Modern Nationalism and the Making of a Professional Historian: The Life and Work of Leopold von Ranke

This new study re-examines the relationship between the beginnings of the modern historical profession and the emergence of the nation-state in the nineteenth century. The monograph analyses the founding father of modern historiography Leopold von Ranke and his evolution as an historian, his self-perception and his increasingly dominant perceptions of the historian’s craft and role in society and politics. Su particularly focuses on the tension between a commitment to an objective represent ion of the past and the allegiance to a nation. The approach suggests an original and important revision of the conventional view of Ranke as an historian and, perhaps more importantly, of the origins of the modern historical profession.

This revision also suggests that some of the conventional attacks on the alleged fixation on objectivity of the Rankean school were/are misplaced, on the one hand; and that, other hand, the historical profession has been from its very beginnings locked in battle with itself over its relationship with a specific nation, culture, and race, its claim of universal meaning and implication and its assertion of truthfully telling the story of the past. Su demonstrates that many, if not in one way or the other all of the dilemmas and conundrums that confront historians today were already present in the making of the profession and more or less clearly in the minds of such major figures as von Ranke.