This lecture deals with themes and methods of 19^th-century history writing developed in Germany and Britain. The lecture will first investigate the historical context and ideas of the German historians Leopold von Ranke, the founder of modern academic history writing. While Ranke continued the German Enlightened tradition of history writing (historicism), which we encountered in the previous session, he is famous for turning the study of the past into a rigorous ‘science’. (We shall see that the German term 'Wissenschaft' means something very different from the English term 'science'). Ranke distinguished historical research and writing from more literary or philosophical pursuits, popular at his time. Ranke's famous ‘critical method’, the empirical collection of archival facts and their philological verification, became so successful that it was adopted by historians all over the world. But we do not only owe our method to Ranke. He also introduced the lecture and the research seminar. Both continue to structure the study of academic history at universities until today.

 

However, while Ranke's system was quickly implemented at universities all over the world, his historicist beliefs that nurtured his ‘critical method’ were often deeply misunderstood, particularly in the English-speaking world. Why? The second part of the lecture will explore the reasons for this misunderstanding, using mid-nineteenth century Britain and the debates among British historians as an example. In contrast to Ranke's German lands, Britain was not only the leading imperialist and trading nation of the day but also highly industrialised. Great faith was put into the methods of the modern natural sciences and new technologies, such as the steam engine, believed to be the key to national and progress and economic prosperity. The lectures suggests that the overnight success of Henry Buckle's, History of Civilisation in England (1857) has to be understood within this specific political, economic and socio-cultural context. Buckle, today celebrated as the ‘father’ of scientific history writing, based his work entirely on methods and statistical data from the natural sciences and strongly identified with British utilitarianism as well as the new philosophical ideas of French positivism. His History of Civilization in England became a bestselle,r but not everyone was happy with it. British academic historians who were enthusiastic followers of the Rankean method (or what they believed it to be, as we shall see) -- rejected Buckle's positivistic approach. The battle over whether history writing is a science (i.e. in the sense of the modern 'natural sciences') or an art (a literary endeavor based on philological and literary standards), or, perhaps a bit of both, began right there. This battle continues until today as we shall see in later lectures.

READINGS BELOW CAN ALSO BE FOUND HERELink opens in a new window.

Core Texts/Documents/Arguments/Source

Buckle, Henry Thomas, History of Civilization in EnglandLink opens in a new window (1857), vol. 1 (e-book, Warwick library), chapter 1.

Ranke, L. von, ‘The Young Ranke’s Vision of History and God’, in ibid., The Theory and Practice of History, ed. by G. G. Iggers (London, 2011), p. 4 [Course Extracts].

Ranke, L. von, ‘The Role of the Particular and the General in the Study of Universal History’, in ibid, The Theory and Practice of History, ed. by G. G. Iggers (London, 2011), pp. 24-25 [Course Extracts]

Ranke, L. von, ‘On the Character of Historical Science’, in ibid., The Theory and Practice of History, ed. by G. G. Iggers (London, 2011), pp. 8-16. (Course Extracts)

 

Core Seminar Readings

For an overview see: CWHT, chapter 8 (Ranke)

 Gil, Thomas, ‘Leopold von Ranke’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, ed. by Aviezer Tucker (London, 2009), pp. 383-391. (online: https://analepsis.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/blackwell-companion-to-the-philosophy-of-history-and-historiography.pdf).

Hesketh, Ian, The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak (London, 2011), ch. 2Link opens in a new window (e-book, Warwick library)

 

Seminar Questions

Ranke strongly disliked certain forms of history writings? Which and why?

How did the socio-cultural, political and economic context shape Ranke’s and Buckle’s view of the past?

Was Ranke really the coolly objective and empiricist historian 19th-century British historians celebrated him to be?

Is ‘objectivity’ a universal value in history writing?

Why was ‘being objective’ such an attractive value for historians in the 19th century?

Does data tell us the truth about the past?

What was Buckle’s aim and why was he rejected by many of his English academic historian peers at the time?

Is positivism a useful approach to history writing?

How did Buckle's and Ranke's political, economic and socio-cultural context' differ? How did this affect their history writing?

 

Significant Quotations

‘History is distinguished from all other sciences in that it is also an art…History is a science in collecting, finding, penetrating: it is an art because it recreates and portrays that which it has found and recognized. Other sciences are satisfied simply with recording what has been found; history requires the ability to recreate.’ (Leopold von Ranke, ‘On the Character of Historical Science’, 1830)

‘For one does not study history only for school: the knowledge of the history of mankind ought to be common property of mankind, and, above all, should benefit the nation to which we belong and without which our studies would not exist.’ (Leopold von Ranke, The Role of the Particular and the General in the Study of Universal History, c. 1860)

 

‘In all of history God dwells, lives, can be recognized. Every deed gives testimony of Him, every moment preaches His name…Let us go forward. No matter how it goes and succeeds, let us do our part to unveil this holy hieroglyph! In this way too we serve God, in this way we are also priests and teachers.’``( Leopold von Ranke, Excerpt from a letter to his brother, March 1820).

‘…when we put all these things together, we may form a faint idea of the immense value of that vast body of facts which we now possess, and by the aid of which the progress of mankind is to be investigated… at present it is enough to say, that for all the higher purposes of human thought history is still miserably deficient, and presents that con-fused and anarchical appearance natural to a subject of which the laws are unknown, and even the foundation unsettled.’ (Henry Buckle, History of Civilisation in England, 1857).

 

‘Our acquaintance with history being so imperfect, while our materials are so numerous, it seems desirable that something should be done on a scale far larger than has hitherto been attempted, and that a strenuous effort should be made to bring up this great department of inquiry to a level with other departments, in order that wemay maintain the balance and harmony of our knowledge. (Henry Buckle, History of Civilisation in England, 1857).

 

 

‘..still I hope to accomplish for the history of man something equivalent, or at all events analogous, to what has been effected by other inquirersf or the different branches of natural science.’ (Henry Buckle, History of Civilisation in England, 1857).

 

 

‘In regard to nature, events apparently the most irregular and capricious have been explained, and have been shown to be in accordance with certain fixed and universal laws. This has been done because men of ability, and, above all, men of patient, untiring thought, have studied natural events with the view of discovering their regularity : and if human events were subjected to a similar treatment, we have every right to expect similar results.’ (Henry Buckle, History of Civilisation in England, 1857)

 

 

Further Readings

Adler, Hans, ‘Johann Gottfried Herder's Concept of Humanity,’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23 (1994): 55–74

Barnard, Frederick Mechner, Herder's Social and Political Thought. Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press 1965.

Beard, Charles, ‘That Noble Dream’, American Historical Review 41: 1 (Oct 1935), pp. 74-87

Beise, Frederic C., Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, M. 1992), chapter on Herder.
-- ‘Humboldt, the Proteus The German Historicist Tradition’, in ibid, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford, 2011), pp. 167-213, specifically: subchapter 6: 187-189; 7: 190-194; 10: 207-213. (very good)
-- ‘Introduction: The Concept and Context of Historicism,’ in ibid., The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford, 2011): pp. 1-26 (excellent overview over the complexity of the term and its history).

Braw, J. D., ‘Vision as Revision: Ranke and the Beginning of Modern History’, 
 History and Theory, 46:4 (2007), pp. 45–60.

Fuchs, Eckhardt, Henry Buckle: Geschichtsschreibung und Positivismus in England und Deutschland (Leipzig, 1994)

Birnbaum, Norman, ‘Conflicting Interpretations of the Rise of Capitalism: Marx and Weber’, British Journal of Sociology 4 (1953), pp. 121-141.

Berlin, Berlin, 'History and Theory: The Concept of Scientific History,' History and Theory 1, no. 1 (1960). (note: his view on the natural science is problematic,remember that he writes in the 1960!)

Burrow, John, 'Historicism and Social Evolution', in British and German Historiography 1750-1950, ed. b B. Stuchtey and P, Wende (Oxford, 2000).

Daston, Lorraine, Classical Probabilit in the Enlightenment (Chicago, 1995).

Daston, L., and Galison, P., Objectivity (2007). (excellent book on the rise of our concept of objectivity in scientific observation during the 19th century (e-book, Warwick library)
Gaukroger, Stephen., “History of Objectivity,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil. J. Smelser and Paul. B. Baltes (Oxford, 2001), 10785.

Ghosh, P., ‘Max Weber’s Idea of “Puritanism”: A Case Study in the Empirical Construction of the Protestant Ethic’, History of European Ideas 29 (2003): 183-221.
Ghosh, P., ‘Not the Protestant Ethic? Max Weber at St Louis’, History of European Ideas, 31 (2005), 367-407
Ghosh, P., ‘Max Weber’s Idea of “Puritanism”: A Case Study in the Empirical Construction of the Protestant Ethic,’ History of European Ideas 29 (2003): 183-221.

Giddens, Anthony, Introduction to Weber’s Protestant Ethic, vii-xxv (https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2013/SOC571E/um/_Routledge_Classics___Max_Weber-The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism__Routledge_Classics_-Routledge__2001_.pdf)

Iggers, Georg G., The German Conception of History: the National Tradition from Herder to the Present, Middletown, 1983. Chapter III: 44-62 (Humboldt)

Iggers, Georg G., The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (2nd ed.; Wesleyan University Press, 1983), good section on Weber within the wider socio-cultural and intellectual contexts)

Iggers, Georg, G. G., ‘Historicism: The History and the Meaning of the Term’, Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 129-151.

Lamont, W., ‘Puritanism and Capitalism’, in W. Lamont, Puritanism and Historical Controversy (London, 1996), 103-28

Popper, K., The Poverty of Historicism (London, 1957), 1-3, 31-46 (available as Google Book)

Porter, Theodore, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton 1986).
Ibid, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, 1995) (e-book, Warwick Library)

Ross, D., ‘On the Misunderstanding of Ranke and the Origins of the Historical Profession in America,’ in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, ed. G. G.Iggers and J. M. Powell (Syracuse, 1990), pp. 154-169. (digitised extract)

Parker, Christopher, ‘English Historians and Opposition to Positivism’, History and Theory 22 (1983): 120-45

Warren, John, 'The Rankean Tradition in British historiography, 1840-1950, in Writing History: Theory & Practice, ed. by Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (London, 2003) (e-book).