RANKE, LEOPOLD VON

RANKE, LEOPOLD VON (1785–1886), German historian.

Leopold von Ranke was one of the most important historians of the modern era, whose work became the model of professional historical writing for the modern academic discipline in Germany and abroad, especially the United States and Britain. Ranke was remarkable for aspiring to dispassionate treatment of past eras; for attempting to understand them on their own terms, without the imposition of anachronistic ideologies; for assessing their significance in the broadest possible chronological and geographic frame of reference; for focusing on political history; and for insisting on critical use of original written sources as the foundation of professional historical writing.

Born on 20 December 1795 in Wiehe, Thuringia/Saxony, Ranke came from an educated Lutheran family. His paternal grandfather was a pastor, and his father, Gottlob Israel Ranke, began his studies in theology before switching to law. At age eighteen Ranke himself went to the University of Leipzig, where he studied theology and classical philology from 1814 to 1817. He gradually decided to become a historian, but with his personal piety undiminished. He received his initial appointment at the University of Berlin in 1825 and became professor of history there in 1834, making the Prussian capital his home until his death on 23 May 1886. In the fall of 1827 he began a research trip that took him to Vienna, Venice, Florence, and Rome. Returning to Berlin in the spring of 1831, he produced a succession of ambitious works over the next half century including Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1535 (1824; History of the Latin and Germanic peoples from 1494 to 1535), Die römischen Päpste. Ihre Kirche und ihr Staat im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (1834–1836; The Popes: Their church and state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation (1839–1847; German history in the age of the Reformation), Französische Geschichte (1852–1856; French history), Englische Geschichte (1859–1868; English history), and Weltgeschichte (1881–1888; World history). His graduate seminar, which turned out generations of professional historians, contributed to the outstanding reputation of Germany's historical profession.

Ranke's conception of history was inseparable from his political conservatism. He was hostile to the democratic political movements that had challenged the traditional European order since 1789 and thought of the political actors in the moderate French Revolution of 1830 as a "mob"; for his model of government he looked to monarchs and statesmen like Frederick William IV, king of Prussia (r. 1840–1861), Maximilian II, king of Bavaria (r. 1848–1864), and Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), all of whom admired his work. He tried to further a pragmatic conservatism that respected historical institutions while accommodating innovation. The historian Friedrich Meinecke interpreted his approach to nationalism as typical for his politics: he argued for maintaining the individual German states, and in particular Prussia with its conservative social order, in a larger German nation-state—which was in fact the goal Bismarck realized by 1871.

Ranke's history had the parallel aim of furthering his readers' insight into past historical eras. He was dismissive of theories of progress that made the past into a means to a final historical end. Instead he asserted in his private lectures for Maximilian II that "every era is next to God; its value depends not at all on what emerges from it, but on its own existence, its own self "(Ranke, 1979, p. 17). He particularly objected to what he considered G. W. F. Hegel's empty scholasticism for draining past eras of their individuality and meaning. Instead he was fascinated by the task of an impartial, dispassionate discovery of the specific structure of different historical eras, which could be recovered by means of intensive research in written sources. Not that Ranke believed the facts spoke for themselves: The famous statement (in the preface to the History of the Latin and Germanic Peoples) that he wished to write history "wie es eigentlich gewesen" ("as it really was"), was a protest against imposing ahistorical schemas on the past (Ranke, 1867–1890, vol. 33, p. vii). Taken out of context it belies the complexity of his efforts to understand previous times in an age of accelerating change. As George Iggers has noted, Ranke was not a narrow factmongerer, even if some of his American and German followers chose to interpret him in this way. Far from letting the facts speak for themselves, he selected and narrated with great artistic skill and readily employed concepts like "nation" and "state" as organizing principles. His histories were never chosen for their local interest, but had the high drama, as he related them, of chapters within a universal history of humankind, its meaning never wholly clear, its future unpredictable, but nonetheless in retrospect a meaningful story of ever richer political, religious and cultural life.

Ranke has been criticized by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and other historians for hiding conservative politics beneath an ideology of objectivity and contributing to the generally antidemocratic politics of the German historical profession before 1945. Peter Burke has argued that many varieties of social history flourished in the eighteenth century only to be excluded by Ranke's narrow preoccupation with diplomatic and political history. Rudolf Vierhaus has analyzed how Ranke's political conservatism made it impossible for him to come to terms with the class society and proletarian politics undermining the traditional social order, a limitation that carried over into his historical writing, which failed to conceptualize the novel social history of his own time. His narratives lack anything comparable to Karl Marx's analyses of capitalism or Alexis de Tocqueville's grappling with democracy in America. A distinctive feature of Ranke's work, however, is its cosmopolitanism. He published a history of Serbia, wrote about Turkish diplomacy, and immersed himself in French and English history; although he wrote about individual nations and states he strove to establish their significance, as Leonard Krieger has emphasized, within a unified world history. His works remain timely for their synthesis of sympathetic imagination and dedication to empirical accuracy, qualities that make them enduring classics for the historical profession.

See alsoBismarck, Otto von; Germany; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; History; Mommsen, Theodor; Nietzsche, Friedrich.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Ranke, Leopold von. Das Briefwerk. Edited and with an introduction by Walther Peter Fuchs. Hamburg, 1949.

——Über die Epochen der Neueren Geschichte and Das Politische Gespräch und Andere Schriften Zur Wissenschaftslehre. New York, 1979.

——Sämmtliche Werke, 3rd ed. Leipzig, 1867–1890.

Secondary Sources

Dove, Alfred. "Ranke, Leopold v." Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (1875–1912), vol. 27, 242–269. Reprint, Berlin, 1967–1971.

Iggers, Georg G., and James M. Powell, eds. Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline. Syracuse, N.Y., 1990.

Krieger, Leonard. Ranke: The Meaning of History. Chicago, 1977.

Liebersohn, Harry. "German Historical Thought from Ranke to Weber: The Primacy of Politics." In A Companion to Western Historical Thought, edited by Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza, 166–184. Oxford, U.K., 2002.

Meinecke, Friedrich. Cosmopolitanism and the National State. Translated by Robert B. Kimber. Introduction by Felix Gilbert. Princeton, N.J., 1970.

Mommsen, Wolfgang J., ed. Leopold von Ranke und die moderne Geschichtswissenschaft. Stuttgart, 1988.

Vierhaus, Rudolf. Ranke und die Soziale Welt. Münster/Westfalen, 1957.

Harry Liebersohn