Idea of History

In the nineteenth century the competing paradigms for historical interpretation were the natural-science model and cultural history inclining toward art and aesthetics, the first represented especially by Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) and Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) and the second by Jules Michelet (1798–1874) and Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897)—and both represented in the famous exchange between Bury and Trevelyan. In general, historians have taken two paths to disciplinary science, one based on brute empiricism and reliance on primary sources and the other, under the influence of positivism, seeking general laws, as notoriously did Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862) and Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893). In this mode history was represented as a physical process that followed set patterns, a view that was reinforced by the analogy of Darwinian evolution. It was in this context, too, that the ideal of objectivity—history sub specie aeternitatis—was defended against the idea of history as a subjective literary art, to the extent indeed that the term "literary" became a pejorative term for scientific and professional historians following the quest of Ranke for history "as it actually happened."

Yet historians had long been aware that history had to be written from a particular "point of view" (Sehepunkt), and this hermeneutical insight, first expressed by Johann Martin Chladenius (1710–1759), was taught by the classical historian, and Ranke's colleague, Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884), for whom history was indeed partial insight and not "objective knowledge." For Droysen history was, as it had been for Herodotus, a matter of endless inquiry—"not," alluding to John the Baptist, "'the light and the truth' but a search therefor, a sermon thereupon, a consecration thereto." This was especially appropriate for art history, which was the model chosen by Jacob Burckhardt, for whom "History is actually the most unscientific of all the sciences" (1979, p. 21). Burckhardt rejected the "bogus objectivity" of Ranke for the subjectivity that arose in the Renaissance and Reformation. As he wrote about his own classic study of the civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, "To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a given civilization present a different picture, [so that] it is unavoidable that individual judgment and feeling should tell every moment both on the writer and on the reader" (1950, p. 1). The result was a principle of relativism that applied to the study of history itself, for "each age has a new and different way of looking at the more remote periods of the past" (1998, p. 7).