ABSTRACT

Is there an accepted nomenclature for 'methodological disputes', or is the term generic to all such disputes? It is probably a pointless exercise trying to answer this question. Like the bubonic plague, its outbreaks are intermittent yet part of a series, often localized but still part of a general occurrence and with effects sometimes more, sometimes less, severe. I tend to regard the historians' Methodenstreit, which is the phenomenon that concerns this chapter, as subsidiary to the first major Methodenstreit - which was the long-drawn-out dispute between the claims of the new marginalist economics and the Historical School of political economy - and more distantly connected to the second dispute - which was the science/political value-distinction argued out, again over a lengthy period of time, pre-eminently in the Verein fiir Sozialpolitik (Social Policy Association).