One has attributed to history the task, to judge the past, and to instruct the present to the benefit of the future: The present attempt does not dare such a high office: it will only tell, how it really was.

Name	Leopold von Ranke
Life	1795 - 1886
Country	Germany
Category	Realism
Wikipedia	>>

"Wie es eigentlich gewesen". Historians of quality, in all nations, know this phrase in German. When we fail in our endeavors, when "the law on unintended consequences" is stronger than we, we often don't want to know "how it really was". The more we fail, the less we want to know it. In olden time, messengers bearing news of defeat were often killed. The most widely spread ideology of the past two centuries has been tested in reality on one third of humanity. It failed so tragically that its many friends, still seduced by Amos's simple-mindedness, hate to know "how it really was". Leopold von Ranke pleaded for "objective" studies of history. To avoid true knowledge of what has happened, any pretense to "objectivity" has long been the target of much bespattering by leftist political philosophers in the West. There is only subjectivity, they say. Truth is exclusively in the eye of the beholder. Everybody is biased. Each author should be "deconstructed" to get to know what he really said and meant. Because, this school claims, the author himself didn't know it! Much nonsense has been written in this vein. Ranke surely knew how difficult it was to reach a fully objective knowledge, and even more so, how difficult it was to express it! The fact that the world is complicated, sometimes extremely so, does not mean, however, that objective facts do not exist. On the contrary, the complexity demands an even more intensive striving to understand, explain and present it in as objective a manner as possible. Even more complex becomes our world if we follow Ranke's ideal, inspired by his reading of Guiccardini's Historia d'Italia, that all history should be universal

history. On any small spot, influences come from anywhere and a serious observer must take a global view. That surely makes objectivity more difficult, but in no way diminish it as an ideal. Objective facts do exist. When five million Africans were worked to death to enrich the rubber-hungry Leopold II, that is an objective fact. So it is when a number of millions Jews are gassed, or dozens of millions of "capitalists", sometimes defined as owners of two cows, are executed or worked to death in slave camps. If such things happen in all nations where a certain ideology is given rule, it is also an objective fact. The presentation of these facts can certainly be more or less biased, discussing variations in quantitative figures, or putting the blame unequally hard on various groups or facts. But each one of the millions of dead individuals remains a fact! The same is true for the approximately 75 million new lives, more than the entire population of Italy, with which mankind increases every single year. This is also an objective fact. If we like our own lives, this should be seen as a very positive fact. You and I may live, thanks to it. Distributing praise for this flow of human life is difficult without some bias or subjective slant. I might have some of that myself, in constantly repeating, along with Heraclitus, Machiavelli, Mandeville and Smith, that newborns are permitted to live not in spite of, but thanks to the ruthless competition for luxury living among the rich. My personal conviction is, however, that this is as close to Ranke's objectivity that we may come.