Stephen Gaukroger, The Natural & the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841 (2016)

This is the third in Gaukroger's four-part series on the emergence and transformation of a modern scientific culture. Gaukroger is astonishingly erudite. I only read parts of this book as my aim was to get back into reading for my project on historical methodology. The most interesting point for me was the contrast between Herder and advocates of a "natural history of man" (think Hume, Voltaire, Smith, Ferguson, Buffon, etc.). Both see themselves as pursuing a science of man, both subscribe to the notion of man's development over time. Yet, they work quite differently and will lead to very different schools or approaches. Herder is one of the founders of historicism. He focuses on differences between particular cultures or peoples and sees the study of language as the key to understanding their thought. Advocates of the natural history of man, on the other hand, rely on comparison across time and space as their essential tool. Many of them adhered to stadial theories of human development - hunter, pastoralist, farmer, trader and craftsman - which meant that their topics were on the grandest of scales. This seems to me like a pivotal moment, in which a comparative and, in my eyes, truly scientific approach to history was available, but lost out to historicism. A few decades after Herder, Ranke supplied historicism with an apparently scientific veneer in source criticism. I'll most likely incorporate this into my methodology manuscript. Next up: Frederic Beiser's history of German historicsm.