ABSTRACT
Most disciplines in the humanities are not very concerned with their own history. Although the dialogue between contemporary scholars and their predecessors might extend into a somewhat further past than in the natural and social sciences, the various fields of the humanities tend to reflect just as little on their own history as, for instance, chemistry or psychology. Historians seem to be the main exception to this tendency: unlike most other disciplines, history has a long tradition of examining its own past. In many university programmes the history of historical writing is a compulsory course, and there is a wide range of textbooks on this subject. Traditionally, overviews of the development of historiography tended to focus on the succession of different speculative ideas on the course of the historical process and on the emergence of empirical methods of studying the past. A characteristic variety of Whig history in this field is the idea that with the advancement of modernity, theological and philosophical perspectives on the past lost their position to an increasingly critical and empirical approach to history. The main turning point in this narrative is the early nineteenth century, when historiography became a professional academic discipline that defined itself as a ‘science’ in contrast to the Enlightenment's explicitly normative perspective on the past and the grand speculative designs of Hegelian philosophy of history.
