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World History: Ranke welcomed the unification of Germany by Prince Otto von Bismarck and hailed it as a victory of the conservative forces over the lower classes, whose rise he watched with alarm. He adhered to his quietist conservatism to the end of his life. In the 1880's, in an era of strident nationalism, he embarked on what he viewed as his crowning achievement, a world history in which he tried to fuse the national histories of the Western peoples into the ultimate unity of a universal history.
This view of the world as a completely rational system was developed with unexampled thoroughness by Hegel, who is the outstanding rationalist of history. His model in explaining the world, however, is not a mathematical system but an organism or a mind, whose parts are so related that none of them can be understood except through their relation to the whole.
The British today are divided into two schools of thought—those who seek to regain a major world role for Britain and those derogatively called "little Englanders"—and the division cuts directly across traditional party lines. World War II was the first conflict in Britain's history that left the nation totally exhausted. After earlier wars, even after World War I, the general attitude was acceptance and a willingness to return to business as usual. |
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