Leopold von Ranke

Leopold von Ranke (Wiehe, Electorate of Saxony, December 21, 1795-Berlin, German Empire, May 23, 1886) was a German historian of the 20th century xix, founder of modern history based on documentary sources, that is, positivist. According to Caroline Hoefferle, "Ranke was probably the most important that shaped [the] historical profession as it emerged in Europe and the United States in the late 19th century.' He was able to implement the seminar teaching method in his classes and focused on archival research and analysis of historical documents. On the basis of the methods of the School of History at the University of Göttingen, he was the first to establish a historical seminar.

Biography

Leopold von Ranke was born in Wiehe, then the kingdom of Prussia, today in the federal state of Thuringia, Germany. Ranke was educated at home and at the Schulpforta Institute. Even as a child he showed a strong interest in classical cultures, which led him to perfect Greek and Latin.

In 1814, Ranke enrolled at the University of Leipzig, where he concentrated on Classical Studies and Theology, strongly influenced by the Lutheran Church. In Leipzig, he becomes an expert in philology and begins to translate texts of classical authors from Latin. 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 due to his dissatisfaction with what he considered history books to be simply a collection of facts put together by modern historians.

Between 1817 and 1825, Ranke worked as a schoolmaster teaching classics at the Friedrichs Gymnasium in Frankfurt (Oder). During this time, he became interested in history partly out of his desire to become involved in the developing field of more professionalized history and partly because of a desire to find God's hand in the workings of history.

Historiography

Influence of Walter Scott

The circumstances that lead to History are personal. His interest is awakened by the historical novels of Walter Scott, inventor of this genre. Scott writes Waverley in 1814, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The story in this work is not the backdrop, but the protagonist. The novelist tries to recreate the past, reconstructing the conflict between the English and the Scots. This genre caught on and was imitated, having many successes. Ranke reads these novels and is fascinated, and it occurs to him to read things from the real past to find out if the past was really like that, discovering it even more fascinating for himself.

Niebuhr's influence

The work of Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831) inspired Ranke, since he was the inventor of what Ranke later did. He carried out the agrarian reform in Prussia, since this country was in a feudal system and he led it to modernization. Barthold Georg Niebuhr is in charge of carrying it out, and for the solution he is interested in history and tries to find out how the Roman agrarian reform was carried out, and then apply it to his own. He also analyzes the reforms, so he turns to Roman historians (Titus Livy), coming to the conclusion that this method was not reliable, so he studies contemporary documents, applying the philological method to them.

As a consequence of this study, he wrote a Roman history, in which the first thing he tried to do was reconstruct what happened based on documents of the time, but, although he did not have the same historiographical qualities as Niebuhr, his work inaugurated the method that Ranke will be brought to its full splendor at later dates.

Historic history

In 1824 Ranke published History of the Roman and Germanic Peoples (1494-1514). This is the first book of the historicist type of history, and it will include the ideological program of that new history. The content analyzes a conflict between the French and Spanish monarchies over the territories of Italy; Ranke's thesis is that Europe emerged as the conflict between the Romanesque and Germanic peoples.

The important thing about the book is the method, the approach it gives to the matter. That is why it publishes an "Appendix" where he exposes his methods, while criticizing previous authors who had written about that history, for example, Francesco Guicciardini, who in his History of Florence does something unsustainable, which is resorting to novel, since Ranke believes that we must go to the documents to know for sure what had happened (Ranke bases this book on the reports of the Venetian ambassadors).

Ranke obtains immediate recognition and is appointed to the chair at the University of Berlin. He is considered the great teacher of German History and will serve as a reference point for the entire world; His complete works cover 54 volumes and in them he talks about the history of Prussia, England and the popes, but he does not write a universal history. Ranke carries out teaching based on the seminar method, in which he indoctrinates historians who work side by side under Ranke's supervision. For the epistemological mentality of the time, Germany was an obligatory center of historical training.

Ranke's Postulates

There should not be a historical theory, with previous schemes that impose on the past, as was done previously. Ranke says "let the past speak, the historian has no mouth." Thus the historian must extinguish his self and become a mirror of things in order to see the events as they really were. He reveals a method: the philological method, which consists of recourse to documents.

Its history has a religious component. Ranke was a man who was interested in history because he believed it was a vehicle to find God (he considered that he had a presence in history in the Christian way, which gave meaning to it), understanding himself as the father of scientific historiography.

Work

When he published his first works, his postulates on historical objectivity were not initially understood, which is why he was attacked by other historians such as Heinrich Leo. Heinrich von Treitschke and other historians of the Prussian School lamented that von Ranke's objectivity did not make the reader feel which side the narrator was on.

Ranke placed emphasis on historical narrative, introducing ideas such as reliance on primary sources, an emphasis on narrative and especially political and international history (Aussenpolitik), and a commitment to writing history &# 34;as it really was" (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist).

Beginning with his first book, the History of the Latin and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514, Ranke made extraordinarily extensive use of sources for a historian of the period, including "memoirs, diaries, letters, diplomatic expeditions and first-hand testimonies of eyewitnesses. In this sense he relied on the traditions of Philology, but gave emphasis to mundane documents rather than old and exotic literature.

Between 1834 and 1836 he published History of the Popes, a valuable study of the pontiffs of Catholicism and their representatives in the Modern Age, from the century XV to the first half of the XIX. Considered extremely critical and substantially skeptical, it was widely answered by the Catholic historiography of the time, especially by the historian Ludwig von Pastor and his monumental History of the Popes since the end of the Middle Ages.

At the core of his method, Ranke did not believe in general theories that could cut through time and space. Instead, he spoke of the approach to historical time being done through primary sources.