The Social History of Politics [antikvár]

IntroductionThe prestige of German historical studies in the twentieth century has been very different from that in the nineteenth. Then, German historical scholarship, identified with the name of Ranke, was accepted widely throughout the world as the model for historical research. As amateur traditions were replaced by the stress on history as a 'scientific' enterprise and a profession, German patterns of university education, specifically as they related to the training of the historian in critical methods, were imitated. Historical societies and journals were founded following the German example. Students flocked to Berlin to study with Ranke, Droysen, Sybel, and Schmoller.' All of this has changed since the First World War. German historiography has been largely ignored, and until relatively recently probably rightly so. An extremely narrow provincialism came to pervade historical thinking and historical writing1. For a history in English of the conservative tradition of German historiography and historical thou^t, see Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History. The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, Middletown, (Ct.) 1968, 2nd ed. rev., 1983; for two studies in German, see Heinrich von Srbik, Geist und Geschichte vom deutschen Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart, 2 vols., Munich, 1950, 1951 (by a conservative Austrian advocate of a Greater Germany), and Joachim Streisand (ed.), Studien über die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 2 vols., Berlin/GDR, 1963, 1965 (from a Marxist-Leninist perspective). A very useful collection of brief studies of individual historians is contained in Hans- Ulrich Wehler (ed.), Deutsche Historiker, 9 vols., Göttingen, 1971-1982. See also Manfred Asendorf (ed.). Aus der Außlärung in die permanente Restauration. Geschichtswissensch^t in Deutschland, Haniburg, 1974, particularly his Introduction, 'Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft'; the thoughtful essays by Ernst Schulin, Traditionskritik und Rekonstruktionsversuch, Göttingen, 1979. On the influence of German scholarship in America, see Jürgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship, Ithaca, NY, 1965; in France, see William R. Keylor, Academy and1