Ranke’s secular historical method still hid a providential shaping agenda
Evidence
Although Ranke, a staggeringly prolific scholar whose collected works consist of fifty-four volumes, presented himself as an objective scholar just seeking to understand what it was that his sources had to tell him, nevertheless he had an overall vision of history that amounted to a shaping agenda. History had a mysterious divine purpose and it was the task of the historian to uncover that purpose. God made use of races and civilizations as his instruments and then discarded them. During the Middle Ages, Islamic civilization had served the divine will but, having been defeated by the Latin and Roman peoples, that civilization became a dead thing and was to be studied as such. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 278
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the father of ‘objective’ source-based history operated on a hidden theology of Islam-as-discarded-instrument cuts against how Ranke is usually taught — genuinely paradigm-shifting for how we read historical method.