{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.723809523809524, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Burckhardt and the ideology of the past

As a young man, Jacob Burckhardt was predisposed to melancholy. A student of two historians of daunting reputation, Leopold von Ranke and J. G. Droysen, as well as the imposing historian of art, Franz Kugler, he felt temperamentally unsuited to the prevailing modes of nineteenth-century German historiography. The positivism and political bent of Ranke’s school interested but did not enchant him, and he claimed to be repelled by Hegel’s metaphysical explanations of the historical process. ’I feel at times’, he said as a young man in a letter to a friend,