ABSTRACT
The emphasis on specialized research and the steadily growing amount of sources and literature becoming available for each period of history made it increasingly difficult for any historian to maintain a know ledge of recent scholarship in a wide historical area. In the evaluation of a historian the amount and importance of the editorial work he was doing and organizing began to count heavily. In asserting that history had its own method, different from that of the natural sciences, the philosophers were also defending the position of philosophy, at least of that manner of philosophy in which they had grown up. Croce's concern was with social and political action rather than with Dilthey's interest in broadening man's knowledge of his own potentialities. Industrialization spread rapidly throughout the European continent. Ambitious and energetic sons of the middle classes turned to careers in industry, banking, and commerce.
