Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886): The Professionalization of History
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Formula “How It Actually Was”
Leopold von Ranke’s famous formula appears in the preface to his first work, “Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples” (Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker, 1824): history wants “merely to show how it actually was.”
This formula is often read as a rejection of Hegel - but that is too simple. Ranke is opposing arbitrary constructions, the reading of preconceived theories into sources. But Hegel would have subscribed to that as well. The real difference lies elsewhere.
The Actual Difference: “Immediate to God”
Ranke’s famous statement: “But I maintain: every epoch is immediate to God, and its worth does not depend at all on what proceeds from it, but on its existence itself, on its own inherent being.”
This is directed against a teleological view of history that values earlier epochs only as “preliminary stages” toward later ones. Hegel’s sequence of stages of world history appeared to Ranke as a forced unification of diversity.
But even this criticism hits Hegel only partially. Hegel does not claim that history is teleologically “concluded.” He claims only that historical scholarship can write only about what is past - the owl of Minerva begins its flight at dusk. That is something different. Only in hindsight do we see where something has led.
Even today, historians are hesitant to write about the present - the closer one gets to one’s own time, the harder it becomes to gain an overview. This will also become apparent in Volume 3 of this book series.
At the end of his lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel says something to his students that is anything but oriented toward “conclusion”: “To its urging - when the mole burrows on within - we have to listen, and to procure it actuality; they are an absolutely necessary progression, which expresses nothing but the nature of spirit itself and lives in all of us. I wish that this history of philosophy might contain an invitation for you to grasp the spirit of the time, which is natural in us, and to draw it forth out of its naturalness, that is, its concealment, its lifelessness, into the light of day, and - each in his own place - to bring it forth into the light with consciousness.”[1]
This is no conclusion, but a call to further work.
Ranke’s Contribution
Ranke’s real achievement lies in the professionalization of historical scholarship: rigorous source criticism, the historical seminar as a form of training, the establishment of scholarly standards. His students - Sybel, Treitschke, and others - shaped German historical scholarship for generations.
Philosophically, Ranke was less reflective than Droysen. His method contained unexamined presuppositions - for instance, the focus on the state as the central subject of history, which is by no means self-evident.
Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, conclusion. ↩︎