National History

National histories were written before history was professionalized. Whig historians like Thomas Babington Macauley (1800–1859) located the English national genius in the development of parliamentary liberty. The Whigs' French counterparts held that history provided the unifying force that prevented individualism from undermining the social body, and that the Orleanist regime (1830–1848) represented the culmination of French history because it reconciled individual liberty with the national good. Some amateur national historians, influenced by positivism, felt that the triumph of the nation was scientifically inevitable. National histories represented one element in disparate amateur historical writing, which also included social, economic, religious, revolutionary, and women's history, and which were united by special pleading—often explicit. They were written as much to inspire as to inform.

The professionalization of history in the nineteenth century was predicated, as Lord Acton (1834–1902) put it, upon the removal of the poet and patriot from history. Acton's hero, Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), rejected Hegelian teleologies on the grounds that individual periods should be understood in their own terms. The uniqueness of a set of events would be grasped by careful criticism of primary sources and their arrangement into an interpretation. Historians would constitute a profession, endowed with a special ability to understand the past objectively through the mastery of special skills.

In practice, it might be argued, professional historians merely provided scientific authority for existing ideas about the nation-state. Modern universities were created in periods of nation building, for which governments expected historians to provide historical legitimacy. In Prussia the universities expanded after defeat in the Napoleonic wars, in France after defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870, and in Britain during a period when global preeminence seemed to be threatened by the rise of Germany and America.

It was not inevitable that nationalism should have acquired a historical dimension. The French revolutionaries (at least in theory) had preached a territorial nationalism, dependent upon the democratic choice of a people to live under a particular government. It was widely believed, however, that abstract rights had led to the dissolution of the social body and to the Jacobin Terror. Even democratic nationalists feared that abstract rights nationalism might permit the overthrow of any government at the behest of the people. A historically rooted nationalism limited a people's freedom to choose and provided a defense against unrestrained individualism, anarchy, and the recourse to despotism.

Moreover, nationalists and national historians were impressed by the pseudo-scientific pretensions of theories of race, Social Darwinism, and group psychology that depicted individuals as products of national and racial origin. But the extent to which individuals were prisoners of their nationality varied. Women, "inferior" races, workers, and peasants were seen as passive embodiments of the nation, who grasped the national idea "instinctively," or through the "fetishization" of national symbols and great men. The active carriers of the national idea were bourgeois men, who alone possessed the ability to understand the national idea rationally. To govern effectively, this elite needed to take account of national character and provide a people with a system of government in keeping with their characteristics. National history became an essential part of training for government, and in societies where gendered separate spheres were an integral part of bourgeois culture, it became an essential attribute of manliness too.

There were also intellectual reasons for privileging the nation-state. Ranke followed Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) in seeing peoples as "thoughts of God." Through a process of intuition, combined with careful documentary research, the historian could grasp the nation's unique spirit. While the historian could not discern the end of history, God was present in history, and the objective historian could glimpse something of God's divine plan.