Leopold von Ranke

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

7 min readDec 21, 2023

Today is the 228th 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.

Ranke’s influence in historiography is pervasive — one cannot avoid his influence, whether directly or through those who have reacted against him — but I don’t think his histories are much read today. That may be different for native German speakers (I don’t know any German historians to ask whether they actually read Ranke). Gibbon today is read both as a classic of history and as a classic of English prose style of the Enlightenment, and so retains a certain currency (admittedly, a limited currency) in the twenty-first century, but I doubt that Ranke is read to the same extent, which, however, has not limited his influence among historians, which is no doubt greater than that of Gibbon.

Because of Ranke’s influence, his legacy is endlessly debated. Some call him an historicist; some call him a realist; some call him an objectivist (though not in the Randian sense). Perhaps these labels, which imply a Rankean school of historiography are misleading — not because there is no Rankean school, but because it is history itself that is the contemporary Rankean school, and not some minor historiographical position held by a few outliers and malcontents. In his “Ranke in the Manuals on Historical Methods of Droysen, Lorenz, and Bernheim” (included in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, edited by Georg Iggers), Hans Schleier positions Ranke in the generation of historical professions to follow Ranke:

“Ranke’s historical methods and his historical thinking are crucial both to those thinkers who agree with him and those who reject him. This applies to the three scholars treated above, as well as to the entire German historical profession. The three historians presented incorporate, of course, different tendencies within idealistic German historicism. For this reason no sequence of generations in the succession of conceptions becomes apparent. One would have to establish a totally unchronological sequence from Bernheim to Droysen and Lorenz in terms of identification with Ranke on epistemological and methodological grounds. There is no alternative social science history to be found in Germany or in Austria, apart from Marxism, which was not permitted at the universities. There were only a very few systematic efforts made in this direction, as, for instance, in the work of the Viennese historian Ludo Moritz Hartmann…”

In a similar vein, John Nyarko writes:

“Leopold von Ranke was the first to establish a historical basis, and his academic methods and teachings greatly impacted Western historiography. He studied theology and classical studies at the University of Leipzig. Dedicated to the study of philology and the translation and interpretation of texts, he has greatly influenced the development of highly influential techniques of philology and historical text criticism.”

This, then, was the primary impact of Ranke, but beyond the professionalization of the history and its status within the academic milieu, Ranke’s philosophical position has been debated extensively, no doubt a function of his influence on the profession. It could be called something of an intellectual scandal that no one can definitively put their finger on Ranke’s philosophy of history, despite the fact that he is the Father of Scientific History. Helen Liebel wrote of Ranke (in her paper “Ranke’s Fragments on Universal History”) that,

“…he had imbibed the essential ideas of German idealist philosophy with its emphasis on seeking the true, living, idea within all concrete reality. And although the doctrine of ideas (Ideenlehre) represents the fundamental and necessary principle of Ranke’s philosophy of history, it was used primarily as an epistemological tool. The speculative Augustinian tradition of the Middle Ages always provided the framework for his historian’s goal. Ranke remained true to the form of the Augustinian and Christian idea of world history, centered as it was on the unfolding of a divine plan of salvation, although of course he did emphasize the secular content of history in his own work.”

There are many claims made in this paragraph, though, perhaps strangely, she never attributes any kind of scientism to Ranke the scientific historian. That Ranke should be situated within the German idealist tradition is familiar, but I don’t know of any others who have attributed to Ranke an Augustinian conception of history. Felix Gilbert in History: Politics or Sulture?: Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt addresses the idea of Ranke as a representative of German idealism:

“…he is said to have integrated into the study of the past the notions of German idealistic philosophy. Here the view is that there are forces at work in human existence and social life whereby ideas attain realization; and the task of the historian is to show the relationship of the struggles of the past to the ideas that stood behind them. Thus the historian has not only to set forth the story of past events but to reach for what is behind them — their meaning.”

Gilbert rightly notes that the meaning of Ranke’s most famous line — “wie es eigentlich gewesen” — is ambiguous when rendered into English, and this ambiguity accounts, at least in part, for the various interpretations of Ranke as a scientific historian or Ranke as a neo-Kantian:

“The difficulty lies in the ambivalence of the word eigentlich. Does Ranke say that he has limited himself to showing how it ‘essentially’ was, how it ‘really’ was, how it ‘actually’ was? These are the expressions that have been used to translate the word eigentlich into English. Essentially, and to a certain extent also really, seem to refer to a truth that lies beneath the surface of facts; the historian must penetrate this surface to get at the essence of events. On the other hand, translating eigentlich as ‘the actual past’ or ‘actually’ suggests that the final aim of the historian is the precise rendering of facts. The term eigentlich is of such an opaque character that all these translations seem possible. Thus the exact meaning of the statement seems uncertain, and this explains why the same statement could serve different, contradictory interpretations.”

Thus 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. So, for example, in another Liebel paper 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. This atomization of historical periods — along with the equally familiar Rankean dictum that, “…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” — makes each historical period ideally self-sufficient and 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) mean that there are multiple and overlapping epochs all immediate to God that derive their worth from their own existence, but this existence is shared with many other periods.

Further Resources

_________________________________________________________________