Historiography

STORIOGRAFIA. – Exposition of the complex of human events in their concrete configuration within space-time coordinates.

I. GREECE and ROME

In 6th-century B.C. Greece, one may identify a first form of historiographical consciousness, that is, a reconsideration and evaluation of history. This emerges in Ionia (the most culturally advanced region) with the critique of the mythical world (of which Hecataeus is the most characteristic representative), constituting a defining element of Greek historiography in contrast to that of the East. This critique, however, is understood (and herein lies its limit) only as a rectification of the traditional datum, eliminating from it whatever contradicts truth ascertained by other means: through philosophical or naturalistic inquiry, or through direct experience of personally observed facts, or verified against the most reliable accounts. Furthermore, it manifests in an avid curiosity toward the surrounding reality, initially confined within the narrow bounds of ethnographic-geographical description (the "logographers"), later expanding—through the first attempts at local histories and biographies—into the broad fresco of Herodotus, where ethnographic interest is gradually relegated to the background, while a war, its distant roots, and its complex unfolding become the principal theme. Until, in Thucydides, every ethnographic residue is burned away, and another war, that of the Peloponnese, becomes the problem upon which the historian’s passionate inquiry converges, and which, identified in the conflict between two political forms, becomes almost a guiding thread of Greek history. Between the realm of myth, upon which the critique of tradition operates, and that of pure contemporary history, naturally open to comprehension, Herodotus has identified an intermediate zone, of uncertain physiognomy, too recent to be subjected to critical revision, yet too distant from the present to allow for a pragmatic understanding. Toward this zone, the historian turns his attention to preserve its memory and commemorate its glories. He thus places himself, chronologically and ideally, between Hecataeus and Thucydides, characterizing a third fundamental direction of Greek historiography. Indeed, the encomiastic character underlying it will assume ever greater importance, as an ethical-rhetorical attitude in the judgment of human deeds—derived from Isocrates—spreads in the historiography following Thucydides. The works of a Xenophon, a Theopompus, or a Callisthenes are, under the master’s influence, synchronic history (and even those who turn to the past—Philistus, Ephorus, Anaximenes—expand their narrative as they approach their own time), but they also embody an ethical-rhetorical conception in which Herodotean and Isocratean motifs converge, of which Theopompus is the most evident example. On the one hand, contemporary political ideals decisively enter historiography, becoming motives for interpreting and judging the past, upon which they cast the ambiguous light of praise and blame; on the other, interest—as in the practical and speculative spheres—becomes concentrated on individual personalities: from the "almost anonymous history of two constitutions" in Thucydides, one arrives at Theopompus’s Philippics, a vast framework for the history of a single man. The typically rhetorical desire to keep attention alive enriches the narrative with extravagant and fantastical details, but renders the boundaries between it and the historical novel with a thesis uncertain, as already seen in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. If the vision expands from the πόλις to Greek civilization as a whole, and then to other peoples, if it deepens in the analysis of the characteristics of peoples and the humanity of individuals, the limits between real and imaginary dissolve: Callisthenes, Onesicritus, and Clitarchus create a biography of Alexander that is already, in nuce, a novel. Others (Aristobulus, Nearchus, Hieronymus of Cardia, etc.) will react against this tendency, but their concern for strict adherence to the reality of observed and known facts results in an exacerbated formal simplicity, which diminishes their effectiveness. Reconnecting with the most rigorous memorialistic tradition and the ideal of the "practical historian" that informed it, Polybius creates a historiography that, beyond rhetorical falsifications and the narrowness of chronicles, grasps political transformations and military events in their concrete physiognomy. With him, history recognizes its true center, Rome, and becomes cosmopolitan history. Polybius’s pragmatic vision, however, is compelled to explain human events through the intervention of τύχη, fortune, an irrational and transcendent force. Even if his continuator, Posidonius, seeks to reintroduce this force into the historical process as "fury" (θυμός), antithetical to logos (reason) yet a motor of events alongside it, and, seeing barbarians as the incarnation of this "fury," includes them—rendering it more rigorous—in the framework of cosmopolitan history, in these two historians the transition from historiography to teleological reflection, to the philosophy of history, is already implicit. After Posidonius, Greek historiographical activity lives off the past, without revealing original motives: Theopompus, Posidonius, Xenophon, and above all Thucydides remain the great models. Those who wish to react against the ever-flourishing rhetorical historiography turn to Thucydides, and he is well present, along with the best Greek historiographical experiences, in Lucian’s How to Write History. The finest products of late Greek historiography arise from contacts with the Roman world, but the reciprocal influences and dependencies with Roman historiography are not yet clarified. Polybius’s effort to achieve a pragmatic understanding of the Roman world has its continuators. Plutarch’s Lives, the most notable product of the imperial age, are both an effort to uphold the Greek world in relation to the Roman and a recognition of the latter’s moral values.

The beginnings of Roman historiography (s. romana) are to be traced in the primitive pontifical records, domestic traditions, and popular memory linked to monuments, festivals, and folk songs. However, this chronicle-like recording constitutes a sort of "prehistory" of Roman historiography, which arises from its overcoming. The effort of Roman historiography will thus be to surpass the annalistic scheme, even in cases where it is formally accepted. Another fundamental characteristic of Roman historiography is its close relationship with Greek historiography: a relationship of dependence and reciprocal influence whose developments are difficult to define for the entire pre-Livian production, of which various significant testimonies remain. The oldest annals seem to have been written in Greek for a dual reason: due to the influence of their models and because they were intended to trace the history of the city more for the Greeks than for the Romans. Cato the Censor, who violently reacts against this historiography in a foreign language and for foreigners, nevertheless employs two Greek literary genres—the history of city foundations and contemporary history—to combat it: a sign that his critique was directed primarily at the linguistic form and the narrative, i.e., annalistic, structure of that production. Since Cato’s work is lost, nothing can be said about the methods with which, in the Origines, he intended to gather—almost in a single corpus—the archaic legendary material on the individual cities of the peninsula, or the ways in which he could surpass the traditional arrangement while writing about his own time. However, an attitude can be identified in him that would remain a constant characteristic of Roman historiography: the refusal to provide the names of the actors in the events he narrated, because the true actor was the Roman people. This is an indication of a political passion that does not subside in the objective consideration and exposition of facts but revives them with the spirit of one who directly participates in the narrated events. The continuous presence of the "virtue" and "majesty" of the people as historical forces in the narration of its events constitutes the perennial and suggestive charm of Roman historiography.

From this stems its decided moralism, on the one hand, and on the other, the rhetorical character, so clearly defined by Cicero, that informs II. From this also stems its connection, beyond the formal imitation of Thucydides, to the rhetorical-political historiography of the Hellenistic age. Yet its rhetorical nature does not consist, as in the more degraded aspects of the latter, in an unjustified deformation of facts, but rather in their organization according to a context that reflects the writer’s sentiment toward them. A history of Roman historiography can, however, only be written based on what has survived, and it resolves into the judgment of the works of Sallust, Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus, in whom the aforementioned attitude reveals itself and modulates in different tones.

Thus, Sallust harks back to Thucydides and Cato as witnesses of an ancient austere virtue that he sees, submerged by corruption, disappearing in the society of his time. Thus, Caesar identifies himself with the interests of the Roman people and transfers to the narrated events, in his memoirs, that clarity of design and sure touch that characterized his political actions. Thus, Livy unfolds the history (or the epic?) not of Rome, but of its greatness or virtue, under the continuous, looming threat of devastating corruption. Thus, finally, Tacitus, in his bitter and merciless analysis of the figures and designs of tyrannical emperors, documents the desolating absence of those civil ideals, of that original virtus, which he transfers—whether as warning or despair—to the barbarians of Germania. And each of them judges above all as a citizen, a citizen in whom the entire ideal patrimony, the spirit of the Roman State, is embodied. The inability to comprehend within oneself the reasons and ideals of this State, to make them the criterion of historical interpretation, is the sign of the decline of Roman historiography after Tacitus. Already to him, the world of the provinces eluded understanding; to his contemporary Suetonius, history appeared organized and enclosed in a series of imperial biographies and was thus handed down to continuators and reworkers, whose work culminates in the Historia Augusta of the 4th century A.D.: and even here, the boundaries with the novel become quite uncertain. In the 4th century, Ammianus Marcellinus, a wealthy officer who seeks to infuse, in a continuation of Tacitus, that sense of Latinity recovered from military tradition and bookish experiences, creates a singular work in which Roman historiographical thought merges with Eastern suggestions. The epitomes of Livy and similar compilations, which become increasingly frequent, exhibit an absolute poverty of thought, with the sole merit of preserving the sense of the unitary development of Roman history.

Meanwhile, Christian thought of the first centuries elaborates the germs of a new historiographical vision, and in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, it represents the moment when the Church, opposing itself to the State, makes its own events a history complete in itself. But "the true work that opens and dominates the Middle Ages is De civitate Dei by St. Augustine,... because it poses and resolves the new problem that arose from the dissolution of the ancient political world: that of the relationship between the civitas terrena and the civitas caelestis" (A. Momigliano).

II. MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE

With St. Augustine, in fact, the historian was invited to consider not the events of individual political organisms or aggregates, but rather that of "humanity," operating through time, manifesting itself in a dramatic alternation of good and evil within the various empires. History became a moral problem, a drama of human conscience, and this problem and this drama became its interpretive criterion. This vision was framed within schemes that underlie all medieval historiography: the scheme of the six ages of the world, corresponding to the six days of creation or to the various ages of man, and the other, intertwined with the first, of the four monarchies (Assyrians and Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Diadochi, Romans), to which Isidore of Seville and Bede would later give a precise chronological determination. Furthermore, the profound and enduring influence of Augustine must be traced to the sense of continuity between the new era and the Roman Empire (whose providential function in preparing for the advent of Christ he had celebrated); this sense prevented the exact perception of the profound changes that had occurred among peoples and tied the Christian Empire of the 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries to the ancient one, though so different from it, through the formula of translatio. The great Augustinian construction would not remain intact in the writers who, in subsequent centuries, drew inspiration from it, simplifying and vulgarizing its themes, fragmenting its architecture. The sense of the dramatic conflict between the earthly and the heavenly, the fabric of human events, would transform, for example, into the minute, sporadic moralistic gloss inserted into the narrative. Nevertheless, some of the fundamental concepts of Augustinian thought resurface continually, constituting almost the characteristic constants of medieval historiography: the predominance of the moral-religious element in historical judgment (evil in history arises from the sins of men, especially from the oldest and most deeply rooted, pride); pax as the supreme good for man on this earth, and yet only a pale image of the true peace, that of eternal life; the creation of the two types of the rex iustus and the tyrannus, to which the great protagonists would be constantly assimilated, resulting in a uniform stylization of the intellectual and moral characteristics of individual figures, in contrast with the care taken to individuate their external particularities. Placed at the center not only of the consideration of the present but also of the vision of the past, the problem of salvation reduced historical research to the subordinate role of ancilla of theological and moral speculation; and as such, it assumed, in the hierarchy of arts and sciences, that uncertain character which had been its own in antiquity, now magistra vitae, now fabula. By this path, and by the more direct one of the persistent fortune enjoyed by certain Roman historians (Suetonius, Justin, Eutropius), the unspent influence of the ancient world thus operated alongside the Christian-Augustinian one; and it became evident both in the external modeling of the innumerable Vitae and Gesta on the Suetonian work, and in the more general effort to approach, in tone and narrative manner, the texts taken as models.

This second influence is, in many respects, prevalent in the historiography of the 6th-9th centuries: even if one senses that the spiritual climate is different from that of the "pagan" historians, the marked interest in political events and certain characteristics of the narrative lead back to them. Augustinian motifs, and even the moralistic attitude, are absent in the Historia Langobardorum of Paul the Deacon, or remain in the background; for him, history is still, above all, a beautiful tale, in which reality is veiled by a legendary tone, rich especially in epic-chivalric motifs: he admires his heroes with complacency and notes with curiosity what strikes him in the surrounding world. The radical wickedness of the civitas terrena is entirely forgotten. And in the Vita Karoli Magni of Einhard, not only is the exaltation of the rex iustus conducted along clear Suetonian lines, but the very fact of being an exaltation of a layman and of emphasizing human factors in the narrated events reveals the suggestive force of the ancient model; on the other hand, the inability to fuse, in the portrait, physical characteristics with moral and spiritual ones is already evident in him. The picture of later historiography is more complex: on the one hand, the ability to grasp particular men and things, to represent "realistically" individual aspects of reality, to judge certain political events with acuity becomes livelier and more acute; on the other—and perhaps in the same person, as in Liutprand of Cremona—the religious-moralistic note is equally accentuated, recourse to the designs and judgments of Providence in motivating events and to moral reflections in judging them becomes more frequent. Indeed, this note alone documents the "Christianity" of the chronicler, now that the universal dimension of the Augustinian framework has been lost, and a kingdom, an emperor, a region or a city, a monastery, is the object of the narrative; and this narrative sometimes even loses the awareness of the intrinsic sinfulness of human action, and at other times takes on an incipient national pride. In such production, the character of pure and simple testimony and registration of facts is accentuated, while the task of passing a value judgment on them is transferred to the rich political literature that grew around the problem of the relationship between regnum and sacerdotium, so rich in new insights and presentiments. It is precisely within such literature, in fact, that the new conception begins to take shape and clarify, seeing human events as articulated not in

Historiography here presents the complex of human events in their continuity, no longer in the contrast between the earthly city and the heavenly city, but in the far more defined one between Church and State. This new conception matures simultaneously in the pamphleteering of the Libelli and in the historiographical production of Annales, Vitae, and Chronicae emerging from the Investiture Controversy. The central problem for historians now becomes the relationship between Church and State, two institutions that, though founded in the ultramundane, manifest themselves in earthly form and act in entirely human ways and terms. This makes possible a new unitary synthesis of world history, based on Augustinian foundations, in Freising (v.): but Otto’s Civitas Dei, insofar as it can be realized on earth, encompasses both Church and Empire; and of the Imperium, now become Teutonicum through translatio, the grandeur is deeply felt, and its mission vigorously reclaimed. This curious intertwining of Augustinian conceptions with the imperial idea is both the culmination of medieval historiography and the symptom of a new profound crisis. Alongside a revival and deepening of the concept of history as the unfolding of spiritual values—original but yielding few fruits—a sense of national sentiment, already present to some extent in Otto of Freising’s impassioned involvement in the affairs of his Empire, gains strength among chroniclers. Thus, especially in Norman historiography, the idea emerges of a divine mission entrusted no longer to a universal power but to a State, to a particular nation; the city, with its glories and vicissitudes, assumes the role of protagonist in municipal historiography, particularly in Italy. Municipal pride soon intertwines, in the production of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, with partisan spirit; one aligns with the Guelph or Ghibelline faction, in defense of the free communal regime or the emerging seigneurial power; the great universalistic ideas fade ever more into the background; in the concrete political reality that now takes center stage in historical narrative, the interplay of forces is increasingly identified in its human components. When the vision expands again beyond the urban or regional sphere, the subject of narration is at most the—political—affairs of “Italy” (A. Mussato, F. de’ Ferreti). This “national” character is accentuated, especially in Italian historiography, by the use of the vernacular; yet this does not signify a rejection of the classical tradition or the waning of the suggestive power of the idea of Rome, but rather its reconsideration in new terms. Rome is above all caput Italiae; the Roman tradition is seen as the root of the new municipal reality, and its republican phase is thus revalued at the expense of the imperial one; conversely, toward the more recent past, aversion and suspicion of decline grow, and reservations about the glorification of the Empire become ever more serious. Faith in an eschatological conclusion of history beyond the earthly realm thus weakens, in the sense that confidence in humanity’s ability to create better times through its own efforts increases, and the conviction emerges in some (Villani) that, despite everything, the world’s affairs were proceeding well: a confidence and conviction that make the historian increasingly attentive solely to human action in its earthly school. The ties between fourteenth-century Italian chroniclers and their predecessors are not, however, entirely severed; a whole series of traditional motifs coexists in their works with new ferment: a certain stylization in the depiction of political conflicts, whose fundamental—and undifferentiated—motif remained human pride, and a vein of moralism of which Dino Compagni is the most conspicuous example. Such ties to the past are far more evident in transalpine historiography. Here, too, the collapse of universalistic conceptions had strengthened the sense of national particularity, which was accentuated by the adoption of the vernacular: notable testimonies to this new direction in France, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, are Villehardouin and Joinville. Yet it reflected a spiritual world quite different from the Italian one; while in Italy, the emerging bourgeois world prompted a view of history, as of daily life, as the effect of human reason and action, in transalpine society, still governed by a chivalric-religious foundation and then at its height, a heroic-adventurous spirit passed from life to permeate history.

The Italian historiography of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, by contrast, enacts a profound revolution in the criteria of judgment and the overall attitude toward human affairs, a revolution that underlies modern historiography.

The return to the Latin form does not represent a loss of freshness and representational capacity, as might appear at first glance; the cult of elegant form, the vigilant attention to style that characterizes this, as other manifestations of humanism, the admiration for Livy as a new model, and for Cicero (the theorist of history as opus oratorium maxime) bring to consciousness the artistic character of the historical work and the necessity of reconciling the demand for truthfulness with that of effectiveness in narrative—a recurring problem in historiographical thought from this point onward. This awareness also translates into a greater theoretical dignity of historia compared to other arts, the first step toward its establishment as an absolutely autonomous discipline. The renewed cult of Rome is not merely formal but extends to an admiring consideration of the spiritual and moral motives that had animated it, of the political organism it had created. Moreover, admiration for such a civitas terrena had freed itself from all theological justification, had neither metaphysical premises nor ends. The meditation on and judgment of its affairs from this purely terrestrial perspective enriched that vigilant sense of political reality already alive in the historiography of the communal and seigneurial age, broadened its scope, and confirmed its validity (L. Bruni, P. Bracciolini, F. Biondo). Finally, a more refined critical sense, first matured in the context of that science of antiquity (philology and archaeology) which owes its foundation precisely to humanism, is applied to the study of the more recent past; though a systematic methodology is still lacking, judgment becomes more assured, the ability to distinguish the acceptable from the fanciful, more prompt. A consequence of this critical spirit is the effort to procure the broadest possible documentation, to study, alongside chronicle material, documentary sources, which from the second generation of humanist historians (Giustiniani, Sabellico, Simonetta, Calchi, Pontano) passes into a Sleidan, a Zurita. In Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the first great historians of the modern world, all these “new” motifs, after long labor, reach full maturity, leading to the enclosure of history within its purely human boundaries, from which every providential intervention seems excluded—or at least in which such intervention is not invoked to explain its events.

The historian no longer needs, as if to clarify the meaning and direction of history, to retrace it entirely from its most distant origins, but only to illustrate, within more restricted chronological terms, a specific moment of civic or national history in all its living richness. This marks the end of the Augustinian conception: there is no general principle explaining the world; each event carries its own explanation within itself, and the historian’s interest is exhausted in identifying and clarifying the human interests and passions that gave it life. For Machiavelli, every state and every people follows its own fatal cycle of development, from birth to death; but each of these cycles is self-contained, distinct from every other, and does not articulate itself through an eternal, divine law governing history: each fragment lives for itself. The only common bond among the various ages and cycles is the immutability of human impulses and passions; the shared destiny of societies is their necessity to traverse the aforementioned cycle. These are the premises from which Machiavelli moves to affirm the possibility of a "lezione delle cose antique"—that is, a pragmatic value of history. Such value, however, does not restore its unity, since the "lesson" is not inherent in the unfolding of human events themselves but is entrusted only to certain ones, selected by the historian. Guicciardini, in whom historical sensitivity and adherence to the concrete were more acute, denies any value to the "lesson": every historical fact is "particolare", an unmistakable and unrepeatable individuality, thus a problem unto itself. With this, the Renaissance arrived at its discovery—the sense of "individualità storica", the sense of history as a human creation whose individual moments each constitute, in themselves, a complete event. Medieval Christian thought had identified the element of "continuità" in the historical process, focusing more on the "value" of individual facts in relation to a "before" and an "after"; Renaissance thought, by contrast, emphasized the element of "momentaneità", "particolarità", concentrating on the single fact while neglecting its significance for universal development. The attempt to reconcile these two fundamental exigencies of historical thought will be the constant preoccupation of modern historiography. The purely empirical concept of historical individuality that animates these writers, however, leads them to center their attention almost exclusively on the human figure and personality, on the individual actors around whom the entire narrative revolves. Herein lies the limit of their historiography, which overlooks both the value of moral forces and ideas and the influence of economic and environmental factors in historical development. In the rigorously "politica" history they offer, few forces, few elementary instincts, drive the entire game: war and diplomacy, the clash of parties, the succession of governments are the almost exclusive "temi" of the narrative. What this historiography lost in terms of reconstructive possibility, it regained in descriptive efficacy, precision of judgment, and characterizational capacity. The "lezione" of early 16th-century Florentine historiography became exemplary for subsequent historiography until the end of the 17th century, guiding the hands of writers across Europe, whether directly or through the treatment—by Italians—of events in other countries, a treatment that assumed paradigmatic value. On the other hand, a similar exigency had led—with the decline of the state and the religious-chivalric ideal—transalpine historiography to adopt analogous positions: the work of the Frenchman Commynes at the end of the 15th century is also a vigilant depiction of a purely political reality, albeit with less decisiveness in rejecting providential interventions and within a narrative form still "medievale" in many respects. The new historiographical direction also influenced the historical-polemical production of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation era. While religious history now became the center of historical consideration—so much so that, as the Centuries of Magdeburg show, it could become the guiding thread of a new universal history—it did not escape a process of "politicizzazione". Perspectives did not change: the same method, the same mentality, the same preoccupations that animated 16th-century Florentine historiography were transferred from political problems to ecclesiastical questions; and even these were considered and discussed, alongside the former, in political terms, as is evident even in the most significant figures of this current, Sarpi and his adversary, Pallavicino. In such literature, where the historical and controversialist elements are inextricably intertwined, humanist criticism was applied to religious history, and the need for documentary support for one’s assertions became pressing. In the first direction, the Centuriators made the first, unfortunate attempts; in the second, Baronio’s monumental Annales constituted an important moment in the formation of an erudite tradition.

III. MODERN AGE

At the dawn of the modern age, the landscape of historiographical production becomes more complex: only its principal directions can be outlined schematically. At the beginning of the 18th century, the break from the humanistic conception of history becomes evident in two main ways: the extension of "criticism" to ancient historians, who had been undisputed authorities in previous thought, and the application of the empirical method to historical research. The phase of collecting and verifying factual data—drawn from sources, especially documentary ones—comes to prevail over that of their literary reworking. This enormous work of research and verification, initially limited to the sphere of ecclesiastical history (Maurists, Bollandists), extends to literary and political history, while the so-called auxiliary sciences (paleography, chronology, diplomatics) refine their methods. The vast material brought to light, also driven by other immediate interests, prompts a move beyond purely political history: customs, culture, moral life, and the institutions of the past are investigated. At the same time, the need arises to trace an animating principle that allows the myriad of facts to organize themselves into a coherent design. Thus, Vico’s solitary meditation asserts the necessary integration of philological research and philosophical interpretation of data, offering a comprehensive vision of human events in which Providence operates through the collective forces of "nations." The prevailing tendency of the 18th century, however, is one that sees history moving in a linear progression from barbarism to the state of reason. This leads to a devaluation and misunderstanding of the values of the past, which, precisely as such, is regarded as a surpassed moment, unworthy of consideration, in human development. And this process of development is always viewed in a schematic and naturalistic manner: the effort is to give meaning to universal history through a wholly secular "philosophy of history." Individual historians, however, offer other noteworthy insights: in tracing the portrait of the age of Louis XIV, Voltaire abolishes any annalistic scheme and seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of the life of a state; Robertson offers the first unitary treatment of the history of European states; Gibbon seeks to clarify the reasons for the fall and decline of the Roman Empire and those for the rise of Christianity.

The Romantic reaction to Enlightenment thought also influences historical thought: Herder theorizes, against the abstract conception of humanity posited by the latter, the harmonious operation in history of a plurality of nations, organic and irreducible individualities, according to a mysterious unitary plan disposed by Providence. The "nation" thus becomes the center of historical consideration, which now tends to reconstruct its phases and developments, its "spirit," both vertically through time and horizontally across all areas of human activity: economy, literature, law and institutions, folklore. Moreover, the current problems of individual nations constitute, in many ways, a continuous stimulus to historiographical activity, in the sense of prompting inquiry into their historical "precedents" and offering occasion to identify in the past issues debated in the present. The Hegelian system disseminates the concept of a dialectic immanent in history itself: ideas are the forces operating within it, and their conflict is the engine of reality. History is, in fact, a phase of the cosmic process by which the Spirit, lost in nature, regains its self-awareness. The application of such principles to historiographical activity makes the connections between individual facts and the links between periods clearer, but it risks rigidifying the living variety of reality within overly rigid schemes, simplifying it to the extreme. Hence, the reaction of philologists becomes increasingly strong, for whom history is above all the clarification of individual facts through the aids of an ever more refined methodology. The first approach posited the need for synthesis, the second for analysis: the balance between critical method and narrative synthesis would be achieved only by Ranke, to whom is owed the assertion—pregnant with consequences for the future—that the task of the historian is to understand and narrate how things happened, without judging, without taking sides. For the moment, however, the political issues of the day direct European historiography in the choice of themes and the manner of treating them: German historians are intent on tracing in the past the various manifestations of the German "national spirit," or, in light of this principle, they reweave the history of the Hellenic tribes; French historians see in the history of their country the rise of the Third Estate and in its development the inescapable premise of the revolutionary outcome, and they rewrite the history of the French Revolution to extract its achievements, in their view indelible, and to trace therein the profound motivations of their present stance. In Italy, especially thanks to the Neo-Guelph historians, the Middle Ages are rediscovered as the epic moment of the Italian nation, its institutions, spiritual and social life are investigated. The conflicts between Whigs and Tories in England pass from the political to the historiographical plane, animating with new insights the interpretation of the nation’s modern history. The crisis of 1848 opens new perspectives for historiography; the revision of ideals is followed by a reconsideration of the past in light of new experiences: greater attention is given to social issues. The antithesis between bourgeois liberalism and radical democracy shifts from the political to the plane of reconstructing the past, especially in French production; in German historiography, the various orientations regarding the solution to the national question project their influences both in the field of the formulation and judgment of some fundamental problems of the ancient world (the Macedonian Empire, the Roman Empire) and in the treatment of the history of the Germanic people. Nevertheless, in this historiography—the most lively and rich in problems in Europe—a weariness toward approaches centered on the problem of the state is felt, evident both in Burckhardt’s escape toward a reconstruction of the Renaissance primarily as a moment in the history of civilization and as a celebration of individualism, and in the opposition of a Kulturgeschichte to the prevailing Staatgeschichte. In the same period, Catholic historiography frees itself from polemical and controversial positions, reweaving with modern methods and sensibility the internal and external history of the Church and of Catholic culture.

But a deeper weariness pervades the field of historical studies in the final decades of the 19th century. The spread of positivist doctrine lends support to the never-extinguished opposition of philologists against the intrusion of general conceptions into what they considered solely the domain of meticulous, detailed research. The historian’s activity is now reduced to the edition of documents and chronicles, to investigations into "sources," to the preparation of ever more reliable and complete materials for a future, yet problematic, synthesis—understood, by analogy with the natural sciences, as the sum of the greatest possible number of "scientifically" verified factual data. Historiography (s.), conceived as the reconstruction of a moment in humanity’s life, thus declined into erudition: the individuality, the unity of a period, a figure, a nation, a state—all the great themes of historical research—disappeared, fragmented into an infinity of particular studies without coordination. Having failed the attempt to restore meaning, orientation to research, and unity to investigations through the schemes of positivist sociology, the overcoming of the crisis is sought in historical materialism and historicism, understood in the broadest possible sense: encompassing in the first direction all research that aims to utilize the data gathered by erudite philology for the reconstruction of the economic-social aspects of human history (studies on population, social classes, agricultural, industrial, and banking activity, production, prices); and in the second, that effort—common to much of 20th-century historiography—to integrate and surpass such a reconstruction of reality by reaffirming the value of ideas, ideal forces, and ethical-religious life. These tendencies are not to be considered in absolute opposition, nor without reciprocal influences, and they re-propose, on the historiographical plane, the grave problem of the relationship between necessity and freedom in human action.