Ranke, Leopold Von

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Ranke, Leopold Von

Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) is one of the great figures of European nineteenth-century scholarship and a founder of modern historical science. The son of a lawyer in a small town of Thuringia, he graduated from Schulpforta, one of the most renowned public schools of Germany, and studied philology and theology at the University of Leipzig. In 1818 he became a teacher of classical languages in the high school (Gymnasium) in Frankfurt on the Oder. In 1824 his first book, the History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, appeared and immediately brought him wide recognition. Ranke was appointed professor at the University of Berlin and received a travel grant from the Prussian government that permitted him to spend four years abroad, mainly in Italy—decisive years for the development of his historical views. He returned to Berlin in 1831 and, with the exception of extended trips for research in German, French, and English archives, he spent the rest of his life in Berlin. In the historical seminars that he made an essential part of the education of a young historian he trained most of the better-known German historians of the nineteenth century. Ranke retired from teaching in 1871 but continued to work on a last great enterprise, a world history. When he died in 1886, ennobled by the king of Prussia and laden with honors from all countries of the world, he was generally recognized as the greatest historical scholar of the modern world.

Ranke’s collected works comprise 54 volumes. Most famous among them are his history of the popes (1834–1836), his history of the Reformation in Germany (1839–1847), his works on French history (1852) and on English history (1859–1869), and his 12 volumes on Prussian history (1847–1848). All of them focus on developments from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century; they show that Ranke’s main attainment was to provide a scientific basis for the study of modern history.

Ranke’s most important innovation was the introduction of a critical historical method. In an appendix to his first work, the History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, which was concerned with the development of a European state system around 1500, Ranke showed that the historical works by contemporaries, on which previous treatments of this period were based, were vitiated by personal and political prejudices and should be used only with great caution. When Ranke was in Italy he discovered the reports that Venetian ambassadors delivered before the Senate after their return from their diplomatic missions and realized that such materials of an official character, produced in the course of the conduct of affairs, were far superior to narrative sources as tools for discovering the truth about the past. Thus he established that the materials from which the historian should construct his history ought to be, wherever possible, documentary sources. Both the proposition that serious history ought to be based on archival research and the large-scale publications of documentary source materials that were started in the nineteenth century have their origin in Ranke’s adoption of a new critical method.

This methodological innovation sprang from Ranke’s general notions about the task of the historian: “to show what actually happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). This statement sounds simple and matter-of-course, but it was meant to be a challenge to the philosophies of history of the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly the philosophy of Hegel. According to Ranke, history has no final aim that can be abstractly defined and is not an ascending process in which the later period is always superior to the earlier one. Ranke thought that it is almost sacrilegious for man to believe that he can grasp God’s providential plan, but he did believe that history helps reveal the working of God by demonstrating the richness and variety of life. Thus the statement that the historian ought “to show what actually happened” was complementary to another famous pronouncement by Ranke—that “each period is equally close to God.”

For Ranke each period of history has its own individual features: it is unique. Each period, almost each historical phenomenon, reflects a distinctive “idea.” His own deeply religious feeling, his romantic enthusiasm for the “abyss of individuality,” as well as Platonic influences—all combined to form Ranke’s view of the role of “ideas” in history. He had a very fine understanding of the manner in which the various activities of a period —political, literary, intellectual—are permeated by the same spirit and express the same “idea.”

Despite his understanding of the interrelation of all these spheres, Ranke was chiefly a political and diplomatic historian. He belonged to the age of rising nationalism, and his interests were focused on the great powers that were the political embodiments of the spirits of the various European nations. He saw these powers as individualities, as expressions of different “ideas.” The clearest formulation of these views can be found in his essay entitled “A Dialogue on Politics,” published in 1836 in the periodical Historisch—Politische Zeitschrift, which Ranke himself edited and which represented one of his few ventures into the field of practical politics. In the essay Ranke defended the existing governments against the revolutionary movements of 1830 and explained that liberalism could not set a generally valid political pattern because each state was a living organism, an individuality, and must have its own particular institutional forms. The events of foreign policy must form the central interest of the historian because the great powers developed their particular individualities during, and by means of, struggles against each other. Ranke never used the expression “primacy of foreign policy,” but the doctrine that is signified by this term—that external pressure forms and determines the internal structure of a state—is implied in his works. Because Ranke was principally concerned with foreign policy, he had little understanding of the importance of the changes that industrialization brought about in his own century. Ranke was fundamentally conservative.

Ranke’s views are incompatible with the aims of the modern social sciences. He rejected the possibility of laws of social development and of patterns generally applicable to social action or behavior. He was a great writer, and his books are not simply histories but also works of literature. Nevertheless, the turn he gave to the development of historical scholarship did have an influence on the development of the social sciences in that his views were a decisive factor in “professionalizing” history. History became an academic subject that required specialized training, and archival research and the editing of source materials became a great part of the activity of a historian. Although originally such efforts focused on sources for the history of foreign affairs, they soon extended to other aspects of the past: the sources for institutional, economic, and social developments. Thus historical scholarship has produced significant material for all kinds of social research. Moreover, by emphasizing the particular and individual character of each period of the past, Ranke implicitly suggested the existence of a relativity of values and helped to remove the barriers that had prevented an understanding of foreign cultures.

Felix Gilbert

[Directly related are the entriesHistoriography; History. Other relevant material may be found in the biography ofRobinson.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Von Laue 1950 gives a description of Ranke’s early intellectual development and contains a bibliographical essay. The intellectual roots of Ranke’s views on history have been analyzed in Meinecke 1936. See Vierhaus 1957 for Ranke’s views on social developments and social history, and for Ranke’s part in the professionalization of history see Higham et al. 1965.

WORKS BY RANKE

(1812–1885) 1964 Aus Werk und Nachlass. Volume 1: Tagebiicher. Edited by Walther Peter Fuchs. Munich: Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. ? The first volume of a projected set of Ranke’s previously unpublished works.

(1814–1886a) 1949 Neue Briefe. Edited by Bernhard Hoeft and Hans Herzfeld. Hamburg (Germany): Hoffmann & Campe.

(1814–1886b) 1949 Das Briefwerk. Edited by Walther P. Fuchs. Hamburg (Germany): Hoffmann & Campe.

(1824) 1909 History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations (1494–1514). London: Bell. ? First published as Ge-schichte der romanischen und germanischen Volker von 1494 bis 1514.

(1833) 1950 The Great Powers. Pages 181–218 in Theodore H. Von Laue, Leopold Ranke: The Formative Years. Princeton Univ. Press. ? First published as “Die grossen Mächte.”

(1834–1836) 1912 The History of the Popes During the Last Four Centuries. 3 vols. London: Bell. ? First published as Die römischen Päpste in den letzten 4 Jahrhunderten.

(1836) 1950 A Dialogue on Politics. Pages 152–180 in Theodore H. Von Laue, Leopold Ranke: The Formative Years. Princeton Univ. Press. ? First published as “Politisches Gesprach” in Volume 1/2 of the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift.

(1839–1847) 1905 History of the Reformation in Germany. New York: Dutton. ? First published as Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation.

(1847–1848) 1930 Zuöblf Bücher preussischer Geschichte. 5 vols. Munich: Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. ? An enlarged edition of the Neun Bucher preussischer Geschichte.

1852 Civil Wars and Monarchy in France, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A History of France Principally During That Period. 2 vols. London: Bentley. ? First published as Franzbsische Geschichte in five volumes. The English translation was never completed.

(1859–1869) 1966 A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. ? First published as Englische Geschichte, vornehmlich im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert.

Sämmtliche Werke. 54 vols. 3d ed. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. 1875–1900.

(1881–1888) 1882–1902 Weltgeschichte. 9 vols. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.