The “Professionalization” of History

The “Professionalization” of History

If the first half of the West’s nineteenth century is characterized by literary historical writing in a

romantic and nationalist vein, the second half may be noted for a rapid growth in what may, with

due caution, be loosely called “professionalization.” Although this too has nationalist origins, it is

associated less with the “nation” in any ethnic, linguistic, or cultural sense than with the political

“state” and its bureaucratic apparatus. The romantic liberalism of national independence and unity

rapidly transformed itself in much of Europe into the institutional conservatism of preservation

and social stability. Changes were signaled by a number of developments: the expansion of university

systems and the turning of many of them by the century’s end to advanced training in historical

scholarship; the systematization of public record systems in many countries; the advent of

several new professional associations, frequently accompanied by a new style of high-standard periodical

or journal; a further development of the longstanding trend to publish archival documents,

often under government sponsorship and now with a considerably higher standard of

accuracy than previously applied; and the systematic convergence of the erudite skills evolved over

the previous three centuries (paleography, diplomatic, numismatics, and epigraphy) within an

overarching science of the criticism of sources, for which the German term Quellenkritik provides

the best shorthand descriptor. This is also significant as the period during which Western-style

historiography first began seriously to have a lasting effect on its rival traditions in the Orient and

the Middle East, starting it down a road to eventual hegemony in the twentieth-century world.

Any account of nineteenth-century professionalization must begin with a colossus: the imposing

figure of the German Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886). Initially a student of ancient history

and philology (which were themselves making considerable advances under the older contemporary

whom Ranke admired, the philologist Barthold Georg Niebuhr), Ranke wrote a doctoral dissertation

on Thucydides. He quickly expanded his interests to include the medieval and modern

history of much of the world, beginning in The Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples from

1494 to 1514 with the period tackled by Francesco Guicciardini three centuries earlier. Subsequent

works traced the emergence of the European state system that this good German public servant

much admired as the source of modern civilization and individual freedom; and with a gaze

wandering steadily outward in expanding circles, his life closed with an unfinished multivolume

Weltgeschichte. Staggeringly prolific as he was, however, Ranke is less important for any of his individual

histories than for what he came to symbolize. Over his long career at the University of

Berlin, which had displaced Göttingen as the epicenter of German scholarship, he thoroughly

transformed the training of young historians (many of them foreigners), by focusing his research

seminars on primary sources and their criticism. Among his pupils and associates, Ranke could

include many of the great names of the mid- to late nineteenth century, such as Georg Waitz

(1813–1886) and Heinrich von Sybel (1817–1895); the latter deserves much of the credit for having

converted Ranke’s ideas into institutional form throughout Prussia and then Germany as a

whole. Some of Ranke’s students, to be sure, departed from the master’s model. The Swiss historian

Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), for instance, was an unusual apprentice whose great Kulturgeschichte,

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) remains one of the most-read

historical works of the entire century and is a forerunner of modern cultural history. The conservative

Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896), who was not a student of Ranke but succeeded him

in the chair of history at the University of Berlin (an opportunity Burckhardt had declined), deviated

in a different direction. Treitschke’s multivolume history of early-nineteenth-century Germany

(1879–1894) provided a celebration of the Bismarckian state and a script for later German

imperialism—a development that Ranke, a European rather than a strict nationalist, would not

have embraced.

Willingness to subject to criticism documents and texts, and the received notions that derive

from them, has often been taken as a sign of secularism or impiety by contemporary critics and

later admirers alike: one recalls John Selden’s experience in seventeenth-century England and the

reaction to the Han Learning scholars of early Qing China, discussed above. The adulation now

paid to earlier critics of Old Testament texts such as Richard Simon and Baruch Spinoza as heralds

of modern secularism is not necessarily more accurate than the scorn heaped upon those scholars

by conservatives of their own day. With Ranke we find a devoutly religious man, with intellectual

debts to German idealist philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, attempting to find God’s

handiwork in history, as had so many historians before him, but with a focus on the mechanics of

human action on the earthly stage to the degree that these could be recovered through careful criticism

of sources. Ranke had a strong belief in divinely dictated progress, but also in the distinctive

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value and contribution of each historical era and people, all “equal before God.” He promoted a

historiography that as far as possible could tell the story of the past wie es eigentlich gewesen. This

famous phrase translates most accurately as “the past as it essentially was”—not, as some later students

thought, “the past as it actually happened.” Later admirers wrongly believed that this meant

the complete avoidance of anything not based on a specific fact and the absolute repudiation of

conjecture or interpretation, thereby ignoring the moral and philosophical side of Ranke’s work.

Thanks to Ranke, his immediate disciples, and the celebrated German university seminar environment,

German scholarship loomed large over many of Europe’s nations in the second half

of the nineteenth century and beyond; the Sorbonne historian Ernest Lavisse (1842-1922) was so

impressed by Ranke’s successes that he introduced the historical seminar into French higher education.

In truth, many of the methodological practices were already practiced elsewhere in Europe.

The real appeal of the German approach to historiography was its emphasis on the historian’s

calling as a professional (with the high status that it accorded in German society) rather than an

amateur or “gentleman scholar.”

If anything, German influence was stronger outside western and central Europe than within.

To the east, for instance, several generations of early-twentieth-century Romanian historians derived

inspiration from Germany, including the archaeologist Vasile Pârvan (1882–1927) and the

methodologist Alexandru Xenopol (1847–1920). To the north, the Dane Kristian Erslev (1852–

1930) and the Norwegian Gustav Storm (1845–1903) both spent extended periods in German

seminars. Although some British and French historians trained in Germany (Lord Acton [1834–

1902], for instance, with the Catholic scholar Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger), it was American

students who most frequently flocked to Germany, returning home to staff departments of

history and new graduate schools at U.S. universities. Of those historians working at American

universities in the 1880s and 1890s, roughly half had spent some period of time studying in Germany,

though frequently too short a period to permit them really to absorb German historical

method—much less the whole philosophy behind it—in detail. The “objectivity” mantra chanted

in American historiography for many decades may be ascribed in large measure to the importation

of a naïve version of Rankeanism that upheld Ranke himself as an idol while largely misunderstanding

the more subtle aspects of his thought. Indeed, the myth of Ranke was far more

influential in America than his methods, and Gabriele Lingelbach has argued persuasively that the

concrete influence of German historiography among U.S. historians at this time has been overstated.

Many American scholars, such as Henry Adams, who introduced a seminar at Harvard,

even held the German university system in low esteem. Again, it was the aura of the “professional”

that was most appealing. Professional standards that upheld a creed of “scientific history” were

policed by influential academics like J. Franklin Jameson (1859–1937), editor of the American

Historical Review (est. 1895) and upheld by the newly founded (1884) American Historical Association.

The brief assault on the supremacy of political history by James Harvey Robinson

(1863–1936) and the “New Historians” before and after World War I, and the work of the Progressive

historians such as Carl Becker (1873–1945) and Charles Beard (1874–1948), did not endure,

but it opened the door to the advent of social history in the 1960s. Becker and Beard’s

“relativist” doubts about objectivity were also rejected in the conservative search for certainties after

World War II. The arrival of postmodernism has given them a new relevance in recent decades,

though probably not one that either man would have welcomed.

European methods began to penetrate elsewhere in the world. Late Victorian notions of “scientific

history” migrated into India during the first third of the twentieth century through Britishtrained

Indian historians returning home to teach. In part owing to the influence of scholars such

as the Sanskrit philologist Sir R. G. Bhandarkar (1837–1925), his son, D. R. Bhandarkar (1875–

1950, an epigrapher and numismatist), and the Mughal-period scholar Sir Jadunath Sarkar

(1870–1958), the institutional apparatus of Western historiography gradually emerged, beginning

with the Historical Records Commission of 1919 and the Indian History Congress established in

1937–1938. Early attempts at multivolume histories of India were aborted, but advocates such as

the novelist Kanaiyalal Maneklal Munshi promoted Hindu rediscovery of their ancestral, pre-

Islamic past. Following independence in 1947, Munshi called for a new history of India which,

on this occasion, under the direction of the prolific historian Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, resulted

in The History and Culture of the Indian People (11 vols., 1951–1969). In recent decades,

India has continued to produce outstanding scholars of international reputation such as the historian

of early India, Romila Thapar (b. 1931), and the social historian Sumit Sarkar (b. 1939).

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Perhaps the most interesting example of direct importation from the West and the profound

change it could occasion is provided by Japan. Long closed to the West during the Tokugawa era,

Japan rapidly opened up to international influence in the years running up to and following the

Meiji Restoration of 1868, which brought an end to the age of the Bakufu. History had enjoyed

considerable popularity through much of the nineteenth century, and the new regime established

an official department of history and then, in 1875, an expanded Office of Historiography. Its

initial purpose was to organize the compilation of the Dainihon hennenshi, a new history along

the lines of the Six National Histories, and from a pro-Imperial perspective. A rival official history,

the Taisei Kiyo (Outline of the Imperial Rule), to be written in Japanese, was also initiated

by more conservative members of the new regime.

Following a series of renamings and reorganizations, the Office of Historiography was transferred

to the Tokyo Imperial University in 1888, and a department of Japanese history founded

there in the following year. Closed in 1893 when the government disapproved of its research

agenda, the Historiographical Institute, as it had become, was briefly closed. It reopened in 1895,

by which time the plans to write a new national history had been all but abandoned: attention

now focused on the narrower mandate of recovering and publishing documents.

Any residual Chinese traditional influences on historiography were soon overwhelmed by Western

scholarship, for in the meantime, the director of the office, Shigeno Yasutsugu (1827–1910)

had arranged for one of Ranke’s later disciples, the German Jew Ludwig Riess (1861–1928), to

come to Japan in 1887 and teach at Tokyo Imperial University; he remained there until 1902.

At the same time, reform-minded and pro-Western scholars such as Fukuzawa Yukichi

(1835–1901), a reader of Alexis de Tocqueville, Buckle, Spencer, and Guizot, formulated a theory

of civilization espousing the superiority of the West and the need for Japan to catch up with

the rest of the world after centuries of isolation. Others practiced the equivalent of British “Whig

history,” describing the restoration as a major milestone on the road to progress. The popular historian

Taguchi Ukichi, another admirer of Western liberals and social theorists, epitomized this

outlook in his multivolume Nihon kaika shoshi (Brief history of Japanese civilization, 1877–1882).

As in Europe, not everyone accepted the value of academic historiography: Yamaji Aizan (1864–

1917), an outsider and popular historian highly critical of the sterility of scholarship at Tokyo

Imperial, and of “dead history.” Moreover, the consequences of the kind of source criticism that

Riess’s Japanese friends espoused were by no means always welcome, especially among conservative

nationalists determined to maintain the tradition of a social and moral function in historiography.

Shigeno (who was also president of the Historical Society established in 1889) was himself

reviled as “Dr. Obliterator” for his attacks on historical verities. Another historian, Kume Kunitake

(1839–1931) was forced to resign from his position in 1892 for using scholarly methods to

undermine the historical basis of Shinto and thereby calling into question the historicity of the

early myths; this in part occasioned the temporary closing of the Institute in the following year.

In her authoritative study of the period, Margaret Mehl has argued (Mehl, p. 14) that in comparison

with their German counterparts, scholars at the Historiographical Institute had scant influence

on the national interpretation of the Japanese past.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Japanese historians had divided themselves into three

formal fields: national (Japanese) history (kokushi or Nihonshi ), oriental history (Toyoshi ), and

Western history (Seiyoshi ). As the Kume affair illustrates, there was an uneasy tension in the application

of what the Japanese themselves called “scientific history” to the construction of a national

and Imperial-focused account of the past; in the decade leading up to World War II, the

so-called “Imperial view of history” seriously constricted freedom of interpretation. Though actual

incidents of government interference were not numerous, they have become well-known: for

instance, the historian Tsuda Sokichi (1873–1961) was convicted in 1942 for undermining the

still-revered national mythology of the Kojiki in work he had published nearly three decades earlier

on the ancient imperial court. His doubts about the historicity of Jimmu and his immediate

successors were entirely unacceptable in an aggressively militaristic state that had marked the founding

emperor’s 2600th anniversary in 1940 with national celebrations.

History as Philosophy and as Science

Although the general thrust of nineteenth-century historiography was toward critical scholarship

and away from philosophical speculation, the period nevertheless gave birth to a number of schemes

for the explanation of all of history, often by nonhistorians. Many of these had origins in German

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idealism, especially Hegel’s philosophy of history as the gradual self-realization of mind in history

through a process of “dialectic.” His views, while distinctive, had roots in earlier Enlightenment

thinkers, but Hegel firmly rejected—as Herder had earlier questioned—the longstanding classical

notion that history was “philosophy teaching by examples.” For Hegel, history was a process and

simultaneously a coherent narrative of that process, rather than a well from which useful guides

to morality and behavior could endlessly be drawn.

The most significant consequence of Hegel’s philosophy of history and its dialectic engine was

its inversion by the socialist Karl Marx (1818–1883) into a historical materialist philosophy of

economic and social change leading from primitive times, through feudal and capitalist phases, to

the triumph of the proletariat. With less obvious debts to the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach

(whom he severely criticized), the scientific positivism of Auguste Comte (whom he viewed with

contempt), and more remotely to such a theorist as Vico, Marx developed his views of history

piecemeal through several theoretical works, beginning with The German Ideology (1846). He wrote

at least one work that can be considered a political history, the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

(1852). Without exception, no theory of history in modern times has had more influence, in terms

of sheer numbers of adherents, especially among Marx’s Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese

admirers, and the citizens of their states.

Germany also produced other versions of thought about the unfolding of history, and about

the nature of the historical discipline. The historian turned theoretician Johann Gustav Droysen

(1838–1908), though a believer in the possibility of improved historical knowledge, argued in his

Grundriss der Historik and elsewhere for a less naive view of the historian’s relationship to sources.

Droysen placed particular emphasis on the creative role of interpretation as guided by present-day

circumstances and values and the need for firm and consistent methodological rules. He was just

as hard on historical positivists like Britain’s H. T. Buckle for their reduction of human actions

and institutions to the categories of the natural world. A further late-nineteenth-century turning

away from the post-Rankean fetish of the document can be seen in Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911)

assertion that history is a mental act of understanding (Verstehen) whereby the meaning of events

must be intuited from our own inner experience, not simply narrowly read from the sources. Like

Droysen’s, Dilthey’s position was antipositivist because it assumed historical acts could be apprehended

in a way that did not apply to the natural world of science, owing to our essential human

similarity with historical figures. Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) similarly poured doubt on

the modish tendency across Western Europe to see history as a “science” (in a positivist mode that

went well beyond anything that Ranke would have advocated) by defending its status as an “ideographic”

(representative of the unique and singular) rather than a “nomothetic” (law-generating)

practice.

The notorious Methodenstreit or “dispute about method” set off in 1891 by Karl Lamprecht

(1856–1915) presaged some of the uncertainties of the twentieth century. Critical of the neo-

Rankeans of his day, but more sympathetic to positivism than Droysen or Dilthey, Lamprecht

cast doubt on the usefulness of history conceived as the account of leaders and particular events,

as opposed to larger groups, and invoked the need for an alliance with the incipient social sciences,

including psychology. Though roundly denounced at the time, Lamprecht was not without

adherents. His students included the leading Romanian historian of the next generation,

Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940), and he was seen by a number of East German historians, following

World War II, as having provided an “alternative to Ranke” (Chickering, p. xiii). At the same

time, Lamprecht’s historically minded contemporaries, the philosopher Georg Simmel

(1858–1918), the political economist Max Weber (1864–1920), and a French former history student,

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), were pushing the study of the past toward the emerging discipline

of sociology, which has enjoyed a steady if troubled relationship with its parent discipline

in the century since.

German philosophy and German practice were powerful, and traveled well, but were not in

the end omnipotent. The great French ancient historian of the mid-nineteenth century, Numa

Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889), remained quite immune to Niebuhrian Altertumswissenschaft.

In Britain, which has never highly valued speculative history (Arnold Toynbee being a

notable, and oft-criticized, twentieth-century exception), little attention was paid to the philosophy

of history. More surprisingly, even the reception of German scholarship and pedagogy was at

best mixed. It was perhaps most influential in the area of the history of law, which enjoyed its

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