Otto Hintze: The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze

Otto Hintze's response to Karl Lamprecht's Was Ist Kulturgeschichte?:

Hintze's essay tackes the old debate over historical laws: are events of such a nature that they can be generally arranged in some form of order or unique in their appearance. Psychological investigation, rather than the quarrel over teleology and materialism, altered the fight over why typical patterns emerge in historical development.

Social psychology has its roots in the idealistic spirit that provoked many German philosophers to believe a mass psychology of a nation impacts, if not determines, the destiny of a people.

Historians know of no driving forces other than those carried out by men, not as individuals, but in connection with their time and place. A man shaped by the assumptions of his era give life to all institutions.

For Lamprecht, the mind of the individual and the mind of the society are two separate entitites. All in a group are ruled by the emotions and ideas common to the group. In other words, members of every group, though they vary in minor ways at an individual level, are nonetheless ruled by the emotions, ideas, and desires common to the group.

Ideas have their ultimate origin in thepsychology of the minds of individuals and are therefore subjected to individual impulses. More advanced societies have more options for breaking in conformity. Individual are essential for change and a society progresses as the variance between traditional norms and new ones.

Assuming that individuals are the catalysts for the creation of "history," how does one determine how and why certain people at certain times emerge? Why is it some people are more successful than others in altering their environments?

For Hintze, this task is too arduous for the historian:

"Historians deal with people whose consciousnesses are already fully formed. We can understand them only on an act of artistic insight, founded on careful research."

The life of an individual and the life of a society can be described and analyzed, but the connection between the individual and the group cannot be made given the limits of source material available. In this manner, the distinction between cultural and political history is meaningless for Hintze because the individual and the group evolve and react against one another.

Using a metaphor, Hintze writes:

"We want to know not just the summits and peaks of the range, but also the base of the mountain."

In this respect, he advocates employing social psychological tools to illuminate the trajectory of world history. Rather than dividing the various chronologies of events into national stories, Hintze wants to examine the "universal cultural forces" that shape the behavior of nations which are reactions to world events.

Leopold Van Ranke: A History of England, Principally in the 17th Century

Leopold Van Ranke, A History of England, The Prince of Orange and the Protestant Episcopalian Party in England:

A rather dull tract recounting in tedious detail the downfall of James II. Mostly using available correspondence, Von Ranke paints a picture of politcal manuevering in the Hague and London in the 1680s. He tersely lists events with little transition and the only instance of the author's voice come in broad statements that clarify or minimize the importance of each event he lists in the narrative, i.e.:

"Personal quarrels of this kind never fail to have some consequences,"

I gather the reason this reading was assigned was to provide a sample of the limits of a strict political and diplomatic history that employs only documentation without a unifying theme. Von Ranke stresses the unique situation of William of Orange as a catalyst for driving French foreign policy and English domestic policy:

"The effect which a man can produce on the world often depends not so much on the power he possesses, as on the attiutude which he assumes towards those forces."

Policy considerations are only considered for their impact on the ruler's power and the status of his nation's power vis-a-vis the rest of Europe. Religious differences are considered political impediments. Nowhere do we learn how or why certain people think the way they do, save a passing reference to William's upbringing. For Van Ranke, only documented evidence can be placed in the book.

Leopold Van Ranke: History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations

Leopold Van Ranke: History of the Latin and Teutonic Races: Introduction

Van Ranke begins his introduction by limiting his scope for the sake of narrative clarity. The historian acknowledges forces outside Western Europe impacted its development, but chooses to omit them for the sake of clarity.

In perhaps the most famous line of his many works, Van Ranke dismisses the historian's attempt to "teach the past to instruct the present and so they may profit from the future." For Van Ranke, this school of thought makes historical research completely subjective on the chance morality of the evaluator.

One can teach history "as it happened" because an informed observer can read the memoirs, diaries, letters diplomatic dispatches and first hand accounts of eye-witnesses to construct a picture of political and diplomatic history. For Van Ranke, every specialist from every year looking at every event would reach the same conclusion. Unlike laboratory scientists, we cannot run and rerun simulations on past events to isolate exactly how something happened and why. What we can do, for Van Ranke, is locate through rigorous research and documentation a reliable record of the past. He uses the term "highest law" to describe "a strict representation of the facts, however narrowly circumscribed or ugly they may be."

Rather than focusing on imparting the moral lessons from the past or teleology, Van Ranke believes "The lofty ideal of historical presentation is to present events themselves to the limit of human comprehension." He doubts his own capacity to meet this standard, but believes it is attainable.