Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (2011)

I read this for my project on historical methodology. In fact, I'd read it several years ago, but I'd forgotten the contents nearly completely, and it seemed to fit with my current focus within the project, i.e. understanding how and why the study of human history parted ways with other historical sciences (geology, paleontology, archeology, anthropology) in terms of methodology. Beiser seems to know the topic quite deeply and his judgments seem persuasive. What I came away thinking was that the earliest historicists - Chladenius, Moeser, Herder, Humboldt - all seemed open, or even committed, to the 18th century idea of a naturalistic "science of man." This was particularly true of the last two thinkers. At the same time, compared to Scots like Smith and Hume, and Frenchmen like Montesquieu, Rousseau or Condillac, the Germans were simultaneously wrestling with heavy-duty philosophical questions - about individuality, free will, and providence in history, for example. The enormous (and in my eyes disastrous) influence of Ranke from the 1830s on cannot be explained by the originality or persuasiveness of his ideas. Ranke is the first historicist who fully rejects naturalism and seeks to establish history in a way fundamentally distinct from the natural sciences. He emphasizes the importance of source criticism - this is to provide the scientific certainty of history. However, source criticism had been around for some time, originating in the Renaissance with men like Lorenzo Valla and Agricola, and in Germany being promoted in the 18th century at the University of Goettingen. My argument might be that source criticism didn't become the rallying cry of history in the 18th century, say, because a more naturalistic science of man was still being considered. Once that is dropped - because it would require unacceptable compromises when it came to philosophical ideas about individuality, free will, and providence - source criticism comes to seem especially appealing as an adequate source of scientificness. (Alas, it really isn't!). At least, this is one of the reasons. Another might be that the naturalistic science of man became associated with Hegel's teleological and procrustean account, something historians found distasteful for several reasons. No doubt I will have to return to this book when I am ready to return to writing.

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.