at the understanding of the irrational, vital forces of history and of the unique, metaphysical reality of these forces. These theories, the doctrine of ideas, the individualizing approach, the concept of the central role of politics in history, formed the basic elements of the philosophy of history of German historiography and historical thought from Ranke to Meinecke.
[ CHAPTER IV ]
The Theoretical Foundations of German Historicism II: Leopold von Ranke
1.
Two misconceptions have marked the image of Ranke held by American historians, since history in the 1880’s became an academic discipline on purportedly Rankean principles. Ranke has been viewed as the prototype of the nontheoretical and, for many, the politically neutral historian. When his conservative prejudices have been recognized, he has nevertheless been given credit for the fact that these prejudices were not reflected in his historical narrative.1
Graduate study in history developed in American universities at a time when philosophic naturalism and positivism dominated the intellectual scene. In their endeavor to give academic respectability to historical study, a few writers who had been influenced by Comte and Buckle, e.g., Andrew D. White, John Fiske, Henry and Brooks Adams, identified scientific history with the application to the historical process of general laws similar to those of the natural sciences. A far greater number of writers were conscious of the distinctions between historical narration which deals with unique situations and discourse in the natural sciences which aims at general and typical truths. Accordingly, they sought to explain the scientific character of historical writing and its method of establishing facts objectively, free from philosophical considerations. For this new school of historians Ranke was the “father of scientific history”2 who, as H. B. Adams at Johns Hopkins University observed at the time, “determined to hold strictly to the facts of history, to preach no sermon, to point no moral, to adorn no tale, but to tell the simple historic truth.” His sole ambition was to narrate things as they really were (“wie es eigentlich gewesen”).3
Ranke was thus identified in America with a concept of historical science that eliminated not only philosophical but also theoretical considerations. He was understood to have conceived historical science primarily as a technique that applied critical methods to the evaluation of sources. If carried out conscientiously, this approach by necessity would recognize only monographic studies as scientific. As Professor Emerton commented, after he proclaimed Ranke the founder of “the doctrine of the true historical method”: “If one must choose between a school of history whose main characteristic is the spirit, and one which rests upon the greatest attainable number of recorded facts, we cannot long hesitate.… Training has taken the place of brilliancy and the whole world is today reaping the benefit.”4 Similarly, George B. Adams told the American Historical Association, in a presidential address in 1908 in which he attempted to defend “our first leader” against the onslaught of the social scientists, that theoretical questions must be left to “poets, philosophers, and theologians.”5 The image of the nonphilosophical Ranke, concerned only with facts, rejecting all theory, was taken over by the “New Historians” who had repudiated the older “scientific” tradition and stressed the interaction of social factors in human history. Frederick Turner and J. H. Robinson attacked the Ranke whom the “scientific” school had created. The image of the naturalistic Ranke survived. Only a few years ago, as prominent a historian as Walter P. Webb observed that Ranke “was contemporary with Lyell and Wallace, Darwin and Renan, who were applying the analytical and critical method with startling results in their respective fields. He turned the lecture room into a laboratory, using documents instead of ‘bushels of clams.’ “6
To an extent, Ranke’s individualizing method did prepare the way for the type of unreflective, professional history-writing which marked not only American historiography at the end of the century, but had already manifested itself in many German historical and legal studies in the second part of the nineteenth century.7 Still, despite Ranke’s concern with the critical examination of sources, perhaps no German historian of the nineteenth century (with the possible exception of Droysen) paid as much attention to the theoretical foundations of his historical practice as did Ranke. Moreover, no one succeeded as completely in integrating his concept of the historical process and his theory of knowledge with his political views. The philosophic context of Ranke’s methodological consideration received little understanding in America, particularly at a time when his basic metaphysical and religious assumptions had become questionable, even in German thought. Indeed, little was left of Ranke’s heritage for broad groups of pedantic historians on both sides of the Atlantic, except a souless positivism which Ranke had always repudiated.
2.
One can question whether the new critical treatment of sources or the introduction of the seminar method into historical instructions was Ranke’s main contribution to German historiography. Ranke was not the first historian to apply the so-called “new” critical methods to the examination of historical sources. Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824) and August Böckh (1785-1867) had applied rigorous philological criticism to the examination of classical texts. Herbert Butterfield, in a recent chapter on the Göttingen School, has traced the eighteenth-century background of modern historiographical method.8 When Ranke applied critical methods to modern historical texts, he was consciously indebted to Barthold Georg Niebuhr’s critical approach to Roman history. Perhaps more significant for historical thought, if not also for historical practice, was Ranke’s development of the basic philosophical concepts of the Historical School during his editorship of the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift (Historical-Political Review) from 1832 to 1836.
Ranke published his first book, the Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514, in 1824. In its famous technical appendix, “In Criticism of Modern Historians,” he applied the critical principles of G. B. Niebuhr to the discussion of modern sources. By that time, the line between a philosophical and an Historical School, which Savigny had defined so neatly, had already divided the University of Berlin into two hostile camps. The one centered around Hegel; the other included a broad group of jurists. Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Karl Friedrich Eichhorn, the founders of the Historical School, belonged to this second group as did Niebuhr, the philologists Bockh, Bopp, and Lachmann, and the theologian Schleiermacher. What divided the two schools was their different concept of truth and reality. Was the diversity in the phenomenal world merely a manifestation of an underlying rational principle, as Hegel maintained? If so, then truth could be attained only by reducing this diversity to rational concepts. Or was this diversity reality itself, and was any attempt to reduce it to a conceptual scheme a violation of the fullness and individuality inherent in life?
Both schools shared in the conviction that behind the phenomena of historical study there was a metaphysical reality, and that the aim of all study must be the apprehension of this reality. Niebuhr, Savigny, and Ranke agreed with Hegel that true philosophy and true history were basically one. They differed from Hegel in their conviction that this fundamental reality could be approached only through historical study, for it was much more complex, vitalistic, and elusive and possessed much greater room for spontaneity and uniqueness than Hegel’s panlogistic concept of the universe would permit. In brief, only history offered answers to the fundamental questions of philosophy. “History,” Savigny and Eichhorn observe in the Introduction to the first volume of the Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft (Journal for Historical Jurisprudence), “is by no means a mere collection of examples but is the only way to true knowledge (Erkenntnis) of our own condition (Zustand)” This, Savigny stresses, does not mean the superiority of the past over the present.9 Rather, the Historical School recognizes the value and autonomy of every age, and only stresses that the living connection, which links the present to the past, be recognized. In the area of law, this means that there is no abstract, philosophic law, no law of nature which can be codified; instead, every law is inseparably interwoven with the total historical development
