Historicism From Ranke To Nietzsche

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Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche

john toews
Historicism as a general framework for thinking about human existence was

connected to the development of the European national state after 1815 not
only in Germany, but across Western Europe. It was a critical component in
the formation of a public culture in which the emergence of new collective
identities was tied to the production of narrative scripts creating the memory
of a common past. Increasing recognition of the value of historical research
and historiography was entangled in this process, as historians teaching in
public universities or writing for an expanding literate public became the
recognized spokespersons for the collective memory that created and sus-
tained the common identity of the otherwise fragmented populations of the
emerging nation-states. Both the articulation of national borders as cultural
boundaries and the definition of nation-states as primary sites for integrating
ethnic and ethical identities were central to nineteenth-century historicism;
and the emergence of a professional academic discipline for the production of
publicly validated historical knowledge delineating a common past was
important in both of these processes. Historicism was defined most of all
by the belief that reconstruction of the meaning of the past could sustain the
meaning of existence in the present, and that historical understanding was
a necessary condition for determining the creative possibilities of human
individuals both in the present and in the future.
In this chapter I will explore the ways in which the historical transforma-
tions of the revolutionary watershed period of 1789–1815 merged cultural
difference and temporal difference in ways that framed the development of
historicism in the nineteenth century. I will follow the personal itinerary of
the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), who represented the
professional institutionalization of history as an autonomous discipline, but
who also participated in the broader cultural discussions concerning the
implications of defining human existence as essentially historical during the
middle decades of the nineteenth century. Reading Ranke historically also
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serves as an important entry into the process of living and thinking human
existence as historical in the decades between the integrative and totalizing
metaphysics of Romantic and Idealist philosophies of history and the reflec-
tive critique of the assumptions of historicism during the last quarter of the
century. This will also help us to understand the tensions in Rankean
historicism in the work of the “post-Rankean” historians Johann Gustav
Droysen (1808–1884) and Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) as well as the critical
reconsideration of historicism in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844–1900).
Ranke: Historical Anthropology and

Self-Determination
Much of the scholarly debate about the defining characteristics of nineteenth-
century historicism has focused on the issue of continuity and discontinuity
with eighteenth-century traditions of historical thinking and historiographi-
cal practice. It has also addressed the question of whether the era of political
turmoil between the onset of the French Revolution in 1789 and the end of
the Napoleonic Empire in 1815 marked a radical break with inherited under-
standings of temporal and cultural difference, and transformed multiple
stories of human development into a singular history of “man” as historically
fashioned and self-fashioning. At this juncture Ranke was engaged in the
transition from his initial immersion in the religious and secular (Lutheran
Protestant and neoclassical humanist) value systems of his culture in the elite
boarding school of Schulpforta to the more advanced philological, philoso-
phical, and theological study of those traditions at the University of Leipzig.
Central to Ranke’s inheritance was the commitment to a critical linguistic
and also historical analysis of the biblical and classical textual sources that
sustained cultural meaning in the present. During his pre-university years
Ranke was often absorbed in the philosophical and literary texts of classical
Greek culture as expressions of an immanent or naturalistic humanism that
could be imagined as universally valid. But by 1815, as he entered the mature
phase of his training, honing his linguistic and philological skills, and became
a spokesperson for historical traditions of cultural meaning, he began to
rethink the content of his intellectual inheritance in light of the current
political turmoil: the defeat of Napoleon’s Imperial ambitions, the emergence
of pan-German ethnic nationalism in resistance to those ambitions, and the
battle over the nature and appropriate institutional forms of political author-
ity. A number of fragmentary, unpublished writings as well as extensive diary
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entries from Ranke’s early years reveal his intense engagement with the
question of how to give meaning to the historian’s vocation.
Ranke’s process of thinking through the theoretical assumptions of inher-
ited traditions of historical self-consciousness is most evident in an essay
fragment entitled “Man and Nature” that he wrote during his last two years
as a university student at Leipzig.1 This essay empathetically worked its way
through what seem to be contrasting, even contradictory, conceptions of
historical existence. Following the inspiration of the neo-humanist natural-
ism of Herder and Goethe, who were dominant figures in the emergence of
a distinctively German public culture in the late eighteenth century, Ranke
examined the implications of perceiving man “as product and part of nature”
when nature itself was experienced as a creative power, rather than as
a “created” order of atomized objects. Human existence, including both
human individuality and the collective existence of “peoples” or cultural
ethnicities, was conceived as a particular combination of drives and feelings
that shaped the forms of embodied human identity in relation to other forms
of natural life and the world that they shared. Even the most advanced forms
of consciousness, self-consciousness, and interpersonal social interaction that
characterized human existence were conceived as expressive individuations
of nature. Ranke connected the investigation of this immanent naturalism to
an aesthetic form of knowing. Aesthetic representations articulated the
implicit presence of the universal substance of nature in any particular
form, of divine creative purpose within created existence. As a part of the
proliferating and changing organic forms of nature, human existence was
temporally specific, being marked by particular forms of association among
individuals and relationships to the environment that differed from one
period to another, and thus “historical.” Human self-determination, or “free-
dom,” implied the spontaneous expression of the potential determinations of
nature, undistorted by arbitrary “external” impositions of abstract order.
Moreover, knowledge of the essence or “idea” of humanity as an historically
situated form of existence was not separated from knowledge of nature.
Rather, the human was imagined as a development within nature.
In Ranke’s youthful ruminations, the conception of historical reality as an
organic totality of self-expressive manifestations of natural energies was
confronted with a rather different conception of historical reality as the
product of autonomous action, a conception grounded in the ethical
1 Leopold von Ranke, “Mensch und Natur”(1816–1818), in Aus Werk und Nachlass, ed.
Walther Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1973), vol. III, 223–232.
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philosophies of Kant and especially Fichte. The moral perspective of natur-

alistic historical anthropology was that of free self-expression of latent “ideas”
in appropriately individuated cultural forms. Accepting one’s identity as the
expressive fashioning of unconscious natural powers was the mark of moral
freedom. But as soon as human beings recognized their possibility of choos-
ing – and not just reaffirming – their own fate and shaping themselves
according to acts of self-legislation, they were no longer “products” of nature
but independent producers distinguished from, and potentially opposed to,
their natural determinations. Natural powers were no longer the inevitable
driving force of all human activity; they could also be experienced as the
material means for creative self-production. Ranke insisted that the self-
determining moral subject could not make the world in its own image or
simply dissolve the reality of nature into a self-projection. Consciousness of
the ethical determination of the human will revealed that human subjectivity
was not just the finite manifestation of natural energy, but a self-determining
activity with potential access to an infinite power that transcended the
natural world. Subjectivity thus functioned as the ground for actions that
might transform that world, including the human subject’s own physical
being. To be historical in this second sense entailed more than simply
reaffirming one’s particularity as an individuation of natural energies at
a particular time and within a particular environment. It meant acting in
time and space so as to change one’s relation to one’s unconscious energies,
to others, and to the world, and thus continually to refashion one’s identity,
both individual and collective.
Ranke avoided any one-sided, reductive resolution of this tension between
the culturally expressive and the actively self-determining forms of historical
subjectivity. Instead he affirmed the tension between the natural and transcen-
dental dimensions of human agency as an indication of the peculiar nature of
what it meant to live human existence as historical. In this sense he reaffirmed
the tensions between historical anthropology and the philosophy of the trans-
cendental ego of the late eighteenth century and resisted attempts by thinkers
like Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel to overcome these differences in
a radically transformative actualization of “natural supernaturalism”2 that
merged spirit and nature in a teleological process of self-integration. In his
first forays into thinking about being historical, Ranke distanced himself from
the utopian Romanticism of the revolutionary decade, in which the ethical
2 As analyzed in the brilliant study by M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and

Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
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freedom of subjective self-determination was seen as a product of the imma-

nent logic of human development, and historical identity was construed as
submission to a metahistorical process.
We can better grasp the implications of Ranke’s historical method when
we recall his private reflections on this period of political and cultural
turmoil. Although he did not take an active public role in the political
opposition to Napoleonic domination or in the war of national liberation in
1813–1815, his private writings express sympathy for the resistance to French
imperialism by the nationalist student movement and its cultural spokes-
persons. He clearly believed that the process of liberation from foreign
domination entailed a liberating recovery and self-recognition of an essential
German ethnic identity, a “natural” historical power that was finally to
achieve an appropriate cultural manifestation in the practices and institutions
of public life. He saw the external liberation from French rule as an inner
liberation: It would affirm Herder’s conception of historical identity as the
manifestation of the evolving heterogeneous ethnic organism of the German
“people.”3
Ranke’s student diaries and fragmentary papers also explored the mean-
ings of religious identity within the two dimensions of his emerging histori-
cist framework. On a number of occasions he expressed a profound
awareness of being overtaken by an almost mystical experience of identifica-
tion with the infinite power that was articulated in the individuated forms of
both natural and cultural phenomena, a consciousness of dissolving into
a universe in which “All is One and One is All” and in which self-
affirmation became indistinguishable from immersion in the totality of
Being.4 In such moments Ranke imagined his philological study of historical
texts as a path toward unveiling the totality of divine life in all of its
individuated difference. But Ranke’s persistent attempts to unpack the mean-
ing of Martin Luther’s writings and the religious (and political) transforma-
tion they initiated revealed the other dimension of historical existence – the
potential for commitment to a power that transcended the immanent deter-
minations of individuated life and made possible the control and transforma-
tion of those determinations through ethical actions grounded in religious
belief in transcendentally grounded universal truths. For Ranke, investigation
of the textual articulations of the Lutheran Reformation within the historical
3 Leopold von Ranke, “Aus den Papieren eines Landpfarrers” (1818), in Aus Werk und
Nachlass, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1973), vol. III, 467–483.
4 Leopold von Ranke, “Tagebücher” (1816–1817), in Aus Werk und Nachlass, ed. Walther
Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1964), vol. I, 141–142.
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development of Christianity became a means for examining the possibility

that a universal ethical order of self-determining “free” subjects could emerge
from and ultimately transform those historically individuated determinations
of archaic natural powers manifest in the cultural communities of ethnic
“peoples.” But such transformations were dependent on historical actions by
individuals who grounded their intentions in a religious commitment to
a universal, objective truth that transcended their immanent or “natural”
existence and their ethno-cultural contextual determinations.
By the time Ranke had completed his university studies, it had become
clear to him that although philology, defined broadly as the linguistic and
historical examination of the traces that constituted the text of the past, was
an important dimension of his search for the connection between ethnic
identity and ethical action, it was the historical investigation of subjective
agency working within, but not necessarily fully determined by, specific
temporal and cultural frameworks that would open the possibility of grasping
the meaning of historical existence for his own age. Ranke chose the vocation
of historian as a way of addressing the questions of personal self-formation,
collective identity, and religious or ontological grounding of human existence
that had emerged in the political and cultural transformations of the post-
Revolutionary and post-Napoleonic era, and which he was convinced could
not be adequately addressed or answered by the inherited forms of historical
anthropology and philosophies of subjective freedom, or by Romantic
attempts to fuse them into a metahistorical, teleological narrative of absolute
identity. It was in the historical sequence of events produced by the actions
and interactions of human beings that Ranke saw the tension being played
out between the immanent determinations of ethno-cultural individuation
and public activity motivated by transcendent principles directed toward
disciplining, shaping, and transforming such individuations.
As Ranke made clear in the opening paragraph of his first work as an
historian, The Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514
(published in 1824), he came to the study of history with both a clear view-
point (Ansicht) and a clear intention (Absicht).5 His viewpoint was that the
three Latin (French, Spanish, and Italian) and the three Germanic (German,
English, and Scandinavian) peoples or cultural nations of Europe constituted
a differentiated but recognizable ethno-cultural unity, the articulation or
formal expression of an “idea,” which was not identical with the geographic
5 Leopold von Ranke, “Vorrede der ersten Ausgabe” (1824), in Geschichten der romanischen
und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514, 2nd edn. (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot,
1874), v.
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boundaries of the European continent or the religious boundaries of

Christendom. The present intention that drove Ranke’s examination of the
fate of this individuated cultural identity in the modern era of state formation
during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the desire to gain some
clarity about how the naturally grounded energies of ethno-cultural identity
could find an appropriate political form that would transform ethnic deter-
minism into a public community of ethical self-determination, a problem
made acutely relevant by the apparent failures of the universalizing revolu-
tionary and imperial projects of the period between 1789 and 1815. By tracing
the interlocking sequences of political actions at the dawn of the modern era
in which the public representatives of the major cultural nations tried to
create a pluralistic order of mutual recognition that affirmed their differences,
Ranke hoped to think through the question of historical existence as both
ethno-cultural determination and self-determining ethical action. He
admitted that the historical intentions fueling his search for historical knowl-
edge and meaning had ultimately remained unfulfilled. Despite evidence of
an underlying pattern of common development and occasional signs of the
potential for creation of political forms of interactive recognition, the hoped-
for singular “history” of the Germanic and Latin peoples as a history of
emergent modern Europe remained a plural ensemble of “histories,” in
which the universalizing power of ethical principle was relegated to the
external judgments of the historian/narrator. The main result of Ranke’s
initial attempt to find an historical answer to the pressing issues of integrating
ethnic determination and ethical self-determination in the public life and
institutions of the evolving modern nation-state was recognition of the
robust resistance of ethno-cultural differences to any attempts to impose
a uniform political order or homogeneous religious identity. Thinking his-
torically did not immediately answer the questions that drove Ranke’s
investigations. But in some sense that was not the point. More significant
was his reformulation of historical thinking not as the recreation of
a teleological process, but rather as an inquiry into the conditions defining
the meaning of human existence in the present.
Ranke’s choice of the historical vocation as the royal road for examining
fundamental questions of human identity and ethical purpose in the modern
world shaped his perspective on questions of historical methods of research
and representation. History’s role, he claimed in 1824, was not to judge the
past or derive exemplary lessons for the guidance of later generations, but to
reconstruct the human activity of the past in its own terms, “as it essentially
was (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist).” In this famous phrase Ranke articulated his
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commitment to uncovering and presenting human actions of the past in the

immediacy of their actual occurrence and the framework of their original
intentions, allowing the historian and his reader to think along with those
actions without necessarily prejudging their consequences or results, or
inserting them within the script of a closed framework. The historian’s
central focus should be “to grasp the event in itself, in its human comprehen-
sibility, its unity and its fullness,”6 to understand the workings of the essential
Ideas articulated in the immediacy of particularized appearances. But this
research agenda was clearly framed by the question of defining the meaning
of human existence in the historical present. Although Ranke has often been
seen as a historical ‘positivist,’ he did not see his task as simply an ‘objective’
accounting of empirically verifiable ‘facts.’ He understood objectivity as an
intersubjective relation between the questioner and the witness. To uncover
the undistorted testimony of historical actors was to touch upon the essential
meaning of actions before these actions had been interpreted by others for
their own purposes. The immediacy of historical testimony was evidence of
the ongoing human attempt to transform the given “natural” identity of an
ethnic people into the self-conscious collective identity of a political state,
whose laws and institutions gave form to the processes of self-determination
and mutual recognition while also forging heterogeneous ethnic commu-
nities into a common transnational culture.
Culture, Politics, and Religion: Ranke’s Historicism

after 1830
Following the liberal-populist overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty in France in
1830 and the ensuing political turmoil, Ranke’s attempts to think historically
about the relations between ethno-cultural, “natural” peoples and commu-
nities of self-determining subjects ruled by ethical principles gained a new
focus. In his historical investigations, politics now became the primary
concern, both as the active mediator between ethnic life and ethical commu-
nity and as the privileged site of their ultimate integration. Between 1832 and
1836 Ranke even took on the role of a public intellectual with a clearly
partisan conservative political message as a founding editor of the Historical
Political Journal (Historisch-politische Zeitschrift). He was disturbed especially
by the political divisions between conservative patriarchal authorities and
populist democratic forces within Europe’s and Germany’s ethnic
6 Ranke, “Vorrede der ersten Ausgabe,” vii–viii.
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communities. This inner political division made more problematic the his-
torical scenario in which the recognition and expression of ethnic identity in
language and literature created the foundations for the political “forms” of
the modern sovereign state as an ethical community. Conscious political
action was required to play a more determining role in the creation of an
ethical community, and this role demanded a principled universal foundation
(a religious ground) more powerful than the natural “life” of the people,
which seemed to have devolved into the atomized aggregate of the masses.
Ranke continued to insist that cultural nationality was the living substance
of any viable modern state that purported to function as an ethical commu-
nity and to reject the notion that the modern sovereign state represented
a universal form of community that simply dissolved ethnic difference into
ethical identity. “Every people must have its own peculiar politics,” he
insisted.7 Politics should not override or displace ethnic difference but help
it to flourish, by protecting it from external threats of foreign intrusion or
internal threats of ego-driven fragmentation, by organizing material
resources to protect cultural autonomy, and most of all by creating appro-
priate institutions of socialization or cultural identity formation that would
bind people together as self-determining citizens of an ethical community
through voluntary obedience to the “spiritual” unity that defined them,
a unity articulated in the historical narrative of the growth and development
of the cultural nation into a sovereign nation-state. By the mid 1830s Ranke
had clearly chosen post-1815 Prussia as the appropriate form of a German
nation-state defined by what he saw as benevolent patriarchal relations
between prince and people, powerful disciplinary protection of external
borders and internal order, and a focus on administrative rather than parlia-
mentary institutions to organize the implicit will of the people through
specialized cadres of functionaries who understood their roles as the histor-
ical representatives and educators of national identity formation.
But Ranke clearly did not think that the political rulers of the national state
could simply read the implicit natural will of the ethnic nation, its divinely
instituted “genius” or “living substance,” and transform it into the individualized
spiritual substance of a community of law informed by a common ethical
consciousness. Controlling and disciplining the ethnic community, and especially
educating it into voluntary obedience to the principles of a unified ethical public
life, required the foundation of a moral authority that transcended the natural
7 Leopold von Ranke, “Frankreich und Deutschland” (1832), in Zur Geschichte Frankreichs
und Deutschlands im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Alfred Dove, in Sämmtliche Werke, 54
vols. (Leipzig, 1867–1890), vol. 49–50, 72.
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authority of the ethnic life of the people. In fact, the construction of the historical
narrative of national identity was not merely an anthropological account based
on indigenous myth, language, and literature, but a story of the ways in which
universal ethical principles had become integrated into this ethnic life through
individual actions in time and had been sustained by the moral traditions that
those actions had created. The problem of defining the ontological ground or
transcendent foundation of the ethical principles that informed the political
actions which produced the narrative of the emergence of an ethical community
from the natural state of ethnic life dominated much of Ranke’s thinking in the
1830s. Classical nineteenth-century historicism was characterized at its very core
by the relationship between immanent historical existence and the transcendent
other that made this existence not only possible but also meaningful.
The historicist narrative of a sequence of ethically motivated actions in time
and space that transformed the implicit identity of ethnic life into the explicit
consciousness of a unified ethical will required an account of the ways in which
the transcendent reality of the universal spiritual being that sustained the free-
dom of subjective agency intervened in the immanent process of individuated
cultural development.
Ranke’s great multi-volume works of the 1830s and 1840s, The Roman
Popes during the Last Four Centuries and German History during the Age of the
Reformation, explored the historical relationship between ethical univers-
ality grounded in a transcendent spiritual power and the ethnic indivi-
duality of immanent cultural life through an historical account of
church–state relations within European Christianity. His work on the
papacy described the ultimately unsuccessful historical attempts to impose
the universal principles of a transcendent spiritual order on the individual-
ized humanity of ethnic tribes and peoples in the form of centralized,
homogeneous temporal order. Ranke’s account makes clear that by the
mid 1830s he had come to the conclusion that a historical knowledge of
human existence was premised on a commitment to the transcendent
truth of Christian religious principles. The freedom of the will that
informed the ethics of a community of self-legislators was grounded on
a purified apostolic faith, in which voluntary submission to “the true and
eternal principles of religion” would produce a “unity of conviction” based
on a “pure and simple consciousness of the ever-enduring, all-pervasive
presence of God.”8 It was the recovery of this apostolic faith that defined
8 Leopold von Ranke, History of the Popes: Their Church and State, trans. E. Fowler, 3 vols.
(New York: Colonial Press, 1901), vol. III, 173. This passage was excised after the first
edition and does not appear in the Sämmtliche Werke.
310
the message of Martin Luther and the German Reformation and it was
precisely this purification of the subjective experience of religious truth
from all earthly mediations that released the power of ethical actions that
could enter into and possibly transform the relations of the immanent,
individuated life of historical peoples. Paradoxically, it was the separation
of the grounds of ethical principle from the immanent processes of ethnic
existence that opened up the possibility of liberating those processes from
the immanent necessities of natural life. Through actions based on reli-
gious belief, the universalism of ethical principle entered into the hetero-
geneous organism of individuated historical life. Historical knowledge was
not restricted to the immanent processes of ethnic life, but encompassed
historical traces of the interaction between universal principles and the
particular conditions of ethnic existence. It thus allowed for the emergence
of a common “human” or at least European cultural tradition that amal-
gamated the individuated ethnic “ideas” of national cultures with the
transcendent “ideas” of a shared ethical life.
Historical writing for Ranke reconstructed the contextual totality of life-
relations that gave individual phenomena immanent meaning. Purified of the
distorting lens of individual subjectivity, the documentary traces of the past
emerged as representations of a life whose interconnectedness displayed the
foundations of all human life in “the ground of universal life.” However, Ranke’s
growing confidence in the 1830s that history could replace philosophy as the
universal knowledge of human existence was based on his incorporation of the
transcendent dimension – the ground of human freedom in the universal moral
order ruled by the personality of an absolute subject or God – into the project of
historical understanding and the expansion of his theory of ideas to include not
only the implicit divine essences actualizing themselves in the patterned totality
of historical cultures, but also ideas of a transcendent, infinite reality that entered
the historical process as the empirically recoverable convictions, ethical ideals,
and cultural ideologies of specific individuals and groups. By tracing the emer-
gence, diffusion, conflict, and transformation of religious ideas the historian
could discover how human words and deeds not only exemplified or
“expressed” the hidden organizing power of the national Idea, but actually
created, in the specific actions of historical events, a constructed order of their
own, which could then become the customary frame of moral assumptions for
future generations. The source of this constructed historical meaning was the
relation of human actions to the supra-historical transcendent; its practical
actualization emerged through an appropriation of the transcendent “idea” as
a goal of self-conscious individual and collective action.
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The transcendent ground of being to which religious ideas referred was not
itself an actor within history. History was not the revelation of a “becoming
God” or a progressive self-expression of the redemptive reconciliation of the
finite and the infinite. In this sense Ranke continued to reject the identity
philosophy of Romantic and Hegelian forms of historicism. The transcendent
entered history through individual conviction, choice, and action, as the mark
of human freedom. The religious relation to the transcendent, articulated in
the doctrines, liturgies, and sacraments of churches but also, Ranke increas-
ingly suggested, in the post-ecclesiastical tradition of a universal, deistically
grounded humanism, broke through the apparent necessity of the evolution of
immanent relations. In the 1840s Ranke rejected Hegelianism not only because
it dissolved concrete existence in abstract thought, but also because it denied
“individual human consciousness” as the real subject of history.9 In most eras
and among most national cultures, freedom took the form of customary
obedience and conformity to inherited religious ideas. But on those rare
occasions when the reproduction of religious meaning veered into historical
discontinuity and qualitative change, the words and deeds of individual human
subjects would break into the ongoing necessities of life and the customary
forms of religious meaning, providing an experience of new possibilities for the
construction of the relation to the transcendent and opening new possibilities
for the way human lives were lived.
The appropriate representational form for Ranke’s view of the relationship
among national cultural totalities, inherited discourses concerning the con-
nection between finite existence and its infinite ground, and the free acts
through which a recreation of the discourse of transcendence opens up new
possibilities for the direction of national cultures was a narrative of contin-
gent human action that only in retrospect displayed the larger coherence of
divine purpose. In such narratives the immanent meanings of cultural devel-
opment were set in relation to the construction of meanings based on direct
experience of the transcendent sphere in order to produce a genealogy of the
contingent events that had shaped the tradition that confronted the present as
a fund of inherited meaning. The narrative of Ranke’s German History was
organized around such historical conjunctures in which creative intervention
and discontinuity had been possible. In the last volume of his history Ranke
reflected on this post-Romantic, “existential” or “positive” historicism that
informed his narrative:
9 Leopold von Ranke, “Neuere Geschichte, seit dem Westfälischen Frieden” (1847), in Aus
Werk und Nachlass, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1964), vol.
IV, 187–188.
312
From the distance of centuries we can perceive the great combinations that
are inherent in the nature of things; the individual action in every individual
present, however, cannot depend on them. Here it is a matter of the correct
handling of what is immediately given, on the good cause which one
represents, on the moral force one can exert. The moments which condition
the progress of world history are, I would like to say, a divine secret.
The value of man is grounded in his self-determination and activity.10
The emergence of an ethical community of free subjects was not just the
perfected expression of the immanent potentialities of the national genius, an
objectification of the implicit goal of the collective cultural subject, but
a constructive shaping of that culture on the foundation of an experience of
the transcendent grounds of all cultures and historical possibilities,
a construction that expressed the freedom of human beings to make the
world conform to (or to fail to make the world conform to) divine truth
through moral action.
The site of ethical community for Ranke was the “national” state, the
political world produced by the interaction of the immanent forces of ethnic
and linguistic tradition and the moral convictions grounded in religious ideas
about absolute, transcendent truth. In the relations between church and
state, the church became the exemplar of the transcendent grounds of free
action that could break the internal causal nexus of ethno-linguistic national
life and produce a new moral order within the constructed forms of the state.
Within the political constitution of the state the inherent necessities of the
national idea were modified according to a will infused with a conviction of
universal transcendent truth. The national culture provided the specific
contextual limitations within which such ethical construction could occur.
Ranke affirmed the freedom of the moral subject as the creator of its own
history. But religious convictions manifested themselves in effective action
only if they conformed to the objective foundations of human existence both
in the “maternal” ground of “natural” being and in the transcendent spiritual
ground of divine “paternal” authority. The human subject could exert its will
as a free agent only by conforming to the restrictions imposed by its status as
a finite creation. To exist historically was to exist simultaneously or stereo-
scopically as cultural product and self-determining subject.
In Ranke’s historical constructions the description of human existence in
terms of a narrative of relations between religion and nationality, church and
10 Leopold von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, ed. Paul Joachimsen,
6 vols. (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1925–1926), vol. IV, 64.
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state, became a way of expressing the contingency of historical events.

Church and state framed the discussion of associative life as long as the
question of that life as an expression or construction of fundamental values
remained a vital and contested question, as long as politics was perceived in
terms of the historical creation of an ethical community according to values
derived from an experience that related the immanent relations of historical
cultures to the transcendent ground that defined their possibility.
Integrating Individuality into Universalism: From

Ranke to Droysen
Ranke’s first historical works already made fairly clear that he viewed historical
knowledge-production as an intentional activity whose purpose was to under-
stand human existence and guide human action in the present, in the “modern”
cultural epoch. In the half-century after his first works, often stimulated by
historical events that seemed to threaten the stability of the inherited ethical
and political forms that defined the experienced present, like the European
Revolutions of 1848 and the military conflicts leading to German unification in
1870–1871, Ranke periodically rethought certain aspects of his historical pro-
ject’s general framework, especially regarding the specific historical forms that
framed the struggle to achieve an integration of individual freedom and
essential human identity in the ethical sphere of the state.
After the revolutions of 1848 Ranke viewed the nineteenth century as
a historically distinct “revolutionary” epoch, a temporally defined synchronic
cultural form whose determining problematic was the tension between
representative constitutional government that articulated the participatory
role of individual citizens comprising the nation or “people” and the patri-
archal rule of a hereditary monarchy that defined ethical life as voluntary
submission to a single personal will. In the movement toward German
national unification under Prussian leadership in the 1860s Ranke discerned
a possibility that these frameworks for the construction of ethical identity
were not necessarily divided among different national traditions but could
converge in a single nation-state. This opened up the possibility that German
political will was not limited to becoming one distinctive power within the
balance of modern European powers but an exemplary articulation of
a general process of human development extending back to the beginnings
of Western Civilization and culminating, at least in the consciousness of the
contemporary world, in the integration of individual freedom and collective
identity in a nationally unified constitutional monarchy.
314
For the elder Ranke the period of political transformations from the late
eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century had produced
a different present for contemporary Germany and thus also a different or at
least expanded past, one defined more by the epochal age of revolutionary
transformation than by the construction of a balanced cosmopolitanism of the
five European powers.11 Germany’s past was also Europe’s, and, more expan-
sively, “humanity’s,” past. To understand the process of self-formation and
ethical identification in late nineteenth-century Germany demanded knowl-
edge of World History as the history of the emergence and development
toward ethical actualization of the idea of humanity, not just an understanding
of the modern European model of a heterogeneous plurality of individuated
forms of political power. As Ranke commented in an introduction to his
lectures on world history in 1848, the most important object of historical
research in the current historical moment was to see how mankind’s con-
sciousness of its unity, the concept of humanity, was forged through the
conflictual interaction between peoples since the Classical Era. Whatever the
given natural differences among nationalities, the emergence of national
identity in ethical form could be understood only if one grasped the connec-
tions between historical individuality and universal ideas of human identity.
It was an error to conceive of world history as a mere collection or fusion of
national histories. The “human race” may have preceded the historical devel-
opment of human ethnic individualities as a natural “prehistorical” reality, but
consciousness of humanity as a coherent identity was a product of the historical
development of human actions in time and space.12
Ranke’s gradual shift of emphasis after 1850 toward universal world history
and the formation of “humanity” as the primary object of historical research also
brought a shift in his conceptions of the practices of producing historical knowl-
edge. In a lecture from 1854 he articulated what became one of his most famous
statements about the need for the historian to focus his research on the reality of
particular existence, free of teleological assumptions about a necessary progres-
sive development: “Each age is immediate to God and its value depends not on
what comes out of it but in its own existence, in its very self.”13 Ranke defined the
11 On Ranke’s changing views of the relations between national and universal history after
1848 see Leonard Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1977).
12 Leopold von Ranke, “Erster Teil der Weltgeschichte, oder Geschichte der alten Welt”
(1848), in Aus Werk und Nachlass, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg,
1975), vol. IV, 198–203.
13 Leopold von Ranke, “Über die Epochen der neueren Geschichte,” in Aus Werk und
Nachlass, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1971), vol. II, 59–60.
315
john toews
universal history of humanity in terms of temporal epochs within a common

historical medium, rather than seeing this medium as broken into ethno-cultural
individualities. He envisioned the ethical identification of the political sphere as
an implicit “human” integration through the central “idea” of ethical life, the
actualization of human freedom. Although the historian still began his research
with the critical examination of original sources that connected him to the
existential reality of the individuated forms of life, much of his work was focused
on drawing out the contextual, synchronic relations that made such particular
existences possible. But the various framing “worlds” in which individual
existence and agency were situated retained for Ranke the character of tenden-
cies or trends rather than closed systems. The cultures of different epochs
constituted “scenes” of human freedom, while the products of that freedom
could never be fully predicted.14
The historian’s constructions of the past needed to remain loyal not only
to this contingency in the individual and collective actions that shaped the
general identifying characteristics of individual cultural epochs but also to the
constant transformative process of individual actions that eventually led to
the cultural frameworks of succeeding epochs. To the end of his life Ranke
continued to insist that an overarching view of this development of humanity
as a unified narrative was not available to the historian within the context of
his own finite, temporally defined existence, but only to the deity who
observed the events of world history from a perspective transcending tem-
poral sequence.15 As creations of historically embedded individualized sub-
jectivity, the historian’s constructions of the past from the perspective of
continually changing presents remained limited, and it was this limitation
that helped to sustain the reality of human freedom.
The theoretical reflections, written between the late 1850s and the early
1880s, contained in the lectures on the production of historical knowledge and
the nature of the historian’s task by Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884)
provided an expanded and detailed conceptualization of the positions that
Ranke had articulated in somewhat inconsistent and scattered fashion over
the last five decades of his life.16 Droysen, however, did not see himself as
Ranke’s follower or disciple. He continually dismissed Ranke’s historiography
14 Leopold von Ranke, “Neuere Geschichte seit dem Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts”
(1867–1868) and “Die Notwendigkeit universalgeschichtlicher Betrachtung”
(1859–1861), in Aus Werk und Nachlass, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs, 4 vols. (Munich:
R. Oldenbourg, 1975), vol. IV, 414 and 296–298, respectively.
15 Ranke, “Über die Epochen der neueren Geschichte,” 62–63.
16 Droysen’s Historik comprises both a condensed outline (Grundriß), which was printed
during Droysen’s lifetime (the last edition in 1882), and a series of lectures delivered
316
as a naïvely unreflective combination of positivist fact-grinding, antiquarian

nostalgia, and literary story-telling. In his theoretical revisions of basic histori-
cist principles Droysen sought to legitimize the production of historical knowl-
edge as an academic discipline that possessed both its own content and its own
methods of production. But his work also unwittingly helped to expose both
the limits and the unexamined assumptions of historicism.
Droysen, like Ranke and many other mid-nineteenth-century German
historians and philosophers, defined the substance of historical knowledge
in terms of the historical development of humanity toward the full actualiza-
tion of the idea of freedom. Through history, subjective agency or selfhood
(Ichheit) achieved the transparency of self-reflection (sich-auf-sich beziehen) and
the freedom of self-determination (sich-in-sich-bestimmen).17 To create histor-
ical knowledge was to create a means by which individuals might grasp their
own existence as self-conscious agents acting within the “ethical cosmos.”
Historical consciousness was self-consciousness of the individual’s “human”
being. By examining the formation of mankind as an integrated, self-aware,
and self-determining collective agency, historical study distinguished itself
from the natural sciences, in which empirical reality was examined as a world
of objects connected by recurrent laws and systemic relations. The world of
objective natural relations and determinations was not, of course, completely
separated from the world of subjective freedom and ethical life. In the process
of self-formation human subjectivity was fashioned in its ongoing and chan-
ging relations to its own embodiment and the external natural world in
which it found materials for actualizing its own possibilities as a subjective
agent. The individual substance of the human subject (its “spiritual” content)
was a complex nodal point of socio-cultural relations.18 The object of histor-
ical investigation was primarily the contextual forms of these associative
processes, from family life and kinship to socio-economic relations to the
rituals and institutions of religious and political interactions. In Droysen’s
work, history was defined as a study in morphology,19 as an analysis of the
constantly changing forms of cultural meaning, in order to distinguish it from
the search for recurring laws pursued by natural scientists.
occasionally after 1857 and reconstructed from handwritten notes. Here I cite the edition
Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik. Rekonstruktion der ersten vollständigen Fassung der
Vorlesungen (1857); Grundriß der Historik in der ersten handschriftlichen (1857/1858) und in
der letzten gedruckten Fassung (1882), ed. Peter Leyh (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-
Holzboog, 1977).
17 Droysen, Historik, 369. 18 Droysen, Historik, 7. 19 Droysen, Historik, 17 and 398.
317
john toews
Droysen’s claims about the universal content of historical knowledge as

knowledge of the actualization of the idea of humanity in the historical form
of an ethical community were more confident, systematic, and theoretical
than Ranke’s statements about the meaning of universal history. But their
fundamental views of the nature of this universality were similar, and
grounded in the model of the historical self-formation of human subjectivity
associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s conception of Bildung or cultural
self-formation, as well as Hegel’s vision of history as the self-creation of
humanity as self-conscious spirit, but without Hegel’s claims to logical
necessity and teleological closure.
Droysen’s discussion of the proper methods to be applied in the produc-
tion of historical knowledge also made explicit some of the implications of
Ranke’s less systematic formulations. As a clearly defined academic discipline
and legitimate, communicable knowledge of contingent, open-ended activ-
ities and associations, history was grounded in carefully elaborated empirical
methods of investigation. Like Ranke, Droysen saw historical production as
an ongoing activity of “research understanding (forschend zu verstehen),”20 in
which the materials of the present were examined and associated in con-
textual layers or “forms” of historical determination produced in prior epochs
or cultural moments. The materials that historians used to produce their
knowledge of the past were materials existing in the present. Droysen was
much more specific (and expansive) than Ranke in articulating the variety of
such present sources – from unconscious habits and assumed traditions and
customs to written testimony and material remainders. The forms of the
present in which the historian’s own self was fashioned were a “historical
result (historisches Ergebnis)”21 or product of the past and the only material
available for reconstructing, or, as Droysen unabashedly asserted, “construct-
ing” the past which had produced the current world and shaped its possibi-
lities for the further development of subjective agency and ethical life. But
Droysen’s elaboration was also in many ways a narrowing of the individual
historian’s freedom of interpretive construction. Although he claimed that
the historian’s truth was a relative, perspectival truth, he also insisted that the
historian could construct the past from a universalizing viewpoint as the only
and absolute truth for his epoch and community if he attained full self-
consciousness as a participant in the present. “When I look at the fate of
the world from the standpoint of my state, my people, my religion, I stand
high above my own ego,” he claimed. “I think as it were from a higher ego, in
20 Droysen, Historik, 22. 21 Droysen, Historik, 7.
318
which the restricting fragmented debris of my petty personhood have faded

away.”22 Although there might be many possible constructed pasts available
in the source materials of the present, only a single, universal past was the
legitimate or true past that could be plausibly constructed for the present by
a historian who had attained full self-knowledge of his place in the general
framework of his own ethical cosmos. In this case self-knowledge and knowl-
edge of the past coincided in a quite literal sense. “In my present,” he insisted,
“things appear in one way and not another, their truth is for now this
interpretation (Auffassung), and only in this interpretation is it possible for
both myself and my age to understand them, and thus articulate its truth.”23
The historian’s self-knowledge embodied in his historical constructions of the
past was the knowledge of the universal “I” of humanity at that specific
moment in time.
A similar issue arose in Droysen’s discussion of the appropriate method for
organizing and interpreting historical sources in the process of constructing
the complex morphology of past worlds. With greater consistency than
Ranke, he insisted on the distinctive nature of the historian’s materials as
objectifications of human subject agency or intention. The historian read the
evidence of possible pasts in his present world not as facts referencing
objective past events, but as signs of human meaning within larger networks
of cultural meaning. Empirical description of the “transactions (Geschäfte) of
the past” was not yet History (Geschichte), which needed to be created from
such pools of factual associations.24 Like Ranke, Droysen saw the historical
method as a contextualizing, hermeneutic circle in which the historian moved
from the individual statement or signification of meaning to the broader
context and then circled back again to expand the original sense or depth of
the individual statement, and thus systematically approached knowledge of the
essential “idea” of an epoch or cultural formation. By unpacking the meaning
of the individual primary source, the historian made contact with the sub-
jective agency, “the determining power (bestimmende Kraft), the will (Wille), the
spirit (Geist), the idea (Idee)” that created the forms or meaning-structures of the
past, thus affirming the making and remaking of meaning in the process of self-
formation as the defining form or the final, essential “truth” of all human
existence.25
Droysen also helped to make explicit at least two of the underlying
assumptions of Rankean historicism. First, he insisted that the political
22 Droysen, Historik, 238. 23 Droysen, Historik, 230–231. 24 Droysen, Historik, 69–70.

25 Droysen, Historik, 60.
319
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form of the German nation-state that came into existence in 1870–1871 was
the absolute fulfillment of contemporary ethical life. Although Droysen
pointed to the variety of social forms in which individual subjective agency
participated in meaningful ethical worlds, from families to religious commu-
nities, and described the substantial content of individuality as a heteroge-
neous organism of ethical forms,26 he insisted that for his own age the
Prussian nation-state served as the governing framework for all other
forms of social/ethical life. To recognize one’s own subjectivity as merged
into the “I” of the ethical cosmos of the state was to assume the universal
human perspective for the current age. The human past for Droysen was
a multi-volume history that saw the emergence of Prussia as the political
fulfillment of a coherent ethical cosmos – a view which struck even some
contemporaries as a thinly disguised piece of propaganda.27 In Droysen’s
work, Ranke’s commitment to a unified political will as the organizing power
and frame of ethnical life became more of a straitjacket, ignoring the multi-
plicity of organizing viewpoints in the present and thus eliminating the
legitimate construction of variable and alternative pasts. Connected to this
confidence in a unified construction of a single past for the present was
Droysen’s often-stated religious belief that the meanings he found in the
materials of the present as he created the appropriate (and only possible) past
for his age were in harmony with the divine will. Although his historical
method did not reveal the totality of God’s plan or the ultimate secret (letztes
Geheimnis) of the divine will, it did “unlock an entry into the temple” that
presented God in one of his manifestations, the one most directly relevant for
mankind in the present. “From history we learn to understand God,” he
concluded, “and in God we understand history.”28
What would happen to the historicist framework when the two funda-
mental assumptions of Ranke’s and Droysen’s historicism, the primacy of the
nation-state as the exemplary form of ethical life and the grounding of the

27 Ever since the 1970s Jörn Rüsen has argued that Droysen’s Historik provides an
exemplary metahistorical theory of historicity. See for example his analysis in
Konfigurationen des Historismus: Studien zur deutschen Wissenschaftskultur (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 226–275. The interpretation of his work as politically situated
and motivated has recently been reiterated in Andreas Greiert, “‘Viele sind berufen,
aber wenige auserwählt’: Geschichtstheorie, Politik und sittlicher Kosmos bei Johann
Gustav Droysen,” Historische Zeitschrift, 292(2) (2011), 397–423. The monograph by
Arthur Alfaix Assis, What Is History For? Johann Gustav Droysen and the Functions of
Historiography (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014) provides a nuanced defense of
Rüsen’s position.
320
individualized forms of a common humanity in the will of a transcendent

God, became historically problematic ? The contemporary writings of Jacob
Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche provide a starting point for this post-
history of Rankean historicism.
The Insider as Outsider: From Burckhardt to

Nietzsche
For Droysen, the years from 1864 to 1871 – the years of aggressive power
politics and war that marked the creation of the German national state under
Prussian leadership – were also years of fulfillment, presenting a series of
historical actions that integrated the oppositions of the Revolutionary Age
and created an ethical world in which individual freedom was synonymous
with collective identity. For the Swiss cultural historian Jakob Burckhardt,
this same period was marked by an increasing cultural unraveling and
imminent threat of catastrophic collapse. The outlines of these opposing
perspectives had been present since the 1830s. But the creation of the unified
German nation state in 1870–1871 marked a culmination of opposing judg-
ments of the historical significance of the present moment. Burckhardt felt
that the basic trends shaping the European world in the Revolutionary Age of
the nineteenth century – from the emergence of unified, sovereign nation
states, to the political liberation of the “masses” from traditional structures of
association and authority, to the reduction of the subjective agency of
individual lives into a leveling and commodified objectivity through the
economic and communicative practices of market capitalism and the central-
ized administrative state – were all conspiring to undermine a cultural world
of dynamic, heterogeneous difference and creative destruction in which the
values of self-fashioning individuality had survived and occasionally flour-
ished both at the individual level and at the collective level.29 Burckhardt,
a student of Ranke who had received his academic training in Prussia in the
post-reform era that placed great public emphasis on historically fashioned
29 Burckhardt’s pessimistic descriptions of the crisis of his time are scattered throughout
his writings, but see for example his “Introduction to Lectures on the Age of
Revolution” (1867), in On History and Historians, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Harper & Row, 1958), 217–224; “Historische Fragmente aus dem Nachlass,” in Jacob
Burckhardt-Gesamtausgabe, 14 vols. (Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1929), vol. VII,
420–426; and especially “Supplementary Notes on the Origins and Nature of the Present
Crisis,” in “Lectures on the Study of History” (1868 and 1870–1871), in Force and Freedom:
An Interpretation of History, ed. James Hastings Nichols (New York: Meridian Books,
1955), 260–266; and “Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,” in Jacob Burckhardt-
Gesamtausgabe, 14 vols. (Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1929), vol. VII, 148–159.
321
john toews
collective identity, had returned in the 1840s to the traditional and increas-
ingly marginalized cultural milieu of Basel, Switzerland. From his perspec-
tive, the evolution of historicism in the work both of his academic mentor
Ranke and of members of his original university cohort like Droysen
appeared increasingly problematic, prompting Burckhardt to develop
a revisionist and critical form of cultural historicism that not only clarified
some of the political and religious assumptions sustaining the perspectives of
Droysen and Ranke, but also exposed historicism to the more radical critique
articulated by his younger Basel colleague Friedrich Nietzsche during the
1870s.
Burckhardt’s critique of the historicism of Ranke and the Prussian school
of historians was in many ways an insider critique, grounded in the basic
assumptions of historicism itself. It affirmed that the purpose of historical
knowledge was self-understanding of the present as a manifestation of the
cultural process of human self-fashioning in which the determinations and
conflicting energies of natural life were given meaningful form as expressions
of the freedom of subjective agency. “Culture is, for us, the sum of all that has
spontaneously arisen for the advancement of material life and an expression
of spiritual and ethical life (geistig-sittlichen Lebens),” Burckhardt asserted in his
course on “The Study of History” (given in 1868 and 1870–1871), “including all
forms of social intercourse, all technology, the arts, literature and science.”
It constituted “the realm of the variable, free, not necessarily universal – all
that cannot lay claim to compulsive authority.”30
The last phrase was revealing, as it led Burckhardt into a critical analysis of
the relation between the power of culture as “society in its broadest sense,”
the sphere of an expansive, “millionfold” process of the free creation and
recreation of meaningful forms, and two other “potencies” – State and
Religion – which were intimately entangled in the cultural process of mean-
ing production, but did lay claim to “compulsive authority.”31 From
Burckhardt’s perspective, both political power structures and organized
religion were directed toward forcing the endless diversity of culture into
stable, permanent forms. In some instances this might temporarily protect
and even further the process of individuated meaning-creation, but more
often it stifled and petrified such creativity in ways that threatened the
survival of human existence as individuated self-determination. Conceived
30 Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 95; and “Weltgeschichtliche

Betrachtungen,” 20.
322
as an end in itself, political power signified domination over subjective

agency. Insofar as it rejected the “absolute value” of individual human
existence it stood as the epitome of “evil.”32 Similarly, Burckhardt recognized
the universal human need to find ontological grounding for the created forms
that gave meaning to human suffering; but once representations of a divine
foundation of human subjective agency were institutionalized in churches
and states and presented as absolute, universally valid truths, they became
fetters rather than frameworks for the cultural production of individuated
meaning.
Whereas historians such as Ranke and Droysen displayed great confidence
in the ethical universality of their historical knowledge, Burckhardt chal-
lenged the political and religious “powers” that informed this confidence. His
criticism clearly reflected his own contemporary situation. From
Burckhardt’s viewpoint, the sources, traces, or remnants of the past available
in the present for the construction of meaningful pasts were heterogeneous,
conflicting, and constantly expanding. And the ethical worlds in which
historians in the present found the appropriate forms for interpreting the
signs of various pasts were equally differentiated. Like Droysen, Burckhardt
claimed that historical pasts were constructs, based on the material traces
available to the historian in his present, traces that should obviously be
examined with critical care and scholarly responsibility. But the interpretive
task of creating meaningful pasts from such traces, he admitted, was
“unscientific,” “because it hardly possesses or can possess, an assured,
approved method of selection.” Every historian selected the sources for his
constructed meanings differently “according to nationality, subjectivity,
training and period.”33 Instead of advocating the kind of objectivity based
on identification with the singular yet universal perspective of an imagined
coherent and unified ethical world in the present, Burckhardt counseled both
the makers and the consumers of historical knowledge to step back from their
constructions, place them in comparative relation to other possible pasts, and
view them as individuated images or scenes of the constantly repeated
32 Burckhardt, “On Fortune and Misfortune in History”, in Force and Freedom:

An Interpretation of History, ed. James Hastings Nichols (New York: Meridian Books,
1955), 321–322 and 325–326; and “Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,” 202–203 and
205–207. See also Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 102–103; and
“Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen,” 25–26.
33 Burckhardt, “Introduction to Lectures on History of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries” (1871), in On History and Historians, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harper &
Row, 1958), 163; and “Historische Fragmente aus dem Nachlass,” 373. See also
Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 70–71; and “Weltgeschichtliche
323
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activity of the production of cultural meaning by human subjects at different

moments in history.
Burckhardt’s historical cultural studies, The Age of Constantine the Great
(1853) and The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), were complex
constructions that portrayed cultural patterns at particular epochal moments
of the breakdown and potential recreation of universalizing paradigms.
In both works he described the dynamics of free self-expression and meaning-
creation in relation to the “compulsive” forces of the state and religion.
Eschewing any assumptions of teleological development, he acknowledged
all attempts to freely create meaning from the ground of finite, individual
human existence. Beginning “from the one point accessible to us, the one
eternal center of all things – man, suffering, striving, doing, as he is and was
and ever shall be,” the historian and his audience could think their way
historically into other ways of imagining their own present situation, and
study “the recurrent, constant and typical as echoing in us and intelligible
through us.”34 For Burckhardt narrative construction held little interest. Like
Droysen, he defined historical self-knowledge in terms of a morphology of
contextually defined meanings, but, in his case, examination of the constant
transformation of forms for individual and collective life was fueled by the
need to recognize the freedom of creative individuation in a world in which
objective values and meanings were unavailable.
In his own alternative form of historical knowledge-production and under-
standing, Burckhardt did hope to secure a kind of wisdom, a reflective self-
knowledge and self-determination, a “religious” grounding and collective
human “ethical” identity that he had apparently subverted in his critique of
State and Church as providers of objective values and meanings. His descrip-
tions and analysis of the heterogeneous and entangled layers of cultural
production in different times and places singled out one particular level of
meaning-creation for particular emphasis – the production of visual, literary,
and musical works of art, the monuments of “high” culture, in which the
general patterns of meaning-creation which individuals and groups in parti-
cular cultural epochs had appropriated as their own were raised to the level of
self-conscious individuality and infused by great artists with a self-knowledge
of the universally human production process itself. Such artistic activity
transmuted the activity of making meaningful cultural forms, with all its
pain and conflict, sorrow and joy, into an ideal aesthetic object in which later

Betrachtungen,” 3. In this passage Burckhardt described the human condition as
“pathological.”
324
generations could both recognize their own individuated finite existence as

the universal human condition and rise above it into a universal community
of the spirit, joining a “spiritual continuum” transcending temporal and
cultural divisions, a continuum of formal objectifications of human freedom
that embodied the spiritual memory of a universal human community,
constantly faced with the task of transforming despair into beauty.35
The function of historical knowledge was not so much to provide the kind
of orientation in the present that made it possible to transform man’s self-
knowledge of his own existence as a historical “product” into his self-activity
as a historical “producer” (in Burckhardt’s phrase, to thus “make us shrewd
(klug) for next time”) but to recreate moments of creative transcendence or
“greatness” in which the finite individual could achieve consciousness of
participation in the general activity of creating meaningful form out of
existential suffering, thus making him/her “wise (weise) forever.”36
Friedrich Nietzsche was Burckhardt’s colleague (and admirer) in Basel. But
Nietzsche, who was strongly marked by the events culminating in Germany’s
emergence as a unified state, went much further than his mentor in his
criticism both of the academic, historical, and philological and of the neo-
Romantic, philosophical, and aestheticist versions of the historicist tradition.
During the wars of German unification between 1866 and 1870, and especially
the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1871, Nietzsche’s expressed loyalties were
clearly with Bismarck and Prussia. In July 1870, filled with fear that a vengeful
France might destroy the possibilities of German national consolidation,
Nietzsche, who had taken on Swiss citizenship as a young Classics professor
at the University of Basel, requested a leave of absence to join the Prussian
army as a volunteer in the Medical Corps in the campaign against France, and
in his few weeks of service in August 1870 he experienced some of the most
devastating elements of modern warfare. Fresh from this battlefield experi-
ence, Nietzsche entered the arena of public life with a rhapsodic evocation of
the ancient Greek experience of tragic drama, which he took as a model for
his German contemporaries’ own project of a self-transcending conscious-
ness of cultural identity and will to life in the face of the meaningless suffering
35 Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 77 and 78; and “Weltgeschichtliche

Betrachtungen,” 6 and 7. See also Burckhardt’s lecture “The Great Men of History”
(1870), in Force and Freedom: An Interpretation of History, ed. James Hastings Nichols
(New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 277–281. The title is an awkward translation of “Das
Individuum und das Allgemeine (Die historische Größe).” See also “Weltgeschichtliche
Betrachtungen,” 167–171.
325
john toews
of finite individual existence. Nietzsche thus began his public career as the
self-styled prophet of a national German community that would actualize its
implicit tendencies. Evidence of these tendencies he found in a distinctive
ethnically grounded German philosophy of the formation of self-conscious
individuality out of the unconscious energies of natural life (culminating in
Schopenhauer) and of communal identification through aesthetic experience
of the mythic representation of emergent individuated ethno-cultural forms
(culminating in Wagner). The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, pub-
lished in 1872, was a “political” intervention – a “call” to release the uncon-
scious dynamics of nature underlying all specific forms of historical human
existence, and to sublimate this primordial instinctual energy into the forms
of Wagner’s music dramas, in which Germans could recognize themselves as
members of an authentic cultural community that had faced the terrors of
individuated existence and transcended the agony of division and separation
in the ecstasy of a unifying aesthetic experience. This was definitely not an
attempt to provide Germans with a positive historical self-consciousness
through recognition of the present German public order as an identity-
affirming ethical cosmos, but rather a critical unveiling of a potential for
what Burckhardt had called cultural or spiritual “greatness” in which traces of
past self-representations could be creatively transfigured as forms of the
present, thus unveiling the foundations of historical meaning in the endless
creative movement from the pre-historical, unconscious flow of energy to
the making of individuated cultural form.
In the years following the publication of this Wagnerian call for national
cultural renewal, Nietzsche grew disillusioned with his youthful dreams of
the imminent emergence of a revived ethno-Germanic culture. By the late
1870s he had liberated himself from the thrall of both Schopenhauer and
Wagner, and he reimagined them as individual self-creators unaware of the
personal subjective nature of their intellectual or aesthetic productions. He
now judged the search for collective identity, both in the reimagining of
ethnically grounded myths and in “scientific” knowledge of the present as
a product of the past, as ideological bids to escape the anxiety of mean-
inglessness that characterized individual existence in the modern era and as
an abnegation of personal responsibility for creative self-fashioning.
Historicist claims to see past meanings as embodied in the present only
produced what Nietzsche deemed a passive acceptance of the given cultural
order, just as the aesthetic recreation of a pre-historical mythology ignored
the reality of the contextual conditions of present existence. Nietzsche’s
disillusionment with what he called the “monumental” and ” antiquarian”
326
forms of historical knowledge37 led to a major shift in his view of the cultural
functions not only of philosophy and art, but also of history. Any claims to
know objective truths and values beyond the perspectives of individual
interpretation did not yield self-knowledge, but simply encouraged one’s
subordination to collective meanings and inherited conventions. History,
like philosophy and art, served to produce the illusions and mystifications
of determined identities, affirming the deadening sense that human beings
were simply products of the past. What Nietzsche called his “joyful” science
was understood as a science of historical and cultural critique that sought to
dismantle this deadening sense of submission to the past: It dedicated itself to
the task of uncovering the constructed, interpretive nature of all truth claims.
“Genealogy” aimed to undermine all assertions of historical necessity for
integrative collective identity, by exposing the contingent actions and power
struggles that had produced and sustained dominant cultural meanings and
moral norms.
All of this critical unmasking of the production of value and truth, of the
various ethical worlds that defined not only individualized human identities
in history, but also the nature of human identity itself, eventually centered on
one core issue – the belief in a transcendent power that held the world
together as one world and gave purpose and meaning and therefore
a “soul” or subjective identity to “man,” a power that had gone through
a number of metamorphoses and secularizations. Most notably and recently
for Nietzsche’s contemporaries and historicizing teachers, this transcendent
power was no longer portrayed as a supernatural deity, but as the universal
human essence, grounded in a natural species-being, which evolved in
a single integrative progressive history whose ultimate purpose was to
actualize the full potentialities of this essence as the activity of collective self-
determination. But belief in any form of objective, universal truth was for
Nietzsche simply the last version of religious illusion. Thus Nietzsche pro-
claimed the death of God as the death of all objective truth and meaning, and,
more specifically, as the collapse of any concept of universal humanity or
“man” that claimed to transcend the realm of perspective and interpretation.
There were two connected consequences of this implicit cultural nihilism
as Nietzsche understood it. The first was the terrifying vertigo of experien-
cing nothingness, an absence where one sought a center or foundation of
universal meaning and truth. The second, however, was a liberation of the
37 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sections 1 and 2 of “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for
Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
327
john toews
vital energies that belief in objective, stable meaning had denied. The death of
objective meaning was also the beginning of life. For Nietzsche, this “release”
also implied a “forgetting” of the inherited burden of the forms of the past
that had shaped humans into homogeneous products. God died so that
Burckhardt’s ideal of the self-creating, life-affirming individual could be born.
Nietzsche’s joyful science of historical critique thus applied the principle of
the historicity of meaning and the meaning-knower, the core of mid-
nineteenth-century historicism, to the contemporary forms of that histori-
cism, paradoxically transforming the absence of historical meaning and value
into an affirmation of the creative power of individuals to produce their own
forms of individuation as the only legitimate source of meaning. The process
of critical unveiling, he suggested, would release the individual energies that
had been inhibited through conformity to collective meaning systems. Such
cultural nihilism could be a cleansing, purifying experience, an elevation into
lightness after the burdens of dependence and conformity. Liberation meant
you were no longer a slave defining yourself in relation to some other power,
but a master who created your own forms of life. Art was not merely the
representation of meaning but rather the creation of meaning, and thus an
ethical and political act of self-formation that constantly celebrated the form-
making activity itself.
The task of thinking through the form of a meaningful life after the death
of the assumed values of inherited historical cultures runs through
Nietzsche’s work of the 1880s, but it was most prominently articulated for
public consumption in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which Nietzsche tried to
move from critical demolition to the creation of new forms of existence
through the persona of an ancient Persian prophet speaking in parables,
sermons, sayings, and songs. Nietzsche’s positive message, as represented
in Zarathustra’s teaching, had three general aspects: First, the god who died
was displaced by an affirmation of life before meaning, of pure Being before
any particular beings, as that formless regenerative energy that Nietzsche
called “the will-to-power,” a transhistorical and pre-personal force that
opened up a critical perspective on the process of historical becoming and
the constructed nature of all cultural forms. Nietzsche rejected any notion of
general purpose in this life-energy – there was no specific historical goal that
was somehow innate to being, no inherent historical meaning to life. Yet
Nietzsche did imagine a hierarchy of types of power in which purely physical
power defined by mastery over others (Burckhardt’s definition of “evil”) was
sublimated into a reflective spiritual mastery in which life would consciously
determine its own processes of regeneration and creative expression
328
(Burckhardt’s “greatness”). It was this spiritualization of power that

grounded Nietzsche’s second major “positive” teaching – the displacement
of belief in a universal human essence to which individuals must conform by
what he called the Overman or Übermensch – a concept of human existence as
a constant process of redefinition operating in the sphere between the pre-
historical and the supra-historical, continually moving beyond any fixed or
stable identities, not in order to produce a final end state of humanity but as
an affirmation of the process of recreation itself, thus giving a subjective,
visceral, dynamic intensity to Burckhardt’s contemplative wisdom of enter-
ing the spiritual continuum of self-creators. Finally, instead of defining his
identity within the movement from past to future in some larger story
scripted by the purposes of God or Man, the Overman affirmed his process
of becoming as always fully in the present, as an affirmation of the NOW.
To love one’s fate (amor fati) was to affirm the constant movement of self-
overcoming and self-creation without guilt, or regret, without nostalgia or
hope, turning panic at the absence of any stable identity into self-affirming
joy.38 Mid-nineteenth-century German historicism thus found one possible
culmination in a Nietzschean hyper-historicism as historical critique that
transfigured the historically produced human subject into the producer of
a world or a series of worlds transcending the historical determinations of the
past, a supra-human subjective agency for which temporally individuated
appearances became mere materials for the infinite activity of creative
destruction.
38 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Book IV, Sections 270 and 341; and Thus
Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Robert Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Part III, Section 2 (“On the Vision and
the Riddle”).
329

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13

Historicism from Ranke to Nietzsche

Historicism as a general framework for thinking about human existence was

Ranke: Historical Anthropology and

philosophies of Kant and especially Fichte. The moral perspective of natur-

2 As analyzed in the brilliant study by M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and

freedom of subjective self-determination was seen as a product of the imma-

development of Christianity became a means for examining the possibility

boundaries of the European continent or the religious boundaries of

commitment to uncovering and presenting human actions of the past in the

Culture, Politics, and Religion: Ranke’s Historicism

6 Ranke, “Vorrede der ersten Ausgabe,” vii–viii.

state, became a way of expressing the contingency of historical events.

Integrating Individuality into Universalism: From

universal history of humanity in terms of temporal epochs within a common

as a naïvely unreﬂective combination of positivist fact-grinding, antiquarian

Droysen’s claims about the universal content of historical knowledge as

20 Droysen, Historik, 22. 21 Droysen, Historik, 7.

which the restricting fragmented debris of my petty personhood have faded

22 Droysen, Historik, 238. 23 Droysen, Historik, 230–231. 24 Droysen, Historik, 69–70.

26 Droysen, Historik, 288.

individualized forms of a common humanity in the will of a transcendent

The Insider as Outsider: From Burckhardt to

30 Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 95; and “Weltgeschichtliche

as an end in itself, political power signiﬁed domination over subjective

32 Burckhardt, “On Fortune and Misfortune in History”, in Force and Freedom:

activity of the production of cultural meaning by human subjects at different

34 Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 73; and “Weltgeschichtliche

generations could both recognize their own individuated ﬁnite existence as

35 Burckhardt, “Lectures on the Study of History,” 77 and 78; and “Weltgeschichtliche

(Burckhardt’s “greatness”). It was this spiritualization of power that

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