Ranke and nationalist historiography
The codification of historical methodology in the early nineteenth century drew from a very diverse array of sources, including the natural sciences, political theory, philology, and, of course, earlier histories.
Recent world historical study has further complicated this picture by pointing to the nonEuropean circumstances that influenced many such sources and the nonEuropean intellectual traditions from which they often borrowed and distinguished themselves. Pooling several hundred years of global inputs, “the nineteenth century is the great reservoir in the modern history of history.”[87] Concerning periodization in particular, Enlightenment era studies in geology and epistemology significantly impacted the subsequent approach. Taken together, they contributed to the “paradoxical character” of eighteenthcentury thought.[88] First, the European engagement with the wider world spurred a revival of integrative, universal histories. Among the different influences on its methodology, geology was perhaps the most significant. Specifically, fossils - previously used to help examine the human past - were for the first time recognized as indicators of pre-human times and geohistory, what Buffon called “nature's epochs.” Naturalists and others increasingly replaced static and theocentric views of creation with developmental accounts of ever deepening timescales. Out of this “critical arena,” Fontenelle, followed by Voltaire, Montesquieu, and others, formulated sequential causality as the basis for historical explanation. The universal scope of Enlightenment historiography was thus mirrored by the universal chronology of earthly time.[89] Second, the sheer flood of global information and scientific discovery outpaced the “convertibility of time and space” employed by historical writers of the earlier tradition.[90] Historical truth now became subject to historical conditions, and self-reflecting expressions like “viewpoint," “position,” and “standpoint” entered regularly into the scholarship.[91] Thomas Abbt, in his 1766 History of the Human Race, noted that the narrative would have been quite “different” if written from Asia, rather than Europe.[92] Herder famously turned this perspectival epistemology against Voltaire and others, whose naturalist chronologies, he argued, illegitimately judged the past by the present, and then relegated present-day non-Europeans into that past. “In the universe,” he wrote, “there are innumerable times, all at one time.”[93] Here, the global differentiation facing historical thought was mirrored by differences in the experience of time. The European nineteenth century opened with an intense interest in and knowledge about the world as a whole, and with that came an ambivalent sense of history as a universal disjointed from itself.Pulling together many strands of the eighteenth century, Ranke set out to formalize the proper conditions of historical knowledge. He endeavored to find for the field its own methodological autonomy and rejected any simple derivation from natural science or idealism. This distinguished him from previous writers, and transformed the discipline profoundly.[94] Regarding the central problem of time, Ranke sought an intermediate space between the two previous tendencies. In his formulation, a period delineated a selfcontained logic, yet it was also chronologically chained to its neighboring configurations. After the facts, Ranke wrote, “comes the unity and progression of events.” This brief phrase encapsulated the axiomatic temporality of subsequent historical methodology: a period was both an immanent meaning and a moving force within universal chronological time. On the one hand, a period possessed its own internal coherence. Its significance for historical study relied on neither its preconditions, nor its consequences, but rather “on its existence itself, on its ownness itself [in ihrem Eigenen selbst]" As Ranke famously proclaimed, “every epoch is immediate to God.” On the other hand, every period also partook in the world's overall course of development. “All these epochs themselves belong to the great whole, what we call universal history... the sequence of centuries, each in its original essence, all linked to one another... from the very beginning to the present day.”11 An epoch was entirely present unto itself as well as mediated by others along the chain of time.
This enigmatic joining of the intrinsic and the developmental helps explain some of the unusual contrasts in Ranke's reception. Pieter Geyl, for example, valued the temporal interiority and differentiation, while Hans-Georg Gadamer faulted the chronology of power. More astutely than both, Friedrich Meinecke called it “an irreconcilable dualism.”[95] [96]Ranke himself acknowledged the dilemma. To grasp the event both in its singularity and human universality, “one attempts, one strives, but in the end, one does not achieve it.” He made the opposition manageable by condensing it into his principal object of study, the state. As in his conception of time, Ranke characterized the state as a selfsame spiritual unity and as an interacting material force. It possessed “together, a godly trace and a human impetus.” A state was a noumenal essence, a divine immanence irreducible to any external relations or historical fluctuations, in Ranke's phrase, “identical only with itself.” Conversely, every state derived from a natural, “common necessity,” each one conditioned by its context within the universal struggle for “independence” and “position in the world.” Like a period, a state exhibited “not only historical roots,” but also its own meaning, a particular and unifying “spirit which binds past and present, and which must also give life to the future.” For Ranke, these “earthly-spiritual communities” furnished an actual form to the antinomy between unity and progression, immediacy and interrelation. Historical intelligibility thus centered on the state, even as the contradiction remained insoluble: “God alone knows world history. We perceive the contradictions.”[97]
In his final years, Ranke altered a key element in this formula. He began to designate the state's spiritual realm as its “nationality.” Previously, he had opposed any equivalence between state and nation. Now, following the Prussian unification of Germany, his analysis highlighted their uniformity.
In Leonard Krieger's reading, this synthesis finally resolved for Ranke the contradiction between the selfsame and the continuous. Ranke, defying his own earlier warning, could now embrace a universal “science of world his- tory."1[98] It appears, though, that Krieger somewhat overweighted the dialectics of conciliation, for the temporal antinomy in Ranke indeed continued.[99] Still, Ranke's Weltgeschichte, among other late works, did largely parallel the nationalist and Hegelian turn of mid-century historians. “Man was both in nature and outside it," Hayden White observed of the era's historiography.[100] [101] Yet, this duality was camouflaged - or, if one prefers, reconciled - by the transubstantia- tions of liberal-nationalist history.The nineteenth-century institutionalization of historical thought included as a matter of course Ranke's critique of philosophical generalization. History demanded the archival source and the concrete detail, what Johann Droysen called the method of “individualization." This principle applied fundamentally to the historical period, whose unique demarcation enabled the requisite contextualization of every other particular. To focus only on development, Droysen stressed, “sacrifices the truth." George Bancroft declared similarly, “truth itself knows nothing of the succession of ages." William Stubbs argued that historical knowledge showed endless differentiation, not “elemental unity." Even Jules Michelet, in his early Introduction d l'Histoire Universelle, separated from the short narrative a considerably larger section of “clarifications" that contextualized particulars into their own era.17 In all such cases though, the immanent meaning of every period appeared to contradict the universal progressivity that nationalist historians credited to the actions of their own states. The harmonization of these temporalities invariably derived from the nation-state itself.
As John Burrows skillfully showed, Victorian historians such as Stubbs fashioned a spiritual-political English national “identity” to mediate synchronic local details and diachronic causal connections. Droysen bridged his irreducible epochs to the “uninterrupted stream” of time by giving German unification a peerless world historical significance, namely, as resolution to the ancient problem of freedom. Michelet likewise fused his single chronology and assortment of times by interweaving through both the all-encompassing force of France, the “pilot of the ship of humanity.” And for Bancroft, the United States now brought to “consummation” every age of the civilized human past. “Our country holds the noblest rank,” he wrote, bestowing to western Europeans “the renewal of their youth,” while “the hoary civilization of the farthest antiquity leans forward from Asia to receive the glad tidings of the messenger of freedom.”18These temporal reconciliations relied specifically upon the categorical correspondence between nation and state, what Droysen described as an “essential mutuality, like body and soul.” The nation-state, he wrote, uniquely integrated the many and the one, moral freedom and willful action, and its history expressed the greatest synthesis of all: “that which for humans is godly.” With this embrace of Hegel, numerous historians of the nineteenth century voided the methodological antinomy that otherwise bisected the concept of the period. Transported by the equivalence of nation and state, spirit now fully entered into the course of history, and in this way the nunc stans of every period, the immediacy of each before God, was now also discernible across the succession of time. As events “pass away,” Bancroft argued, “God is visible in History.” Michelet, with characteristic bombast, claimed to have finally discovered the true purpose of historical scholarship, “Thierry called it narration, and M. Guizot analysis. I have named it resurrection.” More modest by a tad, Droysen defined it as “consecration,” likening historical study to John the Baptist, a “witness to the light.” Through the
Historical Society, 1854), p.
9; William Stubbs, Lectures on Early English History (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), p. 195; and Jules Michelet, Introduction a VHistoire Universelle (Paris: L. Hachette, 1834).18 J. W. Burrows, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 108 and 146-7; Southard, Droysen, pp. 10, 37-8, and 47-8 (translation modified); Michelet, Introduction, p. vi; and Bancroft, Necessity, pp. 28-9. metaphysical unity of the nation-state, meaning and chronology were reconciled without remainder.[102]
Nineteenth-century historiography, it is often noted, served the political interests of the nation-state. Yet the reverse was also true. Nationalism gave to historical thought an invaluable connecting passage between its two conflicting treatments of time. Occasionally, historians figured the sequential half of this formulation by using the developmental language of the latest geological and biological findings. The final distillation of Darwin's theory of evolution, however, threatened their synthesis, for within the universal drift of change, post hoc period markers could index descriptions, but they could offer nothing of spirit or meaning. In subsequent decades, many historians did more fully absorb what Henry Adams dubbed Darwin's “violent impulse,” but only by inverting its relativism. Frederick Jackson Turner, for example, portrayed the periodization of American history as a “record of social evolution.” The buffalo trail, Indian society, the fur-trader, the intensifying phases of agriculture, the industrialization of cities: each expressed a “higher stage” in the “single file... procession of civilization.” At the same time, the westward expansion that propelled these changes also occasioned an ever new encounter with the wilderness frontier. For Turner, a historical period thus marked a stage of American evolutionary development as well as the “perennial rebirth” of its nationality. “The land with no history,” he wrote, quoting Achille Loria, “reveals luminously the course of universal history.”[103]
Turner's evolutionism was not just the dress of “Darwinian metaphors.”[104] It found historical determination in natural processes and natural settings. Beyond the chronology of “adaptation,” however, the American national “spirit” gave to each period its meaning and then to their sequence a world historical direction.[105] During these same years, Karl Lamprecht's philosophy of history likewise concentrated on stages of natural development and expansion. A nation, he wrote, was “the highest social organization in nature.” An “element of universal lawfulness inhered” within the “evolutionary progression” of a nation, and Lambrecht linked such laws to his advocacy for German territorial annexations.[106] Yet historical analysis required more than Darwin's “one-sided mechanical explanation.” A nation, like an individual, also possessed a unique and undivided “soul.” On the one hand then, “everywhere on earth” nations evolved through a “common” sequence of stages. On the other hand, a national period could be grasped “in itself... without needing to consider either chronology or terrestrial localization.” For Lamprecht, the contradiction resolved through the “world-historical context” itself, the great timeless totality of evolution-history, which provided both “connection” and “coherency.” With this naturalistic synthesis of development and immanence, Lamprecht dispensed with God as its guarantor. The reconciliation still hinged, however, upon the singularity of the nation-state.[107]