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PARTISAN REVIEW
only insofar as they bear upon the tension between the particular and
the universal in Ranke's history.
Krieger's stinginess with social and psychological context is not
merely a practical matter of having to select some things and leave out
others.
It
is part of his argument. His psychological argument, for
instance, is that the historian Ranke completely absorbed the personal
Ranke: "the record confirms the manifest picture of a Ranke who
organized his private life in such a way as to absorb his problematic
personal drives and
to
create a respectable foundation for the untram–
meled pursuit of scholarship." Besides being nothing new in Ranke
scholarship, this lay diagnosis of "sublimation" explains nothing.
It
does get Krieger past some of the more obvious pitfalls of psychobiog–
raphy. More significantly, however, it seems
to
make further bio–
graphical information superfluous.
The suppression of social and political context is more problem–
atic. The book jacket is decorated with the famous portrait of the
elderly Ranke bearing his two great medals of nobility, but Krieger
does not mention that Ranke was ennobled in 1865 (or why). He treats
Ranke's lectures to Maximilian II of Bavaria on modern history
exclusively for the light they shed on Ranke's own struggle to appre–
ciate the relationship between the vantage point of the historian rooted
in the turmoil of present politics (this after 1848) and the historical past
which he hoped to portray objectively. Ranke's position as official
Prussian historiographer, his writings on Prussian history, indeed his
relationship to Prussia generally, receive attention only as background
to the tension in Ranke's writing between national and universal
history. Likewise with Ranke's polemical political activity as editor of
the
Historisch-politische Zeitschrift.
Thus an eminently political
historian is presented here "with the politics left out." The effect of this
can only be to counter the arguments of scholars like Georg Iggers and
Hayden White, to name only two Americans, who have demonstrated
the reactionary implications of Ranke's historical writing.
Even more disturbing, Krieger omits the most important intellec–
tual context of his problem: historicism. He says in the preface that the
great tradition of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in
German historical writing "was irrelevant, for he [Ranke] considered
his approach to universal history to be idiosyncratic." This is hardly a
substitute for an analysis of whether this is in fact the case, which is
doubtful. Krieger ignores not only Ranke's predecessors, but virtually
all of his contemporaries among historical writers as well: not a word
of comparison with Michelet, Macaulay, Tocqueville, or Burckhardt,
