RANKE, LEOPOLD VON (1795–1886)

Leopold von Ranke (ennobled in 1865) was a German historian who is sometimes referred to as the ‘father of modern history’. He not only had a major impact on the style of German historiography right up to the mid-twentieth century but he also influenced the set-up of the academic discipline of history in Britain and the USA, in so far as he developed a methodology of historical source research and source critique.

Born a lawyer’s son, he studied in the university town of Leipzig Philosophy and Protestant Theology, whereupon he started work as a grammar school teacher. In 1824,

he published his first great work, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514 (Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494–1535, trans. 1887), a book that reflected his life-long desire to come to an understanding of the culture and history of the Occident and which made him instantly famous and earned him a professorship at Berlin University where he stayed from 1825 until his retirement in 1871. From 1832 to 1836 he edited the conservative journal Historisch-politische Zeitschrift . His conservative stance brought him close to the Prussian king Frederick William IV: in 1841 he became historiographer of the Prussian state. He was equally close to the Bavarian king Maximilian II who had been Ranke’s student, and in 1858 he was appointed director of the Historical Committee of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich.

His most well-known other works are: The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes of Rome during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Die römischen Päpste, ihre Kirche und ihr Staat im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, 1834–6, trans. 1840); History of the Reformation (Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, 1839–47, trans. 1845–7); Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg and History of Prussia during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries (Neun Bücher preussischer Geschichte, 1847–8, trans. 1849; new extended German edition entitled Zwölf Bücher preussischer Geschichte, 1874); Civil Wars and Monarchy in France, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Französische Geschichte, vornehmlich im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, 1852–61, books 1–6 trans. 1852); A History of England, Principally in the Seventeenth Century (Englische Geschichte, vornehmlich im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, 1859–68, trans. 1875).

Ranke stood for a narrative history with a claim to portray history ‘as it actually was’—‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’—a famous and often cited dictum found in the preface to his History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations. He demanded to study history without any preconceived ideas induced by some dogmatic superstructure: he broke with the

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 540

Enlightenment model of history as a ‘teacher’ with ‘teaching goals’. It was not the task of the historian to judge the past and preach to the present; history should be understood out of itself, not out of the present and with the questionable benefit of hindsight. Ranke rejected the Hegelian notion of seeing in each epoch only the early stage for the following ones (see HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM); he repudiated any kind of teleological constructions of a philosophy of history that would already know its ending. On the other hand, Ranke did not approve of the Romantics’ tendency to see certain historical epochs as being closer to God’s heart than others: instead, every epoch showed other aspects of the God-given human spirit and was thus equally valuable. So, in Ranke’s eyes, each generation, each historical epoch was ‘immediate to God’—never a mere transitory station in the development towards some, however defined, goal in history. It was not progress in history he was looking for, but history’s truth. Individuals determining the course of history were both free in their decisions and dependent on the historical circumstances of their respective epoch. Ranke was interested in the histories of states and peoples as original creations of the spirit of man and thus as ‘thoughts of God’, each one of them being unique. Searching for the prevailing ideas in history, he was ultimately looking for God in history whilst stressing that one could not discern from the historical events as such God’s ultimate design for the world. Although deeply religious,

he always remained a secular historian. The method he advised historians to adopt was to ‘understand’ historical facts and developments in their genesis and to refrain from ‘explaining’ thern by means of mechanistic cause-effect models and historical ‘laws’. Such an ‘understanding’ of history was at the heart of ‘historicism’—the prevailing philosophy of history in the nineteenth century. Ranke saw the historian’s task in comprehending history’s individual phenomena embedded in an understanding of the general principles weaving through them.

Ranke demanded to go ‘back to the sources’: not relying on historians’ accounts but writing history solely based on the detailed study and philological-textual analysis of documents such as diaries, private letters, public reports or diplomatic dispatches. He did himself what he preached, extensively touring during his life archives in Germany, Austria, Italy, France and England. His methodology of historical source research and source critique became instrumental world-wide in setting up history as an academic- scientific discipline.

Ranke was convinced that his conception of history and his historical method were objective and free from the value judgements of the historian investigating historical facts. In the twentieth century such presuppositions were increasingly being questioned, stressing the notion that every question asked by a historian relates to the respective present and its value systems and perceptions of the world. Still, until the 1950s, the historical discipline in Germany remained strongly attached to the principles of historicism and to Ranke’s ‘primacy of foreign policy’ and his focus on political history, embarking at a much later stage on the course initiated by Western European historiography in the realm of social history. Ranke’s most enduring legacy is his admonition to ‘go back to the archives’ and to subject original sources to a methodical analysis and critique.

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RANKE, LEOPOLD VON (1795–1886)