It's the latter category which concerns us here. In the mid-19th century, the University of Berlin was considered by Germans to be the greatest university -- certainly the greatest in Germany, and perhaps in the world. Cultured Germans were certainly not unaware of the Sorbonne and other great universities in other lands -- and Leopold von Ranke, the chairman of the history department in Berlin, was a figure treated with awe. If there was a greater historian than Ranke somewhere in the world in 1872, then Germans, at least, didn't know much about that. In 1872, Jacob Burckhardt,
who had caught Ranke's attention as a student in Berlin, and who was then a professor at Basel, was offered Ranke's chairmanship -- and to the surprise of many, he declined. Burckhardt preferred to stay in Basel, where he had been born in 1818, where he had taught from 1843 to 1855 and again since 1858, and where he would remain until retiring in 1893. And where he had, among great throngs of devoted students, a notable prodigy of his own: Friedrich Nietzsche. If Burckhardt had gone to Berlin in 1872, and if Nietzsche had come with him -- not an unreasonable thought, surely a number of people would've followed Burckhardt anywhere -- what all might have been different in the world since 1872?
Heinrich von Treitschke ended up succeeding Ranke in Berlin, a highly respected figure, to be sure, but not as charismatic, as individualistic, as memorable as Burckhardt. Somewhat the way Nietzsche did in philosophy, Burckhardt drew outside the lines in history. He did things his own way, to the extent that many people describe him as an art historian, or an historian of culture, or something else rather than just an historian. I think it's best to describe him simply as Jacob Burckhardt. To the best of my knowledge, there have not been others like him. Very much of his prose, perhaps most of it, combines political, art-historical, philosophical and other considerations, in a way which no-one else I know of has done. His best known book is probably Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, but he also wrote Der Cicerone, a book intended to be used as a field guide to painting, sculpture and architecture in Italy, from the Greek temple of Paestum, built around 600 BC, up to 18th-century works; Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen (The Time of Constantine the Great); Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (World-Historical Considerations); and other works which don't fit into similar categories any more than the ones I've named.
Burckhardt's reputation may have faded a bit since his time. One of the reasons I say this is that I had a very, very hard time finding a copy of Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, and the copy I found was published in Bern in 1941. And I can't find any record that it was ever translated into English. World-Historical Considerations, that's my own translation. This is a collection of lectures making up a course which Burckhardt gave at Basel just twice. He didn't repeat himself very much, to put it mildly. Those lectures blew students' minds, and they carried his reputation with them out into the world. He very much believed in the view of history being shaped by geniuses, by "world-historical figures," a phrase made popular by Hegel (and then, after Burckhardt's time, by Edward Albee), although Burckhardt is at pains in these lectures to point out how his views differ from those of Hegel. The view that history is shaped by great individuals, by geniuses, is rather unpopular at the moment among academics. But it makes sense to me. And for that reason, it makes sense to me to assume that Burckhardt's reputation will rise again at some point.
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