The German Conception of History. Georg G. Iggers

significant. “Any reading of his works leaves … the impression that Ranke did not ignore (wegretouchiert) the masses but took them seriously as an important factor of historical movement.” Ranke “wrote no line without being conscious that historical life is not only determined by the thoughts and deeds of the few great men but just as much by the interests, needs, abilities, fears and desires of the many.”⁹⁹ Vierhaus rightly points out that Ranke was not entirely blind to social and class conflict. Nevertheless, Vierhaus’s documentation does not really change the traditional image of Ranke. Indeed, in the 1830’s, in his diary Ranke himself suggested that a world history be written which would emphasize the growth of population and stress economic and cultural activities; colonization, knightdom, the building of churches, art, and religion in the Middle Ages; agriculture and public works in the eighteenth century and the “tremendous development of industry and highways” in the nineteenth century. However, this was an isolated remark.¹⁰⁰

      As Hans Schleier notes, the attempts to recount the instances of Ranke’s preoccupation with economic and social questions only underline how marginal these problems were to Ranke’s historiography, and how little he understood the social forces of the nineteenth century.¹⁰¹ Vierhaus himself admits how poorly informed Ranke was about the economic conditions of the working class and how little understanding he had for the social questions of his time.¹⁰² Ranke, analagous to many of his contemporaries, saw the vision of an amorphous mass threatening all culture and civilization, and he failed to appreciate the significance of industry. He saw many social changes, of which the rise of the “third estate” was the most important to take place. The central social problem for Ranke was, Vierhaus admits, a political one, that of fitting the bourgeoisie into the framework of the old state, at the same time excluding the masses who lacked all prerequisites for political responsibility.¹⁰³ Ranke’s concept of the state remained a static one. The continental monarchical great power, as it had arisen in the struggle between princes and estates and the religious civil wars between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, remained for him the model by which the states that existed in history were to be judged.¹⁰⁴ This concept of the state reflected Ranke’s attachment to legitimacy, his religiosity, and the impact of the political thought of German Idealism on his thinking. But this viewpoint of the state remained inadequate for an understanding of the preabsolutistic state or of the political forces that emerged in the nineteenth century.

      It is to his credit that in an age of rising nationalistic sentiment in historiography, Ranke did not sacrifice his belief in a European community. For him, state and nation were never identical, although he recognized the tendency of nations to form states and realized the strength which nineteenth-century states had gained from the rise of national feeling. Ranke studied all major states, which he described as the Germano-Romanic world, in terms of their interaction within this broader European context.