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Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 2 > Issue 8 (1904)

 

Abstract

Ranke, the Nestor of modern historical research, was wont to say that he only wanted to know how things had happened. Lamprecht, however, more truly indicated the aim and purpose of the investigation of the past when he said that be wanted to know how things had become. Another distinction between the schools which these two men represent is, that one is primarily interested in political affairs, while the other would include within the historical field all phases of social activity. A survey of the course of scholarship during the century just closed, leads to the conclusion that this latter point of view represents the prevailing tendency. History has come to be more than a mere record of political events. Moreover, not only has history, as such, come to be a more inclusive study, but the historical method has invaded the domain of special subjects, and has been applied with advantage to the study of philology, literature, art, economics, law, and theology, not only in their relations to one another, but as independent branches of learning. Modern historical study, however, began with political problems, the impulse being furnished by the questions involved in the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the far-reaching political and constitutional reconstructions which followed. This helps to explain the attitude of Ranke and his disciples, an attitude which has had powerful advocates in many quarters until comparatively recent times. Freeman, for example, declared that history was only "past politics," and the late Sir John Richard Seeley professedly regarded historical study as a mere John the Baptist for the study of political science. But the attempts of these men to narrow the scope of their subjects were resisted even in their own lifetime, and would probably be rejected by a vast majority of the younger generation of scholars.

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