ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the philosophical ideas that arose at a time when the study of the social sciences was developing rapidly. It sketches briefly the methodological tendencies within some of the most important of the human sciences at this time. The chapter also sketches the wealth of ideas about the relationship between the methodologies of the natural and social sciences to be found in philosophy, and in the emergent social sciences in the nineteenth century. It outlines the developments in philosophy and in the social sciences for forming the back-drop, then, to the Chicago sociology of the 1920s and 1930s. The chapter discusses that positivism became very influential in Germany after the collapse of absolute idealism and with the rapid development of science and technology. It employs several terms in the discussion, that are often used in diverse and even conflicting ways, such as 'positivism', 'romanticism', and 'historicism'.
