8 - Conceptions of Scientific History in the Nineteenth-Century West

Summary

Peter Burke recently developed ten categories of Western historical thinking and discussed them from a cross-cultural perspective. He states that the specific combination of these elements characterizes the phenomenon of Western historical thinking, especially in the modern period, that differentiated it from non-Western modes. Although Burke carefully eschews the assumption that there was a single and monolithic historiographical scholarship in the West, he nevertheless thinks that these general categories can become a basis for a global comparison of historiographical thinking. Applying these categories to nineteenth-century Western historiography, however, we find that they took different shapes in varying contexts. Talking about Western historiography one has to bear in mind that the notion “West” suggests more than the geographic land mass of Europe. It also includes those countries that owe their cultural heritage in whole or in a significant part to the European tradition, namely the “neo-European” countries grown from former “white settlement colonies” in Latin America, North America, and Australia. Western historians of historiography have considered the way in which European and especially German historiography became professionalized and “scientific” as a universal model and have taken it as a comparative measure for international historiographical development. But until now, research on the history of Western historiography has been more or less bound to the four historiographical centers of the West, namely Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States. Much less is known about the historiography in other European countries. For example, extensive research on historicism and positivism in Italy has not yet found its way into German or Anglo-American scholarship. Studies of historical scholarship in countries like Spain, Finland, Poland, Hungry, and Russia, not to mention Argentina or Mexico, are even rare. In many of these countries at the periphery the emergence of an academic historical discipline did not begin until the end of the nineteenth century, if not the early twentieth century.

In this essay I will not deal with the cultural differences and social institutions of historiographical production in the West but concentrate on epistemology and methodology in history because they played a significant role in the process of scientification of historical scholarship. The development of historiography as an academic discipline in Europe is a nineteenth-century phenomenon. The professionalization of historical studies and the re-definition of their theoretical and methodological foundations were embedded in the process of modernization and nationalization of Europe.