Abstract

The close connections between the sciences and the scholarly discipline of history which prevailed during the Age of Enlightenment loosened in the nineteenth century. Now, most historians were well trained in philology and some even in law, but they had no comparable grounding in any one of the sciences.Three systematic attempts were made, however, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to apply characteristic methods of the sciences to the activities of the historian. Firstly, Marxist historiography treated economic and social processes in close analogy to natural processes. Secondly, Darwinist authors considered human behaviour as largely biologically determined. Thirdly, the so called positivists (e. g. Thomas Buckle) made use of statistics and even mathematical formulas in their historical writings. For several decades these attempts were rejected by traditional (historistic) historians such as Gustav Droysen with the argument that history was a Wissenschaft sui generis. But eventually „positivistic”︁ elements were integrated into accepted professional historiography. Max Weber, for one, demonstrated successfully to what extent historical interpretation can make use of ideal types and recurring causal connections or regularities. On the other hand, scientists, have recently emphasized the role of elements in their disciplines which used to be considered characteristic of the humanities: the intrusion of subjective factors into scientific findings, and the admission that in many cases statistical probabilities and not unexceptional valid laws is all that scientific research can provide.