The German Conception of History. Georg G. Iggers

attention to the theoretical foundations of his historical practice as did Ranke. Moreover, no one succeeded as completely in integrating his concept of the historical process and his theory of knowledge with his political views. The philosophic context of Ranke’s methodological consideration received little understanding in America, particularly at a time when his basic metaphysical and religious assumptions had become questionable, even in German thought. Indeed, little was left of Ranke’s heritage for broad groups of pedantic historians on both sides of the Atlantic, except a souless positivism which Ranke had always repudiated.

      2.

      One can question whether the new critical treatment of sources or the introduction of the seminar method into historical instructions was Ranke’s main contribution to German historiography. Ranke was not the first historian to apply the so-called “new” critical methods to the examination of historical sources. Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824) and August Böckh (1785-1867) had applied rigorous philological criticism to the examination of classical texts. Herbert Butterfield, in a recent chapter on the Göttingen School, has traced the eighteenth-century background of modern historiographical method.⁸ When Ranke applied critical methods to modern historical texts, he was consciously indebted to Barthold Georg Niebuhr’s critical approach to Roman history. Perhaps more significant for historical thought, if not also for historical practice, was Ranke’s development of the basic philosophical concepts of the Historical School during his editorship of the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift (Historical-Political Review) from 1832 to 1836.

      Ranke published his first book, the Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514, in 1824. In its famous technical appendix, “In Criticism of Modern Historians,” he applied the critical principles of G. B. Niebuhr to the discussion of modern sources. By that time, the line between a philosophical and an Historical School, which Savigny had defined so neatly, had already divided the University of Berlin into two hostile camps. The one centered around Hegel; the other included a broad group of jurists. Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Karl Friedrich Eichhorn, the founders of the Historical School, belonged to this second group as did Niebuhr, the philologists Bockh, Bopp, and Lachmann, and the theologian Schleiermacher. What divided the two schools was their different concept of truth and reality. Was the diversity in the phenomenal world merely a manifestation of an underlying rational principle, as Hegel maintained? If so, then truth could be attained only by reducing this diversity to rational concepts. Or was this diversity reality itself, and was any attempt to reduce it to a conceptual scheme a violation of the fullness and individuality inherent in life?

      Both schools shared in the conviction that behind the phenomena of historical study there was a metaphysical reality, and that the aim of all study must be the apprehension of this reality. Niebuhr, Savigny, and Ranke agreed with Hegel that true philosophy and true history were basically one. They differed from Hegel in their conviction that this fundamental reality could be approached only through historical study, for it was much more complex, vitalistic, and elusive and possessed much greater room for spontaneity and uniqueness than Hegel’s panlogistic concept of the universe would permit. In brief, only history offered answers to the fundamental questions of philosophy. “History,” Savigny and Eichhorn observe in the Introduction to the first volume of the Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft (Journal for Historical Jurisprudence), “is by no means a mere collection of examples but is the only way to true knowledge (Erkenntnis) of our own condition (Zustand)” This, Savigny stresses, does not mean the superiority of the past over the present.⁹ Rather, the Historical School recognizes the value and autonomy of every age, and only stresses that the living connection, which links the present to the past, be recognized. In the area of law, this means that there is no abstract, philosophic law, no law of nature which can be codified; instead, every law is inseparably interwoven with the total historical development of a people. The jurist must eliminate those aspects of the law which have atrophied and no longer constitute a living part of the present.¹⁰ If Savigny thus recognizes the elements of change within tradition, at the same time he denies the possibility of progress. For history is neither static, nor is any epoch a steppingstone in a linear process of fulfillment. Rather, every age represents an end and a value in itself.

      The issues between the two schools were well illustrated in the bitter controversy which developed between Leopold Ranke and Heinrich Leo, after the latter, a young disciple of Hegel, had reviewed Ranke’s first book and its Appendix.¹¹ It was not Ranke’s insistence upon methodological accuracy, however, which Leo challenged, but his view of history. Indeed, Leo based his criticism on grounds that Ranke would have accepted. He merely rejected the justice of these criticisms. Ranke’s style was poor, Leo complained; he had introduced sentimentality into his narration, and lacked critical judgment in the use of his sources.¹² The real controversy in the critical exchanges between the two men centered around their treatment of Machiavelli, and this involved two fundamental problems of a philosophic nature: (1) was it legitimate to apply ethical standards to the assessment of historical characters and (2) should historical personalities be studied for their own sake or in terms of their role in world history? Ranke, attempting to refrain from passing moral judgment upon Machiavelli, viewed the Florentine in terms of his time. He did recognize that there was something “shocking” (Entsetzliches) in Machiavelli’s teachings. However, Ranke held that The Prince had not been intended as a “general textbook” for practical politics. Rather, Machiavelli’s teachings were directed at a specific historic situation.¹³ Ranke shuddered at the idea of using them as general precepts of political action, as readers had done for centuries. But as the means used for a specific situation, he urged that they be understood. As pointed out in Ranke’s Preface to the Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples, the task of history is not “to judge the past” but the more humble one, “merely to show what really happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).”¹⁴ We must “be just,” Ranke argues. “He (Machiavelli) sought Italy’s salvation. But conditions seemed so desperate to him that he was bold enough to prescribe poison … Cruel means” alone could save “an Italy corrupted to the core.”¹⁵

      For Leo, on the other hand, the Florentine historian must be judged both by moral standards and as a world-historical person. In the Introduction to his translation of Machiavelli’s letters, Leo describes him as an amoral person who looked at good and evil as an outside observer and pursued the most perverted sensual pleasures without real personal engagement, “a mind torn loose from all that is eternal.”¹⁶ Machiavelli, Leo continues, knew that as one flatters French, Burgundian, or German princes with the hope of expelling the Turks from Europe, so Italian princes were flattered with the vision of cleansing the fatherland.¹⁷ Machiavelli’s patriotism was a mere device to obtain personal ends. But all of this is unimportant, Leo concludes, compared to the man’s “world historical significance” as the midwife of the new age of the modern state to whose basic principle he gave expression, without himself being conscious of his great task.¹⁸

      Hence Ranke’s supposed criteria for judging the value of historical works solely in terms of the degree to which they represented “naked truth” appeared faulty to Leo. For truth, he holds, is found not in the representation of every detail, but in a context that takes growth into account. The true landscape painting is not one in which the painter has counted every blade of grass which changed before he had time to finish the painting, but one that places the living scene in front of the observer “without in the least sticking pedantically to details.” And history is like that. “Truth in history is the process of life and of the spirit. Historiographical truth consists exclusively in describing this process which is manifested in the events. This description need not betray the index finger of the philosopher although the true historian and the philosopher meet at every step.”¹⁹

      However, to identify his concept of naked truth with “the silly notion of copying and making anatomical slides”²⁰ seems to Ranke a caricature of his procedure. Ranke believes that he, no less than Leo, sought general truth, but he argues that it can be apprehended only through the particular. By absorbing himself in the particular, he attempts to represent “the general straight away and without much circumlocution.” Only in its outward appearance is the individual phenomenon particular; within it, as Leibniz