had done. “But after they have subsided, this system is reconstituted, and all efforts aim at making it perfect once more.”68 The struggle of the powers is not merely a meaningless clash of power.
World history does not present such a chaotic tumult, warring, and planless succession of states and peoples as appears at first sight. Nor does history deal only with the often dubious advancement of civilization. There are forces and indeed spiritual, life-giving, creative forces, nay life itself and there are moral energies, whose development we see. They cannot be defined or put in abstract terms, but one can behold them and observe them. One can develop a sympathy for their existence. They unfold, capture the world, appear in manifold expressions, dispute with and check and overpower one another. In their interaction and succession, in their life, in their decline or rejuvenation, which then encompasses an ever greater fullness, higher importance and wider extent, lies the secret of world history.69
This leads Ranke to the concept of the spiritual character of power, a theme recurring throughout his writings, but most systematically developed in the “Political Dialogue” in the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift. The state must not be conceived as the state in the abstract, but as the concretely existing, specific state in its historical development. The state is not merely an empirical concentration of power; it possesses a “positive spiritual content,” an idea which cannot be expressed in general, abstract terms because it relates specifically to the particular state. This “idea that inspires and dominates the whole”70 shapes the state into an organic unit, completely different from all other states. “There is an element which makes a state not a subdivision of general categories, but a living thing, an individual, a unique self.”71 This uniqueness, of course, prevents the successful transplantation of alien institutions or ideas. The state is real in its concrete particular existence; at the same time, it contains in its fundamental idea an element which is general, which transcends the transitory reality of the concrete state, but which can express itself only in the concrete state. The state, in Ranke’s terms, is thus “real-and-spiritual” (real-geistig) in its “unimagined uniqueness.”72 Thus every independent state has special tendencies of its own, determined by the idea derived from God. In the states themselves, Ranke writes, “instead of the passing conglomerations which the contractual theory of the state creates like cloud formations, I perceive spiritual substances, original creations of the human mind—I might say, thoughts of God.”73
Two important implications follow from the above: the spiritualization of power and struggle, and the subordination of the interests of the individual to the state. The activities of the state are determined by its idea, according to Ranke. This idea finds itself in conflict and ultimately involves the clash of military power. The state originated through struggle; its existence and development are inextricably connected with struggle. “The world, as we know, has been parceled out. To be somebody, you have to rise by your own efforts. You must achieve genuine independence. Your rights will not be voluntarily ceded to you. You must fight for them.” But is it not brute force alone that matters then, Karl asks Friedrich in the Political Dialogue. No, Friedrich replies. The foundations of the European community are there and remain, although this community requires “moral energy” to attain “universal significance.” As confident as Hegel in the victory of good through the struggle of arms in the course of history, Ranke has Friedrich observe: “But seriously, you will be able to name few significant wars for which it could not be proved that genuine moral energy achieved the final victory.”74 In one important sense, Ranke’s state is limited in its ambition: his recognition of a European community and of the role of all the great powers to maintain this community and contribute to the fullness and variety of the European family.
Thus, for Ranke, a state can only develop fully to the extent that it is independent of other states. Considerations of foreign policy and military strength are primary to the state. Its “supreme law” must be to subordinate its internal life to these needs.75 Opinions in regard to the internal structure of the state must fall behind considerations of foreign policy. Differences of domestic politics must be transcended in public discussion, as they were before the French Revolution, and “politics again relegated to the field of power and foreign affairs where it belongs.”76
The individual is thus clearly subordinated to the needs of the state. States as ideas of God are ends in themselves. “It would be ridiculous to explain them as so many institutions for the safeguarding of interests of individuals who may have banded together for the protection of their private property.”77 Individuals have their existence only in the state. In the good (rechten) state “purely private life” does not exist for the individual citizen. “Our activities belong primarily to our community.”78
Liberty in the sense in which liberals or democrats have traditionally understood the term therefore needs redefinition for Ranke. For Friedrich, in the Political Dialogue, man is wholly a “political creature” whose personality is formed and develops in relation to the community. The state is a “spiritual unity” whose fundamental idea “permeates every individual, so that he feels in himself some of its spiritual force, that he considers himself a member of the whole with love for it, and that the feeling of belonging to the community is stronger than the feeling of provincial, local, or individual isolation.”79 In this sense, the state resembles a family, and “what belongs together by nature does not need a social contract. Among parents and children, among brothers and members of the same family, no compact is needed.”80 Hence there is also no need for written guarantees of individual rights. In every healthy state liberty is identical with obedience. “Compulsion will be transformed on a higher level into voluntary individual initiative. Duty will become liberty.” Once this is attained, the state can achieve what must always be the supreme aim of its domestic policy: social cohesion on the basis of the voluntary cooperation of its citizens.81
In its organization the good state was understood by Ranke as a monarchy in which “the right man is placed in the right place.”82 To demand participation of the governed in the affairs of government, or to consider the governing class as a group alien to those they rule, is to misunderstand the role of the division of labor in a society. The rulers represent a “selection of the most skillful in the whole nation, who have cultivated their ability for this task.”83
Underlying Ranke’s monarchical conviction is the optimistic idea that, left to herself, “nature, which is always complete, guarantees that these (capable men) are always there. All that matters is to find them.”84 Considering “the human inclination to abuse power,” Karl asks whether the power of the government should not be limited. To Friedrich, who admits that this form of government can degenerate in a thousand ways, this seems unnecessary. The state will not only abstain from regulating those spheres of life in which “nothing is more desired than spontaneity of expression,” but it seems obvious to Friedrich that this type of government is “founded in the nature of things, required by the idea of our monarchies.”85
One cannot help sensing a very deep contradiction in Ranke’s argumentation in the Political Dialogue. On the one hand, Ranke’s purpose is to describe not the “best state,” but “merely to understand the one before our eyes.”86 On the other hand, he is constantly seeking the good state, the natural state. If all the existing states are of divine origin, should not, as Carl asks, “all states be equally perfect?” In other words, should not the North American Republic, the French July Monarchy, as the product of historical forces, be of equal value with the Prussian Monarchy. If Ranke were consistent in his demand that the historian or political thinker should find the state in history rather than apply abstract criteria to it, he should have had Friedrich reply to Carl in the affirmative. Instead, he now distinguishes between the “idea” of the state “to which we ascribe divine origin” and “its realization, its concrete form in the world.”87 Thus there are healthy and sick states. By the former type, which he compares to a body “in possession of all its powers and all its limbs,” he obviously
