POSITIVISTIC HISTORY AND ITS CRITICS: Buckle and Droysen

Abstract

[Although most historians of the mid-nineteenth century considered history a science if it attempted to reconstruct the past according to verified, original sources, some historians, especially those that had come under the sway of Positivist philosophy, thought history had to discover the general laws of human development. Among the latter historians none was more popular or perceptive than Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862), a self-educated historian who had neither studied nor taught at a University.