The Last Judgment before the Last

Throughout the nineteenth century, most historians preferred not to ask philosophical questions. In their writings, however, they indirectly engaged with problems about the character of the world-historical process, thus confronting what might be called penultimate questions. This article analyzes both the notions and the practices of historical work in Leopold Ranke's writings to consider how his spontaneous philosophy of history came to shape an entire discipline. It argues that Ranke crafted what I call historical figures from archival materials and that these served as equivalents to concepts in G. W. F. Hegel's philosophical world history. The writing of history has not yet escaped the logic of these narrative figures of historical argumentation.