ABSTRACT
Positivism and historiography make for strange bedfellows. Positivism is usually portrayed as a hostile takeover of the humanities, with the latter being colonized with alien methods derived from the natural sciences. This account of “scientism” was forged by 19th century German historicists who used it to establish the conceptual autonomy of the humanities. Reading both Auguste Comte’s positivism and German historicism as responses to the French Revolution, my essay brings out their shared basic assumptions. Adherents of Comte and Leopold von Ranke both rejected natural law, argued that history could only be judged from within history itself, and maintained that all epochs possessed intrinsic value. Yet while Comte fully appreciated the natural sciences of his day and sought to grasp the history of all humankind in his agenda of global reform, his historicist contemporaries created a double foreclosure effect: Seeking to monopolize historical time as their exclusive field of expertise, they ignored its significance for the sciences and drove a wedge between pace-setting Europe and the supposedly irredeemably backward rest of the planet. Reformatting history into a philological exercise in the service of the nation, historicists bequeathed posterity a vendetta against positivism in all its guises. This has occluded the shared concepts and techniques used by historicists and naturalists alike, and it has conflated Comte’s, John Stuart Mill’s, and Henry T. Buckle’s attempts to define history as a science. My chapter seeks to bring out these nuances while also sketching the trajectory of the quest for overarching laws that determine the course of history.
