nm0087: okay Leopold von Ranke he's dead and he's German but do we need to know 
more about him well we probably do even though he's not a historian who is read 
all that much today perhaps more than most historians of that time i should er 
add at this point by the way before i claim any er credit or otherwise that the 
lecture i'm about to give is actually the lecture normally given by Dr namex 
who's kindly given me his lecture notes and while i've added one or two details 
the er substance of the lecture today is almost all his so er he's with us in 
spirit and er any questions that you have should probably be directed to him 
rather than me as he is the er the only begetter of this lecture so er namex 
actually told me the other day that Ranke some of his writings on diplomatic 
history in the late nineteenth century is still someone whom he recommend to 
students to read on various subjects and so it is the case that some of what 
he's written is still read 
today as history but that's not probably the main reason that we we er we ask 
you to look at him in this historiography course er in nineteen-ninety-nine 
other things which owe a lot to his influence perhaps are not so immediately 
obvious but the fact for instance that you've been studying for most of the 
last two-and-a-half years in seminar groups and the fact that you've er learned 
how to use the footnote function on Microsoft Word are indirectly tributes to 
Ranke who was one of the most important er historians in using these new as 
they were in the nineteenth century new methods to try and put forward a new 
scientific type of history getting away from the more sort of romantic and 
unobjective sort of history that had existed before he didn't invent these 
methods but he was very influential in popularizing them so er seminars and er 
footnotes are at least some of the er the legacies of Ranke you might say in 
the lecture plan that you'll see on the er the 
handout i'll just briefly go through what we're going to go through today first 
of all we're going to talk a little bit about who Ranke was where he came from 
what his intellectual background was and why he decided to become a historian 
we'll then talk a bit about the way in which he studied history which is 
probably the most important thing you'll take away i hope from the lecture but 
also from your reading and your seminars on Ranke in other words the ideas that 
changed the way in which historians think about history we'll talk a bit about 
the kind of history that went before and therefore what Ranke was er reacting 
against and then we'll finish off by talking a bit about the dangers with er 
the methods that Ranke wanted to put forward so that's the er plan for today 
and if you look at the back of the lecture sheet you can see how we'll map 
through that Ranke was probably the most prolific and most influential 
professor of history anywhere in Europe in the 
nineteenth century his ideas lived on into into of the er works of a lot of 
twentieth century historians including Geoffrey Elton who you may have come 
across in your reading before relatively conservative British historian 
although others of his ideas already were beginning to look old hat during the 
nineteenth century he wrote a lot he lived for ninety years admittedly but even 
during that time he still managed to publish sixty-three very large volumes of 
history which is er pretty good going and er in this century six more volumes 
were published after his death of his lectures diaries and correspondence so 
there's a great deal of Ranke's writing out there all of which you'll be 
expected to read of course by the end of next week for the seminar [laughter] 
he er for the last fifteen years of his life was blind and he relied on er 
dictating to scribes who would write down what he was saying including er his 
nine volumes of Ranke's world history which er oddly enough 
was actually unfinished by his death and only reached the early modern period 
all of his life he wanted to write world history and here you have this whole 
kind of stream of thinking which you know about from previous courses the 
Enlightenment and so on very much influencing people like Ranke everyone trying 
to find the ultimate knowledge that would let you solve anything the whole sort 
of er legacy of the er the age of reason there however on his way towards this 
world history in the previous sort of sixty-odd years Ranke was diverted into 
writing numerous national histories which were going to be the sort of building 
blocks for this ultimate universal history that he was planning to write his 
quality has to be judged by the multivolume works of his mature period and 
these are the histories of the papacy of Germany in the age of Reformation and 
also of England and France in early modern times his motto for what he was 
doing was labor ipse voluptas meaning work 
itself is pleasure with the kind of hint that word voluptas if any of you sort 
of done Latin will know that it means sort of kind of pleasure of an almost 
sort of erotic and sexual kind you may or may not wish to relate that to the 
fact that he didn't actually get married till he was forty-eight [laughter] and 
he used to write letters to his brother about caressing documents in the 
archives [laughter] as if they were loved ones now one critic Krieger er put a 
Freudian kind of spin on this and er other statements he made trying to show 
that this showed that Ranke was sort of you know er you know getting off with 
these documents instead of off er with er with his wife but er it is entirely 
possible of course that he may be making a joke this is something that Freudian 
critics don't always er take on board and er the critic er Nicholas er i think 
it's Nicholas Kenyon pointed out in a review of Krieger that quotes just as 
Ranke needed to write history for 
self-fulfillment so he needed also to torment himself on his motives for doing 
so so a very kind of you know Freudian thing there you know kind of the 
pleasure and the pain all together and certainly although there must have been 
pleasure there must have been an awful lot of pain in writing sixty-three fat 
volumes of history as well the one thing he didn't write a whole volume on ever 
which is a bit ironic from the point of view of this course is on what he 
thought he was doing on the nature of history he only wrote fragments about 
this subject in the prefaces to his main works in some in the lectures he 
sometimes gave and in occasional essays so we're basically putting together all 
these other bits of evidence to try and produce a picture of what Ranke 
actually thought about the way you should write history in that picture there 
are two main ideas that you need to keep in mind first of all Ranke was not 
just a fact man he wasn't just 
sitting there writing down you know kind of a narrative of this happened in 
sixteen-eighty-four and then this happened in sixteen-eighty-five and all that 
sort of thing he was not just doing that er he was not just doing a sort of 
political narrative the second point to keep in mind which is related to that 
is that rather like Karl Marx Ranke had stages as a thinker so there's an early 
Ranke a middle Ranke and a late Ranke just as people talk about late Marx or 
early Marx early Ranke is probably up till about eighteen-thirty the mature 
Ranke is about eighteen-thirty to the early eighteen-sixties and the late Ranke 
er as interpreted by the later Rankeans in other words his pupils was er after 
the eighteen-sixties until his death now obviously the people who came last 
people like his students were trying to later suggest that what he believed 
late in his life was what he believed all of his life sort of airbrushing over 
the past but we need to actually get 
back and look at what he was saying throughout his life to understand how his 
thought developed and of course the one thing you cannot expect i'm sure you 
wouldn't expect is that the man's going to be completely consistent for the 
entire sixty-odd years that he was writing history 'cause he was constantly 
rethinking his approach and so you will find contradictions in what he said 
about history what we can do today is to draw attention to certain themes that 
preoccupied Ranke throughout his career and occasional glances at the way in 
which that that changed so we're going to look at the way in which he was a 
product of his time the nature degree of originality of his contribution to the 
development of historical studies the philosophical underpinning of his method 
and the dangers and shortcoming er presented okay let's talk now a bit a ben 
then about Ranke's life particularly his background he was very largely 
influenced by his religious upbringing and 
that's important to know as well as that the political events of a century er 
most of which he experienced 'cause he lived throughout most of the nineteenth 
century and of course his educational training was important too so first his 
forefathers in the male line were all Lutheran pastors with the exception of 
his father who was a lawyer but Ranke himself was not an orthodox Lutheran he 
disliked the institutions of the contemporary church and its doctrine which at 
that time was supported by highly rationalist arguments and again this is the 
legacy of the Enlightenment and so on Ranke was not rationalist in that very 
strict sense he was more in the sort of mystical tradition pietist you might 
say saying that you couldn't know God through doctrine you had to know him 
through history in other words Ranke saw the hand of God at work in history in 
namex's notes say rather like Maradona so er so that's the comparison that came 
to his mind therefore for 
Ranke history was a holy hieroglyph whose deciphering was in effect a sacred 
priestly type of calling historical writing wrote Ranke is an office which can 
only be compared to that of the priest and it was his er in a sense his 
religious calling really rather more than any of the supposed sexual urges that 
were sublimated in his work as a historian in other words he wasn't going to 
become a priest so he but he did decide to become a historian there's two 
aspects of th-, of the same part of his character okay what was going on around 
Ranke then well his early life cons-, coincided with the French Revolution 
followed of course by Napoleon's invasion of the German states including Saxony 
where Ranke was born and then of course the Restoration of eighteen-fifteen now 
all of these events war turmoil revolution and 
so on actually turned him into a very conservative character he had a big s-, a 
great suspicion of Enlightenment ideas which we may think are all about 
rationality and so on but Ranke saw the result of and he held them responsible 
for political chaos so he believed therefore in an allegiance to the monarchy 
and the principle of the balance of power which was of course famously the 
result of the eighteen-fifteen political settlement and you know the famous 
thing supposedly is that it kept the broad peace in Europe for ninety-nine 
years until the outbreak of the First World War and that was fine as far as 
Ranke went the career of Napoleon who again obviously Ranke had looked at with 
some interest gave pause for thought that great men could influence the cause 
er the course of history because Napoleon's defeat showed that forces of 
continuity were at work in the states and the nations that were able to resist 
Napoleon's attack but that also history could 
sometimes at least temporarily be diverted from its course by an individual who 
had sufficient greatness in other words history's always kind of going in a 
straight line in effect but someone like Napoleon can briefly wrench it to the 
side and the other forces of order have to sort of work quite hard to bring it 
back Ranke's drift towards this conservative position was reinforced by the 
threats posed by the July revolution of eighteen-thirty and the revolutionary 
outbreaks of eighteen-forty-eight and then of course by the unification of 
Germany in eighteen-seventy-one at first he had not been in favour of this 
because it excluded Austria which he thought ought to have been included now 
because Ranke served the Prussian monarchy in various capacities and had 
regular correspondence with the king of Bavaria and the foreign ministers of 
Prussia and Austria and later even with Bismarck Karl Marx once rather 
contemptuously called him quotes a born 
palace servant in other words kind of a a li-, er a lickspittle there's an 
element of truth in this accusation although it's true also that Ranke turned 
to the Prussian government mainly because it was willing to give him financial 
support for his research abroad which his institution the University of Berlin 
which he was a professor at refused to do nothing much changes if you ever try 
and get research money out of this university you'd find it er equally hard not 
that i've yet been er asked to go and er er play lickspittle to Tony Blair and 
get money in return for it but one can always live in hope so Ranke's loyalty 
to the Prussian state was not therefore unqualified it was partly to do with 
their sponsorship of him okay let's think then about what it was that Ranke was 
studying at university now he had trained as a philologist he applied textual 
criticism which was something that had been developing since the Renaissance he 
applied it to the 
study of literature and then moved from literature to taking a textual analysis 
of the ancient historian Thucydides and then later the works of Martin Luther 
he only became a historian of the more modern era later on he first of all 
became a school teacher applying the skills he had learned earlier to modern 
historical sources he also reacted at this point against what you might call 
the philosophical school of historians and we'll say a bit more about that 
later on and also against the Romantic historians of whom the most foremost was 
the British er writer Sir Walter Scott between about eighteen-ten and eighteen-
twenty-three Sir Walter Scott's works swept across Europe and er Ranke disliked 
intensely the ways in which he saw correctly that Scott had either distorted 
his sources or relied on them so slavishly that he refused to criticize them 
and suggest that maybe they weren't telling the absolute truth but were biased 
in their own way so Ranke was 
attempting to react against that and that brings us to the next section which 
is to think about what Ranke himself contributed to the historical field well 
first Ranke insisted on using sources close to the events described and this 
may obviously you know seem obvious to us now but at the time it really was 
something of a breakthrough he also insisted on subjecting all sources of 
whatever period to critical analysis so this in practice meant that he searched 
very hard to find out if something was a forgery and sometimes you know it was 
he compared sources with one another so that you'd get a sort of er wider view 
of one particular period and he also placed his sources in their historical 
context his first book which was the History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations 
which only dealt with twenty years from fourteen-ninety-four up to er fifteen-
fourteen used mainly contemporary Italian historians of the time including 
people like Giovio but at 
the same time as using these contemporary Italian sources he also put out 
another companion volume which criticized their reliability and pointed out 
things that he could see were loopholes in what they were saying even at the 
time and most of Ranke's major books had a similar kind of appendix volume of 
source criticism critiquing the er materials which he used to actually write 
the book itself after the first book however Ranke discovered manuscript 
sources especially the reports of the Venetian ambassadors from all around 
Europe and he spent years in auction houses and at archives in Germany Venice 
Rome and elsewhere ferreting out these more immediate sources which had not pre-
, er which had not passed through the prism of a contemporary chronicler's mind 
in other words people like Giovio were still one step away from you know the 
ideal in a sense because they were taking contemporary sources but they were 
putting their own spin on it whereas these original 
documents from the ambassadors were the real thing written at the time without 
retrospective knowledge and therefore in a sense the purest kind of source to 
use and we d-, operate many very similar assumptions today when writing history 
so after about eighteen-thirty a lot of archives which had been closed unto 
that point er up to that point in Europe began very slowly to open up to 
historians and Ranke was often able to consult material which had not 
previously been available to historians he at one point said God must have an 
archive in heaven now he tended to er not be so keen on the more mundane 
bureaucratic sources er for er the er for the for the kind of histories he was 
writing he was keener on the sort of considered and contrived diplomatic 
reports the reason being that he thought that foreign observers were actually 
more qualified than people from a country itself to talk about what was 
happening there because they had a more sort 
of outside eye he also believed on the same principle that historians should 
always try and study countries other than their own because they were you know 
too involved with er the culture of their own place whereas they could look at 
somewhere else with a much fresher eye what else did he do he developed the 
methods and the tools of professional history now some of those had been 
available before such as the editing of texts in other words taking some 
manuscript source or whatever and publishing edition in which you put sort of 
side notes and things explaining where it came from who these people were and 
how to use it also the use of footnotes which i mentioned at the beginning now 
again he didn't invent these these had been used especially in the previous 
century the er eighteenth century amongst historians in Göttingen in er in 
Germany and also by ancient historians historians of the classical world er in 
er in Germany b-, er but Ranke 
was taking a new step by applying these methods for the first time to modern 
history in other words history since fifteen-hundred and also used them much 
more systematically than they'd been used before then he also came on to the 
idea of the research seminar in other words the small group of people swapping 
great historical thoughts which you know obviously from your own experience 
here now this kind of seminar again he didn't invent it but it had previously 
been used mainly for teaching philology in small study groups and it was now 
used after Ranke for historical studies beginning with meetings which Ranke 
held in his own house during the course of the century others picked up the 
baton from Ranke and developed seminars in other universities so the idea that 
he pioneered then spread out elsewhere throughout the intellectual community of 
Europe learned journals devoted to history also emerged series of critical 
editions of documents and texts 
special chairs professorships in history at university the beginning of an 
academic bookmarket in history and also conferences at which people get 
together and swap ideas and papers about history these are all developments of 
the nineteenth century and they er er w-, which still underpin professional 
history today and they all owe a great deal to Ranke in a century when all 
professionals were beginning to develop their own er expertise Ranke set the 
standards and this approach had a profound impression on historians in England 
and America as well now this emphasis on sources and their proper handling is 
sometimes known by the term scientific history you'll find that in some of your 
books when you see that though you have to remember that's actually a 
translation of the German word wissenschaft which means not the natural 
sciences in the sense of physics or chemistry and so on but means any academic 
discipline which has its 
own methodology so science is used in a much broader sense er to translate 
wissenchaft than you might expect from its normal use in English Ranke believed 
in the need for objectivity in two related senses the historian's conclusions 
had to be of the kind that could be checked against the evidence he also had to 
preserve his distance from the past and not seek to impose modern standards on 
it Ranke once wrote every epoch is directly under God and its value depends not 
on what comes from it but f-, but in its existence itself all generations of 
mankind are equally justified in the sight of God therefore what is meant 
objectivity in practice for instance in his own history was that as a 
Protestant historian he tried to teach the he tried to treat the popes and the 
papacy dispassionately although it's still possible when you actually read his 
history to see 
his prejudices against the Catholic church coming through Ranke was certainly 
concerned to get the facts right but he was also very much concerned with how 
you interpret those facts and he insisted on combining accuracy with art he 
disliked Walter Scott's inaccuracies but he liked his literary style Ranke 
wanted the big bucks he wanted to write bestsellers for the general public but 
to have them based on historical veracity and many historians will again tell 
you today that that's the kind of ideal they'd like to reach whether they do is 
another matter at the height of his powers Ranke wrote history as drama using 
all sorts of literary devices such as flashbacks to heighten the sense of 
excitement when relating political history he didn't try and do a complete 
narrative A to Z but would take episodes and little stories to illustrate the 
point he wanted to make he concentrated on what he considered to be significant 
and his prose operated at three levels the 
events of political history the b-, sort of big thread the colourful sort of 
pen portraits of various characters and then the philosophical reflections that 
went with it he was much given to writing in terms of the conflict between 
contrasting trends and their influence on one another in other words continuity 
versus change the individual versus the community political versus church 
interests not everyone was an admirer of his style the poet Heinrich Heine 
called it well cooked mutton with plenty of carrots but Ranke was rarely a dry 
as a dry as dust historian in other words his concern with scientific accuracy 
did not mean that he thought he had to write in a boring style the philosophy 
which underlay Ranke's work was partly a reaction against what he called 
philosophical history but he also shared some of the assumptions of those he 
attacked at the same time his historical viewpoint was also shaped by his 
political and religious outlooks so what was 
he reacting against first of all he was reacting against the mainstream 
approach of historians who were influenced by the Enlightenment that kind of 
thinking believed that history was the in effect the working out of certain 
universal truths about humanity which were the same everywhere and they would 
believe that the task of the historian was to recognize these universal truths 
by means of reason and demonstrate their presence in history through selective 
deployment of the facts in other words you have your basic idea and thesis 
first and then you cherry pick little facts to try and back this up this was a 
sort of philosophy of natural law which believed in the idea of progress and 
saw the past as being mainly important to teach you lessons for the presence 
and many of its er practitioners emphasized economic and social history now 
conservatives like Ranke thought all these ideas of progress and everything 
were terribly dangerous and had given rise to the 
French Revolution and he blamed especially the er the great Enlightenment 
thinkers we know of Voltaire Montesquieu Diderot and so on the philosophes 
already in eighteen-twenty-four quite young Ranke had written his famous 
counterblast he said history has had assigned to it the office of judging the 
past and of instructing the present for the benefit of the future ages to such 
high offices this present work the book he's writing does not presume it seeks 
only to show what actually happened and this is a key phrase which is er yup 
down there at the top of your sheet in German wie ens-, wie es eigentlich 
gewesen Ranke wanted to start from the particular in other words specific cases 
and then from that draw out an idea of the universal not start from some kind 
of universal view and then go down to it in orver-, in order to discover the 
particular so in this aim Ranke was part of 
a wider movement it didn't just concern history but this anti-movement was 
known as historicism or er German historian j-, er historians just called it 
historism some critics have said that this word historicism has had so many 
different meanings in the last century that it's probably best to leave it out 
because actually a confusing term but it still appears in an awful lot of your 
books and it has a clear meaning for a particular set of ideas that were 
prevalent during most of the nineteenth century it has its antecedents in the 
late Enlightenment as a critique by some Enlightenment thinkers of others in 
other words Vico's The New Science in seventeen-twenty-three which has the idea 
that a nation or a society develops through time this idea of progress again or 
Herder's Also a Philosophy of History seventeen-seventy-four in which he 
believes that human progress is not a science but an endeavour historical texts 
can only be understood in context and 
all values are historically conditioned history may only be understood he says 
through empathy not through reason now this idea of historicism was practised 
in the universities at the turn of the eighteenth century and the beginning of 
the nineteenth century by philologists legal historians and Roman historians 
and it was expressed as being the nature of the historical discipline shortly 
before Ranke came on the scene in essays by Wilhelm von Humboldt so what were 
the chief tenets what were the ideas behind this idea of historicism how do we 
define it well there are er five or six key points first historicism believed 
that history differs from the natural sciences in that it studies human actions 
which display great variety not a pattern which can be established by research 
because the human will is unpredictable in other words it doesn't work like a 
scientific experiment two because the human world is in constant flux it cannot 
be explained by reason only 
by the study of its historical development it's a very clear reaction against 
the Enlightenment there three states historicism believed states are ends in 
themselves they are not utilitarian in other word they're not there just to 
serve the interests of the population of the er the state the aim of the state 
is to achieve strength and independence in competition with other states all 
domestic affairs and domestic politics have to be subordinate to foreign policy 
foreign policy comes first reasons of state have to override everything else as 
only a strong state can guarantee freedom culture and the rule of law next 
ethical and moral values are norms for a society but they arise within a 
particular historical tradition human values are not universal not based on 
reason but bound by any particular culture therefore political institutions 
aren't transferable because they're culturally different so you can't transfer 
for instance French political institutions to 
Germany and again that's a very clear counterblast against people like Napoleon 
attempting to spread a universal code all over Europe next historicism rejects 
conceptual thinking in favour of reaching understanding by contemplation 
intuition and empathy so these views were not limited to the discipline of 
history by the middle of the nineteenth century the belief was all over Europe 
that every institution and every human and cultural activity had a history and 
could only be understood by examination of that history especially in its 
specific national manifestations so this is obviously part of the big rise in 
nationalism during the nineteenth century people trying to find their own 
culture making that history part of it and then examining that as part of that 
kind of national er national development thereafter there was a revolt against 
this outlook in disciplines like law and literature which only this revolt only 
came later to history Ranke and 
other historicists were partly in revolt against idealism this was a set of 
ideas propounded most systematically by the philosopher Hegel but they also 
shared some of his assumptions now idealism had nothing to do with being 
idealistic about the future or whatever it was about ideas not about ideals 
this Hegelian philosophy was dominant at the University of Berlin again Ranke's 
own institution in the eighteen-twenties and what Hegel did was to apply 
dialectical reason later used of course by Marx in a different way applied 
dialectical reason to deciding what was important in history and insisted on 
seeing the past through the present for Hegel individuals states and nations 
were manifestations of abstract ideas which were the only reality and that of 
course makes him the heir of Emmanuel Kant who was coming up with many of these 
sort of similar ideas in the late Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth 
century now Ranke saw individuals and institutions 
as manifestations of the human spirit but this was an idea that was basically 
very similar to Hegel's Hegel's big er big idea in effect was er the idea of 
the er world spirit which supposedly controlled all human progress which in 
German is known as geist which can be translated as ghost but i think spirit is 
probably better here er and er this idea was adapted again by Marx later on in 
the century to say that Hegel had a lot of this right but instead of being 
spirit it was actually class that was the defining factor so this Hegelian idea 
has a big intellectual hold on many of the thinkers in the nineteenth century 
Hegel said that in time this spirit geist which ultimately derived from God 
became enshrined in increasingly rational institutions and Ranke in the 
tradition of philo-, philological critique or hermeneutics and s-, again that's 
on your your sheet er said that the spirit manifested 
itself in individual forms individuals states nations cultures and mankind as a 
whole all of whom all of these could not be grasped by reason but only by 
studying texts and then applying your intuition ultimately Ranke thought God 
was the supreme idea or spirit so Ranke shared many ideas with other idealists 
despite the fact that he was reacting against them to some extent such as er 
Herder for instance some of these shared ideas with the idealists includes the 
idea that God is present in all of humanity as and all of history as the tutor 
of mankind the idea that history is organic that it in other words that it 
works itself out in the same way that a human life does by a process of 
development maturity and decline so in effect history is parallel to human 
lives in that sense he also believed that all states go through a similar cycle 
of development maturity and decline and he also believed that each historical 
period has its own spirit geist and therefore 
its own value the notion that institutions had this spirit by the way may well 
have something to do with another idea which flourish er which flourished from 
the end of the eighteenth century to around eighteen-forty and then came back 
again at the end of the nineteenth century and this is a relatively little 
known idea called vitalism and this was an alternative outlook within the 
natural sciences which argued that a purely mechanical view a scientific 
rational view of the natural world failed to explain the order which existed in 
nature because life itself had to be explained living bodies according to 
vitalism were not merely elements of matter impinging on one another but there 
had to be some breath of life within them which set them in motion so they 
would believe that in the human body there's a vital energy in every part of 
your body which is responsible for its generation nutrition and reproduction 
and if you look through Ranke's writings 
as you will for the seminar you will see that the adjective vital comes up over 
and over again in his writings also thinking about Ranke's philosophy it's 
important to look at that phrase that key phrase i mentioned wie es eigentlich 
gewesen as it really was 'cause it's got a hidden meaning that the English 
translation doesn't always manage to bring out that's this eigentlich in German 
is an adverb which can equally mean actually or essentially or really now 
whatever Ranke may have meant when he first used this phrase er polemically 
against the philosophical historians with time it became apparent that what 
Ranke was actually trying to do his main purpose was to go behind the mere 
surface facts to explain far more a grasp of the facts was the initial basis 
for a deeper understanding of origins causes intentions and interactions in 
history Ranke held that the ultimate truth can never fully be known in history 
but only divined history he felt was the 
product of God's purposes Ranke often writes in terms of the hand of God the 
finger of God or the breath of God these purposes he believed could not be 
discovered by reason but only intuitively and by empathy he was able to do this 
or he was able to suggest that this could be done because the spark of God was 
in every person who can then hope by a process of intuitive understanding to 
penetrate that divine purpose now this approach doesn't really sound all that 
scientific i mean not in the terms that we're talking about it's more romantic 
in a sense it's more subjective than objective and indeed it does have a very 
mystical type of quality as it equates scholarship in effect with worship 
remember what we said at the beginning about or what i said at the beginning 
about Ranke in effect thinking that history was a sort of priestly vocation so 
in those senses Ranke was not scientific he was not an empiricist in the sense 
that he believed that only what you 
can see with your own eyes has reality for him all phenomena all historical 
phenomena were the expression of metaphysical intangible forces okay the last 
element which shapes Ranke's view of the course of history were his own 
political views when he was employed between eighteen-thirty-two and eighteen-
thirty-six to edit a semi-official journal in Prussia which aimed at supporting 
the monarchy in Prussia he declared like again sort of er our great leader 
today that he was advocating a quote third way and his third way was claimed to 
be between the revolution and reaction something in between he wanted a state 
that was controlled neither by the great landowning aristocracy of Germany the 
junkers nor by the kind of the ordinary populace but by something in between a 
bureaucracy which would be loyal to the state and not pursuing their own 
interests but working for the greater good of the state er Ranke claimed that 
he wanted to adopt 
new ideas only in so far as they corresponded to the interests of the state in 
fact he spent most of his period as a journalist attacking er liberals and 
later on he became even more conservative and only accepted change for instance 
after the unification of Germany in eighteen-seventy-one when it was obvious 
that it was a fait accompli anyway and anything he said wasn't going to change 
it so he became a bit more of a last ditcher by the end you know resisting all 
change until he absolutely had to accept it as a result his secret of world 
history the pattern he discerned in modern times was the rise and decline of 
states with creative forces to advance civilization this was this great 
underlying pattern through all of history that he saw and which he was pushing 
in the later part of his work in these great fat books so for instance whereas 
in medieval times the univer-, er the er sorry the unity of Christendom had 
been preserved by the papacy when the papacy 
declined again this pattern that happened everywhere rise maturity decline so 
when the papacy declined it was replaced in its turn by nation states which 
were aided and abetted by the forces of the Reformation a special constructive 
role in Ranke's history was given to the Latin and Germanic nations in other 
words generally the western and northern Europeans Ranke was not going to 
suggest the Slavs and certainly not the non-European peoples had anything to do 
with this progressive civilizational advance he stated that states developed 
through external struggle and were harmed by internal conflict so war with 
other countries in effect is worthwhile but civil wars are harmful states he 
felt expressed the spirit of nations and in different eras different states had 
the greater energy and the vital spiritual forces which would enable them to 
triumph over their rivals at the same time the states of Europe acted in 
concert to prevent any individual 
state obtaining power which was hegemonic over the others in other words 
dominant power by the operation of a principle which again is still used today 
of balance of power the statesman in charge of each state thought Ranke had er 
a duty to fulfill that state's particular mission which the historian can help 
him uncover by unravelling how it had developed so by the eighteen-fifties 
quite late on in his career Ranke had come to believe that the struggle of the 
secular and spiritual powers that had characterized the period before the 
French Revolution had been replaced by a new struggle between revolution and 
counter-revolutionary forces so having started out by rejecting the idea of 
progress he was really coming to some quite similar sort of idea suggesting 
that you have these cycles these dialectical cycles which dear old Hegel of 
course was er talking about before er and as these cycles sort of have thesis 
and antithesis and move forward eventually 
you progress onwards in history so er he came round in a sense sort of 
contradicting his earlier thoughts there let's now for er one of the last 
sections talk about the dangers in Ranke's method the problems with the kind of 
history that he put forward these dangers which Ranke himself sometimes 
realized were magnified by later historians who weren't as subtle as he was and 
took these ideas they had their own political agendas often and they lacked 
Ranke's caution in historical ability so in a sense we're also criticizing 
Ranke's heirs here rather than necessarily just Ranke himself okay problem 
number one with this method of just the facts ma'am it became very easy to 
become totally absorbed in the records and the facts and lose sight of the 
wider interpretation and Ranke did that in his first book which was just you 
know on twenty years period but it's very very dense and thick and you can't 
really see the wood for the trees second danger 
was Ranke's in a sense philosophical stroke political position of seeing the 
state itself as being an ethical good because if you believe that the state is 
the most important thing not the individual then this can lead you in the 
direction of glorifying power for its own sake now the defi-, er now Ranke had 
some sort of caution on this he of course had this idea of God and the divine 
restraint which er Ranke felt that good states would have that they would never 
go too far 'cause they were run for the benefit er the ultimate benefit of all 
and he believed also that certain moral standards were timeless and would 
always apply to states but later historians who had his admiration for the 
state but did not have his religious convictions abandoned the latter part of 
the idea so they glorified power without talking about the kind of religious 
brakes that could be put on abuses of state power so historians such as 
Treitschke who i think it's er yes it's 
on your sheet as well Treitschke and others saw Prussia and the German state 
which emerged as the ultimate goal of all history in other words this new sort 
of Prussian and German nationalism emerging in the late nineteenth century was 
heavily underpinned by an idea of history which came from Ranke but wasn't 
exactly what he was saying and it was an idea that the German state was kind of 
glorious and must be glorified above the interests of individual Germans now 
Ranke himself did slip in his history of seventeenth century England he played 
down the role of Parliament and saw the struggles of that century in other 
words talking about the Civil War period as mainly being religious problems 
with the papacy and he put much more emphasis in the er the seventeenth century 
history on England's role in Europe rather than on the constitutional conflicts 
which is what we think about er the Civil War and of course in contrast to this 
more liberal German historians of 
the period looked to the achievements of the English parliament and Oliver 
Cromwell and so on as being a model for their own newly emerging unified 
country so liberal German historians were looking at the Civil War and thinking 
you know this is a great example you can get rid of the king you know abuse of 
power and so on whereas Ranke was saying oh dear no all this civil war very bad 
idea don't worry about that think about England having power abroad instead and 
managing to throw its weight around that's a much better way for you to be 
thinking so there's an aspect of contemporary German politics in the way in 
which history is being defined a third problem Ranke's view was highly 
Eurocentric he dismissed the history of China and India because he claimed they 
had no historians or written sources which were worthy of the name he also took 
a very narrow view of the bits of Europe that were interesting er in other 
words again mainly western and northern 
Europe despite the fact that he'd actually written a book on Serbia and on the 
Ottoman empire early on in his career another problem and Ranke believed that 
it was wrong to pass judgement on the political actions of the past but 
nonetheless he was prepared to condemn massacres and other actions which were 
evil by standards which he held to be universal now we may not m-, consider 
that to be necessarily a bad thing but it was something of a contradiction in 
method nevertheless by j-, er by regarding as justified all actions by states 
which pursued their own interests he also opened the door to the concept of 
relativism the view that success is the only criterion that matters that ends 
justify means and that therefore you cannot see men as evil you can only judge 
them by whether they succeed or not another problem Ranke deliberately 
neglected devoting much attention to social and economic trends and did not see 
how overwhelum-, overwhelmingly important 
they were especially of course in the era of industrialization which was really 
in full swing when he was working now from his point of view these omissions of 
social and economic history were explicable because Ranke believed that the 
strength of the state was to be explained by religion and law not by money 
social history was in effect irrelevant for Ranke except in so far as social 
movements detracted from the strength er of the state so social movements in 
that sense could be important if they were bad and helped to sap a sate's 
strate's state's strength but he didn't see them as being positive you do find 
in Ranke's work quite full social analyses of the elite classes in papal Rome 
for instance all of the German peasantry on the eve of their revolt in fifteen-
twenty-five but these were very much subordinated to his account of the 
political struggle between the papacy and the European powers or between the 
emperor and the princes in the empire and its 
enmeshing with the Reformation certainly Ranke did not neglect culture that was 
a key element in the spirit of nations which was harboured by their states so 
Ranke used the popular pamphlets of the Reformation in Germany discussed French 
literature as part of Louis the Fourteenth's drive for domination of Europe and 
the eighteen-thirties he actually published separate histories of art and 
poetry in Renaissance Italy so in that sense Ranke was certainly a cultural 
historian as well as a historian of politics but the neglect of most economic 
and social factors became increasingly anachronistic as the nineteenth century 
advanced and that meant that some of Ranke's ideas were already outdated by the 
end of the century in which he lived last flaw by the time of Ranke's death 
really but certainly his late working period most historians considered that it 
was no longer adequate to rely on intuition this great idea of empathy and 
intuition that this sort of 
almost mystical belief that he had it was no longer considered adequate to rely 
on that for a deeper understanding of the forces at work in history historians 
while accepting the need to research facts with impartiality looked for their 
interpretation to other ideas hypotheses concepts and the methodology of the 
social sciences economics sociology and so on which were beginning to emerge at 
this time er 
nm0087: so er these are some of the er the the areas in which Ranke perhaps 
fell down either at the time or in retrospect they don't detract from his great 
contribution but they need to be understood to er see where his ideas have been 
adapted so to er to 
finish off despite these flaws Ranke either laid the groundwork for or 
consolidated many of the features of history as a discipline which most 
historians today regard as being absolutely obvious for instance the need for 
impartial research and faithfulness to the sources once they've been critically 
appraised the need for the historian to set aside her or his subjective 
opinions while seeking empathy with the past an appreciation of the variety of 
history and an open view about historical development in the future the 
combination of an academic approach with literary skill so as to make history 
both reliable and readable and last but not least the view that history is 
an important way to understand humanity now if you think about those four or 
five factors which are Ranke's contribution i don't think there's very much 
that seems all that much out of place at the end of the twentieth century and 
if you understand that then you'll understand quite why Ranke's so influential 
and why we still ask you to read this now no longer much read nin-, er er er 
historian from Germany of the late nineteenth century okay please do remember 
to put in your exam forms if you haven't done so please namex's group don't 
forget to go to namex thanks er you can head off