its expression in the various states. If there were only one possible and right form of the state, then the only meaningful form of government would be a universal monarchy. However, this is not the case. The task of every great people, “the condition of its existence (was) to provide the human spirit with a new form of expression, to articulate this expression in its own new forms and to reveal it anew. This is the task God has given it.” Everything great in Germany since the French Enlightenment, had been achieved not in imitation, but in opposition to French forms and ideas.41
This position is not very different from Humboldt’s. Even certain political demands made by Ranke for his immediate time were similar. With Humboldt he saw the danger of creating a unitary German state wherein provinces and states would lose their individual character.42 Closer bonds needed to be drawn, particularly in regard to defense and commercial relations and notably the control of the press, without creating a uniformity of institutions. For Germany existed in diversity. “Who will ever be able to define in concepts or put into words what is German?”43 “It is as if they wished to depict the genus but destroy the species. The genus appears only in the species. It possesses no other way of manifesting itself.” To destroy the differences would be to kill the living reality.44 Ranke differs from Humboldt in his far less critical identification of the then existing German governments with the historical trends. Hence his portrayal of Germany as forming “one family” with its legitimate princes.45 Unlike either Haller on the right or liberals such as Stein or Humboldt, Ranke does not question the centralizing reforms of the eighteenth-century enlightened despots in Germany. He accepts unconditionally the bureaucratic structure of Prussia, and observes that the military power upon which” Prussia’s prestige rests “requires that its needs be met without any reductions or interruptions; it requires unity and strict subordination.”46 He opposes a constitution for Prussia, and argues against a Prussian Parliament representing the estates (Ständeversammlung)47 for which Stein and Humboldt had called.
Completely missing from his essays is the demand for greater local self-administration, characteristic of liberal and even conservative political programs of the time. Ranke nowhere acknowledges the rights of individuals against the state which Humboldt and Haller had defended from opposing political positions. Absent in his concept of Prussia is both the conservative view of “liberties” (Libertäten) and the liberal idea of the integrity of the individual. Although Ranke recognizes that the Carlsbad Decrees, adopted by the German states in 1819 to suppress “demagogic” agitation, following the murder of Kotzebue, were emergency measures too stringent to be maintained as permanent legislation, he nevertheless justifies press censorship. Certainly, he admits scholars must have full freedom to investigate truth, but the communication of scientific truth must be distinguished from that of political opinions. The political press, when left uncontrolled, has circulated not only “doctrines and ideas,” but has stirred up passions and represented diverse interests “so that immediately strong opposition is organized against the supreme authority, creating a conflict of parties. It is questionable, he continues, whether this situation which points at a pluralistic society is in accord with the “general welfare.” The defenders of freedom of the press “would have to prove that such a condition is at all desirable for the lives of nations; that it is also useful and beneficial to young states still in the process of formation.”48
These diverging concepts regarding the structure of the Prussian state, held by men like Haller, Ranke, or Wilhelm von Humboldt, point at a basic dilemma inherent in the historicist orientation. It had been a fundamental assumption of the Historical School that political and other values could be clearly and indisputably recognized within the historical context in which they operated. The ethics to be followed by the Prussian state was determined by Prussia’s nature and history as a state. This implied, of course, that every state or nation was an organic body with one tradition. If this tradition could be identified, then one could separate the extraneous elements from the state. But what happened if within the same social group there were several, diverging traditions? The naive assumption that the dominant political forces were the sole ones with roots in history, and hence the only ones that could claim to be legitimate, proved to be much more problematic than Ranke realized. No significant thinker held this position unconditionally. Ranke drew the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate rulers common to conservative thought. In recognizing the reality of change, he admitted that there were elements in existing states which were antiquated and lifeless.49 Moreover, one government might combine two conflicting forces. In Ranke’s opinion, this had been the case in the Charte of the French Restoration which had wedded the two irreconcilable principles of monarchy and constitutional government.50
What Ranke did not recognize was that the historian could trace the historical background of the values and institutions of a society and that he could describe the conflicting forces in a society at a given moment; however, when he identified certain forces as those which alone represented the historical direction of the nation, he was making an arbitrary choice. Even if he could exclude revolutionary attempts to remodel society as inorganic and unhistorical, he would still be confronting a pluralism of traditions and of interests. The pious distinction made by the writers in the tradition of the Historical School since Burke, between deliberate attempts at directing social change and natural, organic growth, is a doubtful one. In the face of the conflicting interests, traditions, and values which exist in any society, the statesman is forced to guide the state consciously in a definite direction. He can not merely follow the direction of history, as Ranke had hopefully assumed, but must decide whether to champion the maintenance of Prussian state power, the restoration or preservation of feudal privileges, or the extension of representative institutions.
2. As we have already observed, Ranke’s empiricism has often been misunderstood, and not only in the United States. Empiricism refers to a methodological position, as well as to a philosophical concept of reality. The empiricist insists that knowledge can be gained only through sense data and through inductions resulting from these data. Empiricism generally implies a philosophically nominalist position. For the most part, empiricists hold that phenomena alone are real or that knowledge cannot go beyond phenomena. In the philosophic sense, Ranke was no empiricist. His position was much closer to philosophic realism.51 Just as he saw a deeper reality behind historical phenomena, so he saw in phenomena merely the concrete expressions of metaphysical forces. In the methodological sense, Ranke was an empiricist only to a limited degree. Despite his insistence upon the objective, critical observation of the particular event as the beginning of all historical study, Ranke never found in such data the only means of obtaining knowledge. Rather, the intuitive understanding of these data was to open up the possibility of attaining glimpses of the reality underlying the ephemeral appearance of the world of senses. Ranke’s desires for objectivity must be therefore understood not merely as a call for the exclusion of one’s own subjective desires and prejudices from historical cognition. Ranke agreed with the empiricists that the object of the historian’s research must be to establish what had actually been (wie es eigentlich gewesen), but for him this historical reality was not exhausted by historical events. Rather, Ranke assumed that there was an objective order behind these events. “The historian is merely the organ of the general spirit which speaks through him and takes on real form (sich selber Vergegenwärtigt).’52 His impartiality (Unpartheilichkeit) consisted less in not approaching the great “struggles of might and ideas” without an opinion of his own, but “only in this, that he recognizes the positions occupied by the active forces (in history) and does justice to the relationships peculiar to each. He sees these (forces) appear in their particular selves, confront each other and struggle. In such conflicts the events and fates that dominate the world are carried out.”53 In fact, Ranke is not very far removed from Hegel.54 What distinguishes the two men sharply is Ranke’s insistence that knowledge of the objective order can be gained only through thorough study of the individual event, which must never be approached with abstract concepts, and his conviction that the plan of the universe is beyond man’s grasp, that man can only intuitively suspect (ahnden) its outlines. “For although every spirit (geistiges Wesen) stands in relationship to God, the human spirit is
