INtroduccion

Probably no historian in the nineteenth century has had an influence on the development of
historical scholarship equal to that of Leopold von Ranke. He has been called the "father of
historical science”. And indeed Ranke's critical use of documents became the model for historical
research and writing in the nineteenth century, first in Germany and then generally throughout
the world, as history increasingly became a professional, university-centered discipline. Ranke was
extensively and repeatedly translated into English. Five separate translations of the History of the
Popes appeared before 1900. The newly formed American Historical Association in 1885 elected
Ranke, whom George Bancroft at this occasion called “the greatest living historian", as its first
honorary member. Nevertheless since the First World War, Ranke has been largely ignored
outside of Germany. This lack of interest is related to the identification of Ranke with modes of
historical writing that appeared outdated by then.

Despite the reverence in which the new historical profession held Ranke, he was little understood
in America or in Great Britain.? Indeed the reverence rested in part on misunderstanding. He was
viewed as the prototype of the technically trained historian and as a great representative of the
positiviştic scientific tradition of the nineteenth century, a contemporary of Lyell, Wallace, Darwin,
and Renan, who *turned the lecture room into a laboratory, using documents instead of 'bushels
of clams'"? The core of Ranke's method was seen to lie in his determination "to hold strictly to the
facts of history", 4 "his formulation of the principles of internal criticism and his insistence upon
entire objectivity in the treatment of the past”, his avoidance of questions of theory, which he
rightly left to the poets, philosophers, and theologians, and his stress on technical training at the
cost of literary brilliance.? Ranke let the facts speak for themselves; and since history for him was
past politics, these facts were contained primarily in the documents of state.

But such an approach appeared increasingly irrelevant to historians who operated in a period of
rapid industrialization and democratization with a concept of science more in line with the revision
of scientific thought in the twentieth century. By the turn of the century, important historians such
as Frederick Turner, James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard in the United States, Henri Berr in
France, and Karl Lamprecht in Germany, rejected the classical academic history which they
identified with Ranke and sought to go beyond a fact-oriented political history to the analysis of
underlying social and economic forces. "History is all the remains that have come down to us", not
just documents, Turner wrote in criticism of Ranke. F. J. Teggart agreed at the time with Lamprecht
that Ranke represented an earlier stage in the development of science that was concerned with
the accumulation of facts rather than with induction and which, "by intellectual predilection no
less than in point of date, antecedes the period of Darwinian biology".

The result was a profound indifference to Ranke in the English-speaking countries which in the
nineteenth century had taken him so seriously, From 1910 until the 1960s no new edition of any of
his major works appeared in English.19 Only in Germany was Ranke still taken seriously and this
for two very different reasons. The political and social climate remained more congenial to his
historiography, as it was then understood to be, at least until the catastrophe of National Socialism
and the reexamination of historiographical traditions after 1945. The incomplete democratization
of the country favored a historiography that stressed the actions of statesmen to the neglect of
the history of the masses.

Introduction xiii Moreover, Ranke's methodology and his idealistic theoretical presuppositions
fitted well into the tradition of historical and cultural sciences dominant in Germany. German
scholars still in the early twentieth century attempted self-consciously to differentiate their
methods, their conception of society and their political values from the supposedly positivistic,
natural science-oriented approach of the social sciences in the Western countries, which they
identified with the ideology of democracy. They viewed Ranke as one of the main contributors to a
peculiarly German outlook in the cultural sciences suited to a uniquely German form of political
and social conservatism. Friedrich Meinecke, as late as 1936, considered this tradition of thought,
which he named "historism" (Historismus)," to be Germany's greatest contribution to historical
thought since the Reformation and the “highest stage of understanding of things human attained
by man".!2 German thought alone, he argued, had freed itself from the rigidity of a natural law
outlook which supposedly still dominated Western social science thought and thus attained an
understanding of the fullness and diversity of man's historical experience. The attempt by
Lamprecht at the turn of the century to repudiate Ranke had little influence. Indeed, the twentieth
century saw an increased interest in Germany in Ranke. Only after 1945 did a searching criticism of
his historiographical ideas set

While

The purpose of the present volume is in part to correct the image of Ranke as a narrow and fact-
oriented historian hostile to theory and to present elements of his writings that reflect important
aspects of nineteenth century historical thought. Far from being hostile to theory, Ranke was
guided more than most historians by conscious theoretical assumptions. Indeed, his main
contribution to German historical science was not the critical method in the treatment of historical
documents, which very much pre-dated Ranke's writings, but his formulation and translation into
practice of a conception of history that affected the main currents

Introduction XV

Life

xiv Introduction

of historical writing in Germany and to a lesser extent elsewhere well into the twentieth century.
Ranke's emphasis on the application of the critical method must be understood within the
framework of his idealistic notions of history. These notions, largely ignored in the United States
where the early generation of professional historians created an image of an essentially positivistic
Ranke, were very influential in Germany into the twentieth century. Indeed Ranke's oft quoted
dictum, "blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen" has generally been misunderstood in the English-
speaking world as asking the historian to be satisfied with a purely factual recreation of the past.
Ranke's writings make it clear that he did not mean this. In fact the word "eigentlich" which is the
key to the phrase just quoted, has been poorly translated into English as ‘really' or 'actually';
'essentially' would be a better rendition in this context. This gives the phrase an entirely different
meaning, and one much more in keeping with Ranke's philosophical ideas. It is not factuality, but
the emphasis on the essential that makes an account historical.

Ranke belonged to the tradition of nineteenth century German thinkers who stressed that the
historical and cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) dealing with values, intentions and
volitions were fundamentally different from the natural sciences and required unique methods
aiming at concrete understanding (Verstehen) of historical phenomena rather than abstract causal
explanations. This tradition viewed history as the realm of spirit and ideas, not in the sense of
Hegel's absolute ideas but as the concrete intentions and thoughts of concrete individuals and
institutions existing in time. Every abstraction detracted from the living reality of history. And
although the historian could not dispense with generalizations, they must be generalizations
rooted in the historical subject matter. Again the originality of Ranke's thought should not be
overstressed. Ranke did not originate the Verstehen' approach, which was reflected in broad
currents of German Idealistic thought in theology, philology, philosophy and jurisprudence and
already foreshadowed in the eighteenth century in the writings of Giambattista Vicol4 and Johann
Gottfried Herder, and found its classical formulation later in the nineteenth and early in the
twentieth century in the writings of the Neo-Kantian philosophers such as Wilhelm Dilthey. 15

Ranke cannot be understood apart from the intellectual and political climate of his time. Born in
1795, Leopold Ranke -- the “von” was added in 1863 when he was raised to the nobility – reflects
currents of early nineteenth century thought, the romantic interest in the past, the organic
conception of society, the distrust of the French Enlightenment and of the political ideology of the
Revolution, but he also retains an element of eighteenth century cosmopolitanism, which
preserves him from the one-sided nationalism of many of his contemporaries. We may perhaps
distinguish four major influences on Ranke's intellectual formation: 1) the Lutheran religious
background in which he grew up; 2) the classical humanistic education he received as a youth; 3)
the German Idealistic philosophy, which dominated the intellectual atmosphere; and 4) the politics
of the post-1815 Restoration,

Ranke was born in Thuringia, in the small town of Wiehe, at the time a part of the Electorate of
Saxony. He was thus not a Prussian by birth. Wiehe and the region in which it lay, the “Goldene
Aue (Golden Meadow)", were annexed by Prussia only in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna, Ranke
did not possess the deep emotional commitment to Prussia of later German historians. He was
relatively little affected by the enthusiasm of the Prussian Wars of Liberation. The decisive political
experience for him was not the French Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars but the post-1815
Restoration. His childhood in Saxony undoubtedly contributed to his conception of a federal
Germany within a European framework of powers. Ranke maintained a deep sympathy for Austria
and its role in a European order such as that attempted in 1815 in the Holy Alliance.

Since the early seventeenth century all the Rankes had been Lutheran ministers in Thuringia
except for Ranke's father, a lawyer, who regretted not having followed the profession of his
ancestors. The Lutheran religiosity of the home was reinforced in the two Latin schools Ranke
attended at nearby Donndorf and at the famous school of Schulpforta, maintained by the Saxon
princes, which Lessing and Klopstock had attended. In 1814 Ranke went to the University of Leipzig
with the intention of studying theology and philology. His first major scholarly work was an
uncompleted study of Luther, known as the "Luther-Fragment". !?

xvi Introduction What dissuaded him from completing his theological studies was the rationalistic
atmosphere which still permeated the theological faculties, a rationalism which he described later
as “unsatisfactory, shallow and flat" in its attempt to "combine opposing principles, the
unconditionally valid which has been proclaimed and recognized as the word of God and the
reasoning of the moment". "I believed unconditionally" he wrote. ' Convinced that "God dwells,
lives, and is recognizable in all history!'' he nevertheless was free of a narrow fundamentalism that
saw the intervention of God in natural processes. His religious belief has been repeatedly
described as panentheism which, in contrast to pantheism, recognized the separateness of all
human existence from God, yet sees the reflection of God in all existence. The historian's task
resembled that of the priest; he was to decipher the "holy hieroglyph” contained in history,20

Studies of Ranke have generally stressed his Lutheran religiosity.21 It is questionable, however,
whether his panentheism was really in harmony with Lutheran teaching, For Luther, as for Saint
Paul, the "world into which God sent his Word was thoroughly debased and alienated". There was
basically no room for evil in Ranke's world. History manifested the unfolding of moral energies, of
ideas embodied in concrete individualities and institutions. This was an idea derived from German
Idealistic thought, from Fichte, Schelling, and Goethe, whom Ranke read extensively in this period
and which had little in common with the pessimism of Luther or Saint Paul.22

Ranke had almost no formal training as a historian. At Donndorf and Schulpforta, he received a
classical humanistic education. At Leipzig he studied classical philology. He attended a mandatory
course in history at Leipzig but disdained the historical works he encountered, which he
considered a mass of undigested notes, indeed of facts not understood” » Nevertheless he
received at Leipzig the foundations of his training as a historian. The one German historical work
that made a positive impression on him was Niebuhr's Roman History.

Introduction xvii other historian who deeply influenced him was Thucydides on whom he wrote his
dissertation. More important, he was introduced by his teacher Gottfried Hermann to the critical
methods of classical philology, which as we shall see were to play an important role in his
development of a critical method for history.24

Ranke's active interest in modern history dated from his days at the Gymnasium in Frankfurt on
the Oder, a Prussian city east of Berlin, at which he taught classics and history. There he devoted
himself first to ancient and medieval history, reading the ancient historians extensively in
preparation for his teaching. Using the rich collection of medieval and early modern sources
contained in the Gymnasium library, he began a critical study of these documents. He was struck
by the contradictions and inconsistencies in the works of Francesco Guicciardini and Paolo Giovio.
The result was a critical study of the histories of the period,25 published as an appendix to Ranke's
own synthesis of the period, Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples (1494 to 1514)
(Geschichten der römischen und germanischen Völker) in 1824. Guicciardini, whose Historia
d'Italia had served as the basis of most succeeding modern histories, according to Ranke had relied
heavily on secondary sources and embellished and fabricated facts. Ranke promised in the preface
to use “memoirs, diaries, letters, reports from embassies and original narratives of eye witnesses;
other writings ... only when they seemed either to have been immediately derived from the
former, or to equal them through some kind of original information", The "strict presentation of
the facts, no matter how conditional and unattractive they might be," he asserted, “is undoubtedly
the supreme law”. But the presentation of the isolated event, he continued, was not the purpose
of the historical work; it rather sought "the development of unity and the progress of events”. The
theme of the book was the emergence of the modern state system and the balance of power. It
was to pave the way for a more comprehensive historical view of the great schism brought about
by the Reformation. Ranke proceeded from the assumptions of the interrelatedness of the “Latin
and Germanic Peoples” of Europe, to "show to what extent these nations have developed in unity
and kindred movement”. In practice, Ranke was unable to maintain the broad sweep of narrative.
The story is interrupted repeatedly by a mass of details on diplomatic negotiations, political
decisions and military

xviii Introduction events, as his critic Heinrich Leo maintained.24 Ranke himself admitted that the
book contained only "histories, not history" (p.136). Later studies agreed. Theodore Von Laue, in
the first significant study of Ranke in English, was justified when he observed, "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".27

The book nevertheless brought Ranke a call to the University of Berlin. The University of Berlin had
been founded in 1809 largely upon the initiative of Wilhelm von Humboldt, then head of the
section for education in the Prussian ministry of the interior, as a new type of institution of higher
learning in which teaching would be closely related to research. This became the model of the
nineteenth century German university. In 1825 Berlin was the most challenging of the German
universities. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel held the chair of philosophy, Friedrich Daniel
Schleiermacher taught theology, Friedrich Karl von Savigny and Karl Friedrich Eichhorn law. Two
major orientations in the cultural sciences, represented by Hegelianism and the Historical School,
were present there. Both believed that all cultural manifestations must be understood in terms of
their historical genesis, But while Hegel saw history as a unitary, all-embracing process leading
toward greater rationality, Savigny and Eichhorn, the founders of the Historical School of
Jurisprudence, stressed the variety of expressions within history. In the late eighteenth century
Herder had already argued that mankind fulfills itself not in a unilinear progressive development
but in the flowering of unique national cultures, each fundamentally different and each developing
its own genius in terms of its inherent principles of growth. Each culture was the expression of the
will of God in a unique historical form. This position enjoins the study of all civilizations in terms of
their own standards of value and refuses to apply any universally valid human norms in the
assessment of a historical situation. In this spirit, for example, Savigny and Eichhorn opposed the
codification of the law, Law, they maintained, grows organically with a culture; legal norms
manifest themselves only in concrete historical contexts in the evolution of the spirit of a people.
The task of the jurist is to understand the law as it developed historically and not to reduce it to
abstract rational formulations. Ranke's own position was akin to that of the Historical School.

The call to Berlin gave him an opportunity to play a central role in the training of historians, Most
of the great German historians of the nineteenth century, among them Heinrich von Sybel,
Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, Georg Waitz and the

Introduction xix Swiss Jacob Burckhardt, passed through Ranke's seminar in which he applied the
critical method to historical writing. These students in turn trained a generation of scholars who
dominated German university chairs of history well into the twentieth century. Ranke thus
became in fact the father of modern historical science in Germany. Critical historical research,
however, preceded him. Already in De re diplomatica (1681), the French historian Jean Mabillon
had developed rules and criteria for judging sources and determining their authenticity. There had
developed in the eighteenth century at the University of Göttingen a school of historians, including
Johann Christoph Gatterer, August Ludwig Schlözer and Arnold Hermann Heeren, who combined
the critical method of erudite scholars like Mabillon with the concern of the philosophic historians
of the eighteenth century, such as Voltaire and Gibbon, who sought to write universal history
without a strict critical evaluation of their sources. Niebuhr and Ranke refined the concern with
critical method; Ranke in the process narrowed the universality of the outlook of the Göttingen
historians. What Ranke brought to history was less a new method - this had been developed to a
great extent by the Göttingen school29 -- than a greater emphasis on the professional and
technical character of history and a conception of history that we shall discuss later in this
Introduction. His contemporaries, Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, Karl von Rotteck and Georg
Gottfried Gervinus appeared to him as moralists and political publicists rather than as technical
historians who wrote history on the basis of a critical examination of the sources.

The Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples had been based on a critical examination of
published works. In Berlin Ranke discovered copies of Venetian diplomatic documents from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which he utilized in his second book, Princes and Peoples of
Southern Europe. The Ottomans and the Spanish Monarchy. Published in 1827, the book was a
broad survey of three centuries of history in which Ranke devoted considerably more space to the
discussion of administration, trade and finance than in his earlier work. In the same year Ranke set
out on a four-year journey to peruse source materials in the Austrian and Italian archives, 30
particularly the Venetian Relazioni (the reports of Venetian ambassadors sent from the various
courts of Europe over

Introduction xix Swiss Jacob Burckhardt, passed through Ranke's seminar in which he applied the
critical method to historical writing. These students in turn trained a generation of scholars who
dominated German university chairs of history well into the twentieth century. Ranke thus
became in fact the father of modern historical science in Germany. Critical historical research,
however, preceded him. Already in De re diplomatica (1681), the French historian Jean Mabillon
had developed rules and criteria for judging sources and determining their authenticity. There had
developed in the eighteenth century at the University of Göttingen a school of historians, including
Johann Christoph Gatterer, August Ludwig Schlözer and Arnold Hermann Heeren, who combined
the critical method of erudite scholars like Mabillon with the concern of the philosophic historians
of the eighteenth century, such as Voltaire and Gibbon, who sought to write universal history
without a strict critical evaluation of their sources. Niebuhr and Ranke refined the concern with
critical method; Ranke in the process narrowed the universality of the outlook of the Göttingen
historians. What Ranke brought to history was less a new method - this had been developed to a
great extent by the Göttingen school29 -- than a greater emphasis on the professional and
technical character of history and a conception of history that we shall discuss later in this
Introduction. His contemporaries, Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, Karl von Rotteck and Georg
Gottfried Gervinus appeared to him as moralists and political publicists rather than as technical
historians who wrote history on the basis of a critical examination of the sources.

The Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples had been based on a critical examination of
published works. In Berlin Ranke discovered copies of Venetian diplomatic documents from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which he utilized in his second book, Princes and Peoples of
Southern Europe. The Ottomans and the Spanish Monarchy. Published in 1827, the book was a
broad survey of three centuries of history in which Ranke devoted considerably more space to the
discussion of administration, trade and finance than in his earlier work. In the same year Ranke set
out on a four-year journey to peruse source materials in the Austrian and Italian archives, 30
particularly the Venetian Relazioni (the reports of Venetian ambassadors sent from the various
courts of Europe over

XX Introduction three centuries), which threw light not only on Venetian diplomatic relations but
also on the internal political history of the various European states. From the fall of 1827 to the fall
of 1828, he worked in Vienna where he developed a friendship with Friedrich Gentz, the Catholic
conservative political theorist, publicist and adviser to Prince Metternich, who arranged for him to
receive permission to use the Venetian papers in the Vienna archives. A by-product of his stay in
Vienna was the History of Servia and the Servian Revolution, 32 written in part with material made
available to him by Serbian patriots with whom he came in close contact. In October 1828 he
arrived in Italy where he became the first historian to work thoroughly through the Relazioni in
Venice; he also used archives in Rome and Florence. The Vatican archives remained closed to him,
but he was able to use important private archives in Rome. The Viennese and Italian researches
provided the basis for his History of the Popes, which appeared between 1834 and 1836.

Upon his return to Berlin in 1831, Ranke became for the first and only time closely involved in
politics. This involvement would be of little interest to us except that it resulted in a crystallization
of Ranke's political views and his conception of society and history that was reflected in his
historical writings. In his student days, Ranke had been aloof from the Burschenschaften, the
nationalistic student fraternity. In his autobiography he describes his interest but lack of
involvement with which he followed the visit of Turnvater Karl August Jahn, the founder of the
ultra-nationalistic sports association, to Frankfurt on the Oder, After Ranke's arrival in Berlin in
1825, the highly conservative First Director of the Section for Public Instruction, Heinrich von
Kamptz, was his sponsor. However, his closest friends were the liberal Varnhagen yon Ense and his
brilliant wife Rahel, whose salon was a gathering place for liberal intellectuals. He was on good
terms with the liberal Alexander von Humboldt, with Friedrich Carl von Savigny, and with Friedrich
Schleiermacher. The intermediate political position of the latter two resembled that occupied by
Ranke in the 1830s. His sympathies for the existing European order had made possible congenial
conversations during his weekly evening visits with Friedrich Gentz in Vienna during his stay there
in 1827 and 1828.

The 1830 Revolution seems to have deeply disturbed him. He believed the European order to be
threatened by a renewal of revolutionary activity. On his return to Berlin in 1831 he agreed to edit
a political journal, the Historisch Politische Zeitschrift, sponsored by the Prussian government, an
undertaking that was to alienate him from his liberal friends, the Varnhagen von Enses and
Alexander von Humboldt. He did not consider his position with the journal to be a reactionary one.
In his autobiography, he wrote: Introduction xxi "The direction I decided to follow was neither
revolutionary nor reactionary. I was so bold as to undertake to defend a third direction midway
between the two points of view that confronted each other in every public and private discussion.
This new orientation, which adhered to a status quo which rests on the past, aimed at opening up
a future in which one would be able to do justice to new ideas, as long as they contained truth."33

In effect the journal was founded to counter the Berliner Politisches Wochenblatt, established in
late 1831 by the highly conservative Friedrich von Raumer and Ranke's acquaintances Joseph von
Radowitz and the brothers Ernst Ludwig and Leopold von Gerlach to propagate the feudal,
corporative doctrines of the late Karl Ludwig von Haller. To be sure, like Hegel, Ranke was not an
admirer of the old regime, which provided social and political functions to a privileged Junker
aristocracy, but instead he supported the bureaucratic, centralized Prussian monarchy as
reformed in the period after 1806. The Prussian state, for Ranke as for Hegel, stood for progress,
but progress based organically on the foundations of the past.

In practice, Ranke's articles contained much more criticism of the liberals than of the Right. He
argued against the transferability of foreign political ideas and institutions, specifically those of the
French Revolution, to Germany. The French Revolution, he warned, had shown the ill-effects of
grafting foreign, British, and especially North American political ideas onto traditional institutions.
The danger of the French Revolution rested less in the military extension of France than in the
threat presented by its ideas. Every state, Ranke held, is unique and must develop according to its
own inner principles, Radical change marks a break with organic development. Ranke opposed a
constitution for Prussia and argued against a Prussian parliament representing the estates
(Ständeversammlung), which moderate liberals like the Baron vom Stein and Wilhelm von
Humboldt had advocated. Ranke nowhere acknowledged the rights of the individual against the
state, which Humboldt and Haller had defended from opposing political positions, Ranke's position
was essentially conservative; he defended neither the reactionary conception of traditional
"liberties” (Libertäten) nor the liberal one of the rights of the individual. The journal turned out to
be a failure and was suspended in 1836. Nevertheless, it was to contain several of Ranke's most
important theoretical statements, including the two essays "The Great Powers" and "A Dialogue
on Politics", which we have reprinted in this collection.

The remainder of Ranke's life was uneventful, closely related to his work. In late 1833 he had been
elevated to a full professorship (Ordinariat) at the University of Berlin where he remained for the
rest of his life, missing only four semesters in four decades on study tours to archives, mostly to
France and Great Britain. Ranke only once seriously considered an offer to move from Berlin, when
in 1853 his admirer and former student King Maximilian II of Bavaria urged him to accept a call to
the University of Munich.

xxii Introduction

In Berlin Ranke led a relatively solitary life, He followed a rigid daily schedule of work, interrupted
by a walk in the Tiergarten, his favorite spot for repose and reflection. In his bachelor days in the
1830s and early 1840s, he was a welcome guest in Berlin's cultured social circles, although no
longer in the circle of liberal intellectuals he had frequented before his trip to Italy. Ranke was on
the whole isolated from his colleagues at the university. He was on good terms with Savigny and
Eichhorn and had formed a close friendship with the philosopher Heinrich Ritter. Ritter, however,
left Berlin in 1833. Among historians a lifelong correspondence connected him with Gustav Adolf
Harald Stenzel, who had been a fellow student in Leipzig. It was Stenzel who at Leipzig had first
introduced Ranke to the critical study of medieval documents. The person closest to him,
however, was his younger brother Heinrich, who had joined him at the Gymnasium in Frankfurt on
the Oder and with whom more than with his other brothers he was able to exchange ideas. In
later years he developed a certain affinity with his brother Ferdinand. Shortly before his 49th
birthday, he married Clarissa Graves, 12 years his junior, the daughter of a Protestant barrister
from Ireland. The marriage was hardly a romantic one. Nevertheless, it seems to have been a good
marriage and judging by the letters Ranke has left, a warm, human although probably not
intellectually stimulating relationship.34

The year 1871 turned out to be a particularly tragic point in Ranke's life with the death of his wife.
Ranke retired from his lectures under not entirely happy circumstances; and his eyesight rapidly
faded. The remaining 15 years of Ranke's life were nevertheless years of intense activity. With the
help of readers and secretaries he continued his research and writing and in the final years of his
life turned to his lifelong hope of writing a universal history,

Ranke's existence consisted mostly of research, writing and teaching. Various students, both
friendly and hostile, have left accounts of his lectures, They generally agree that he was an
ineffective lecturer. “That was no lecture, but a mumbled, whispered, groaned monologue,
delivered with arbitrary interruptions, of which we understood only individual words. Only the
mimicry of the old gentleman was interesting," wrote an annoyed auditor about his visit to a
Ranke lecture in 1857.35 Even his disciple and admirer Wilhelm von Giesebrecht paints a not very
dissimilar picture of a lecture course in 1837. Actually Ranke appears to have put great care into
the preparation of his lectures. Extensive lecture notes still exist.26 These notes he would
regularly reviše. He spoke freely, however, following notes loosely rather than reading a prepared
manuscript. Ranke conscientiously gave his lectures and declined to cancel them even to attend
his father's funeral. The topics reflected his broad historical interests.97 He repeatedly lectured on
universal history. He gave sequences of lecture courses not only on German history since the
Middle Ages but also on general European history. Frequently he lectured about the most recent
past, occasionally on the Romans, at times (after his research led him in that direction) on English
history. During most of his career, attendance at his lectures was not good considering his renown
as a historian, Only three students enrolled for his lectures on universal history in the summer of
1833, two years after he had returned from Italy. For a short time, his popularity increased. In the
winter semester 1841-42, 153 auditors, almost 35 per cent of the students in the Philosophical
Faculty, attended his lectures. After 1848, interest in his lectures rapidly declined. He seemed out
of step with the intellectual and political climate among the students. By 1860 he had only 20
auditors left. In the summer semester of 1871 Ranke canceled his course, the last one he intended
to hold and which he had once more prepared with especial care for lack of enrollment after the
first meeting. Ironically, soon after his retirement the ultra nationalistic and demagogic historian,
Heinrich von Treitschke, was called to the University of Berlin. The faculty justified his
appointment with the explanation that it sought "to do justice also to those circles of students
who seek instruction in history for other purposes than to dedicate themselves exclusively to the
study of history and historical research”,39

Ranke's effective influence on the development of the historical profession was through his
seminars. 40 During his first semester at the University of Berlin he had already announced that he
would hold exercises (Ubungen) in his home in order to become well acquainted with and guide
those students who devoted themselves seriously to history. After his return from Italy, they
became a regular institution. Two types of questions were to be raised in these sessions: those
relating to theory and philosophy of history and those dealing with the critical treatment of
sources. The latter predominated, but Ranke never neglected to raise basic theoretical questions
of historical science. The seminar was a working community. The number of participants was
restricted. Generally five to 10 students participated, sometimes as few as three, only once as
many as 18. Students would critically discuss each other's papers or they would together discuss
an author or a group of authors. It was considered a special honor when Ranke himself assumed
the criticism of a paper. The main emphasis was on critical method. He permitted the students
considerable xxiv Introduction freedom in the selection of topics and does not seem to have made
their choice dependent on his own research interests. Most of the papers chose medieval themes.
Beginning in 1837, his students began to publish the Annals of the German Empire under the
House of Sarony. "These little volumes," George P. Gooch judged, "inaugurated the critical study of
the Middle Ages."41 Ranke remained in close touch with the participants of the seminars over the
years. It was essentially in the seminars that the "Rankean School" of historiography was born.

Ranke permitted relatively few public activities to interfere with his rigid schedule of scholarship
and writing. He was largely inactive in university affairs and frequently missed meetings of the
faculty. He was never elected Rektor of the university, as might have been expected in terms of his
eminence and the small number of full professors at the university eligible for the position. As a
matter of fact several of his colleagues occupied this position more than once. Only once did he
serve as dean of the faculty. Only purely routine business was transacted during his term of office.
In 1841 the new King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who had been an admirer of Ranke for many
years and was personally acquainted with him since he visited Ranke in Venice in 1828, appointed
him official historiographer of the Prussian state. This, however, was a scholarly rather than a
public position, which resulted in the multi-volume history of Prussia. In the years after 1848
Friedrich Wilhelm called on Ranke as an adviser and in 1854 appointed him to the newly
reconstituted Council of State. Ranke's political influence was negligible, although he saw Friedrich
Wilhelm regularly in the 1850s. Most of the meetings, however, seem to have been devoted to
historical interests. Ranke read to the king from his manuscript on the history of France. It is not
unlikely, of course, that the king also discussed political matters with him.
His other royal admirer, Maximilian II of Bavaria, unsuccessful in drawing Ranke to Munich
permanently, did succeed in persuading him to accept the chairmanship of the newly formed
Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Despite its Bavarian title and the
financial support it received from the Bavarian state, the Commission was a central institution for
the scholarly study of German history throughout the German-speaking world. Heinrich von Sybel,
Ranke's former student, was its secretary. Ranke virtually chose the first members, and the
Commission brought together the leading German-speaking historians. It published major series of
sources and monographs such as the Annals of the Medieval Empire and the Acts of the Imperial
Diet as well as the comprehensive German biographical dictionary, the Allgemeine Deutsche
Biographie. In 1859, with the support of the Commission, Sybel began to publish the Historische
Zeitschrift, which has been the central journal of the German historical profession ever since.
Ranke, however, did not play a significant role in the enterprise.

After the suspension of the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift in 1836, he ceased

Introduction XXV

to take a public political stand. He remained deeply afraid of social revolution. The “Political
Memoranda” he wrote for King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia on the revolutionary events
between 1848 and 1851 show how inflexible his opinions had remained in the face of political
changes. The revolutions in Vienna and Berlin, he believed, were directed and partly financed from
France. He opposed the Prussian electoral law of 1848 that granted universal male suffrage and
which he feared would pave the way for a republic and the rule by artisans and journeymen who
had no notion about the use of political power. 42 He advised Friedrich Wilhelm to dissolve the
assembly, restrict the suffrage, and issue a constitution that would leave ultimate political control
in royal hands. The Prussian army alone, he believed, had prevented the revolution from
succeeding. King and army were for him the only stable forces in Germany. Control of the army
needed to be kept out of the hands of the parliament. Ranke remained lukewarm about the
nationalistic movement, which he identified with the movement for democratization. He had
preferred to see the preservation of a German Confederation based on an Austrian Prussian
dualism that would preserve the diversity of the German states. But after the failure of the
attempt at German unification in 1848–1849 and the Prussian humiliation at Olmütz, he began to
favor a policy that would establish Prussian dominance in a North German union still affiliated with
a German Confederation, leaving Austria to maintain a similar position in the south, Ranke
followed with misgivings the course of Bismarck's policy that led to the Austro-Prussian war of
1866. He later defended the war as having been necessary to lay the foundations of a strong
German state that would meet the threat of France to Germany. He welcomed the campaign
against Napoleon III, considered the defeat of France a victory of the conservative over the
revolutionary principle, but greeted with mixed feelings the creation of the German Empire in
1871. He was alarmed by the concessions Bismarck made to the liberals in the years between 1871
and 1878, the introduction of universal male suffrage in the elections to the Reichstag that
enabled the Social Democrats to appear on the political scene, and the legislation of the
Kulturkampf, which threatened the religious basis upon which a stable society rested. Bismarck's
break with the liberals in 1878 reassured him. Despite his fears of social revolution, Ranke did not
share the pessimism of Burckhardt regarding the future of European civilization. The course of the
nineteenth century had shown that conservative, restorative forces were able to maintain
themselves against the forces of revolution. European humanity," he remarked confidently in
1881, "still rests on its old foundations."43

Theory Ranke was foremost a practicing historian, not a theorist, Nevertheless he was very
conscious of the theoretical assumptions upon which his historical work rested. He sought to give
these assumptions written expression at various times, in his great essays in the Historisch-
Politische Zeitschrift of the 1830s, in the theoretical discussions (some of which survive in his
unpublished lecture notes) with which he introduced many of his general lecture courses, and in
random remarks scattered through his histories, letters and diaries. There is a remarkable
continuity in his comments on the nature of history, from the fragment of his Luther manuscript,
written at the age of 21 in the winter of 1816-1817, to his lectures in the 1860s.

Ranke belonged to a broad current of German Idealistic philosophy that permeated and
dominated the social and cultural sciences in Germany throughout the nineteenth and well into
the first half of the twentieth century. He was nevertheless the first important historian to explore
the significance of this orientation for historical practice. This tradition, as we remarked earlier,
later called 'historicism' or better ‘historism' (Historismus) played an important role in later
historical and philosophical thought in Germany, best represented by Wilhelm Windelband and
Wilhelm Dilthey.4 At the core of the historicist orientation was the insistence that man can be
understood only in terms of his history, that the sciences dealing with man's cultural creativity are
historical sciences, and that the methods of the historical sciences are fundamentally different
from those of the natural sciences or of traditional philosophy. The subject matter of history is
living individualities, persons, institutions, cultures. But these individualities cannot be understood
in terms of causal explanation. A sharp distinction exists between the inorganic, the organic, and
the human historical world. The former two can be explained in terms of general laws, but there is
an element of meaning, uniqueness, originality in every individual which defies rational deduction.
The approach to the understanding of human facts must thus be fundamentally different from
that of philosophy or natural science seeking abstractions and generalizations. "First of all,
philosophy always reminds us of the claim of the supreme idea, History, on the other hand,
reminds us of the conditions of existence," Ranke writes. Philosophy, as also natural science, is
always concerned with the general, with seeing the particular and considers "every particular only
as a part of the whole" as part of a total process (p.37); history is always concerned with the
particular, the individual. Its task is not the explanation of general relationships, but the
understanding of the uniqueness of a situation, an individuality, an institution, a culture. This leads
to an idealistic conception of history. For the subject matter of history is ultimately the human
spirit, the unique element of personality that gives individuals in history their character.

For Ranke this emphasis on the understanding of the uniqueness of historical characters and
situation leads to a rejection of philosophic speculation in the manner of Hegel or Schelling. To
understand the unique individualities that appear in history demands a reconstruction of the past
"wie es eigentlich gewesen", which begins with a strict dedication to the relevant facts; therefore
the insistence on strict critical method. But the factual establishment of events does not yet
constitute history. The historian is not a passive observer who merely records the events of the
past but, rather like the poet, he actively recreates a historical subject matter. Unlike the poet,
however, he is required to rely on empirical observation and is bound by the reality of his subject
matter. To grasp the reality that confronts him, he must penetrate the external events that
present themselves to his empirical observation and comprehend the "causal nexus", the greater
Zusammenhang within history,

This demand on the historian presupposes certain theoretical assumptions. It assumes that every
individual, institution or culture constitutes a meaningful unity, a geistige Einheit, which is capable
of comprehension. To be sure, the spiritual content of a historical individuality is not immediately
evident; nevertheless it permeates all expressions of the individual, the culture, or the nation.
While the external facts the historian observes do not in themselves reveal this basic character,
they reflect this character, and it is only through immersion in the external manifestations of the
individuality that the historian can approach its basic spiritual content. Every cultural object or
event, unlike a natural object or event, expresses an act of human thought or spirit. If we are
dealing with a people, "we are not interested only in the individual moments of its living
expressions. Rather from the totality of its development, its deeds, its institutions, and its
literature, the idea speaks to us so that we simply cannot deny our attention” (p.15).

It is at this point that the scientific critical method merges with imaginative literature. Ranke
stressed that "history is distinguished from all other sciences in that it is also an art. ... Other
sciences are satisfied with simply recording what has been found; history requires the ability to
recreate”. In this sense, he argues, it is related to poetry (p.8). But there is also a fundamental
distinction for Ranke between history and literature. Hayden White's reduction of Ranke's
histories to imaginative literature does not do justice for Ranke for whom history in the last
analysis is not reduced to imagination but takes the real into consideration. Ranke was fascinated
as a youth by Walter Scott's historical novels, yet as Gino Benzoni"5 observes, upon reading Scott,
he concluded that "historical truth is infinitely richer, more interesting, and more beautiful than
are imagined events, however suggestive they might appear".

It would seem that for Ranke the task of the historian is fundamentally different from that of the
philosopher insofar as the latter seeks eternal truths while the historian is concerned with
ephemeral phenomena, people who die and institutions that sooner or later dissolve, History is
flux. This position would deny that history has any meaning in a transcendent sense. Whatever
meaning it has is limited to the subjective consciousness of mortal historians, the products of
always changing historical situations. This, however, Ranke and the whole German Idealistic
tradition in the historical and cultural sciences deny. Instead they insist that history is an objective
process that can be studied scientifically and that, in fact, history is the guide, indeed the only
guide, to philosophic truth so that the aims of mature philosophy and of history are not entirely
dissimilar, even if their methods are fundamentally different. The historian, like the philosopher,
seeks ideas of eternal validity. Already in the Luther fragments of 1816-1817, Ranke wrote:
"Since history is an empirical science, it only too often happens to her that she splits herself into
specialized areas and is far removed from doing what she is generally praised for, namely
educating men. Only he who weds the empirical element with the idea can truly attract the
spirit."46

The kind of ideas the historian seeks are, however, basically different from those of the
philosopher. The idea of the philosopher, for example that of Hegel, is a lifeless abstraction; the
idea the historian searches for is concrete, alive and temporal. "While the philosopher, viewing
history from his vantage point, seeks infinity merely in progression, development, and totality,
history recognizes something in every existence" (p.11).

This "recognition“, which claims to be non-speculative, nevertheless involves a philosophic and

religious assumption as speculative in nature as those upon which the Hegelian philosophy rests.
History, Ranke continues, recognizes, "in every being, something eternal, coming from God; and
this is its vital principle". This recognition is beyond proof. "It is not necessary for us to prove at
length that the eternal dwells in the individual. This is the religious foundation on which our efforts
rest. We believe that there is nothing without God, and nothing lives except through God” (p.11).

Ranke's conception of history, thus involves not merely a method but a firm religious faith and a
highly speculative philosophy shared by much of the German Idealistic tradition in the
Geisteswissenschaften in the nineteenth century. This philosophy, as it applies to historical study,
has probably received its most concise definition in Wilhelm von Humboldt's essay "On the
Historian's Task"47 of which

Ranke was aware. The basic ideas of Humboldt are all contained in less systematic form in Ranke's
writings. Central to Humboldt's and Ranke's conception of history is their doctrine of ideas”
(Ideenlehre). Humboldt writes:"An event is only partially visible in the world of the senses; the rest
has to be added by intuition, inference, and guesswork. ... The truth of any event is predicated on
the addition of that invisible part of every fact, and it is this part, therefore, which the historian
has to add”. 48

The historian must "separate the necessary from the accidental, uncover its inner structure, and
make visible the truly activating forces”.49 For Humboldt as for Ranke, the historian first of all
proceeds through the exact, impartial, critical investigation of events", so But after the historian
has considered all the forces acting on an event,

"All life," Ranke writes, carries its ideal in itself' (p.73). "The idea that inspires and dominates the
whole, the prevailing tendency of the minds, and conditions in general, these are what determine
the formation and the character of every institution” (p.60). These ideas, although eternal, are not
universal. They are not abstract ideas in the sense of traditional philosophy but concrete ideas
manifested in time. The theory of ideas in Humboldt and Ranke is inseparably related to their
conception of individuality. “Every human individuality," Humboldt writes, “is an idea rooted in
actuality'$2. The same, he writes, is true of the individuality of nations. Similarly Ranke sees in
every state the manifestation of an individualized idea. The idea is not a static principle; it is
essentially the vital energy, the principle inherent in the individual that governs its growth. “The
innermost urge of spiritual life," Ranke writes, “is movement toward its idea, toward greater
perfection. This urge is innate in it, implanted in it at its origin” (p.73).

This theory of ideas has been called 'neo-Platonic',53 It assumes a universe less closely akin to the
mechanistic cosmos of Newton than to the view of Leibniz, which conceives the world in terms of
self-contained monads, each governed by

Xxx Introduction an inner principle of development yet in harmony in its growth with the will of
God. Newton's universe can be reduced to mathematical terms; in the world of Ranke and
Humboldt, quality defies reduction to quantity. The ideas have their origin in the will of God. 54
The conception of individuals as the expression of an idea inherent within them limits the
applicability of the principle of causation to the historical scene. For the idea itself can never be
subjected to the laws governing nature. It is governed by a law of its own. The uniqueness of
individuality guarantees a residue of spontaneity and freedom in history that defies all
determinism. Regularity and growth can be understood only in terms of the unique principles
inherent in the individualities that compose history. The origin of individuality remains a mystery.

Historical knowledge is possible because both the historian and his subject are part of the process
of history and both have their basis in God's will. Ranke reminds us that history is concerned not
merely with the collection of facts but with understanding these facts. But this understanding
proceeds only from the intuitive contemplation (Anschauung) of the historical subject matter.
Such contemplation for Ranke requires that the historian consciously avoid projecting his
subjectivity into the subject of inquiry. "The ideal of historical culture would consist in enabling the
subject to make himself the pure organ of the object."** But the process of cognition is not
exhausted by empirical observation, nor is it deductive, for abstract concepts cannot grasp
historical reality. It is rather an intuitive one, in which the active intellect grasps the essence of its
subject matter, In contemplating the particular (Betrachtung des Einzelnen), the way opens itself
to the historian to the recognition of the "course which ... the world in general has taken" (p.6), a
course which both Humboldt and Ranke agree can never be fully known but only divined (ahnen),

Involved in the theory of individuality is a highly optimistic philosophy of value. As we already

suggested, there lurks behind Ranke's avowed Lutheran religiosity an outlook basically
incompatible with orthodox Protestant belief. Because every individuality is the manifestation of
an idea that has its origin in God, there is no room for evil. The ethical task of every historical
individual, every nation, and every state for Ranke, is the full development of its self. All
Introduction xxxi values assume a concrete historical form, as the specific values of historical
individualities. Not philosophy but history is the true guide to value. The values embodied in
historical societies are not temporal, fleeting attitudes; they are timeless ideas, but they have no
universal general validity. They relate only to concrete historical individuals or institutions. In this
sense, Ranke's call for impartiality (Unparteilichkeit) must be understood. We must “view every
existence as permeated with original life". Where there is a conflict of values, "both parties must
be viewed on their own ground, in their own environment, so to speak, in their own ... inner
state. ... it is not up to us to judge about error and truth as such," Ranke continues. The ability to
portray the forces of history without interjecting one's own set of values is the core of objectivity.
The historian himself will have value positions. History centers on values. Yet Ranke calls for a
value free understanding of these values:

"It would be impossible not to have one's own set of values in the midst of all the struggles of
powers and of ideas which bear within them decisions of the greatest magnitude. Even so, the
essence of impartiality can be preserved, for this consists merely in recognizing the positions
occupied by the acting forces and in respecting the unique relationships which characterize each
of them. One observes how these forces appear in their distinctive identity, confront and struggle
with one another; the events and the fates which dominate the world take place in this
opposition. Objectivity is also always impartiality."56

Such a conception, which stresses the ethical autonomy of every individual and every culture,
should logically exclude the idea that there is progress in history. For every stage of history must
be judged as an end in itself, not as a step in a progression to a higher state. “Every epoch is
immediate to God," Ranke observes, "and its worth is not at all based on what derives from it but
rests in its own existence, in its own self" (p.21).

Nevertheless Ranke is not fully consistent. In his histories he steadfastly assumes the superiority of
the Christian religion and of Protestantism, and is convinced of the essential soundness of the
civilization of the nineteenth century. Confident about the future of modern civilization, Ranke
writes to King Maximilian II of Bavaria in 1859:

"Until now cultural (geistige) development in the Western nations has ever progressed and is still
progressing in spite of the greatest obstacles and adverse interventions. Why should this not
continue? For the goal has not yet been reached by far and the cultural road is perhaps infinite."57

Similarly, the thread of progress runs through his Universal History, which seeks to show how "in
the course of centuries the human race has won for itself a sort of heirloom in the material and
social progress which it has made, but still more in its religious development" (p.104). Elsewhere
he argues that "since Christendom and with it true morality and religion appeared, there can be no
progress in these areas". In fact he recognizes only one civilization, that of the Christian West.
Admittedly China had developed a civilization, but it stagnated and converted to barbarism. The
same was true of the early stages of the Muslim caliphates. All other societies in Asia and all of
Africa from his view still represented barbarism in his day. In fact, he asserts, history has shown
that there are peoples who are not capable of civilization.

Ranke's political philosophy is spelled out in its most systematic form in the essay, “A Dialogue on
Politics”, reproduced in this volume, but finds theoretical formulation in many of his essays in the
Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift and in his inaugural address "On the Relation of and Distinction
Between History and Politics", also in this volume, and serves as a foundation of his historical
writings. His political theory is an application of his theory of ideas and the doctrine of
individuality. The state, he argues, is not a conglomeration of individuals bound by a social
contract, nor is it a mere concentration of power. Rather, every state rests on a spiritual basis. The
states are individuals" and as such they are manifestations of an individualized, eternal idea in
history, All states "are motivated by special tendencies of their own" and "these tendencies are of
a spiritual nature” (p.66).

A state's fundamental idea directs its development and "penetrates and dominates its entire
environment” (p.66). This idea is of divine origin. “Instead of the passing conglomerations which
the contractual theory of the state creates like cloud formations," Ranke perceives, "spiritual
substances, original creations of the human mind - I might say, thoughts of God" (p.66). Each state
is unique, different in its idea, its spirit, its development and needs, from all others. Similarities
between states are purely formal - for example, all states have some form of constitution - but
these formal similarities do not touch the essence of the state. “There is an element which makes
a state not a subdivision of general categories, but a living thing, an individual, a unique selt"
(p.61). The uniqueness of the state makes it impossible to transfer political institutions to another
state, for example French or English parliamentarism to Prussia without fundamentally changing
the content and nature of these institutions. “Identical institutions, of the same purpose, resting
on common historical foundations, still assume, as we saw, the most divergent forms in different
countries" (pp.60).

Ranke's position involves a radical rejection of the theory of natural law and of the rights of man.
The state must not be judged by any external criteria. It is a law unto itself which must be
understood in terms of its inherent principle of growth, The individuals have no claim to the state,
“It would be ridiculous to explain (the states) as ever so many police departments for the benefit
of those individuals who, let us say, have made a contract for the protection of private property"
(p.66). Rather the individual can fulfill himself only within the state. “There is no purely private
existence for him. He would not be himself, did he not belong to

Introduction

Introduction xxxiii this particular state as his spiritual fatherland" (p.70). The state, however, must
be guided in its actions by its best interests and these interests Ranke interprets primarily in terms
of foreign affairs. "The position of a state in the world depends on the degree of independence it
has attained" (p.65). The cultural creativity of a state depends on its power. The great age of
French literature corresponded to that of French power under Louis XIV; Frederick the Great set
much of the foundation of Germany's cultural revival. "A nation must feel independent in order to
develop freely, and never has a literature flourished save when a climax of history prepared the
way for it” (p.44). It is necessary therefore for the state "to organize all its internal resources for
the purpose of self-preservation" (p.65), to subordinate considerations of domestic politics to the
demands of foreign policy. The area of international relations is viewed, however, as a battlefield
in which every state must fight for its independence and its rights. The central concern of the state
must be power on the international scene.

This emphasis on power for Ranke is, however, linked with his conviction that power is never
brute force but rather an expression of spiritual energy:
"For it would be infinitely wrong to seek in the struggles of historical powers only the work of
brute force, and thus to grasp only the transitory in its external manifestation: no state has ever
existed without a spiritual (geistige) basis and a spiritual content. In power itself a spiritual essence
manifests itself. An original genius, which has its own life. ... It is the task of history to observe this
life, which cannot be characterized through only one idea or one word” (pp.6–7).

War, for Ranke as for Hegel, is therefore not a misfortune but a testing of ethical forces. "You will
be able to name few significant wars," Ranke confidently asserts, "for which it could not be proved
that genuine moral energy achieved the final victory" (p.65). There is no real danger of war
destroying the foundations of civilizations. Ranke recognized that the French Revolution brought
about an intensification in the nature of warfare and that "now the nations, armed as they are,
fight almost man for man, with all their might“ (p.55). Nevertheless, he is convinced, as he
suggests in the essay on "The Great Powers" that "world history does not present such a chaotic
tumult, warring, and planless succession of states and peoples as appear at first sight” (p.52).
There is a balance of power at work in the relations of states, and although "world agitations now
and again destroy this system of law and order ... after they have subsided, it is reconstituted”
(p.33).

The protestations with which Ranke and much of the tradition of German historism greeted the
Hegelian philosophy of history make us overlook the close affinities that existed between the two
orientations. Both saw history as a meaningful and essentially benevolent process in which
spiritual forces assumed concrete reality in social and political institutions. Ranke's and Hegel's
view of the state were particularly close. Both insisted that the state was the manifestation of an
"ethical idea" that in Hegel's words, "each nation as an existing individuality

."

xxxiy Introduction is guided by its particular principles "Sand that the state was not subject to
external moral principles or to considerations of human rights in the pursuit of its political
interests, particularly in the area of international relations. Power possessed a spiritual basis and
war had an ethical element. The victor in war represented the higher moral energies and so world
history, for Ranke as for Hegel, became in a sense the world court of justice.59

The implications of theory for Ranke's historical practice These theoretical ideas determined
Ranke's work from his early writings in his 20s to the Universal History begun at the age of 85. Very
early he wrote that he intended to devote himself to broadly universal history and that he was
particularly interested in "learning something of the lives of the nations in the fifteenth century", a
period of transition to the modern world. Yet he makes it quite clear in his first major publication,
The Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples - 1494-1514 (1824), that he is not writing a
chronology of events but the story of a specific historical unit, namely that which he identifies as
the Latin and Germanic Peoples (p.135) This unit, which has grown organically since Roman times,
is not identical with Europe, which would include the Slavic countries, i.e. Greek Orthodox Russia
and Moslem Turkey. As he mentions elsewhere, Kiev and Smolensk represent a world that is more
alien to us than New York and Lima, which are parts of the Latin and Germanic heritage, or, if you
wish, of the West.6 The late 15th century is crucial to the formation of the modern political and
religious world.

Ranke planned to write a second volume leading up to 1535, which would have included the
Reformation. There are two closely interwoven institutions - the state and the church - which
determine the character of the world with which Ranke is dealing. Politically the transition to the
modern world is marked in the Italian wars by the replacement of the Italian city states by two
great powers, Habsburg Spain and France, in conflict for the control of Italy. The monarchy
emerges as the key political institution of the modern world, and while religion and religiosity by
no means decline, they assume a different more purified form with the Reformation (with which
Ranke intended to deal in the projected second volume and some years later in his history of the
Reformation), by which the power of the Papacy over the central states would be curbed. It is
striking how sharply Ranke's view of the emergence of the modern world differs from that of his
student Jacob Burckhardt in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, for whom the transition

Introduction XXXV to modernity occurs foremost in the cultural sphere with the emergence of a
new mentality exactly in those city states that Ranke assigns to an older world.

Perhaps more important than the narrative account in this volume was the appendix In Criticism of
Modern Historians, which raised the critical criteria on which scholarly history should rest. As we
have mentioned above, he insisted that to meet scholarly criteria all history must be based on the
critical examination of primary sources. Also as mentioned above, he accused Guicciardini and
Giovio, who had been considered the authorities for the very period with which Ranke now dealt,
as not having met these standards.

Ranke now went in two different directions. The second volume of the Histories of the Latin and
Germanic Peoples never appeared. Instead, between 1827 and 1836 he published four volumes
dealing with the Spanish monarchy and the Ottoman Empire, which basically strayed away from
his commitment to write a history of the Western, i.e. the Latin-Germanic world. While in Italy
between 1828 and 1831, he became very interested in Italian art and literature and subsequently
published a volume on each.62

On the basis of his archival studies, Ranke turned first to the history of the Papacy, then to that of
the Reformation, and then to that of the major European states – Prussia, France and England -
only to return to universal history in his old age. How did national histories fit into his concept of a
universal history of the Latin and Germanic peoples as a historical unit?3 He held on to this
concept all his life, but now wrote national histories, which he nevertheless sought to fit into a
broader Latin-Germanic context. The history of the Reformation, entitled German History in the
Era of the Reformation, already centered on German rather than general European development.
What interested him, nevertheless, as he wrote in the preface to his French history, was the
world-historical, not merely the national significance of the history of the various nations (p.148).
On the one hand he was convinced that the Latin-Germanic or Western world was a unit going
back to the Roman period; on the other he compared this unit with the ancient Chinese and the
Roman Empire. While he maintained that the Chinese and Roman empires were administratively
centralized regimes, something which failed to - take cognizance of the role of autonomous city
states and of regions in the Roman Empire, the Latin-Germanic world was marked by
decentralization and pluralism, For Ranke, as we saw in the “Political Dialogue" and the essay "The
Great Powers”, each state possessed a character of its own, and made its particular contribution
to the emergence of the system of the great powers that is a central theme of Ranke's national
history. As he approaches the eighteenth century, France manifests the Catholic-monarchical
principle; England the

Xxxvi Introduction Germanic-maritime and parliamentary principle; Russia, which under the
leadership of Peter the Great had entered the European sphere, represents the Slavic-Greek;
Austria the Catholic-monarchical German; and Prussia the German Protestant-military principle. In
each state, perhaps with the exception of parliamentary England, a powerful monarch such as
Peter the Great, Louis XIV and Frederick the Great molded the modern character of their states.

Taken together, Ranke's histories present a monumental analysis of the growth of modern Europe.
The History of the Popes (1834–36) interested him less for its own sake, for the Papacy "no longer
exercises any essential influence", but does as "a portion of general history, of the overall
development of the modern world" (145-6). It includes not only the immediate sphere of the
popes' political influence in Italy, nor merely their impact as spiritual head of the Catholic Church,
but also the course of Catholic religion in an emerging modern world. Nowhere is this more
evident than in his treatment of the life of Sixtus V. Interwoven in his biography is a long
disquisition on the “Idea of Modern Catholicism", a section that clearly expresses what Ranke sees
as the impact of the Papacy on European history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If the
Church had once fulfilled the purpose of molding the Germanic and Latin peoples of Europe into a
common Christian civilization, and the existence of the papal authority was necessary in the earlier
phases of the world's progress, this power was now challenged by the new forces of nationality
and of the modern monarchies in a period when "the ecclesiastical power was no longer as
necessary as before to the well being of nations", The Vatican reacted to the book by placing it on
the Index.

The German History in the Era of the Reformation (1839–47) that followed the History of the
Popes is the most personal of Ranke's works in that it clearly reveals his German Protestant
background while still achieving a remarkably balanced account. In this work, Ranke sees the
Protestant Reformation not merely as a religious but also as a political phenomenon – the struggle
of the German princes against the control of both the emperors and the popes. The result of the
conflict is the purification of Christian religion and the awakening of the German nationality.
Unlike Hegel, Ranke does not see the logic of history as the driving force of history; instead, great
individuals play a decisive role in all later histories. "It was not, as we see, the quiet course of
events alone or the noiseless progressive development of political and legal relations which
established princely power, but mainly clever politics, successful wars, and the force of powerful
personalities. **64

The books on the papacy and the Reformation were followed by three major histories of states,
concentrating on the rise of the Great Powers: Nine Books of Prussian History (1847–48), Civil
Wars and Monarchy in France (1852–61) and History of England Principally in the sixteenth and
seventeenth Centuries (1859.. 66), each seeking to deal with a period in which the national history
of each country through the importance of the events ... acquired in itself a world historical
character” (p.148). The Nine Books of Prussian History, later expanded
Introduction xxxvii

to Twelve Books of Prussian History, is in a sense a continuation of the work on the Reformation as
a study of the major Protestant German state. It follows the history of the Hohenzollern family
from the fifteenth century on, but focuses on the eighteenth century and particularly on the reign
of Frederick the Great, during which Prussia emerged as a major power. Ranke's study does not
attempt to read a German national mission into Prussian history or to portray Austria as the main
antagonist of German unity, as Johann Gustav Droysen does in his history of Prussia. Rather,
Prussia emerged as a major force in the eighteenth century to fill the power vacuum in northern
Germany and equilibrate the European balance of power. The Civil Wars and Monarchy in France
dealt with the consolidation of monarchical power in France, which contended not only with the
internal opposition of the nobility but also with the power of the Spanish Habsburgs. Again the
story is told in terms of politico-religious conflicts, which are seen not only as clashes of doctrines
or struggles for power but also in relation to the international balance of power. The latter,
especially the threat of the Habsburgs, forced the French state to place political over confessional
considerations. Similar forces are at work in Ranke's History of England in which the religious
conflict is inseparably related to the constitutional struggle and the Revolution of 1688, and is not
merely seen as a victory for constitutionalism and Protestantism within England but as a check
against the hegemonial ambitions of France. Ranke portrays the direct involvement of German
Protestant states and especially of Holland in the events of 1688 as motivated not merely by
religious convictions but also by cold reason of state.

Several monographic studies followed these major works in the 1870s, continuing Ranke's
histories of the Reformation and of Prussia and dealing for the first time extensively with the era
of the French Revolution. More important, however, Ranke finally undertook in 1880 to write a
universal history which was to stress the continuity of a civilization that would endure. He was 85.
In 1830 he had written of his desire to write a broad cultural history that would be "no longer
national, but wholly universal”. 66 To an extent this is what he now did, although the history of
literature, philosophy and art remained marginal, embedded within the framework of the political
struggle for existence. As he wrote in the preface to the Universal History:

"But historical development does not alone rest on the tendency toward civilization. It arises also
from impulses of a very different kind, especially from the rivalry of nations engaged in conflict
with each other for the possession of the soil or for political supremacy. It is in and through this
conflict, which always also affects the domains of culture, that the great powers of history are
formed. In their unceasing struggle for dominion the

xxxviii Introduction

peculiar characteristics of each nation are modified by universal tendencies, but at the same time
resist them and react to them" (pp.103–4),

His history turned out not to be universal in the sense he had prescribed, embracing *the events
of all times and nations" (p.103), but was a history of the West. His task was to show the
development of a heritage upon which modern civilization firmly rested since Antiquity. At the
time of his death, he had traced the story from the ancient Near Eastern civilizations to the death
of Otto the Great. His students, using his notes, continued the history to the beginning of modern
times and completed the work by publishing the lectures "On the Epochs of Modern History",
which Ranke delivered to King Maximilian II of Bavaria in 1854.

These lectures, which were only published posthumously in 1888, have been considered a classic.
Together with Droysen's Historik (Principles of History) and Burckhardt's Weltgeschichtliche
Betrachtungen (Force and Freedom, An Interpretation of History), which were also published
posthumously, they are seen as one of the three greatest works of German historiography in the
nineteenth century and of continued significance for historical thought. It is the only time that
Ranke presented a comprehensive view of Western history, or what he considered to be universal
history, from the Roman period to the nineteenth century, foreshadowing what he had in mind in
the uncompleted Universal History. There is controversy today over the degree to which this is
actually the work of Ranke. No text written by Ranke of the lectures exists, but only a stenographic
account and a written version prepared for him, which at many points deviates from the
stenographic text. Ranke did not assign a title to these lectures; the title by which we know the
lectures was formulated by Alfred Dove, Ranke's student and the editor of his works.68

King Maximilian asked Ranke to define what he considered to be the character, in Ranke's terms
the "leading ideas" (leitende Ideen), of the various epochs of modern history - modern going back
to the formation of the Western world in the Rome of the early Christian period. In the very first
lecture Ranke rejects two conceptions, the idea of progress and the philosophy of history in the
Hegelian manner, as inapplicable to history. Yet on further thought he shies away from the term of
"leading ideas" as too abstract, and instead sets out to identify the tendencies (Tendenzen) that
mark the epochs of modern, that is Western, history, The Oriental elements of the most ancient
history are not destroyed but transformed by the Greeks and transmitted to Rome. For him the
crucial period of Roman history is not the republic but the empire. It is there that the basic
institutions are shaped – the monarchy, the law code (ius gentium) and, most important, the
Christian world religion – that provide the foundation for the Western culture to come. With
migrations this culture takes on its Latin-Germanic character and is finally separated from the East,
which ultimately comes under the domination of Islam. The epoch initiated by the Carolingian
empire sees the formation of modern nationalities, the dualism of Church and a decentralized
Empire, with the Papacy emerging as the dominant political force. The Reformation marks the
revolt of the princes and the towns against Papacy and Empire. The post-Reformation period,
beginning with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sees the emergence of the great powers.
It is striking how little attention Ranke pays to the role of the economy, to the scientific revolution
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or to the Enlightenment. Trade, he recognizes, is a
factor in the establishment of the Dutch and English colonial empires and he is aware of the
development of industry and the natural sciences in the nineteenth century, but has little to say
about the social transformations of the Europe of his time.

Throughout the history of the West, religion plays a significant role in the shaping of political
decisions; he surprisingly sees in it a main motivation for the Spanish and Portuguese overseas
explorations and discoveries, such as the sea route to India, as a means to more effectively
confront the Moslems, so that the spirit of the Crusades remains alive in a much later period. He
does not mention economic or geopolitical considerations. On the other hand, he recognizes that
the modern states subordinate their religious faiths to the exigencies of power on the
international scale.

It is interesting that Ranke assigns great world historical significance to the American Revolution.
Its significance lies in the fact that there republicanism is no longer a pure idea but has a firm
foundation in a state. The French Revolution cannot be understood without the impact of the
ideas of the American Revolution. The nineteenth century is marked by the confrontation of the
idea of popular sovereignty with that of monarchy. If popular sovereignty were to triumph, the
result would be the abolition of monarchy and ultimately communism. But the progress of popular
sovereignty, Ranke assures the worried king, would produce a reaction and the restoration of a
powerful monarchy.

It is not clear why these lectures with their simple, one might say shallow generalizations were so
well received by a broad German public. This has much to do with the political climate in Germany
well into the twentieth century. It is interesting that the lectures were almost the only works of
Ranke that were reprinted in the twentieth century - as late as 1971 a critical edition appeared. I
was able to find only a single translation into a foreign language, one into Russian in 1898, none
since then.

Conclusion: Ranke's impact on later historical thought and practice Ranke's influence on German
historiography cannot be overestimated. There has even been a renewed interest in him in recent
years, although different aspects of his thought have moved to the foreground. After 1945,
German historians

xl Introduction reexamined their national tradition of historiography in the light of the political
catastrophe of the years 1933 to 1945, which also involved a reexamination of Ranke's basic
presuppositions. The positivistic interpretation of Ranke never took hold in Germany, but has also
faded outside of Germany where the roots of his historical thought in German Idealism have been
recognized, and he is no longer seen primarily as a scientific but as a great narrative historian.

Ranke's two major contributions to the national tradition of academic history in Germany were his
adaptation of critical method to historical study and his conception of the state. The former was
integrated into historical practice not only in Germany but throughout the world as historical
scholarship became increasingly a university-centered profession. The latter, the conception of the
central position of the state as an ethical institution, the emphasis on the power position of the
state in international affairs, and the subordination of domestic to foreign policy, remained intact
in Germany well into the twentieth century and was seriously challenged only after 1945. To be
sure, Ranke's historical writing was viewed very critically by many of his students even in his life
time, not on methodological but on political grounds. This rejection was particularly pronounced
among the historians of the so-called Prussian school who viewed historical scholarship as an
instrument of German unification, Ranke's student, Heinrich von Sybel, regretted Ranke's lack of
warmth and overly great concern with technical considerations.69
Ranke was politically out of step with the historians of the Prussian school. He recognized the
"rejuvenation of the national spirit in the whole compass of European peoples and states" (p.98),
but saw this new nationalism as a force that would strengthen the existing powers and support
the balance of power. The historians of the Prussian school rejected Ranke's concept of the
European system of great powers, which they believed maintained the conservative status quo.
Foreign policy, Droysen insisted, must be determined by national interest and conducted openly in
the presence of public opinion rather than by secret diplomacy. Prussia must cease to be European
and become German. Her primary aim must be the unification of Germany and the pursuit of
German national interests, not the balance of power.

Nationalism for the Prussian school was linked, at least until 1866, to a liberalism for which Ranke
had little sympathy, a liberalism, however, which always subordinated domestic political aims to
the demands of the reason of state and, indeed, saw in political reform an instrument for
strengthening the national state rather than an end in itself. The more conservative atmosphere of
the German Empire brought with it a new appreciation for Ranke's "objectivity", for his conception
of the state as standing above parties. The "Neo-Rankeans", a generation of historians at the turn
of the century advocating German imperial

nd.

Introduction xli expansion, sought to project Ranke's conception of the balance of power from a
European to a world scene.70

By the turn of the century, the Rankean tradition of political history based on the critical analysis
of documents, which by then dominated historical scholarship not only in Germany but
throughout the world, was seriously challenged by the "New Historians" in the United States, by
Henri Berr and the forerunners of the Annales in France, and by Karl Lamprecht in Germany. The
Rankean conception of "scientific history", these men held, was inadequate for the understanding
of the social, economic and cultural transformation of the modern world, a revolt which led to an
increasing concern to link history with the social sciences. While in the United States and France
this opened the way to an interdisciplinary social history, in Germany Karl Lamprecht's initiative
resulted in a bitter controversy: the famous Methodenstreit (conflict about methods). The
historical profession saw in Lamprecht a threat not only to German historiographical but also
political traditions. The failure of Germany to achieve parliamentary government in the nineteenth
century was reflected in the opposition of the basically conservative and nationally-oriented
German academic establishment to Lamprecht's approach. These men saw in the German
Idealistic tradition, with its rejection of social analysis, its reverence for the state, and its concern
with the role of individual statesmen in historical change, the ideological foundation for the
political and social order that had emerged in Germany with Bismarck's defeat of the Prussian
liberals and with his unification of Germany under the auspices of a semi autocratic Prussian
monarchy.

The defeat of Germany in World War I and the effects of the Treaty of Versailles solidified the hold
of the Rankean idealistic tradition over German historians. The 1920s saw a steady increase in the
interest in social history in France, Belgium and the United States, which was not shared to that
extent in Germany. As German historians passionately disputed the thesis of German war guilt
contained in the Treaty of Versailles, they increasingly viewed the turn to social history as
subversive of German national political and intellectual traditions. This rejection included even the
relatively conservative, state-oriented type of social history best represented before World War I
by Gustav Schmoller and Otto Hintze,

Only after 1945 was there a serious reexamination of the Rankean tradition of historiography in
Germany. Friedrich Meinecke, then the dean of German historians, in his now famous lecture on
"Ranke and Burckhardt" in 1948, suggested that Burckhardt, with his deep pessimism regarding
men, material civilization, power and the masses, had understood the modern world more
correctly than Ranke. Meinecke now recognized that Ranke's idealistic notion of

xlii Introduction the state guided by reason of state was no longer tenable. It was questionable,
however, whether he was right when he predicted that Burckhardt in the mid-twentieth century
would still have greater importance than Ranke for us and for later historians.72 Burckhardt
concerned himself with the cultural life of elites and less with the relation of culture to the wider
context of society that now interested historians.

The social sciences reentered West German historiography largely by way of the sociology of Max
Weber. Weber, who died in 1920, had written in the early part of the century, but his influence
only made itself felt posthumously in a limited sense in the 1920s, and was fully felt in Germany
only after 1945. He succeeded in combining the best in the German Idealistic tradition-- the
recognition of historical individuality that was lacking in much of Western sociology - with a
recognition of the role of general concepts in social science and history. H. Stuart Hughes observed
that Weber "introduce(d) conceptual rigor into a tradition where either intuition or a naive
concern for the 'facts' had hitherto ruled unchallenged."7 Fully acknowledging the residues of
irrationality in human behavior, Weber nevertheless recognized that such behavior is never
without a degree of structure and regularity. Unpredictability, he observed, is the privilege of the
insane. These elements of recurrence and structure permitted the formulation of generalizations
of limited scope, which took into full account the uniqueness of every historical situation, but
which made nevertheless the comparability of people, social systems and cultures possible. Thus
for Weber, as for Western social science-oriented historians, history had both a narrative and an
analytical function. Deeply influenced by Weber, Otto Hintze in the 1920s sought to bridge the gap
between Ranke's event-oriented political history and Weber's analysis of social institutions.

However, only after 1945 was the hold of the German Idealistic tradition sufficiently weakened to
permit the introduction of sociological and political science concepts and methods into German
historiography. The concepts and methods of political science for the first time occupied an
important role in the analysis of modern political processes in a work such as K. D. Bracher's
Auflösung der Weimarer Republik (Disintegration of the Weimar Republic) (1955). Marxism played
a relatively insignificant role in German historical scholarship outside of East Germany.
Nevertheless, the great controversy aroused by Fritz Fischer's work, Griff nach der Weltmacht,
published in 1961, which gave major responsibility for the outbreak of World War I to German
expansionist aims (a shortened English version, Germany's Aims in the First World War, appeared
in 1967) involved not only the reassessment of German political traditions but of historiographical
practices,
Introduction xlii But already in the 1920s two important reactions against the Rankean paradigm
occurred among a younger generation educated after World War I, on the margins of the
academic profession, coming from diametrically opposed political positions. The first consisted of
students of Friedrich Meinecke who, although not sharing their historiographical views, was willing
to work with them. These young historians were deeply influenced by Weber and by Marx's class
analysis and his stress on the economic factors that affect politics, without being Marxist in a
political sense but rather generally Social Democrats and supporters of the Weimar Republic. They
all, without exception, were forced into emigration after Hitler's accession to power.74

The other reaction came from the advocates of Volksgeschichte (people's history)," ardent
supporters of the Nazi regime. They criticized the "history from above" of the Rankean tradition
and called for a "history from below”, but viewed the Volk in biological terms as the Aryan race
committed to replacing the Slavs to make room for living space for German settlers in the East and
eliminating the Jews. They cherished the ideal of the return to a pre-modern agrarian society. The
two principal advocates and practitioners of Volksgeschichte during the Nazi period, Werner Conze
and Theodor Schieder, after 1945 broke with their racial and agrarian ideology, and Conze
founded a "Working Circle for Modern Social History”. This stress on modernity deemphasized the
confrontation with the Nazi past, which they saw as a phenomenon of modern mass societies with
few specific roots in the German national past. They became the most important mentors of
young historians educated in the Federal Republic who soon were to occupy key roles in the
academic establishment. Historians of his generation, such as Hans Ulrich Wehler, differed
fundamentally in their political and historiographical outlook from their mentors. Their main
concern, as well as that of even younger historians not trained by Conze and Schieder, like Jürgen
Kocka, was how it was possible for the Nazi regime to come to power and carry out its reign of
terror and mass murder with the acquiescence of broad segments of the German population.
Unlike their mentors, they believed that the rise of Nazism has to be understood in terms of the
uneven modernization in which the development of an industrial society was not accompanied by
political democratization, as it was in Western societies.75 They called for a positive reorientation
of German political awareness to the Western model that had long been rejected. They also
believed in the need to break with German Idealistic traditions of historical studies, including
Ranke, and turn to Western, particularly Anglo-American, social science theories and practices.
They called for a "historical social science” to examine the German past

xliv Introduction and present in a transnational context. They also turned again to the historians
and social theorists who had been forced into exile."

By the 1980s there was a reaction against the analytical "historical social science" by critics who
protested that this approach, with its concentration on structures and processes, neglected the
"everyday life" of common people. In one sense, like Ranke they rejected abstractions and
generalizations and called on concretely "understanding" the intentions of individuals, turning
away from sociology and economics to anthropology to fathom the concrete meaning of cultures
in which these individuals lived, rather than seeking explanations guided by theories. Yet the
individuals with whom they dealt were common people, including, and this is important, women
and people on the margins of society. Instead of the tendencies in history that both the Rankeans
and post-Rankeans as well as the practitioners of historical social science pursued, they denied
that such tendencies could be defined and called for "micro-history" to replace the "macro
histories" of conventional historiography.78

This new historical orientation reflected the emerging postmodern mood. By this time the
positivist interpretation of Ranke, which had never taken hold in Germany, had been abandoned in
America as well, where two important studies of Ranke by Theodore Von Laue and Leonard
Krieger discussed the roots of Ranke's historical thought in German Idealism and Protestant
religiosity." Recent years have seen a revived interest in Ranke both in Germany and abroad.
However, he was now no longer seen as the father of historical science but as one of the great
narrative historians of the nineteenth century. His importance lay in the transition that his work
marked between erudite scholarship and modern forms of historical narrative. Hayden White
went furthest in seeing Ranke as essentially a historical novelist. 8' For White, history was an
expression of poetic imagination, i.e. a form of literature. Research did not determine historical
writing but merely served as the subject matter for a historical story. In the final analysis, there
were no clear distinctions between the history and fiction.SI White fitted Ranke's histories into a
structuralist scheme, which predetermined the ways in which Ranke wrote history, his political
conservatism, his organicist conception of society, and his "comic", that is optimistic outlook on
history, which are all

Introduction xlv interwoven.82 White based his chapter on Ranke totally on the two famous
essays, "The Great Powers" and "The Political Dialogue", which he took as the basis of Ranke's
theoretical position, without referring to Ranke's great historical works, which rested on extensive
research. He later abandoned this structuralist scheme but continued to insist on the purely
literary and imaginative character of history, Since White's now famous Metahistory (1973) with
the fitting subtitle The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, a large number of
publications have appeared in Germany and the Anglo-American countries on the literary aspects
of Ranke's histories. In these publications a very different picture of Ranke emerges, with a focus
on the aesthetic concerns of his writings. In a footnote we list the most important studies that go
in this new direction.83 None go as far as White. Of course Ranke himself stressed that history was
both science and art, but he drew a clear line between the two. Nevertheless Ranke wrote for a
broad audience: for scholars but even more so for an educated cultured public for whom his works
presented scholarship in the form of great literature. It is no coincidence that Theodor Mommsen,
a scholar in the nineteenth century German tradition, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1902, the second time it was awarded. It is conceivable that Ranke, had he still been alive, might
have been a serious candidate for the prize.