Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge

Chapter 1. Classical Historicism as a Model for Historical Scholarship

Chapter I Classical Historicism as a Model for Historical Scholarship In the early nineteenth century a radical change took place in the Western world generally in the way history was researched, written , and taught as it was transformed into a professional discipline . Until then there had been two dominant traditions of writing history: one predominantly learned and antiquarian, the other essentially literary. Only occasionally, as in the work of the great British historians of the eighteenth century, Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson, did these two traditions coalesce. The new discipline of history that emerged at the German universities stressed the learned side of history, yet at the same time it freed learning from narrow antiquarianism, and its best practitioners maintained a sense for literary quality. It is important to keep in mind that the new historical profession served definite public needs and political aims that made it important to communicate the results of its research to a public whose historical consciousness it sought to shape and who turned to the historians in search of their own historical identity. Thus there existed from the beginning a tension between the scientific ethos of the profession , which demanded a commitment free of preconceptions and value judgments, and the political function of the profession, which took a certain social order for granted. This tension was reflected in the educational mission the nineteenth -century university set for itself. The prototype of this university was the University of Berlin, founded in 1810 as part 23 of the reorganization of secondary and higher education carried out by Wilhelm von Humboldt in Prussia in the reform era following Prussia's disastrous defeat by Napoleon in 1806 and 1807. These reforms, sometimes described as a "revolution from above," laid the basis for modern economic, legal, and social conditions, similar to those the French Revolution had effected but within a political framework that maintained a great deal of its old monarchical, bureaucratic, military, and aristocratic structure . The civil service, recruited heavily from the university-educated middle class, played a central role in a political order in which representative institutions functioned as yet only on the communal level. Humboldt sought to reform the Gymnasia and the university with the aim of providing a comprehensive intellectual and aesthetic education, the core of what came to be known as Bildung,1 by means of which the foundation was to be laid for a society of informed and dedicated citizens. The reforms were by no means intended to be democratic. The humanistic education, with its heavy reliance on the Latin and especially the Greek classics, not only deepened the gulf between an educated Burgertum and the general population but also created a class of higher public servants whom Fritz Ringer has compared with the Chinese mandarins.2 The new university embodied this fusion of Wissenschaft and Bildung. In contrast to the universities of the old regime, whose prime function was instruction, the University of Berlin was to become a center in which teaching was informed by research. With this in mind, Leopold Ranke was called to the University of Berlin in 1825. Ranke, a young teacher at the Gymnasium in Frankfurt/Oder, had just published a book in which he sought to reconstruct, on the basis of a critical examination of documents, a great transformation in European politics: the emergence as a prime factor in international politics of the modern state systems and the balancing of the great powers that took place in the course of the Italian wars of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.3 In a methodological appendix4 to the book, he rejected any attempt to write history on the basis of other than primary sources, accusing somewhat injustly all previous accounts of the Italian wars, including the classical works of Guicciardini , of failing totally to examine the evidence critically. It The Early Phase 24 was Ranke's aim to turn history into a rigorous science practiced by professionally trained historians. Like Thucydides, who was the subject of his dissertation, he sought to write a history that combined a trustworthy reconstruction of the past with literary elegance. History needed to be written by specialists, but not only or even primarily for them, but for a broad educated public. History was to be both a scientific discipline and a source of culture. Ranke's conception of history as a rigorous science is characterized by the tension between the explicit demand...