Grafton On Felix Gilbert's Ranke and Burckhardt
Grafton On Felix Gilbert's Ranke and Burckhardt
Grafton On Felix Gilbert's Ranke and Burckhardt
Anthony Grafton
thingsincluding American military and foreign policy, on which
he wrote an important bookfrom a distinctive, non-American
point of view. At Princeton University Press, however, his work
marked not an exception but one among many examples of a
characteristic style. Though Princeton University Press has always
been connected to a great university, it has also always been open
to the wider perspectives of scholars from other countries and
traditions. The origins of this tradition go back as far as ,
when the Press published Henri Pirennes Medieval Cities. But its
real heyday, which has never quite ended, began with the rise of
the Nazis and the Second World War. Hitler shook the trees, to
adapt a metaphor first applied to art history, and the Press caught
the apples. A generation of European scholars, expelled from
their homes and deprived of their careers, found new places in
the American university. Princeton University Press became one
of their preferred publishersand after it took over Bollingen Se-
ries, perhaps their favorite.
The histories these scholars wrote ranged widely in scale and
periodfrom the erudite, tightly structured studies of Gilbert and
Hans Baron, sharply focused on a few decades in the history of the
Italian Renaissance, through the sprawling books of Ernst Kan-
torowicz and Richard Krautheimer, which spanned the medieval
centuries, to the work of Siegfried Kracauer and others on modern
European and American culture. But all of them were linked
linked, first of all, by an erudition founded in the great European
secondary schools and universities that Erwin Panofsky described,
in an essay first published by the Press; linked again by long years
of scholarly apprenticeship; and linked, a third time, by the need
to make their findings accessible to an English-speaking public.
Princeton University Press, with its traditions of fine book design,
its passionate concern for craftsmanship and accuracy, and its
openness to new forms of scholarship, brought this new intellec-
tual style into the Anglo-American world.
At the same time, the Press offered opportunities to the most
original American scholars to bring their own distinctive ap-
proaches to European history. Princeton University Press enabled
Ira Wade and R. R. Palmer, for example, to bring out pathbreak-
ing studies of the Enlightenment, rooted in new research meth-
ods, before World War II, and encouraged both to attack wider
problems and reach larger audiences after the war. The Press also
published Joseph Strayers distinctive inquiries, both monographic
and comparative, into the medieval state; Jerome Blums pioneer-
ing investigations into the lives and fates of peasants, from Russia
Anthony Grafton
to Western Europe; and Charles Gillispies challenging synthetic
history of the long trajectory of Western science as well as his
richly particular monographs on French science and its larger
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century context. A small press in New
Jersey became the site where European history, medieval, early
modern, and modern, was renewed, over and over again. The Press
remained hospitable as a generation of younger American schol-
ars, many of them the students of the migrsRobert Benson
and Robert Brentano in medieval studies; Gene Brucker, Lauro
Martines, and Donald Weinstein in the Renaissance; Theodore
von Laue, Charles Maier, and Jerrold Seigel in modern history
developed their own new styles of inquiry into the European past.
At the same time, the Press also continued to welcome the results
of foreign scholarship. It was a hospitable venue for the New
Zealandborn, British-educated, and absolutely individualist his-
torian John Pocock, for the publication of his comprehensive re-
visionist history of republican thought in Europe and the United
States, which reoriented the discussions of historians and politi-
cal theorists as dramatically as Hans Baron had done a generation
before.
The questions Gilbert addressed in his last book, moreover,
were central to the Presss authors over the decades. Princeton
University Press has always dedicated close attention to the state,
which for Gilbert constituted the central object of serious histor-
ical and political thought. From Edward Corwin, whose great
study of the American Constitution first appeared in , on-
ward, original students of political and constitutional thought
have made the Press their natural home. Over the generations,
their methods and concerns have changed, as new analytical
methods came into play. The interpretation of texts has been en-
riched both by new approaches to the relations between political
thinkers and the statethe subject of a groundbreaking book by
Nannerl Keohaneand by new hermeneutical methods, many of
them devised by Quentin Skinner and debated in a rich volume
edited by James Tully.
Like Gilbert, an impenitent admirer of Ranke, those who have
written about the state for Princeton University Press have taken at
least as much interest in the institutions and day-to-day practices
of government as in its theoretical foundations. Medieval histori-
ans from Joseph Strayer to William Chester Jordan have traced the
development of central Western institutions, from legal systems
to tax offices, over the centuries. Political scientists have made the
Press a center of innovation in their field. Princeton produced
Anthony Grafton
history, based on quantitative study of groups and their behavior,
to bear on the development of Jacksonian democracyand used
it to argue, in the teeth of interpretations that went back to the re-
visionist histories of Charles Beard, that economic status had not
determined the ways in which Americans voted. Later, the Press
published William Aydelottes pioneering quantitative analysis of
the British House of Commons.
Princetons tradition in politics, as in history, has been eclectic.
Rather than specializing in quantitative or qualitative approaches,
it brought out a celebrated interdisciplinary work by Gary King,
Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry,
which teases out the common logic of social inquiry that links the
two sets of approaches. The Press has produced both powerful
monographs, like Putnams study of Italy, and wide-ranging com-
parative studies, like Jeffrey Herbsts States and Power in Africa . . .
And it has warmly encouraged efforts to draw tools from other
disciplines and apply them to the study of politicsas in Robert
Jerviss groundbreaking Perception and Misperception in Interna-
tional Politics (), which used cognitive psychology to elucidate
the ways in which decision makers read and misread history.
Ranke and Burckhardt knew that many forces shaped societies
and states. Religion, for example, was central to the history of the
modern West. And religionconsidered from every point of
view, from institutions and theology to ritual and religious art
has always been at the core of the Presss interests. In the s,
medievalists like Robert Brentano and Robert Benson published
with the Press what remain classic studies of the institutions of
medieval Catholicism. Students of the Reformation, such as Hor-
ton Davies, and of the French Revolution, such as Timothy Tack-
ett, pursued similar themes into later centuries. Tightly focused,
dazzlingly written studies by Mark Pegg, Jeffrey Freedman, and
Brendan Dooley have kept the institutional history of Christian
churches at the very center of the Presss offerings in European
history. Jewish historywhich the Press entered with a splash in
, when it published Gershom Scholems extraordinary study
of Sabbatai Sevi and his followershas become one of its special
interests. Amos Funkensteins Theology and the Scientific Imagi-
nation, for example, brilliantly traced remarkable and little-known
connections between the greatest Jewish thinker of the Middle
Ages, Maimonides, and the founders of the seventeenth-century
New Philosophy. A whole series of recent monographs by Mark
Cohen, Susan Einbinder, and others have pursued this interest
Anthony Grafton
taining this tradition, the Press has contributed to the political
education of a readership that proved all too ready to believe, as
the twentieth century came to an end, that warfare was ceasing to
be a central concern of governments and their advisers.
Ranke and Burckhardtand Gilbertwere adepts of techni-
cal scholarship, but they were also great stylists, who set out to ad-
dress and educate a broad cultured public. The Pressas Grosss
case suggestshas always been willing to do the same. Works like
Robert Palmers best-selling Twelve Who Ruled, Pietro Redondis
Galileo Heretic, and Grosss Neighbors have reached tens of thou-
sands of readers, acquainting them with the results of profes-
sional scholarship in highly accessible forms. Many other Press
bookslike Corwins study of the Constitution and Blums work
on Russian social historyhave become durable textbooks, used
by thousands of students over the generations. Studies of public
intellectuals in the United States have tended to concentrate on
the magazines in which professional scholars set out to address
a wider public. In its own way, however, Princeton University
Presswith its policy of encouraging authors to combine mono-
graphic studies with synthesis, its ability to edit and market books
of both kinds, and its consistently high reputation in the acad-
emyhas contributed as much as any generalist periodical to in-
forming and provoking a wide public.
The Presss long tradition of openness to new questions and
new methods has occasionally given rise to problems. A few books
have revealed serious flaws when exposed to systematic criticism,
while others, though praised by the reviewers, have not immedi-
ately found a large audience. But no publisher willing to attack
new subjects can avoid these risks. On the whole, the Press has
succeeded, to an astonishing extent, in preserving into the current
age of new production methods and high competitive pressures
the standards set half a century ago and more, when writers and
editors agreed that it was worth spending years on editing and
production.
At a time when outside critics of the academy rant on and on
about the politicization of scholarship, the hegemony of jargon,
and the abandonment of standards, the Press has maintained a
great tradition in history and politics. Its editors and advisers
have managed to combine broad interests, a focus on questions of
public as well as intellectual concern, and a willingness to take
chances with an absolute commitment to rigorous refereeing,
precise editing and printing, and handsome, distinctive design.
Anthony Grafton