present.10 If Savigny thus recognizes the elements of change within tradition, at the same time he denies the possibility of progress. For history is neither static, nor is any epoch a steppingstone in a linear process of fulfillment. Rather, every age represents an end and a value in itself.
The issues between the two schools were well illustrated in the bitter controversy which developed between Leopold Ranke and Heinrich Leo, after the latter, a young disciple of Hegel, had reviewed Ranke’s first book and its Appendix.11 It was not Ranke’s insistence upon methodological accuracy, however, which Leo challenged, but his view of history. Indeed, Leo based his criticism on grounds that Ranke would have accepted. He merely rejected the justice of these criticisms. Ranke’s style was poor, Leo complained; he had introduced sentimentality into his narration, and lacked critical judgment in the use of his sources.12 The real controversy in the critical exchanges between the two men centered around their treatment of Machiavelli, and this involved two fundamental problems of a philosophic nature: (1) was it legitimate to apply ethical standards to the assessment of historical characters and (2) should historical personalities be studied for their own sake or in terms of their role in world history? Ranke, attempting to refrain from passing moral judgment upon Machiavelli, viewed the Florentine in terms of his time. He did recognize that there was something “shocking” (Entsetzliches) in Machiavelli’s teachings. However, Ranke held that The Prince had not been intended as a “general textbook” for practical politics. Rather, Machiavelli’s teachings were directed at a specific historic situation.13 Ranke shuddered at the idea of using them as general precepts of political action, as readers had done for centuries. But as the means used for a specific situation, he urged that they be understood. As pointed out in Ranke’s Preface to the Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples, the task of history is not “to judge the past” but the more humble one, “merely to show what really happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).”14 We must “be just,” Ranke argues. “He (Machiavelli) sought Italy’s salvation. But conditions seemed so desperate to him that he was bold enough to prescribe poison … Cruel means” alone could save “an Italy corrupted to the core.”15
For Leo, on the other hand, the Florentine historian must be judged both by moral standards and as a world-historical person. In the Introduction to his translation of Machiavelli’s letters, Leo describes him as an amoral person who looked at good and evil as an outside observer and pursued the most perverted sensual pleasures without real personal engagement, “a mind torn loose from all that is eternal.”16 Machiavelli, Leo continues, knew that as one flatters French, Burgundian, or German princes with the hope of expelling the Turks from Europe, so Italian princes were flattered with the vision of cleansing the fatherland.17 Machiavelli’s patriotism was a mere device to obtain personal ends. But all of this is unimportant, Leo concludes, compared to the man’s “world historical significance” as the midwife of the new age of the modern state to whose basic principle he gave expression, without himself being conscious of his great task.18
Hence Ranke’s supposed criteria for judging the value of historical works solely in terms of the degree to which they represented “naked truth” appeared faulty to Leo. For truth, he holds, is found not in the representation of every detail, but in a context that takes growth into account. The true landscape painting is not one in which the painter has counted every blade of grass which changed before he had time to finish the painting, but one that places the living scene in front of the observer “without in the least sticking pedantically to details.” And history is like that. “Truth in history is the process of life and of the spirit. Historiographical truth consists exclusively in describing this process which is manifested in the events. This description need not betray the index finger of the philosopher although the true historian and the philosopher meet at every step.”19
However, to identify his concept of naked truth with “the silly notion of copying and making anatomical slides”20 seems to Ranke a caricature of his procedure. Ranke believes that he, no less than Leo, sought general truth, but he argues that it can be apprehended only through the particular. By absorbing himself in the particular, he attempts to represent “the general straight away and without much circumlocution.” Only in its outward appearance is the individual phenomenon particular; within it, as Leibniz had already recognized, the individual event contains something deeper, “a general truth, significance, spirit.” This general truth cannot be grasped through extensive reasoning, but only in a more direct way, in a manner closer to that of the poet or the artist. “In and by means of the event, I have tried to portray the event’s course and spirit and to define its characteristic traits.… I know how little I have succeeded. But he should not scold me,” Ranke continues in reply to Leo, “whose thinking is restricted to perpetuating the generalizing formulas of the (Hegelian) school. I shall not scold him either. We are traveling on entirely different roads.”21
But if reality consists of a multiplicity of individual natures which can not be reduced to a common denominator, history seems to lose its meaning. While Ranke finds a common denominator in God, he rejects Hegel’s pantheism which identifies God with the total process of history. His is a Christian panentheism which sees God distinct from the world, but omnipotent in it. Hence Ranke defends his observation that “each time at the decisive moment something enters which we call chance (Zufall) or fate (Geschick) but which is God’s finger”22 from Leo’s charge of sentimentality and superstition. The presence of God alone prevents the alternative between the total determinism of fate and the “materialist notion that all is contingent.” God alone offers the bond of unity for Ranke—and for that matter for the Historical School in general—in a world where values and truths are related to historic individualities, rather than to universal human norms. Inherent in this type of historicism which Ranke espouses is always the threat that, if Christian faith is shaken, history will lose its meaning and present man with the anarchy of values.
Despite Ranke’s defense, Leo is not entirely incorrect in charging that the Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples resemble a heap of unassorted details. The historicist positions avowed by Ranke in his replies to Leo have found relatively little application in this work. Ranke has done little, in fact, to seek the general within the particular. One great idea gives the work a degree of inner unity, the concept of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples as a historic unity distinct from nations that compose them and distinct from Europe or Christendom as a whole. The book attempts to treat the emergence of the modern international system of the great powers in the two crucial decades between 1494 and 1514. As a recent American critic observes: “The use of the plural in the title was indicative of the uncorrelated multitude of events and developments, mostly matters of war and foreign policy, in which the book abounded. It resembled a wild garden before the gardener brought order, clarity, and form into its profuse growth.”23 Nor did the Ottoman and Spanish Empires in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1827) or The Serbian Revolution (1829) exhibit any philosophic undertones or intent. Only when Ranke turned to the political issues of the day in the 1830’s did he further develop the philosophic view of history which he had vaguely indicated in his reply to Leo.
3.
Ranke systematically approached the theoretical problems underlying his historical practice only during the four years of his editorship of the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift, between 1832 and 1836. Otherwise, he offered little of a theoretical nature, except for random remarks strewn through his histories and correspondence. One notable exception was the brief introduction to the lectures “About the Epochs of Modern History,” which he read to King Maximilian of Bavaria in 1854.24 But in the essays of the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift, as well as his lecture notes25 and his inaugural address, “On the Affinities and Differences Between History and Politics,”26 from that period, Ranke developed the most systematic and coherent exposition of historicist principles in nineteenth-century historiography. For the most part it was in direct defense of Prussian institutions of the Restoration period and of his own predilections.
The
