Metodo critico, idea di individualità storica, visione dell’identità europea: note su Ranke

The author outlines an approach to the work of the great 19th-century German scholar which emphasizes the intimate and indissoluble bond connecting his advocacy of scientific objectivity, new techniques of investigation of sources, archival research-wrongly ascribed sometimes to his alleged "positivism"-to the employment of the historicist conceptions of spiritual individuality and free human agency. Such categories, on their turn, were instrumental in shaping Ranke's optimistic presentation of the history of modern Europe as the harmonious development of the national peculiarities of a group of peoples organized in a competitive system of sovereign States, bridled in their potentially destructive rivalry by the logic of the balance of power.