ABSTRACT
In recent years, the most noticeable influence on the writing of history has come from the social sciences and hermeneutics. This article is inspired by both these disciplines, in particular by their treatment of the question of understanding, be it the understanding of literary texts or of human actions. The search for the meaning of understanding is also evident in other disciplines, as part of what Quentin Skinner has called the return of the Grand Theory in the human sciences, i.e., the search for a universal and interdisciplinary methodology (Skinner, 1985). The new methodology is based on two principal assumptions: it rejects science as a model for human sciences and it injects scepticism into the scholar’s ability to treat with objectivity any “body of knowledge”, be it the original meaning of a literary text or a reconstruction of past events. In other words, whether we are dealing with the understanding of a literary text or the analysis of human actions in the past or in the present, we can apply the same approach.
