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HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: FROM SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVITY TO

Over the past few decades, Georg Iggers has established himself as a leading historian of the discipline of history. Beginning with The German Conception of History (1968), a study of nineteenth-century German historicism which has now gone through several editions and become a classic, he moved on to chronicling the breakdown of German historicism and the ending of its international influence in the twentieth century under the impact of what he called New Directions in European Historiography, published in 1975. Both of these works were accompanied by editions of historical writing to exemplify the trends Iggers was analyzing-most notably a selection of translations from Leopold von Ranke, published with Konrad von Moltke in 1973 under the title The Theory and Practice of History, and two volumes of selections from contemporary German historians: The Social History of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing since 1945 (1986), and Marxist Historiography in Transformation: East German Social History in the 1980s (1991). Now he has, in effect, brought all these concerns together in the book under review, first published in German in 1993 and then, extensively revised, in English in 1997. The book begins with a reprise of Iggers's earliest work on German historicism, recounting the historical revolution brought about by Leopold von Ranke in the middle of the nineteenth century, with its emphasis on rigorous source-criticism and the use of original documents as the basis for a properly scientific and objective appropriation of the past. From the 1870s, historical studies underwent a characteristically nineteenth-century process of professionalization, with the founding of journals, professional associations, training seminars, and so on. Iggers emphasizes the social and historical context in the rise of the modern nation-state, the triumph of liberal values, and the role of state-run universities in the professionalization process. This, he says, had the effect of leading everywhere to "an increasing ideologization of historical writing. Historians went into the archives to find evidence that would support their nationalistic and class preconceptions and thus give them the aura of scientific authority" (28). The contradictions this embodied became increasingly obvious towards the end of the nineteenth century and brought about a "crisis of classical historicism"