoogle Scholar. I am also indebted to the works of Carl Hinrichs, Ludwig Dehio, Herbert Butterfield, Friedrich Meinecke, and Friedrich Engel-Janosi.

2 Ranke's writing on Luther (1817), a fragment, is in Leopold von Ranke: Aus Werk und Nachlass, vol. III, “Frühe Schriften,” Fuchs, Walther Peter and Schieder, Theodor (Munich, 1973), 329–467.Google Scholar

3 Ranke, , Sammtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1890), 53–54:47.Google Scholar

4 Ranke, , Neue Briefe, eds. Hoeft, Bernhard and Herzfeld, Hans (Hamburg, 1949), p. 37.Google Scholar

5 Aus Werk und Nachlass, 3:484–497; see also pp. 609–627Google Scholar; and Berg, , Ranke als Akademischer Lehrer, pp. 17–19.Google Scholar

6 Sammtliche Werke, 53–54:96.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., pp. 121–24.

8 Ranke, in letters quoted by Krieger, , Ranke, pp. 10–11.Google Scholar

9 Ranke, , History (sic) of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, trans. Dennis, G. R. (London, 1909), pp. 75, 227–28.Google Scholar

10 Ranke, , History of the Popes, trans. MrsFoster, and revised by Dennis, G. R. (London, 1908), 1:139.Google Scholar

11 The official is Karl von Kamptz. His opinion may be found in Schulin, Ernst, “Rankes erstes Buch,” Historische Zeitschrift, 253 (1966), 586.Google Scholar

12 Berg, , Ranke als Akademischer Lehrer, pp. 12, 55Google Scholar; and for everything past as an introduction to a subject, p. 114.

13 Laue, Theodore von, Ranke, chaps. 3–6, pp. 55–138, esp. pp. 80–81, 100Google Scholar. Ranke provoked Lord Acton, the English Liberal and Catholic historian, to lifelong internal debate over moral judgment. He wrote appreciatively of Ranke's good-naturedness, his fairness and his restraint from hasty or popular moral judgments. Nevertheless, the Ranke who would not say directly that the Inquisition was wrong troubled Acton, who thought that judging a past age in its own terms debased moral currency. Ranke rejoiced in the manuscript materials for history but Acton thought that the historians' use of private letters, after about the 1860's, would put great men to a deeper probe of character that none could survive with undamaged reputation (Butterfield, Herbert, Man on His Past [Cambridge, 1955], pp. 83–85, 92–95).Google Scholar

14 Letter to Ranke, Heinrich, 21 11 1831Google Scholar in Sammtliche Werke, 53–54:258.Google Scholar

15 Laue, Theodore von, Ranke, pp. 83, 86, 99, 100, 115Google Scholar. This is a constant theme in Ranke's writings. In The Histories of the Latin and Teutonic Nations (London, 1909)Google Scholar, he wrote that those nations were fortunate in not having been united. This is the source of their life, it also helps to explain the artistic achievements of Florence and the Italian Renaissance: “It grew mainly from the antagonism of parties … from the vigilance of human forces engaged in conflict …” (pp. 75, 321)Google Scholar. People must be true to themselves and the motive for imitation is weakness. In the European system there is a dialectic, a tension which inhibits universal dominance that might end conflict: no such dominance “can be thought of that would not necessarily be one-sided and limiting compared to the ideal and its highest demands.” German History in the Age of the Reformation cited by Constance Nichols Gengen-bach “Ranke: the Development of the Historian's Craft” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1975), p. 100. Finally, “age follows age so that what is not possible in any single age happens in the whole course of ages and the entire fulness of the human race's spiritual life, inspired by God, can be revealed in the succession of the centuries” (Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, “Rankes Meisterwerke,” [Munich, 1914], 4:3).Google Scholar

16 The History of the Popes During the Last Four Centuries, 1:26–27, 101, 448Google Scholar. The Protestant League of Schmalkald brought together provinces often separated. The impetus for it came from below and by an inner necessity. So it was that the League made for the unity of development of the German spirit. “Rankes Meisterwerke,” Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation 4:406–407.Google Scholar

17 History of the Popes, 2:512.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 2:570.

19 Ibid., 1: xii–xiii.

20 After describing Luther's troubled search for divine assurance, Ranke added: “But the eternal laws of the universe seem to require that so deep and earnest a longing of the soul after God should at length be appeased with the fulness of conviction” (Ranke, , Germany in the Age of the Reformation, trans. Austin, Sarah, 2 vols. [New York, 1966], 1:145Google Scholar). This reprint of the 1905 translation contains the first six books of Ranke's reformation history.

21 Ranke, , History of England (Oxford, 1875), 1:vi.Google Scholar

22 Ranke, , Neue Briefe, p. 327Google Scholar. Krieger commented: “Now it would seem clear, a priori, that a historian who discovers more suitable materials for a Prussian than for a French history in French national archives must be working from a definite perspective …” (Krieger, , Ranke: The Meaning of History, p. 192Google Scholar).

23 Quoted in Gooch, G. P., Studies in German History (London, 1948), pp. 251–52; pp. 210–66Google Scholar provide an admiring account of all of Ranke's writings on German history.

24 Ranke, , Neue Briefe, p. 548.Google Scholar

25 Ranke, , Weltgeschichte, 1: pt. i, viii; 1: 2, 217.Google Scholar

26 Acton, Lord, “German Schools of Historiography,” in Historical Essays and Studies (London, 1907), p. 353.Google Scholar

27 These are from Acton's manuscript notes, quoted in Butterfield, , Man on His Past, pp. 92–93.Google Scholar