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Leopold von Ranke
Portrait of Leopold von Ranke, by Adolf Jebens, 1875
Born	(1795-12-21)21 December 1795 Wiehe
Died	(1886-05-23)23 May 1886 Berlin
Nationality	German
Occupation(s)	Historian, classicist, teacher
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Leipzig

Leopold von Ranke (21 December 1795 - 23 May 1886) was a German classicist, teacher, and leading historian of the nineteenth century who had a great impact on Western historiography.

From a Protestant upbringing, Ranke first studied theology and the classics at the University of Leipzig. He went on to teach history in Frankfurt and in 1824 produced his famous first work, the History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514. During his life Ranke completed a number of volumes concerning the leading states of Europe at what he perceived to be critical stages of their development. He also maintained an interest in political life, writing a number of articles on contemporary politics during the 1830s. Ranke's career peaked in the second half of the century; he was ennobled in 1865 and made a privy counsellor in 1882.

As a historian, Ranke identified himself as a radical revisionist, who rejected many of the prevailing assumptions about historical writing in his day. Ranke famously stated the ideal that historians should seek only to show "what actually/essentially happened" ("wie es eigentlich gewesen"), a phrase which remains a subject of much discussion. Ranke relied mostly on primary sources rather than the writings of others, seeking those which would bring him as close as possible to the historical events or phenomena under study. He also pioneered the use of new types of primary sources, many of which historians of his time typically overlooked. Ranke also stressed the literary qualities of historical writing, and sought a presentation of historical facts in such a way that their "essence" and meaning became clear.

Despite rejecting a purely "scientific" or positivist approach to writing history,^[1] Ranke was often mistaken as an advocate of such, particularly by his adherents in Anglo-American scholarship who understood Ranke's legacy primarily in terms of his methodological innovations.^[2] Others, by contrast, viewed Ranke in the context of German philosophy and idealism, and identified his new conception of the past (Historicism) as his main contribution.^[3] Contemporary scholarship, while affirming Ranke's crucial role in the development of Western historiography, has increasingly drawn attention to the difference between Ranke's own views and the various ways they have been used and understood.

economic and scoial factors barely present in the srouces he used; as inchoate "forces" and "tendencies" Ranke found it difficult to comprehend the modern age of incipient social change.

Ranke’s concept and writing of history predominated in German historiography up to World War I and even after; it also influenced a great many distinguished foreign historians who studied in Germany. Unfortunately, many of Ranke’s disciples simply continued, canonized, and debased Ranke’s concepts, retaining all of their limitations without the universality of view that gave them meaning. Ranke’s own achievements, however, remain unquestioned. He contributed greatly to the progress of historiography: it became more self-assured in its method and proved itself capable of transforming the widely felt need for a historical understanding of the world (“historicism”) into an interpretation of the past based on scientific research. Between 1817–1825, Ranke worked as a Classics teacher at the Friedrichs Gymnasium in Frankfurt an der Oder.

Ranke was born in Wiehe, then part of the Electorate of Saxony. He was the eldest child of a lawyer descended from a long line of evangelical pastors.^[4] He was educated partly at home and partly in the Gymnasium of Schulpforta. His early years engendered a lifelong love of Ancient Greek and Latin and of the Lutheran Church. In 1814, Ranke entered the University of Leipzig,^[5] where his subjects were Classics and Lutheran theology. At Leipzig, Ranke became an expert in philology and translation of the ancient authors into German. As a student, Ranke's favorite authors were Thucydides, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Friedrich Schlegel. Ranke showed little interest in the work of modern history because of his dissatisfaction with what he regarded as history books that were merely a collection of facts lumped together by modern historians.

In 1818, Ranke began work as a Classics teacher at the Friedrichs Gymnasium in Frankfurt on Oder in Prussia.^[6] During this time, Ranke worked on his historical studies.^[7]

Ranke published his first work in 1824, the History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 to 1514 (Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514), which sparked considerable worldwide interest.^[8] Ranke had argued in the introduction that a new kind of history was necessary, and in the appendix was a critical discussion of his sources.^[9] Ranke had used an unusually wide variety of sources for a historian of the age, including "memoirs, diaries, personal and formal missives, government documents, diplomatic dispatches and first-hand accounts of eye-witnesses".^[10] In this sense he leaned on the traditions of Philology but emphasized mundane documents instead of old and exotic literature.^[11]

Ranke began his book with the statement in the introduction that he would show the unity of the experiences of the "Teutonic" nations of Scandinavia, England and Germany and the "Latin" nations of Italy, Spain and France through the great "respirations" of the Völkerwanderung (great migration), the Crusades and colonisation that in Ranke's view bound all of the nations together to produce modern European civilization. Despite his opening statement, Ranke largely treated all of the nations under examination separately until the outbreak of the wars for the control of Italy starting in 1494. However, the book is best remembered for Ranke's comment that "To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire: It wants only to show what actually happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen)".^[12]

The concept of wie es eigentlich gewesen was adopted by many of Ranke's adherents as a guiding principle, despite being interpreted in different contexts in different, even contradictory ways. Its precise meaning is ellusive because of an inherent ambiguity in the translation, but many have its precise meaning and was posed partly as an alternative to several approaches to historiography pervasive in the early nineteenth century. The full passage in which the phrase appeared read: "[t]o history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire: it wants only to show what actually happened.’^[13] Friedrich Scholsser had been a strong advocate of the former in his World History, which used the past as a teacher of the need for strict adherence to moral laws.^[14] The idea of history as a source of valid guiding principles for the future was exemplified by Machiavelli, particularly in his Discorso.^[15] Ranke believed both these approaches neglected any understanding or explanation of the past, and moreover led to an image of the past that was distorted and false. The historian therefore ought not to exceed their mandate, but show an accurate picture of the past ‘as it actually was’.^[16]

The necessary preconditions for Ranke’s approach were ‘rigorous presentation of the facts, however conditional and lacking in beauty they may be.’^[17] In his History of England Ranke explained what this “rigorous presentation” was: ‘critical study of genuine sources, impartial view, [and] objective description.’^[18] However, Ranke’s quest to write of the past as it ‘actually happened’ also involved strongly literary qualities. Rather than simply relate a fact to his reader, Ranke attempted to ‘approximate the phenomenon itself … something which is, on the outside, merely a particular thing, but in its essence, is something general with a meaning and a spirit.’^[19] This suggests the more appropriate translation of the word eigentlich in "wie es eigentlich gewesen" might be ‘essentially’ – a meaning it indeed carried in the nineteenth century but does no longer.^[20] In the context of Ranke’s writing, the meaning and spirit of phenomena involved grasping ‘the line, which [people and powers] generally adhere to; the path, which they take; the thought, which moves them’.^[21] What made an account historical for Ranke was thus not its factuality but its emphasis on the essential.^[22]

Ranke also understood the past ‘as it actually/essentially was’ in an experiential or visual sense. Early in his career Ranke had explained that art and historical science shared a close relationship: science establishes what has happened, and art gives it shape and form; a visual immediacy.^[23] Later Ranke remarked in a lecture at Berlin that ‘the aim of history writing [Historie] is to bring past life before one’s eyes.’^[24] As if to underscore this point Ranke used the word zeigen (to show) in place of sagen (to say) in the second edition of his text where he had previously written 'to say how it actually/essentially was.'^[25] In other words, Ranke believed the historian ought to let the reader share or relive the experience of a source’s author.^[26]

Contemporary historians such J. D. Braw have challenged the traditional idea that Ranke's 'empirical' or 'positivist' methodology was the groundwork for his literary or experiential representation of the past. According to Braw, 'the primacy of visual perception was at work already in the selection and reading of sources.'^[27] Ranke sought the most immediate and receptive observer of historical events ‘in order to come as close as possible to seeing the event itself.’^[28] As evidence of this Braw cites Ranke’s use of the “unreliable” Pirkheimer account in the Geschichten, which Ranke justified primarily on the grounds of its ‘particularly visual’ nature.^[29] He praised other sources for their ‘clarity, life and credibility’. Ranke also prized the Venetian Archives as a source which enabled him ‘to look upon the past with the eyes of contemporaries.’^[30] Ranke’s sources were chosen on the basis of their visual quality (Anschaulichkeit), and not treated as merely neutral repositories of facts.

Following the success of Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514, Ranke was given a position in the University of Berlin. At the university, Ranke became deeply involved in the dispute between the followers of the legal professor Friedrich Carl von Savigny who emphasized the varieties of different periods of history and the followers of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who saw history as the unfolding of a universal story. Ranke supported Savigny and criticized the Hegelian view of history as being a one-size-fits-all approach. Also during his time in Berlin, Ranke became the first historian to utilise the forty-seven volumes that comprised the diplomatic archives of Venice from the 1500s and 1600s. Ranke came to prefer dealing with primary sources as opposed to secondary sources during this time. Ranke later wrote "I see the time approaching when we shall base modern history, no longer on the reports even of contemporary historians, except in-so-far as they were in the possession of personal and immediate knowledge of facts; and still less on work yet more remote from the source; but rather on the narratives of eyewitnesses, and on genuine and original documents." ^[31]

It was in Vienna, where the friendship of Frederich von Gentz and the protection of Metternich opened to him the Venetian archives, of which many were preserved in that city—a virgin source, the value of which he first discovered, and which is still unexhausted. He found time, in addition, to write a short book on Die Serbische Revolution (1829), from material supplied to him by Vuk Karadžić, a Serb who had himself been witness of the scenes he related during the First Serbian Uprising in 1804. This afterwards expanded into Serbien und die Turkei im 19 Jahrhundert (1879).

Starting in 1831 at the behest of the Prussian government, Ranke founded and edited the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift journal. Ranke, who was a conservative, used the journal to attack the ideas of Liberalism. In his 1833 article "The Great Powers" and his 1836 article "Dialogue on Politics" Ranke claimed that every state is given a special moral character from God and individuals should strive to best fulfill the "idea" of their state. Thus, in this way, Ranke urged his readers to stay loyal to the Prussian state and reject the ideas of the French Revolution, which Ranke claimed were meant for France, not Prussia. ^{[citation needed]}

Between 1834–1836 Ranke produced the multi-volume Die römischen Päpste, ihre kirche und ihr Staat im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (History of the Popes, Their Church and Their State in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries). As a Protestant, Ranke was barred from viewing the Vatican archives in Rome, but on the basis of private papers in Rome and Venice, Ranke was able to explain the history of the papacy in the 1500s. ^{[citation needed]} In this book, Ranke coined the term the Counter Reformation and offered colourful portrayals of Pope Paul IV, Ignatius of Loyola, and Pope Pius V. The papacy denounced Ranke's book as anti-Catholic while many Protestants denounced Ranke's book as too neutral. ^{[citation needed]} However, Ranke has been generally praised by historians for placing the situation of the Roman Catholic Church in the context of the 1500s and for his treatment of the complex interaction of the political and religious issues in that century. In particular, the British Roman Catholic historian Lord Acton defended Ranke's book as the most fair-minded, balanced and objective study ever written on the papacy of the 1500s. ^{[citation needed]} Ranke followed this book up with multi-volume Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation (History of the Reformation in Germany) in 1845–1847. Ranke used the ninety-six volumes from ambassadors to Imperial Diet in Frankfurt to explain the Reformation in Germany as the result of both politics and religion.^{[citation needed]}

In 1841, Ranke was appointed Royal Historiographer to the Prussian court. In 1849, Ranke published Neun Bücher preussicher Geschichte (translated as Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg and History of Prussia, during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries), in which he examined the fortunes of the Hohenzollern family and state from the Middle Ages to the reign of Frederick the Great. Many Prussian nationalists were offended by Ranke's portrayal of Prussia as a typical medium-sized German state rather than as a great power. ^{[citation needed]}

In a series of lectures given before the future King Maximilian II of Bavaria, Ranke argued that "every age is next to God", by which he meant that every period of history is unique and must be understood in its own context. He argued that God gazes over history in its totality and finds all periods equal. Ranke rejected the teleological approach to history, by which each period is considered inferior to the period which follows. Thus, the Middle Ages were not inferior to the Renaissance, simply different. In Ranke's view, the historian had to understand a period on its own terms, and seek to find only the general ideas which animated every period of history. For Ranke, then, history was not to be an account of man's "progress" because, "After Plato, there can be no more Plato." For Ranke, Christianity was morally most superior and could not be improved upon. Ultimately, "History is no criminal court." ^{[citation needed]}

In 1865, Ranke was ennobled, in 1882 appointed a Prussian Privy Councillor, and in 1885 given an honorary citizenship of Berlin. In 1884, he was appointed the first honorary member of the American Historical Association. After his retirement in 1871, Ranke continued to write on a variety of subjects relating to German history such as the French Revolutionary Wars, Albrecht von Wallenstein, Karl August von Hardenberg, and King Frederick William IV of Prussia. Starting in 1880, Ranke began a huge six-volume work on World History, which began with ancient Egypt and the Israelites. By the time of Ranke's death in Berlin in 1886, at the age of 90, he had reached only the 1100s, though his assistants later used his notes to take the still-incomplete series up to 1453.

Ranke was recognized during his own lifetime as the greatest historian of his age. Within a century of his birth (Bourne)...

Ranke is often regarded as a founding figure of history as a modern scholarly discipline. He played a leading role in many important aspects of the early nineteenth century's new way of looking at the past and how to study it.^[32] In contrast to existing historiography which often sought to teach morals or extract lesson from the past, Ranke stated the ideal that historians should seek only to show "what actually happened" (wie es eigentlich gewesen).

However, interpretations have differed as to the essential nature of Ranke's legacy. Anglo-American historical scholarship throughout the twentieth century has most often ascribed to Ranke a revolutionary methodology and "scientific" approach to history. Others argue the main achievement of Ranke was his conception of the past, sometimes called historicism or historism. A third, perhaps less common interpretation is that Ranke was able to make academic historiography critical as well as readable; a literary genre as well as a science.

Contemporary scholarship has increasingly drawn attention to the difference between Ranke's own views and how they have been used.

was the of Ranke of Ranke's legacy have often differed over what his essential contributions were. over what Ranke's own beliefs were, and how they might differ from the ways in which historians have understood him. In the United States his method of source criticism was widely embraced, allowing the hitherto maligned field of historical from the later nineteenth century as a means for historians to share the

At the core of his method, Ranke did not believe that general theories could cut across time and space. Instead, he made statements about the time using quotations from primary sources. He said, "My understanding of 'leading ideas' is simply that they are the dominant tendencies in each century. These tendencies, however, can only be described; they can not, in the last resort, be summed up in a concept." Ranke objected to philosophy of history, particularly as practiced by Hegel, claiming that Hegel ignored the role of human agency in history, which was too essential to be "characterized through only one idea or one word" or "circumscribed by a concept."^[33] This lack of emphasis on unifying theories or themes led some^[who?] to denigrate his "mindless empiricism." In the 19th century, Ranke's work was very popular and his ideas about historical practise gradually became dominant in western historiography. However, he had critics among his contemporaries, including Karl Marx, a former Hegelian, who suggested that Ranke engaged in some of the practices he criticised in other historians.

While Ranke's method remain influential in the practice of history, his broader ideas of historiography and empiricism are now regarded as outdated and no longer credible. It held sway among historians until the mid-twentieth century, when it was challenged by E. H. Carr and Fernand Braudel. Carr opposed Ranke's ideas of empiricism as naive, boring and outmoded, saying that historians did not merely report facts — they choose which facts they use. Braudel's approach was based on the histoire problème.^{[citation needed]} Remarking on the legacy of Ranke's dictum that historians should represent the past "wie es eigentlich gewesen" (as it actually happened),^[34] Walter Benjamin scathingly wrote that it represented "the strongest narcotic of the [nineteenth] century".^[35]

• Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 ("History of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514", 1824)
• Serbische Revolution ("Serbian Revolution", 1829)
• Fürsten und Völker von Süd-Europa im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert ("Princes and Peoples of Southern Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries")
• Die römischen Päpste in den letzen vier Jahrhunderten ("The Roman Popes in the Last Four Centuries", 1834–1836)
• Neun Bücher preussischer Geschichte (Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg and History of Prussia, during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 1847–1848)
• Französische Geschichte, vornehmlich im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (Civil Wars and Monarchy in France, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A History of France Principally During That Period, 1852–1861)
• Die deutschen Mächte und der Fürstenbund ("The German Powers and the Princes' League", 1871–1872)
• Ursprung und Beginn der Revolutionskriege 1791 und 1792 (Origin and Beginning of the Revolutionary Wars 1791 and 1792, 1875)
• Hardenberg und die Geschichte des preussischen Staates von 1793 bis 1813 (Hardenberg and the History of the Prussian State from 1793 to 1813, 1877)
• Weltgeschichte - Die Römische Republik und ihre Weltherrschaft (World history: The Roman Republic and Its World Rule, 2 volumes, 1886)

• The Ottoman and the Spanish Empires, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Whittaker & Co., 1943.
• Memoirs of the House of Brundenburg and History of Prussia During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, John Murray, 1849.
• Civil Wars and Monarchy in France, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Richard Bentley, 1852.
• The History of Servia and the Servian Revolution, Henry G. Bohn, 1853.
• History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume Two, Volume Three, Volume Four, Volume Five, Volume Six, Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1875.
• Universal History: The Oldest Historical Group of Nations and the Greeks, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1884.
• History of the Popes: Their Church and State, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, P. F. Collier & Son, 1901.
• History of the Reformation in Germany, George Routledge & Sons, 1905.
• History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1494-1514, George Bell & Sons, 1909.

• Historicism
• German Historism
• Rankean positivism
• Friedrich Wilhelm Schirrmacher, historian and Ranke's student^[36]

• Evans, Richard (2000). In Defence of History (Revised ed.). London: Granta Books. p. 256. ISBN 978-1-86207-395-1.
• Gay, Peter (1974). Style In History. New York: McGraw-Hall. p. 256. ISBN 0-393-30558-9.
• Geyl, Pieter (1958). Debates with Historians. New York: Meridian. p. 287.
• Gilbert, Felix (1990). History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 109. ISBN 0-691-03163-0.
• Gooch, G.P. (1935). History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Longman's. p. 547.
• Green, Anna (1999). The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. p. 338. ISBN 978-0-7190-5255-2. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Iggers, Georg (1990). Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. p. 223. ISBN 0-8156-2469-7. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Krieger, Leonard (1977). Ranke: The Meaning of History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. p. 402. ISBN 0-226-45349-9.
• Laue, Theodore von (1950). Leopold von Ranke, the Formative Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 230.
• Novick, Peter (1988). That Noble Dream: the 'Objectivity' Question and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 648. ISBN 0-521-35745-4.
• von Ranke, Leopold (1973). Georg Iggers & Konrad von Moltke (ed.). The Theory and Practice of History. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merril. p. 514. ISBN 0-672-51673-X.
• Stern, Fritz, ed. (1973). The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (2nd ed.). New York: Vintage Books. p. 528. ISBN 0-394-71962-X.
• White, Hayden (1973). Metahistory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 448. ISBN 0-8018-1761-7.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Leopold Von Ranke.

• Leopold von Ranke, from Humboldt University of Berlin website
• Leopold von Ranke historicism, from "Age of the Sage" website.
• Leopold von Ranke's papers at Syracuse University; Ranke's personal library, containing many works by lesser known writers on historical, political and literary subjects of the 16th to 19th centuries, was also donated to the University's Rare Books department.
• Williams, H. S. (1907). The historians' history of the world. Volume XV. (ed., this volume covers Leopold von Ranke on Page 633.)
• Works by Leopold von Ranke at Project Gutenberg
• Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Ranke, Leopold von" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 by Leopold von Ranke at the Internet Archive

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Category:1795 births Category:1886 deaths Category:People from Kyffhäuserkreis Category:German historians Category:German Lutherans Category:Lutheran writers Category:People from the Electorate of Saxony Category:University of Leipzig alumni Category:German monarchists Category:Humboldt University of Berlin faculty Category:Members of the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art Category:Corresponding Members of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences