But if reality consists of a multiplicity of individual natures which can not be reduced to a common denominator, history seems to lose its meaning. While Ranke finds a common denominator in God, he rejects Hegel’s pantheism which identifies God with the total process of history. His is a Christian panentheism which sees God distinct from the world, but omnipotent in it. Hence Ranke defends his observation that “each time at the decisive moment something enters which we call chance (Zufall) or fate (Geschick) but which is God’s finger”22 from Leo’s charge of sentimentality and superstition. The presence of God alone prevents the alternative between the total determinism of fate and the “materialist notion that all is contingent.” God alone offers the bond of unity for Ranke—and for that matter for the Historical School in general—in a world where values and truths are related to historic individualities, rather than to universal human norms. Inherent in this type of historicism which Ranke espouses is always the threat that, if Christian faith is shaken, history will lose its meaning and present man with the anarchy of values.
Despite Ranke’s defense, Leo is not entirely incorrect in charging that the Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples resemble a heap of unassorted details. The historicist positions avowed by Ranke in his replies to Leo have found relatively little application in this work. Ranke has done little, in fact, to seek the general within the particular. One great idea gives the work a degree of inner unity, the concept of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples as a historic unity distinct from nations that compose them and distinct from Europe or Christendom as a whole. The book attempts to treat the emergence of the modern international system of the great powers in the two crucial decades between 1494 and 1514. As a recent American critic observes: “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, clarity, and form into its profuse growth.”23 Nor did the Ottoman and Spanish Empires in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1827) or The Serbian Revolution (1829) exhibit any philosophic undertones or intent. Only when Ranke turned to the political issues of the day in the 1830’s did he further develop the philosophic view of history which he had vaguely indicated in his reply to Leo.
3.
Ranke systematically approached the theoretical problems underlying his historical practice only during the four years of his editorship of the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift, between 1832 and 1836. Otherwise, he offered little of a theoretical nature, except for random remarks strewn through his histories and correspondence. One notable exception was the brief introduction to the lectures “About the Epochs of Modern History,” which he read to King Maximilian of Bavaria in 1854.24 But in the essays of the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift, as well as his lecture notes25 and his inaugural address, “On the Affinities and Differences Between History and Politics,”26 from that period, Ranke developed the most systematic and coherent exposition of historicist principles in nineteenth-century historiography. For the most part it was in direct defense of Prussian institutions of the Restoration period and of his own predilections.
The Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift was founded under the initiative of Count von Bernstorff, the then foreign minister. In founding it, von Bernstorff had had two purposes in mind. He wished to provide an organ for the defense of the policies of an enlightened Prussian bureaucracy against its numerous liberal critics on the left. But he also wished to distinguish the positions of the Prussian governments from that of the reactionary right. In the fall of 1831 this latter group, which included distinguished men such as Radowitz, von Raumer, and the Gerlachs, had founded the Berliner Politisches Wochenblatt (Berlin Political Weekly) to propagate the feudal doctrines of the late Karl Ludwig von Haller.27 The men associated with this weekly publication considered enlightened despotism a forerunner of liberalism. They distrusted the Prussian bureaucracy. Their ideal of government was a pre-absolutistic Mecklenburg type of constitution in which political power was preserved or restored to the aristocratic and noble classes within society. Von Bernstorff and the men he consulted in this enterprise, particularly Savigny and Johann Albrecht Eichhorn,28 von Bernstorff s principal adviser, as well as the Hamburg publisher Perthes, represented a more enlightened position. They recognized the rising role of the middle classes and the need for Prussia to assume active leadership in satisfying the national and economic demands of this class. At the same time, von Bernstorff and his friends wished to do this within the framework of the existing political structure of Prussia and Germany through the agency of a benevolent and relatively progressive Prussian bureaucracy and with a minimum of concessions to political liberalism. These men, accustomed to royal absolutism and used to obedience rather than to deliberation, probably underestimated the force of liberal and national feeling, as well as the entrenched opposition of the vested interests of the old regime.
Ranke’s own political inclinations fitted well into this program. He had been relatively unaffected by the nationalist enthusiasm of the Wars of Liberation. His deep Lutheran piety was not narrow in a confessional sense. Nevertheless, it strengthened his respect for the established wordly authorities, the Obrigkeit, as part of God’s design. He was not yet as doctrinaire in his conservative views as he would become in later years. Although he had been a close friend of Savigny, Niebuhr, and Schleiermacher since his arrival at the University of Berlin in 1825, he had been much closer to the liberal circle around Varnhagen von Ense during the first three years of his stay in Berlin than he liked to admit later.29 Having been granted the complete freedom of expression in the review which he had requested, including the privilege not to have to submit the journal to censorship, Ranke conceived his task as one of keeping equal distance between the extremes of the Berliner Politisches Wochenblatt and of liberalism. Later, he commented on this episode: “I had been so bold as to undertake to defend a third orientation midway between the 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, too, as long as they contained truth.”30 Whether Ranke made his distance from the reactionaries clear is doubtful. In the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift, his criticisms almost entirely were directed at the liberals. Ranke seems to have disappointed Perthes, who withdrew his sponsorship from the journal after the appearance of the first volume in 1832.31 Instead, Ranke found himself encouraged by the very conservative Ancillon who succeeded von Bernstorff as foreign minister during that year.32
Thus almost all that appeared in the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift related to the critique of liberalism and of its theoretical foundations. But Ranke did not content himself with stressing the need of an historical approach for an understanding of the empirical functioning of political forces. Rather, in his contributions to the review, as well as in lectures on the methods and scope of historical study written at this time, he stresses the role of history as a guide to philosophical truth. Through history he seeks to uncover the metaphysical realities underlying the state which could provide the basis of a conservative theory of politics.
Three notions recur throughout his essays and lectures of the period and give them a high degree of unity. The first is the argument against the application of abstract principles to politics, and the identification of “theory” with liberalism and the ideas of the French Revolution. The second is the idea that, although all existence can be understood only in terms of its history, behind the ephemeral appearance of every particular phenomenon there is concealed a general truth. A final idea is that the states existing in history are the concrete expressions of underlying ideas.
1. Ranke’s warning in the Introduction