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Historiography and the State: Bachofen, Burckhardt

In his Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (2000), Lionel Gossman observed how the French Revolution ‘and its Napoleonic aftermath – which included the dissolution, in 1806, of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, had the effect of focussing attention in Germany on ‘the state as the political expression of the culture of a human group and its means of defence against other cultures’. Citing the historian Leopold von Ranke’s 1833 essay ‘The Great Powers’, with its reference to ‘the fundamental, truly actual nationality that is expressed in the state’, Gossman noted how the new German awareness of the need for self-defence lay behind ‘Ranke’s explicit emphasis on the state and on foreign affairs as the core of his practice of history’. [i] Gossman approves Wolfgang Hardtwig’s argument that Ranke’s political faith in the state during the Restoration era (1815-30) and after was allied to his own confidence in history-writing, or that ‘his confidence in th

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