Robert Harrison, Aled Jones and Peter Lambert

The founding generation of professional historians, in Germany, in America, and in Britain, had a narrow view of the subject-matter of history, concentrating their efforts on the study of political history. One reason for doing so was that the methods of 'scientific history' were more easily applied to political topics. The archives of state and federal governments and the collected papers of prominent political leaders provided the most easily accessible documentary material. Therefore states, rather than peoples, became their principal subjects.

In the case of Germany, in addition to the demands of scientific method, state sponsorship of the emergent discipline, and state patronage of historians, provided a second motive for the particular focus on political history, while the Lutheran propensity to defer to state authority furnished a third. Though they rejected almost every other aspect of his work, historians echoed Hegel in pronouncing the state to be the greatest achievement of human endeavour. Johann Gustav Droysen associated the state with the divine; Friedrich Dahlmann attributed more human attributes to it: those of a 'corporially and spiritually eligible personality'. Thus, a first step was taken toward reconciling a focus on the state in general with historians' conviction that their concern should be with the historically particular: the state was itself an individual! The second step was contrived when the historian's task was declared to be the propagation of his own nation-state. Where Ranke's earlier work had combined a defence of traditional authority with a measure of universalism, Prussian loyalism with an interest in the relations between states, and exhibited a sceptical attitude towards nationalism, his political allegiance and academic agenda subsequently shifted toward Germany. Even so, as early as 1833 Ranke had argued that only those states capable of 'awakening' the 'slumbering spirits of the nations' were also capable of surviving in post-French Revolutionary Europe. The hundred years before 1789 had witnessed the rise of the 'great states'; since then, the 'nationalities' had 'consciously entered into the state'. The 'national principle' had furnished the state with a 'moral force' and so

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