RANKE'S HISTORY
RANKE: THE MEANING OF HISTORY.
By
Leonard Krieger.
University
of Chicago Press. $23.
Readers of the
VICIOUS
(and fatuous) review of Leonard
Krieger's
Ranke
in the
Times Literary Supplement
(6 January 1978)
will be surprised to learn that this is not such a bad book. Krieger
possesses considerable powers of conceptual analysis which surely
compensate-in this book as in Krieger's earlier
German Idea of
Freedom-for
his abstractness and stylistic deficiencies. Krieger is one
of the very best intellectual historians in America precisely because he
can manipulate ideas. Here he concentrates upon Ranke 's progressive
reconciliation of his enduring affection for "individuals," documents,
and the particular in history, and his spasmodic compulsion
to
treat
general questions, progress, and even world history. This, of course, is
the classic problem of historicism which Friedrich Meinecke posed and
thought he had solved in
Die Entstehung des Historismus .
On this
general theme Krieger has written a chronologically ordered series of
chapters tracing Ranke's intellect ual development through his succes–
sive books, referring all the while for corroboration of his hypotheses to
Ranke's methodological pronouncements, lectures, articles, and letters.
The evidence consulted is thus quite comprehensive, but the focus is
limited to the tension between the particular and the universal in
Ranke's history. In fact Krieger forthrightly states that " this is not the
full-dress biography or the complete historiographical study of Ranke
that has so often been call ed for. "
In support of his argument about Ranke's historicism, Krieger has
nevertheless admitted two subordinate agenda
to
the book: in each
chapter he discusses Ranke's professional and social arrangements and
muses about his relationship to political personalities and circum–
stances; and he provides a minimum of information about Ranke's
personal life.
Ranke
could not be anything like Ranke's own
History of
Wallenstein,
for as Krieger points out, Ranke led a most uneventful
life. He did hobnob with kings of Prussia and Bavaria, however, and
[or a time he frequented the salons of Rahel Varnhagen and Bettina
von Arnim. He came from a family of Lutheran pastors, married late,
and lived an aescetic life of scholarship. Krieger informs us of all these
things, as well as of Ranke's research trips and other miscellanea, but
