ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a history of the concept of empathy going back to the early eighteenth century and the philosopher-historian Giambattista Vico. It focuses on the role of empathy in the debate that dominated much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the relationship between knowing in the natural sciences and knowing in the human sciences. Indeed, empathy as a way of knowing the human world was the subject of considerable attention in two disciplines that emerged over the course of the nineteenth century to study human beings and their creations: history, as the study of human beings and their societies in the past; and then sociology, as the study of human beings and their societies in the present. The chapter considers: the impact of social history on historians’ use of empathy to know the past during the 1960s and 1970s; the challenge to empathy posed by the influence of postmodernist thinking on historians during the 1980s and 1990s; and the important role, generally unacknowledged, played by empathy in cultural history, which emerged in the 1980s and continues to be a dominant historical approach up to the present day.
