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AbstractThroughout 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.

Abstract
In this essay I lay out an argument about the scholarship on the emergent rationality of files. Looking at the case of Heinrich Otto Meisner's groundbreaking modern diplomatics of files and the conditions and possibilities that shaped the argument of his work both practically and politically, I suggest a model for the analysis of bureaucratic mediocracy in historical perspective. I argue for an historical anthropology that acknowledges the epistemic violence and politics of inclusion and exclusion in bureaucracy in order to arrive at an historical anthropology of reason that does not deny, but instead attempts to think through its unequal terms.

This essay is about Ernst Kantorowicz's stance on the anti-communist Loyalty Oath controversy at the University of California in the early years of the Cold War. Kantorowicz, who just had escaped Nazi Germany, found himself caught up in a fight between a group of so-called non-signers and the Regents of the University who tried to enforce a political oath on all faculty. In his pamphlet about the controversy Kantorowicz turned this moment of university politics into a meditation on the "fundamental issues" of academic freedom, the very character of the public office of the university professor, and the character of the university as legal corporation, which resembled his notion of a Secret Germany and anticipated aspects of his The King's Two Bodies. After a close-reading of Kantorowicz' pamphlet in which I analyze his understanding of the university as an idealized Arcadia of scholarship and a mythistorical reiteration of the medieval universitas magistrorum et scholarium, I finally turn to the afterlife of the Loyalty Oath controversy and its implications for our understanding of academic freedom. ; This essay is about Ernst Kantorowicz's stance on the anti-communist Loyalty Oath controversy at the University of California in the early years of the Cold War. Kantorowicz, who just had escaped Nazi Germany, found himself caught up in a fight between a group of so-called non-signers and the Regents of the University who tried to enforce a political oath on all faculty. In his pamphlet about the controversy Kantorowicz turned this moment of university politics into a meditation on the "fundamental issues" of academic freedom, the very character of the public office of the university professor, and the character of the university as legal corporation, which resembled his notion of a Secret Germany and anticipated aspects of his The King's Two Bodies. After a close-reading of Kantorowicz' pamphlet in which I analyze his understanding of the university as an idealized Arcadia of scholarship and a mythistorical reiteration of the medieval universitas magistrorum et scholarium, I finally turn to the afterlife of the Loyalty Oath controversy and its implications for our understanding of academic freedom.

History as a body of knowledge, a loose bundle of working routines and writing practices, of genres, memories, imaginaries, and institutions, has struggled with its relationship to "religion" for a long time. In the European tradition, but also elsewhere, historical writing often served to fill the gaps in the knowledge about the past that had been, in the main, supplied by scriptural tradition. At the same time, historical writing also became a competitor with this tradition. The resulting relationship was, and continues to be, uneasy. In its familiar present-day form, for example, the quality of being "historical," i.e. "historicity," requires the exclusion of divine agency as a permissible explanation of events in the course of worldly affairs. In what François Hartog calls the modern "regime of historicity," the culture of historical writing after 1750 became dominated by scholarship and aligned with mechanist understandings of the philosophy of nature. Enlightenment-era historical writing increasingly conceived of the world as a nexus of cause–effect relations that afforded space to the divine agency only in the function of "prime mover." History then appeared to fall in line with the other forces of reason-driven "secularization" that stripped religious knowledge of the privilege of explaining things in the world, ultimately transforming it into "dogma" and "belief," both only tenuously connected to reality. Knowledge based on the divinely "revealed" texts and the divinely "inspired" thought of traditionally recognized religious authorities lost its previous epistemic standing. Yet this loss occurred, to the extent that it did, in the form of a highly complicated negotiation, with compromises stacked on top of other compromises, generating a continuously confusing and mobile state of affairs.