Leopold von Ranke
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 226th anniversary of the birth of Leopold von Ranke (21 December 1795–23 May 1886), who was born on this date in 1795.
It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Ranke on history. Here is a sketch of Ranke’s influence from Ranke: The Meaning of History by Leonard Krieger:
“Ranke’s then, is one of the great names in the history of history. His reputation stems not only from historians’ explicit attribution to him of a decisive new direction within their discipline but from his representation of the discipline to the culture at large, plotting a new role for history in that culture. The outer marks of his accomplishments have become truisms in the profession and models of the profession for those outside it. He propounded a science of history, based upon the critical study of its sources and upon the organization of these sources into a hierarchy with its apex in the original document contemporary with the historicized ; event, as close as possible to the historical actor and as distant as possible from the historian. He developed a method for this critical, study, using all possible knowledge of the source to discredit distortions of it and to isolate its true content. He directed this method to the materials of modern history (to history, that is, since the beginning of the sixteenth century), thereby detaching the method from its association with philology, law, and theology in ancient and medieval history, making its modern application a model for universal history, and thus turning it into an autonomous method coextensive with the liberated historical discipline as such. He exemplified his methodical scientific history in a stupendous series of historical works which traversed the histories of the chief European nations between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, each in its own terms and from sources appropriate to it, leading up to the climactic and long anticipated attempt at a universal history — in all a massive performance occupying the bulk of the fifty-four volumes which comprise the incomplete edition of his collected works. Ranke devised, finally, the educational institution appropriate to the perpetuation of his new science — the historical seminar, or ‘exercises,’ as he revealingly called it, in which students practiced the new critical history under the supervision of the master.”
For an historian who wrote so many volumes, it is 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.”
And in 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 — 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 become a rallying cry for a generation of historians, it later became a stalking horse for a later generation of historians who sought to rebel against their elders.
I say that this was an unlikely slogan partly because the idea of history simply being an account of what really happened is 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.
The sentence from Ranke quoted above is from his Preface to the First Edition of Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples (October 1824), which can be found in Leopold von Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History, edited with an introduction by Georg G. Iggers, newly translated by Wilma A. Iggers. This volume contains some occasional pieces in which Ranke touches on issues of significance for historiography and philosophy of history.
The concluding paragraph of “The Pitfalls of a Philosophy of history” in the above volume casts further light on Ranke’s wie es eigentlich gewesen:
“The task is to a certain extent expressed in the two German words used to designate our discipline: Geschichte or Historie. Geschichte is merely the noun for ‘what happened’ (Geschehen). ‘What happened’ must coincide completely with science. Conversely, ίστορίά originally meant knowledge (Wissen) or cognition (Erkenntnis) — on, as Aristotle once said, but διότι: therefore the misuse of the word in ‘natural history’ (Naturgeschichte), which is merely a translation. The word Geschichte expresses more the objective, Historie more the subjective, relationship. The former raises the subject matter (Sache) to a science. In the latter case the science admits the subject matter (Gegenstand) into itself. They coincide with each other, or rather the great task consists in having them coincide.”
Another essay in the same volume, “On the Relations of History and Philosophy” is something of an anticipation of the distinction made by Windelband and Rickert between the method of history as contrasted to the methods of other sciences, but Ranke here also suggests that there is a way to transcend this distinction:
“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.”
It should be noted that many philosophers of history trace the origins of historicism to Ranke, but historicism has meant so many different things to different persons that one would need to define exactly what is understood by “historicism” when this is attributed to Ranke.
Further Resources
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Ranke
https://archive.org/details/universalhistor00rank/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI1GgZwiS_c
