Diverging Interpretations of Ranke’s Methodology
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Saturday 21 December 2024 is the 229th anniversary of the birth of Leopold von Ranke (21 December 1795–23 May 1886), who was born in Wiehe in Saxony, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, on this date in 1795.
It would be entirely possible to pass your entire life, even a scholarly life, and to have never heard of Ranke, but, if you read any historiography at all, you will rapidly come to realize that Ranke has been and is a significant point of reference in historiography. Outside historiography Ranke is almost unknown, but in historiography his influence is pervasive. Many historians consider Ranke to have been the individual to establish modern historical methods, and some say that he was the one to make history scientific, so you could say that Ranke and Buckle vie for the title of Father of Scientific History, though the scientificity each sought to bring to history was different in the two instances. It’s more common to hear Ranke called the Father of Modern History rather than the Father of Scientific History, although Herbert B. Adams did call Ranke this.
Ranke not only established modern historical methodology, he also wrote a great many histories based on his methodology. The method Ranke formalized involves the now-familiar ranking of sources — primary, secondary, and tertiary — and prioritizing primary sources. Furthermore, among primary sources, sources from direct observers of the events in question should be prioritized. To effectively achieve these ranking of sources we have to be able to precisely date them, so we know which sources are contemporaneous with given events. A careful distinction is also made between fact and interpretation. The historian’s primary duty is to establish facts, and only when the facts are clear to furnish an interpretation of the facts. Every factual claim should be established based on a primary source, and the source should be cited in some uniform style so that any other scholar can trace any claim in a history to its source.
Of course, these research and writing methods were in development long before Ranke. In my episode on Paul Veyne I mentioned Veyne’s book Did the Greeks Believe In Their Myths? in which Veyne discusses the beginnings of this historical methodology, and the change in attitude from waiting for time and tradition to confer its own authority on a history, to a proof of historical events the reader is effectively coerced into accepting by the scholarly apparatus. Gibbon also made extensive use of citations and footnotes. But it was Ranke who brought these methods together and gave them their definitive form.
Even though Ranke’s influence has been pervasive, it’s also ambiguous because his work has been given different interpretations. The ambiguous character of Ranke’s influence has been noted by Felix Gilbert in his 1987 paper “What Ranke Meant.” For Gilbert, the different streams of Ranke’s influence are the interpretation of his work as a fundamental contribution to scientific history, and the equally prevalent interpretation of his work as being inevitably linked to German idealism. I say “inevitably” because Ranke was part of the German cultural sphere, he was a contemporary and Fichte and Hegel, and he sometimes employed concepts familiar from this tradition. German academic life was pervasively neo-Kantian in the latter half of the 19th century, and many interpreters of Ranke have sought to demonstrate this neo-Kantian influence.
But this isn’t the only source of the ambiguity of Ranke’s influence. Another dichotomy we can find in Ranke’s legacy is what could be called the division between relativism and absolutism. It would be possible to characterize Ranke’s work as being an example of extreme relativism or as an example of extreme conservativism, or even of providentialism, and I will try to explain why that is. Before getting to an exposition of a distinction between relativistic and absolutist interpretations of Ranke, I need to talk about Ranke’s most influential statement.
For an historian who wrote so many volumes, it’s ironic that Ranke is primarily remembered for four words, the last four words of this sentence:
“Man hat der Historie das Amt, die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt zum Nutzen zukuenftiger Jahre zu belehren, beigemessen: so hoher Aemter unterwindet sich gegenwaertiger Versuch nicht: er will blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen.”
As translated into English:
“People have given History the function of judging the past, to serve the world for the instruction of years to come; but nothing beyond the present investigation will be attempted here — it will simply explain the event exactly as it happened.”
The last four words of Ranke’s above sentence in the original German — wie es eigentlich gewesen — became an unlikely slogan among historians. It has been translated many different ways, such as, “the way it really was” and “how it really was” and “as it actually was,” and after this became a rallying cry for a generation of historians, it later then became a stalking horse for a later generation of historians who sought to rebel against their elders. This sentence is from his Preface to the First Edition of Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples, originally published in October 1824, and which can be found in a collection of Ranke’s methodological writings collected and translated into English as, The Theory and Practice of History, edited with an introduction by Georg G. Iggers, translated by Wilma A. Iggers. An English translation can also be found in Fritz Stern’s widely available anthology, The Varieties of History. The Iggers volume also includes some occasional pieces in which Ranke touches on issues of significance for historiography and philosophy of history, from which I will quote further along.
I said that “the way it really was” was an unlikely slogan partly because the idea of history simply being an account of what really happened is obviously not a new idea. How could it be? In his 1950 presidential address to the American Historical Society, Samuel Eliot Morison noted anticipations of the idea in Alexander von Humboldt and Thucydides:
“He picked up the phrase, I imagine, from Wilhelm von Humboldt, who, in an address to the Prussian Academy three years earlier, declared the proper function of history to be ‘the exposition of what has happened.’2 Some 2200 years earlier, Thucydides wrote, ‘The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest. But if he who desires to have before his eyes a true picture of the events which have happened, and of the like events which may be expected to happen hereafter . . . shall pronounce what I have written to be useful, then I shall be satisfied.’3”
Central to Ranke’s conception of history as telling it like it was means abstaining from judgment. This would later come to be called the objectivity question in history. Ranke didn’t frame this in terms of objectivity, but I think this coincides with his intention. Historical objectivity may seem like common sense to some of us, but before Ranke many historians saw the purpose of history as rendering judgment upon the past — what Nietzsche would call “critical history.” And this tradition, or even, we could say, this need to morally judge the past, was kept alive by Ranke’s younger contemporary Lord Acton, who insisted upon history’s moral judgment of the past, and who criticized Buckle’s effort to formulate a scientific history precisely because it involved a rejection of the moral judgments Lord Acton believed to be the motivation and purpose of history. Not surprisingly, Herbert Buttefield has published a number of posthumous fragments from Lord Acton in his book Man on His Past that are highly critical of Ranke.
For Ranke, telling it like it was in history means rejecting much of the historical tradition, the tradition of moralizing history, but there was more going on with the use of this slogan than the rejection of moralistic history. Ranke’s “wie es eigentlich gewesen” has meant many things to many historians. Because the line is so familiar among historians, we often encounter variations on the theme, attempting to make a point by trading on Ranke’s influence. So, for example, in a 1964 paper by Helen P. Liebel, “Philosophical Idealism in the Historische Zeitschrift, 1859–1914,” she cites one such variation:
“Von Below pointed out that Lamprecht was mistaken in assuming that German historians were not evolutionist enough in their approach and that they were interested merely in descriptive history, in Ranke’s precept ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen ist,’ rather than in ‘wie es eigentlich geworden sei.’ In reality the concept of ‘how it was’ implied that of ‘how it had become’.”
However we interpret “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” we can see that making the central question of history something like, “What was it really like?” is going to render a different kind of history than if we were to make the central question of history “How did it become like that?” or “How did it turn out?” Ranke’s method focused a spotlight on the historical period itself, and not the origins of the period or the consequences of the period. We could call this an atomization of historical periods, and there is another famous remark of Ranke that further underlines this:
“…every epoch is immediate to God, and its worth is not at all based on what derives from it but rests in its own existence, in its own self. In this way the contemplation of history, that is to say of individual life in history, acquires its own particular attraction, since now every epoch must be seen as something valid in itself and appears highly worthy of consideration.” (p. 21)
Sometimes this passage is translated as “all epochs being equidistant from God.” I don’t have the German text of this handy so I can’t tell you what the wording is in the original, but immediacy and equidistance strike me as two clearly distinct concepts. In any case, this atomization of historical periods makes each historical period ideally self-sufficient and, in a sense, cut off from other periods. I find it strange that historians have not drawn attention to the burden that this places on periodization, as distinct periodizations (and there are many of them) mean that there are multiple and overlapping epochs all immediate to God that each derive their worth from their own existence, but this existence is shared with many other periods. Moreover, historical periods are usually defined by some implicit conceptual unity of the historical period in question taken as a whole. Historians are likely to stress dates and durations, but really it’s the thematic unity of a sequence of events that defines an historical period.
We can make a distinction between Ranke’s historical methodology, which is the familiar method that academic historians still employ today, and Ranke’s philosophical methodology, which, we have seen, consists of objectivity, atomization of historical periods, and an equal relationship to God. Together these philosophical aspects of historical methodology constitute one of the main currents of historicism, of which Ranke is the founder, but which we must distinguish from the other main current of historicism, identified by Karl Popper, according to which history is a theoretical science that makes predictions. On the one hand, we could argue that these two traditions of historicism, if that’s what they are, imply each other, so they really aren’t as separate as I am making them out to be. On the other hand, Ranke anticipates the distinction between nomothetic science and idiographic science, which we find much more fully developed later in Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. In a manuscript from the 1830s, “On the Relations of History and Philosophy,” Ranke wrote:
“There are two ways of acquiring knowledge about human affairs — through the perception of the particular and through abstraction. The one is the way of philosophy, the other that of history. There is no other way, and even revelation encompasses both abstract doctrines and history. These two sources of knowledge are therefore to be kept clearly distinguished. Nevertheless, equally mistaken are those historians who view all of history merely as an immense aggregate of facts to be committed to memory, meaning that particulars are strung to particulars and all of these held together only by a common moral principle. I am of the opinion, rather, that historical science at its best is both called upon and able to rise in its own way from the investigation and contemplation of the particular to a general view of events and to the recognition of their objectively existing relatedness.”
What this means is that, insofar as history is an idiographic science, as Windelband and Rickert thought, it isn’t a nomothetic science in the sense that Popper seems to give to his conception of a theoretical science capable of making predictions. Therefore, the tradition of historicism that understands history to be a nomothetic science must be distinct from the conception of historicism that understands history as an idiographic science, which appears to be Ranke’s position, at least to some extent. But, as we can also see, at the same time Ranke anticipated the distinction, he also suggests that there is a way to transcend it.
Now, to return to what I said earlier, that Ranke can be understood as an extreme relativist verging on nihilism or an extreme absolutism, verging on providentialism, I’m now in a position to explain this claim. If we take Ranke’s claim that all epochs are immediate to God to mean that all epochs are equal, and each is to be judged on its own terms, internal to that epoch alone, then we get relativism. On this interpretation, there is no coordination or integration of epochs, no transcendent standard by which they are all to be judged. Historical periods are absolute unto themselves, but each it is own absolute, and these disjoint absolutes add up to an absolute relativism in which nothing can be asserted that is not essentially tied to some historical epoch, and, apart from which any such assertion is meaningless. The further we pursue this line of reasoning, the closer we approximate nihilism.
However, if we take Ranke’s claim that all epochs are immediate to God to mean that all are equally to be judged by a divine standard that equally transcends all epochs, then all ages are subject to an absolute standard. Each and every age, while valid in itself, can be assessed and compared according to divine standards, though whether the historian can ever assume this God’s eye view of history is not something Ranke addresses. This is a position adjacent to providentialism, though it isn’t the providentialism we find in St. Augustine, Paulus Orosius, or Jacque-Benign Bossuet. Several sources suggest that Ranke was serious about his religious beliefs, which implies the second of the two interpretations I have given here. This distinction in regard to Ranke’s claim has also been made by Peter Munz, in his translator’s introduction to Heinrich Fichtenau’s The Carolingian Empire: The Age of Charlemagne, and who also favors the second interpretation:
“Ranke once said that every age stands in an absolute relation to God. He presumably meant by this statement to stress that we should not think of history as a story of progress and that, we cannot find in history an ever progressive and ever more perfect solution of human problems. Unfortunately, there are too many historians who have given a different sense to Ranke’s statement. They write history as if every age found its solution to human problems and thus embodied a set of values of its own. This approach to history is hardly realistic for it ignores what we can observe so readily in our own age and what is, presumably, the case in every other age — namely the fact that the history of an age is not the history of a solution of a number of problems, but the history of the struggle between several possible solutions, and of the way in which men working towards certain solutions are constantly deflected from their paths by other men working for other solutions.” (Heinrich Fichtenau, introduction to The Carolingian Empire: The Age of Charlemagne, translated by Peter Munz, First Harper Torchbook edition, 1964, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 1957, xiii-xiv.)
Munz here goes beyond the point I was making, but his distinction is quite similar the distinction I’ve been trying to draw. The additional distinction Munz makes between each age as embodying a unique set of values and each age as embodying a struggle between competing solutions is easily reconciled: we can’t really disagree on a solution unless we agree on the problem, so each age can be considered a problem set of history, for which there are competing solutions. When one age passes and a new age begins, what seemed like essential problems suddenly fall away while new problems take their place, and the subsequent age is defined by the tensions over the competing solutions to this new problem set. This should be obvious enough from the fact that contemporary politics is not torn by the investiture controversy, and we no longer go to war over conflicting interpretations of the beatific vision. None of this is in Ranke, but it’s an interesting idea, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
What we do find in Ranke is something that we could call a reverence for the integrity of each epoch. To explain the event exactly as it happened, implies that each event, and each sequence of events, has a metaphysical integrity, and it is the duty of the historian to respect this metaphysical integrity of the event. Under this interpretation, moral judgment is not alienated from Ranke’s conception of history, but it is displaced from moral judgment upon an epoch to moral judgment upon the historian of an epoch. The task of the historian is still a moral task, but it is to judge himself, and not to judge the age whose history he writes.
When I said just before that there’s a metaphysical integrity of an event and of a sequence of events that it’s the historian’s moral duty to respect, I was making an implicit reference to a passage from Matthew Crawford, who wrote something that made a real impression on me some years ago. In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, Crawford, who works as a motorcycle mechanic, wrote about: “…the moral tension I’d like to describe between a mechanic’s metaphysical responsibility to the machine and his fiduciary responsibility to its owner.” In other words, the mechanic has a responsibility to the owner in terms of letting them know the options for repair and how much it’s all going to cost. But there is also the issue of making a repair that is true to the machine itself, apart from this fiduciary responsibility to the owner. These two responsibilities may come into conflict when making a repair that is true to integrity of the motorcycle is not what the owner of the motorcycle wants, or perhaps isn’t in the best interest of the owner. A proper repair is likely to be expensive, while some compromise may do the job almost as well.
A page or two earlier Crawford referred to “your metaphysical responsibility to the bike itself.” Being true to the machine itself, for its own sake, is the mechanic’s metaphysical responsibility to the machine. Taking this as my point of departure, I argue that we have a metaphysical responsibility to the metaphysical integrity of the machine itself as an autonomous existent, and that this metaphysical integrity is a form of wholeness and a form of authenticity. A machine, then, is a whole, and that whole commands our metaphysical responsibility to respect its metaphysical integrity, to keep it whole and to keep it true to itself, which is its authenticity. What I am suggesting is that this sense of metaphysical integrity I have derived from Crawford’s sense of a metaphysical responsibility to machines can also be attributed, mutatis mutandis, to history, which, like a machine, is a complex whole composed of many parts, and to be true to the whole means being true to the parts, true to the relationship of the parts to each other, and true to the relationship of the parts to the whole.
Whether reverence for the metaphysical integrity of history is a religious reverence, taking literally the immediacy of all ages to God, or a moral reverence for the duty of the historian, or a quasi-scientific reverence for history parallel to the kind of reverence that scientists feel for nature, could be the basis for another distinction, and another set of interpretations of Ranke. I don’t think these senses need to be kept separate, as each can be understood as an aspect of the other. Bringing these senses of reverence together constitutes another kind of metaphysical integrity that transcends the metaphysical integrities of the subordinate wholes comprehended within the greater whole. The individual epochs that Ranke thought immediate to or equidistant from God are the subordinate wholes that find their place within the greater whole of history, and just as we have a metaphysical responsibility to the subordinate wholes, we have at least an equal metaphysical responsibility to the greater whole within which individual epochs are incorporated.
