Leopold von Ranke

German historian

• Born: December 21, 1795
• Birthplace: Wiehe, Thuringia, Saxony (now in Germany)
• Died: May 23, 1886
• Place of death: Berlin, Germany

Ranke is considered the founder of modern historical scholarship and a founder of the German idea of history. His historical works rank as classics of modern historiography.

Early Life

The father of Leopold von Ranke (RAHNG-kee), Gottlob Israel Ranke, was a lawyer, but the Lutheran ministry was the traditional profession of the family. Ranke’s parents expected him, as the eldest of nine children, to follow a career in the Church. After an early education in local schools, he was sent to Schulpforta, a famous German public school known for the quality of its humanistic, classical curriculum. Ranke studied philology and theology at the University of Leipzig and received a doctoral degree in 1817 for a dissertation on the political ideas of Thucydides.

As a student, Ranke adopted the critical philological method of Barthold Niebuhr, a statesman and scholar whose Römische Geschichte (1811-1832; History of Rome, 1828-1842) reconstructed the historical origins of the Roman state. Ranke admired Niebuhr’s history but not his clumsy prose. A master stylist himself, he was early influenced by the German of Martin Luther and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Although he remained a devout Lutheran, Ranke declined to enter the ministry. The classics and philology interested him more than dogma. In 1818, he became a master of classical languages in the gymnasium in Frankfurt an der Oder. Entrusted with the teaching of history, Ranke was led to write his first book, Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (1824; History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514 , 1887), in which he applied his philological training to the field of modern history. Ranke was called in 1824 to the University of Berlin, where he taught until 1871.

Ranke’s students left a vivid vignette of their master. He is described as a slight figure with dark, curly hair, a low voice, a lively speaking manner, penetrating blue eyes, and a serene temperament. He, in turn, took a paternalistic interest in his students, who eventually filled almost every chair of history in Germany. Surrounded by his children and grandchildren (he married Clara Graves, daughter of an Irish barrister, in 1843, and the couple had two sons and a daughter), he would say that he had another and older family, his pupils and their pupils.

Life’s Work

In the programmatic preface to History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514, Ranke gave a new direction to historical studies by declaring that it was not the duty of the historian to judge the past for the benefit of the present or the future. It was only “to show what actually occurred.” This matter-of-fact statement was directed against the historiography of the Enlightenment, which had given history an abstractly defined end and viewed it as an ascending process in which a later age was superior to an earlier one. According to Ranke each age was unique, “each period is equally close to God.”

In the appendix of his first book, Ranke added that he had found traditional histories untrustworthy; they did not correspond with the evidence he found in contemporary documents. For his history, he wrote, he had relied only on original sources, critically sifted and cross-examined. Ranke’s ambition to use only “the purest, most immediate documents” led him to the Italian archives in 1827. In Italy, where he gratified his “archival obsession” for three years, Ranke became the first scholar to examine the famous relazioni, secret reports Venetian ambassadors had submitted to their government after diplomatic missions to the courts of Europe. In such materials, Ranke believed, the historian could divine the core and secret of human events. Upon his return to the University of Berlin, where he became a full professor in 1836, Ranke created the historical seminar and instructed advanced students in Quellenkritik, the critical study of the sources.

Ranke spurned the schematic history of the philosophers but he was, nevertheless, a generalist. Through the perception of the particular, the historian was to grasp the inner connection and complete whole of history. As a devout Christian, Ranke believed that the unity and tendency of the historical experience were an expression of divine purpose—the “hand of God” was evident in the particular and the universal.

Divine action in the historical world was largely realized through nations or states, Ranke contended, a theory he developed in “Political Dialogue” (1836) and “The Great Powers” (1833), famous essays written while he was editor of the political journal Historisch-politische Zeitschrift (historical-political review) from 1832 to 1836. Ranke argued that there was no ideal political constitution. States developed their own genius and institutional forms: That was the task set them by God. Accordingly, power embodied in the nation-state was ethically good: It was an expression of God’s will. This conception or idea of history, reflected in all of Ranke’s historical studies, affirmed the importance of the great powers and identified the state as an ethical institution whose interests were in harmony with the general good.

While on his tour of the Italian archives, Ranke outlined the course of his future studies: first Italian, then French, English, and German studies. He turned to German history before the French and English, but otherwise the early outline of his life’s work was followed faithfully. The national histories were capped by nine volumes of world history, Weltgeschichte (1881-1888; partial translation as Universal History , 1884), begun in his eighty-sixth year.

Ranke’s Italian project, published from 1834 to 1836 in three volumes, was Die römischen Päpste in den letzten 4 Jahrhunderten (The History of the Popes During the Last Four Centuries , 1907), considered by many his finest work in form and matter. Ranke approached the popes as a historian fascinated by their role in world history, but they were also a subject in which he found the “thought of God.” The history of the popes was followed by Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation (1839-1847; History of the Reformation in Germany , 1845-1847), a six-volume history received in Germany as a national classic, although Ranke himself thought it inferior to his study of the popes. As the first of the Reformation volumes appeared, Frederick William IV recognized Ranke’s eminence as a scholar and appointed him, in 1841, historiographer of the Prussian state. Ranke was ennobled, thereby adding “von” to his name, in 1865.

In the two decades after his study of the Reformation, Ranke wrote his massive histories of the great powers, all focusing on developments from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Neun Bücher preussischer Geschichte (nine books of Prussian history), a study later expanded to twelve books, appeared in 1847-1848, and Englische Geschichte, vornehmlich im 16 und 17 Jahrhundert (A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century , 1966) was issued in six volumes between 1859 and 1868.

In Ranke’s opinion, the most important features of history between 1492 and 1789 were the creation of the modern state, the rise of the great powers, and the establishment of the state system. He appreciated the role of ideas in history and suggested that historians should pay attention to population, churches, agriculture, industry, and transportation. In practice, however, he was a political and diplomatic historian, and he focused almost exclusively on courts and chanceries. Later historians, with a greater interest in the evolution of society, assigned ideas and social and economic forces far more important roles in historiography. On the other hand, while he was the motive force behind the creation of an encyclopedia of German national biography, Ranke himself wrote little biography; exceptions were short biographical studies of Frederick the Great and Frederick William IV. For Ranke, the individual was important only when he played an active or leading role in general history.

It is not surprising that Ranke elected to spend his final years, although infirm and unable to read or write, preparing a world history. He was able to produce eight volumes, taking his story to the end of the fifteenth century, before his death in May, 1886, at the age of ninety. The universal history, although incomplete, was a fitting conclusion to Ranke’s career: To comprehend the whole while obeying the dictates of exact research, he had written during the 1860’s, was the ideal goal of the historian.

Significance

Leopold von Ranke is commonly identified as an empirical, nonphilosophical historian, the founder of the “scientific school” of history. This image is one-sided but not invalid. Ranke sought to write history as it actually happened, free of philosophical presuppositions, and he contributed a critical method that emphasized the use of documentary sources. He suggested that national cultures and periods of history should be examined on their own terms. German historians, however, also appreciated Ranke as a contemplative thinker, and most of his successors accepted his emphasis on the central role of the state and of foreign affairs in the European experience. Many, too, adopted his concept of the spiritual character of power, a theme that runs through Ranke’s writings. It was only after World War II that leading German historians concluded that Ranke had been insufficiently pessimistic regarding power and the state.

Ranke’s own works, and he published a large number of historical classics, are still valuable. They are largely free of bias and show an insight and style that make them profitable reading for modern students of history.

Bibliography

Gay, Peter. “Ranke: The Respectful Critic.” In Style in History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. A perceptive and gracefully written essay on Ranke as dramatist, scientist, and believer.

Geyl, Pieter. “Ranke in the Light of the Catastrophe.” In Debates with Historians. Groningen, the Netherlands: J. B. Wolters, 1955. A strong indictment of Ranke’s idea that power was an expression of divine activity in the historical world.

Gilbert, Felix. History: Politics or Culture: Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. In five essays, Gilbert points out the similarities between Ranke and Jacob Burckhardt, two major historians of the early nineteenth century. Emphasizes the novelty and originality of Ranke’s ideas about history.

Gooch, G. P. “Ranke.” In History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. London: Longmans, Green, 1913.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Ranke’s Critics and Pupils.” In History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. London: Longmans, Green, 1913. Two of the best brief studies in English on Ranke.

Higham, John, Leonard Krieger, and Felix Gilbert. History. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965. A useful discussion of Ranke’s influence in the professionalization of history in Europe and the United States.

Iggers, Georg G. The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968. A valuable interpretative survey of the theoretical presuppositions and political values of German historians. Ranke is identified as a founder of a school that not only adopted the critical method but also viewed the state as an ethical good.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “The Image of Ranke in American and German Historical Thought.” History and Theory 2 (1962): 17-40. A survey of divergent images of Ranke held by German and American historians.

Iggers, Georg G., and James M. Powell, eds. Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Collection of papers delivered at a 1986 conference to mark the centennial of Ranke’s death. The papers place him in the context of the developing historical discipline and discuss various issues in European historiography.

Van Laue, Theodore H. Leopold Ranke: The Formative Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950. Traces the development of Ranke’s historical ideas in the context of contemporary Germany from 1795 to 1836. It includes Ranke’s essays “Political Dialogue” and “The Great Powers” in translation as well as a useful bibliographical essay.