ABSTRACT
It is in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth that the organizational structures of the sciences of man which we use today became fixed. In 1800 the categories (or 'disciplines') which today are standard -his tory, economics, sociology, anthropology, political science-did not for the most part exist as concepts, and certainly were not the basis of sharply differentiated groups of teachers and researchers. The so mewhat tortuous process by which certain combinations of concerns and concepts took particular forms resulted in major 'methodological' debates, which we sometimes still hear about under the rubric, 'philosophy of history' . Among the debates, one of the most influential was that between so-called nomothetic and idiographic knowledge, between the possibility and impossibility of generalizations about human behaviour, between the universalizers and the particularizers.
